Should Conservatives on College Campus Should Be a Protected Group?

Want to know who is truly being harassed on college campuses today? Conservatives. This article by Toni Airaksinen on PJ Media is a very telling window into what’s it’s like out there for people who don’t toe the liberal line:

When I was a sophomore at Barnard College, a women’s college in NYC under the Columbia University umbrella, I applied to become a columnist with the Columbia Daily Spectator. During the interview, the editors asked me what I hoped to write about. As the first person in my family to graduate from high school, I knew how to play this card. “Social inequality and labor issues,” I said, invoking the spirit of Columbia’s longstanding social justice tradition. Needless to say, I got the position.

But instead of focusing on social justice in the traditional way, I focused on something else — the dangers of feminism, misleading sexual assault statistics, and the lack of due process for men in campus rape trials. I wrote columns arguing that Columbia should offer a course in men’s studies, and that students shouldn’t report microaggressions. Sure, women face problems in society, but men do too. Shouldn’t we care about them?

The backlash was swift. Perhaps I went into it too naively. After all, I was a student at a women’s college, a hotbed of militant feminism. I should have expected it. But after a while, the angry comments and diatribes students emailed me gave way into something more pernicious — being targeted on campus.

Students started yelling, quite literally, when they saw me on campus. One student followed me around twice in the local grocery store, trying to accost me. They’d come up to me at my campus desk job, demanding an apology for what I’d written. One student would take pictures of me when she saw me at the library. Then, the death threats came in. Not from strangers on the internet, but from fellow students.

Read the rest of the article here, which is full of examples of political correctness run amok.

These are not mistakes.  As Kurt Schlichter has written, the left doesn’t just disagree with you if you’re a conservative.  They hate you.  They can’t imagine you could be a person of good conscience with a different opinion.  You are instead stupid, evil and must be destroyed.  This is the New Democratic Fascist Party.   Get used to it.  It’s only going to get worse.

Airaksinen has a recommendation on how to fix this hostility on campus, however:

Colleges should add political ideology to the lists of protected classes. Right now, only the University of Colorado lists “political affiliation” and “political philosophy” on their non-discrimination clause. Conservative kids at other colleges are out of luck. These non-discrimination clauses aren’t for naught. They set the tone for campus culture, and provide the impetus for sanctions if a minority is targeted on campus. (Conservatives, we often forget, are a minority on many college campuses too.)

I’m not sure how to fix it.  However, I know that parents should think twice before paying one dime to liberals bent on indoctrinating their children.  Enough is enough.

Hat Tip: PJ Media

Image Credit: Wikimedia