Multiculturalism

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Although politics has been part of education since Greek times , and political messages have been spread through universities consistently during times of war in American history , the politicization of college campuses was still restricted by speech codes until the later half of the 20th century. Colleges first began to remove restrictions on political speech on campus in the mid-Sixties. It had previously been held that political speech would, by necessity, advocate a particular position, and that state money could not be used for such purposes. In October 1964, UC Berkeley student Jack Weinberg was arrested for setting up a table for The Congress on Racial Equality, which was in clear violation of the school’s political speech codes. The arrest led other students to surround the police car he was in and, from atop the police car, give speeches about the importance of defending the right to freedom of expression. This 30-hour demonstration kicked off the first substantial movement for freedom of speech on college campuses and led the UC Berkeley faculty to drop university restrictions on political speech by early December of that year.

After the restrictions on political speech were dropped, “political discourse [on college campuses] quickly turned from one that was intellectually based to one that was advocacy-based.” Students quickly found themselves with too many causes from which to choose: “[f]rom pulling out of Vietnam and pushing for civil rights in the sixties and seventies, to rallying against U.S. involvement in Central America in the eighties and building shantytowns on campus quadrangles to get universities to divest from companies doing business in South Africa, no political issue has escaped college student notice. … …[T]he late nineties brought student protests over sweatshop conditions in Third-World countries and demands of ‘living wages’ for university employees. …[Voices] against U.S. retaliation in Afghanistan were reported on campuses across the country [at the beginning of the millennium, and as] U.S. presence there began to fade from the headlines, students at some larger and more liberal universities, like UCLA, took up the cause of the Palestinians. … Other students have been involved in the protests of globalization,” while yet others have devoted themselves to protesting the war in Iraq.

One of the greatest problems that I see in today’s politicized college campuses is that when students hear one little snip-it in the news or one misconstrued comment from a friend, they all of a sudden they become expert activists on the issue. They have no means by which to filter the information because of their lack of world experience and knowledge (regardless of how smart they may say they are!). There is no ranking of importance among causes – obviously, the Animal Liberation Front is just as important as education reform or poverty. I would go so far as to say that this problem is even worse at the top schools, where many students actually believe that they are smarter than the average person simply because they were accepted to a top institution.

While I was at Wellesley, fair trade was one of the “causes” taken up by Wellesley’s “do-gooder” activists. During my senior year, all of the dining halls were required to switch to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters as their coffee provider, after months of student lobbying of the college food service provider, Sodexho, Inc. On other campuses, students have taken up the cause of Palestinians, lobbying their schools to boycott companies that do business with Israel (such as IBM, General Electric, McDonald's, Raytheon, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, AOL Time Warner, Johnson & Johnson, and Microsoft). In March 2006, students took up the cause of Third World sweatshop workers, protesting in minimal clothing on the Penn State campus. Ben Brewer, a junior at Penn State, demonstrated wearing only a jockstrap with two pom-poms hanging off the front and the words “sweat free” written across his behind. Theresa Haas, one of the other twenty students in the protest, marched along to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” wearing Saran wrap and holding a sign demanding that the school “make PSU apparel sweatshop free!” Similar protests occurred in 2000, when “protestors took over the president's office at colleges around the country, from the University of Pennsylvania to the University of Wisconsin (where they were forcibly removed by police and arrested) to the University of Michigan,” demanding that their universities “withdraw from the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an industry-backed monitoring group, and instead join the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an organization independent of industry influence, founded by students in close cooperation with scholars, activists and workers'-rights organizations in the global South.” I wonder, how many of these scantily clad or occupying protestors have ever talked to a sweatshop worker in the Third World? Have they asked them how they feel about losing their job because the company has to cut the number of employees in order to meet the requirements laid out by the WRC or to make up for lost sales caused by the protest? Furthermore, I wonder, how many of them have moved to the countryside to start making their own clothes from their own homegrown cotton?

From my experience, the same people who demand that their universities or the government do X, Y, or Z, don’t do X, Y, or Z themselves. These students are willing to fight for any cause, but are not willing to make changes in their own lifestyle in order to help achieve the end for which they are “fighting.” How many of them do you think consider the sweatshop conditions in Third World countries when they go out in their $130 baby-t and mini-skirt and spend $100 on alcohol?

Similarly, although 71% of college students believe that elected officials do not share their priorities, they only complain about it without actually doing anything to effectively change it. Less than half of 18 to 24 year-old voted in the 2004 election. Is it truly that they are “boycotting” what they view to be an ineffective government system, or is it just that their bark is louder than their bite?

Young people are more available for political movements because they have fewer commitments (such as jobs or family) than other segments of the population and they are more passionate about political movements because they often are just first being exposed to new ideologies that peak their curiosity. However, this inconsistency between their political activity and lifestyle is not uncommon because many students lack a solid foundation of principles and have no particular commitment to any one cause or ideology because of their lack of experience and wisdom. They identify themselves as defenders and ambassadors for those who do not have the “knowledge” or resources they have after only getting one sound-bite on an issue.

Thanks to the push for multiculturalism on college campuses, students feel that they represent, and must fight for, an entire segment of the population based on single defining characteristics. A black student feels that they carry the responsibility of showing the world their “blackness.” A Latino student feels the need to show off her Latino roots (even if she grew up in a white neighborhood, attending a Protestant private school, and has only one great-grandparent who was Latino). Gay students feel that they must show the world their gay pride and go along with everything the gay group on campus promotes. A student who practices Wicca feels compelled to “play the part” in all aspects of her life on campus. It’s almost as if the “multiculturalists pretend to liquidate false generalizations while trading in them.” Doesn’t the emphasis on single characteristics work completely against the entire purpose of multiculturalism and the civil rights movement? The civil rights and feminist movements were fought on the principle that opportunities should be gender- and race-blind. Yet the shift towards “multiculturalism” has completely undermined these two movements by putting all of the emphasis and attention on those single characteristics.

Looked at closely, multiculturalism has done little to increase our knowledge and understanding of other cultures. At dinner at the house of the ambassador from Rwanda, I was asked if I could tell by looking at a black person what country they were from. Ashamed, I admitted that I could not. The ambassador’s wife explained to me that Africans can very easily tell the difference between people from Ethiopia or Kenya or South Africa. Does the increased number of black students at a university caused by affirmative action policies help non-black students to learn about black culture or African heritage? I would argue that, if anything, it adds to the stereotypes held about black people and distances students from any authentic knowledge of African culture. In fact, most of the black people I knew in college were from New York City, DC, or Philadelphia, and the extent to which they promoted black culture was introducing me to hip hop music that talked about men getting some a** and pu**y.

This is characteristic of the recent emphasis on multiculturalism and political activism. The emphasis on individual characteristics and issues prevents students from getting a true and complete sense of identity, either for themselves or for their community. Without a sense of identity to unite them, political activists are transient between groups and causes and their work is only half-hearted at best. As David F. Wells points out, this – in addition to other cultural changes that have accompanied modernization – has “blighted our lives by cutting our connections to place and community, elevating our level of anxiety, and greatly diminishing our satisfaction with our jobs. It has spawned pervasive fear and discontent. It has contributed to the breakdown of the family, robbed our children of their innocence, diluted our ethical values, and blinded us to the reality of God.” Even as we are more and more connected by technology and globalization, we are feeling less connected and have a less sincere understanding of our ultimate purpose.

This was a significant problem during my experience at Wellesley. Wellesley has a tremendous sense of “community” and the students feel united as “Wellesley Women,” but, at the same time, it seems as though the school lacks a unifying identity. The motto at Wellesley is that the school produces “Women Who Will,” but we would always joke, “Women who will… what?” While the motto was meant to show that there are no boundaries to what a Wellesley woman can accomplish, it also highlighted a lack of direction. Vagueness is a problem that plagues the multicultural movement. As Russell Jacoby puts it, “[t]he radical program on multiculturalism might be characterized as jargon attached to an air compressor.”

The editors of Mapping Multiculturalism contend that there are three points that define multiculturalism: “First, real multiculturalism has been ‘more hospitable’ to ‘a whole range of perspectives’ on ‘gender, sexuality, new panethnicities, and new ‘nations’ like Queer Nation’ than has ordinary pluralism. Second, real multiculturalism ‘has strongly endorsed racially based group identities and antiessentialism at the same time.’ Finally, a ‘transformative multiculturalism’ seeks ‘political parity.’ ‘A real multiculturalism requires political as well as cultural inclusion, requires the sharing of power among relevant groups.’” If you understand what they are talking about, I would bet that you are ahead of the rest of us. This is typical liberal jargon (and I’m not trying to say that conservatives don’t have their share of jargon as well). They throw a bunch of sugar-coated hubbub together with some big words and cross their fingers that the average Joe will buy into it without taking the time to actually figure out what they said. A study done by the Ford Foundation in 1997 “illustrates the confusion that members of the public display around the issue of multicultural education. When asked whether diversity education overemphasizes our differences and ends up creating more division and conflict, 52 percent of the respondents agreed. Yet, 85 percent of the respondents supported multicultural course offerings. These types of conflicting findings show that people may support curricula that emphasize differences if these curricula also help students ‘develop a balanced understanding and appreciation of their own and other cultures.’”

Nancy Fraser, a well regarded political theorist, believes that “the exclusively ‘cultural’ outlook” of typical multiculturalism efforts (“affirmative remedies” in her terms) should be supplemented with “transformative remedies” that “target socioeconomic injustice” by changing the underlying structures that currently oppress minorities. “By destabilizing existing group identities and differentiations, [transformative] remedies would not only raise the self-esteem of members of currently disrespected groups; they would change everyone’s sense of self,” Fraser explains. Yes, destabilizing the structures of society so that our identities are defined by “multiple, debinarized, fluid, ever-shifting differences” is a great idea. Doesn’t a destabilized society make you feel better?

Yet this is precisely the mentality that college students have latched onto. It is almost as if college students today are so concerned with not being bigoted or hateful, and making sure that everyone is happy, that they have lost any ability for critical reasoning. As Jacoby puts it, “critical thought requires conceptual care and precision; nowadays this has been exchanged for cheerleading and academic bombast.” The movement towards multiculturalism is not, with however much icing you may put on it, a movement to be “open” to “new perspectives.” If that were the case, I – along with everyone else – would readily embrace the movement and do everything possible to press it forward. Instead, “it represents familiar liberalism parading as something more,” all the while moving us closer to a state of mindless relativism.

Moral relativism thrives under a guise of political correctness, tolerance, and multiculturalism on many college campuses today. There are no absolutes. As Allan Bloom argues in the beginning of The Closing of the American Mind, “the great virtue of the day [is] the unshakable belief that all truth is relative, and that no one idea or moral value is truer than any other. Openness to every culture and tolerance of every idea has become the greatest insight of our time. The notion of absoluteness, naturally, became the great foe of our times. …What right, students continue to ask, do I or anyone else have to say that one way is better than the other?” What they fail to realize is that this is not about their right to determine what is truth, it is their obligation to do so. This is how multiculturalism has “failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students.” As Rabbi Yosef Y. Jacobson writes, “Our mission today was not to correct the mistakes and learn what is really right, but rather to abolish the very concept of right and wrong.”

The truth of the matter is that some ideas, beliefs, and lifestyles are in fact better than others. Some religions are better than others, some practices and moral understandings are better than others, and the list goes on and on. There are absolutes when it comes to what is right and wrong. In the Dec. 17, 2001 issue of Newsweek, Yale University student Alison Hornstein noted: “On the morning of Sept. 11, my entire college campus huddled around television sets, our eyes riveted in horror to the images of the burning, then falling, Twin Towers… But by Sept. 12, students' reactions…pointed to the differences between our life circumstances and those of the perpetrators, suggesting that these differences had caused the previous day’s events. …Noticeably absent was a general outcry of indignation. These reactions, and similar ones on other campuses, have made it apparent that my generation is uncomfortable assessing, or even asking, whether a moral wrong has taken place. My generation may be culturally sensitive, but we hesitate to make moral judgments.”

No matter who you are or where you are from, it should be clear that the attacks of September 11th were wrong. As Rabbi Jacobson continues, “The fact that so many university students cannot recognize some actions as objectively evil, despite differences in cultural standards and values, is not only philosophically problematic, it is practically suicidal. If we cannot define anything as evil, we cannot stand up to it. We then ensure its victory.” At one point in time, people actually had an understanding of absolutes. My friends often joke at my admiration for the Victorian era, but I contend that, even though the absolute morality of the Victorian era was not staunchly adhered to at all times, there was value in having some absolutes defined. Even though people may have engaged in behavior that deviated from moral absolutes, they still recognized it as deviant. Sin was sin and good was good; never were the two equated. Today, however, there is not clear boundary between the two – college students actually believe that “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.” This has been coupled with what Ben Shapiro calls “defining deviancy up;” that is, stigmatizing those who adhere to absolutes as either fools or fascists.

Conservatives, in particular, have been singled out and accused of being close-minded, bigoted, hateful, racist, and a handful of other expletives, simply because they favor conserving the traditions of the past and are reluctant in embracing the trendy new ideas associated with multiculturalism. It is ironic that the very people who preach tolerance, acceptance, and understanding are the ones who most quickly lash out at conservatives, Christians, and whites. As the Alliance Defense Fund puts it, “Promotion of ‘tolerance’ has bred aggressive intolerance for any individual who does not endorse and approve any behavior, no matter how immoral it may be. These attacks often come in the form of so-called ‘anti-discrimination’ policies which attempt to force campus ministries to compromise their Biblical standards and allow non-Christians to assume leadership positions in order to receive access to student facilities and funding” [emphasis theirs]. It has also taken the form of sexual harassment clauses and honor codes. Honor codes especially trouble me because the language seems so appealing. Who would not want an “honor code”? Yet, the honor code is the “unwritten set of rules” under which I was charged for my role in the Dyke Ball Awareness Campaign. How can an “unwritten set of rules” be fairly litigated in a trial? It can’t. It is an open-door for administrative discretion in regulating behavior and limiting speech and expression. Some schools have successfully implemented honor codes that actually work to preserve the honor and integrity of the institution and its students; however, the majority of schools use it to disguise horrible injustices against freedom of speech.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has a list of school speech codes available on their website. Restrictions on speech are hidden in event guidelines, student organization guidelines, postering policies, “safe zone” policies, sexual harassment policies, and anti-discrimination policies, and often are selectively enforced depending on the “perpetrator.” As FIRE puts it, “Freedom of speech is a fundamental American freedom, and nowhere should it be more valued and protected than at America's colleges and universities… Yet this freedom is under continuous assault at many of America's campuses.”

Sexual harassment codes have received national attention for silencing students and professors at Occidental College, Tufts University, University of Oklahoma, Suffolk County Community College, and William Paterson University. The occurrence at Occidental College is one exception in which I think that the student charged with the offense was just trying to provoke liberal response (which I will discuss in greater depth later in this chapter) and is equally guilty of contributing to the intellectual decline of higher education. In all of these cases, however, the key principle used to justify restricting free speech was that the speech in question constituted a “threat” to another member of the college community. There is little evidence, though, that the email written by Muslim student-employee Jihad Daniel to William Paterson professor, Arlene Holpp Scala, constitutes a “threat.” After receiving an unsolicited email from the Women’s Studies department advertising Connie and Sally, a movie about a lesbian relationship, Daniel wrote an email to Professor Scala saying only, “Do not send me any mail about ‘Connie and Sally’ and ‘Adam and Steve’. These are perversions. The absence of God in higher education brings on confusion. That is why in these classes the Creator of the heavens and the earth is never mentioned.” Professor Scala filed a complaint accusing Daniel of violating the university nondiscrimination policy because his message “sound[ed] threatening” and because she didn’t want to “feel threatened at [her] place of work when [she] send[s] out announcements about events that address lesbian issues.” The school charged Daniel on accounts of “discrimination” and “harassment,” based on an argument that the word “perversions” implies a negative connotation that makes it “clearly a ‘derogatory or demeaning’ term.”

As defined by the United States Code Title 18 Subsection 1514(c)1, harassment is defined as “a course of conduct directed at a specific person that causes substantial emotional distress in such a person and serves no legitimate purpose.” The purpose of his email is clear: to show his disapproval of the event and of the manner in which he was informed of it. Therefore, it would be hard to prove that his “harassing” and “discriminatory” language “serves no legitimate purpose.” Even if you simply look to the dictionary, the word harass is defined as, “to annoy persistently.” What Daniel “persistent” in his “harassing” and “discriminatory” language? No, he wrote her one email, and it was in response to an email sent to him. Lawyers would even say that a charge of harassment requires “systematic and/or continued” unwanted and annoying actions. Daniel’s “harassing” and “discriminatory” language was not systematic or continued. To constitute discrimination, Daniel’s email would have to reflect the “unequal treatment of persons,” or a “process by which two stimuli differing in some aspect are responded to differently.” If someone else had sent the email about Connie and Sally, Daniel would have responded the same way. Are the charges claiming that Daniel was discriminating against homosexuals? The thing about discrimination is that it requires an object or person upon which the action is performed. There is no recipient of “discrimination” in this email. Daniel would have responded the same way if someone else had sent the email, and the argument that it is “discriminatory” towards homosexuals simply doesn’t cut it. It is as if the school chose to ignore the First Amendment simply because it was not convenient at the time to allow it.

Thor Haverson of FIRE jokes that, “Some college students and administrators are under the impression that students have a right not to be offended, which teaches students to call any offense 'harassment' and to run to the Thought Police.” It is baffling to think that the greatest proponents of free speech are the ones who are restricting the speech of people with whom they disagree. Even more baffling is the selective enforcement of speech codes. While at Wellesley, I received an email from an MIT student (unsolicited) informing me of new programs being set up to increase interaction between students at MIT and Wellesley. The student who wrote the email, a guy, that I personally did not find offensive, but which violated Wellesley’s ridiculous unspoken code of political correctness by using phrases such as, “the beautiful women of Wellesley.” I don’t think women fifty years ago would find it offensive to be called beautiful, but as times have changed, that somehow constitutes harassment now. A Wellesley student responded to the email (replying to all its recipients) lashing out against MIT students – both male and female – by stating that all MIT guys have crooked pen**es; all MIT women are desperate, but won’t give the MIT guys any “action;” and other generally derogatory, expletive, and crude comments. Isn’t it obvious that using the phrase “beautiful women of Wellesley” warrants such a response? Was this Wellesley respondent ever accused of harassment? Of course not – it is within her First Amendment rights to send an unsolicited and obnoxious email to everyone on the MIT email list (even though those same rights aren’t extended to the guy who initialized the first “scandalous” email).

Somehow, in the past fifty years, many types of language have come to be considered as “harassment” or “discrimination” that are not protected by the First Amendment because the offended “victims” of this language say that it constitutes “fighting words,” which the Supreme Court decided are not protected under the First Amendment in the decision of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire in 1942. However, what these “victims” fail to recognize is that the Supreme Court ruled “that intimidating speech directed at a specific individual in a face-to-face confrontation amounts to ‘fighting words,’ and that the person engaging in such speech can be punished if ‘by their very utterance [the words] inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.’” I fail to see how using the term “beautiful women of Wellesley” falls under this classification (or any other classification that one might try to place it under using Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964). Even the ACLU finds it silly that so many people ignore the fact that, “[o]ver the past 50 years, …the Court hasn't found the ‘fighting words’ doctrine applicable in any of the hate speech cases that have come before it, since the incidents involved didn't meet the narrow criteria stated above.” The ACLU continues, “the folks who advocate campus speech codes try to stretch the doctrine's application to fit words or symbols that cause discomfort, offense or emotional pain.”

Such speech codes have become immensely popular at today’s colleges. Due to the growing number of racial minorities attending institutions of higher education and an increasing rate of reported accounts of sexual harassment, approximately 75 schools implemented campus speech codes by 1990. This number grew to more than 300 by 1991 (108 of which specifically forbade “advocacy of offensive or outrageous viewpoints), more than 350 by 1995, and an estimated two-thirds of campuses today. Some of these prohibit speech or conduct that creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive educational environment; others ban behavior that intentionally inflicts emotional distress; yet others outlaw general harassment and threats.

It is “impermissible to engage in conduct that deliberately causes embarrassment, discomfort, or injury to other individuals or to the community as a whole,” according to the speech code at Bard College in New York. Bowdoin College forbids jokes and stories “experienced by others as harassing.” Brown University bans “verbal behavior” that produces “feelings of impotence, anger, or disenfranchisement,” whether “intentional or unintentional.” Colby College outlaws speech that causes “a vague sense of danger” or a loss of “self-esteem.” The University of Connecticut prohibits “inconsiderate jokes,” “stereotyping,” and “inappropriately directed laughter.” The University of North Dakota defines harassment as anything that intentionally produces “psychological discomfort, embarrassment, or ridicule.” Shippensburg’s code of conduct suggests that student expression should not "provoke, harass, intimidate or harm" another. Syracuse University outlaws “offensive remarks...sexually suggestive staring...[and] sexual, sexist, or heterosexist remarks or jokes.” West Virginia University instructed incoming students and faculty that they must “use language that is not gender specific,” so as to avoid offending anyone or making them feel uncomfortable. “Instead of referring to anyone’s romantic partner as ‘girlfriend’ or ‘boyfriend,’ use positive generic terms such as ‘friend,’ ‘lover,’ or partner.’”

Even the ACLU disagrees with these efforts:

“[Codes or policies prohibiting speech that offends any group based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation] are the wrong response, well-meaning or not. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects speech no matter how offensive its content. Speech codes adopted by government-financed state colleges and universities amount to government censorship, in violation of the Constitution. And the ACLU believes that all campuses should adhere to First Amendment principles because academic freedom is a bedrock of education in a free society.”

Proponents of these policies claim that censorship of free speech is justified for the protection of civil rights. Some campus speech codes have gone so far beyond restriction of speech as it relates to civil rights that the U.S. Department of Education found it necessary to clarify its position on anti-discrimination policies and free speech:

“[The Department of Education’s] regulations are not intended to restrict the exercise of any expressive activities protected under the U.S. Constitution.

“The Office of Civil Rights has consistently maintained that the statutes that it enforces are intended to protect students from invidious discrimination, not to regulate the content of speech…[The department's] regulations and policies do not require or proscribe speech, conduct or harassment codes that impair the exercise of rights protected under the First Amendment.” - Assistant Education Secretary Gerald Reynolds

In practice, these codes greatly impair the exercise of rights protected under the First Amendment and undermine the role of the academic freedom as a bedrock of education in a free society. As well-intentioned as they may be, these policies are frequently abused and misused for reverse discrimination. While they are intended to cultivate an environment of mutual respect, respect is the last thing that their proponents wish to give to others who express viewpoints that may be considered “disagreeable” or “hurtful.”

In the months following the court ruling that forced Massachusetts to contend with the issue of gay marriage, the homosexual lobby became even more prominent on the Wellesley campus and many of the campus message boards were filled with postings arguing unquestionably in favor of the legalization of homosexual marriage. My boyfriend had written on the issue previously and asked my advice as to whether he should post his article on the message board. I asked him what he hoped to accomplish by posting the article, which argued against the legalization of homosexual marriage. I felt that there was little he could do to convince anyone at Wellesley that the legalization of homosexual marriage was a bad idea and that his hidden motivation in wanting to post the article was to stir up controversy. While I am not against stirring up controversy on campus – and I think that controversy does much to spur intellectual debate – I was skeptical of a male student doing so at Wellesley given the bitter attitude held towards men after one male student did an unfavorable exposé on Wellesley for Rolling Stone Magazine. Regardless of the forewarnings, my boyfriend posted the article, which was a completely intellectual, non-emotive article speaking solely on the policy issues related to the legalization of homosexual marriage, with no talk of the issues of morality, religion, or health.

Following this posting, frenzy broke out among Wellesley students, outraged at Andrew’s “bigoted” and “hateful” views. Emily Smith (Wellesley, ’06) posted an email proposing that the Wellesley community “not speak to [Bouchard] or give him any of the respect due to a human being.” Smith defended her posting by saying that, “in the heat of the moment I wanted to show him how it felt to be invalidated by the majority of the population, like homosexuals are everyday.” Let’s assume that we agree with her statement that homosexuals are invalidated everyday – does that justify her response to his posting? Even if it was justified, is it any more justified than Jihad Daniel’s response to the unsolicited advertisement for the lesbian movie (which, by the way, was not posted on a public message board)? Victoria Winkelman (Wellesley, ’04) responded to Bouchard’s article in an even more directly “threatening” (aka, “harassing” or “discriminatory”) way, posting an email that said, “If I actually knew what you looked like… I might have to find you and beat the living daylights out of you.” Was any action taken against Winkelman? No – “her expression of violence and anger had nothing to do with him, but instead dealt with the homophobia she has to deal with every day.” Instead, Bouchard was called to meet with the Dean of Students, who apologized on behalf of the students but did nothing to enforce school policies against them. How is it that I have tons of examples of friends of mine (myself included) that were required to write “letters of apology” to offended students, professors, and administrators for our free expression (aka, stating our opinions in a respectful, intellectual way, which apparently violates some unwritten “honor code”), yet the people who actually threatened violence or broke written policies were not punished or even investigated in any way? When I received emails expressing how “violently angry” other students were with me, campus police said that I would have to prove that I was in danger before they would do anything to protect me. Furthermore, I was charged with violating the policies regulating computing resources by copying an email from a community message board and the charge remains on my permanent record sent to graduate schools even though I was found not to be in violation of the policy. Another student, however, who clearly violated the policy by posting a private email that I had sent onto the community message board was never disciplined or investigated in any way.

Similarly, the administration considered bringing charges against me – and required that I have a mediated meeting with the leaders of the primary homosexual group on campus – because of posters I hung up to inform students about the origins, evolution, and consequences of Dyke Ball. After speaking with two homosexuals about their views of the party and what would be appropriate to put on a poster to highlight the ways in which Dyke Ball was detrimental to the proponents of the homosexual lobby, I hung up one poster that explained how events like Dyke Ball reinforced ideas used to justify making homosexual marriage illegal and how, if returned to its original form, Dyke Ball could be used to legitimize and aid the movement to legalize homosexual marriage. For this reason, I was labeled homophobic and accused of making an environment that was hostile to homosexual students. Despite my efforts to make a poster that showed arguments from the queer prospective, the homosexual group on campus was upset and said that I had led them on by writing with the term “we” (even though I thought that it would be much more offensive to use the term “you”).

Other students have been reprimanded for similar occasions in which posters were labeled “offensive” or “discriminatory.” This again emphasizes the ridiculous claim on college campuses that students have a right not to be offended, but even more so, highlights the fact that only posters hung by particular people or groups are labeled as “offensive.” University of New Hampshire sophomore Timothy Garneau was charged for violating “affirmative action” policies, “harassment”, and “conduct which is disorderly, lewd” after posting hastily produced fliers loosely based on an advertisement from the UNH gym, reading, “9 out of 10 freshman girls gain 10-15 pounds. But there is something you can do about it. If u live below the 6th floor takes the states…Not only will u feel better about yourself but you will also be saving us time [so that we will not have to wait for the elevator] and wont be sore on the eyes [sic].” As distasteful as this sign may be, there were no specific victims towards which harassment or discrimination was directed, so it was completely inappropriate to bring such charges against him. If the signs are considered offensive, take them down – don’t ruin his record by having it permanently scarred with charges of harassment and discrimination.

Shippensburg University required that Resident Assistants make students take down “offensive” posters depicting Osama bin Laden in crosshairs from the doors of their dorm rooms after the attacks of September 11th, saying that the posters were offensive to other students and in violation of the school’s code of conduct. Students at Central Michigan University and University of Alabama were required to take down their American flags because the flag somehow created a “hostile environment.”

Has anyone mentioned how offensive it is that I couldn’t go to the bathroom at Wellesley for three years without being bombarded with posters about rates of domestic violence among homosexual couples or about all the forms of contraception that I could use for the rampant sex life assumed of a Wellesley girl? What about the “hostile environment” created by all of the posters the plastered the dormitories and bathrooms telling me all of the reasons why I was “homophobic”? As one of my former roommates wrote in a letter to the editor of the school newspaper at Ithaca College, “I may hold certain beliefs that are different than yours. Who are you to say I’m right or wrong? You can call me homophobic or threaten my beliefs with your posters, but these are my beliefs and I have every right to them.” Was anyone ever forced to take down the offensive posters that labeled as “homophobic” anyone who is a Christian or who uses the term “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” instead of “partner”? Were any charges brought against the creators of the posters for “creating a hostile environment”? No, of course not.

What about the “hostile environment” created by the large poster displayed at the front of the cafeteria at UNC-Chapel Hill, which read, “P**sies Unite for the ‘Vagina Monologues’”? Or the zoomed-in pictures of a vagina on posters at Wellesley? Or the sidewalk chalking of a vagina on the pathway to my dorm? Or the pictures of naked women promoting “feeling beautiful” on posters at Bentley College? Even though there are laws specifically prohibiting such posters in Massachusetts, they were never deemed “offensive” by the schools or required to be taken down.

In the case of the posters encouraging girls to lose weight by taking the stairs or the posters which showed bin Laden at gun point, I do not believe that the content of the posters was the best or most efficient way of accomplishing their aims. UNH student Garneau could have easily gone through more legitimate means of accomplishing what he hoped (that is, for fewer people to take the elevator so that it wouldn’t take so long). Perhaps, like the University of Pennsylvania does in their high-rise buildings, he could have petitioned the school to make one elevator specifically for students who live above the 6th floor. However, regardless of how I feel about the content of these posters, they should be treated the same as any other poster on campus and their creators should be given just as much right to free expression as any other student. If UNH and Shippensburg wanted to crack down on offensive poster material, they should have cracked down on all offensive posters.

In January 2003, the president of the College Republican Club at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, Steve Hinkle, was forced to go through a seven-hour hearing before the Judicial Affairs Council for hanging up a poster in the multicultural center to advertise an event with conservative black speaker, Mason Weaver. The poster had a picture of Weaver with the title of his latest book, It’s OK to Leave the Plantation. Hinkle was accused of “offensive” speech and charged with “disrupting a campus event” by hanging his poster – unobtrusively – while a group of students was meeting in the multicultural center, even though there is no record of an event during the time that he hung the poster and no event had been registered to take place in the multicultural center at that time.

There is no problem, however, when signs are hung up advertising a lesbian comedian whose performance, "Holy Sh*t! Stories from Heaven and Hell Out From Underground," includes talk of “homosexual sex escapades, sadomasochism, crude jokes about Columbine, mockery of abstinence, and the general encouragement of sexual promiscuity.” As my friend wrote in an article for his school newspaper, “I couldn’t walk to class or grab a bite to eat without seeing a ‘censored’ obscenity thrown in my face…I wish I could say that I was surprised or even shocked by the flyers that I’d seen, but sadly I’m not because the offensive material is oozing throughout Bentley…[As a tour guide for the school,] I’ve felt dismayed that families walking around campus get to see Bentley as a school that sponsors events that actively promote [such material].”

What is ironic about the situation at Bentley College is that, in the spring semester of 2004, several students at Bentley College were charged for creating “offensive” and “discriminatory” posters when they created posters similar to those used to advertise the Vagina Monologues in order to promote Testicular Cancer Awareness Week. Because the posters had the word “penis” displayed on them, they were deemed “offensive” and the administration demanded that the creators of the posters take them down. While I personally would not enjoy seeing posters such as those hung by Garneau at UNH, the students at Shippensburg, or the “Testicular Cancer Awareness” group at Bentley, I am outraged by the fact that these students are treated differently and held to a different standard than their feminist or racial and ethnic minority counterparts. It is astounding how often postering, zoning, and non-discrimination policies are used to silence “controversial,” “sexist,” “racist,” “homophobic,” “bigoted,” and “dissenting” students and professors, particularly since such policies have often been found to be unconstitutional.

The University of Michigan was the first school to gain substantial attention for its speech policy, which read, “Any behavior, verbal or physical, that stigmatizes or victimizes an individual on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, creed … [and that] creates an intimidating, hostile or demeaning environment for educational pursuits, employment or participation in University sponsored extracurricular affairs [is prohibited].” The policy also provided some examples of "harassing conduct":

• Your student organization sponsors entertainment that includes a comedian who slurs Hispanics
• A male student makes remarks in class like `Women just aren't as good in this field as men'
• You host a dormitory party in which a student is not invited because some think she's a lesbian
• You exclude someone from a study group because that person is of a different race, sex, or ethnic origin than you are.
• You display a confederate flag on the door of your room in your residence hall.
• You comment in a derogatory way about a particular person or group’s physical appearance or sexual orientation, or their cultural origins, or religious beliefs.

Fortunately, this code was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1992 – ironically, after being used by white students to bring charges against black students for using “offensive” racial slurs twenty times, yet not once being used against a white student for racist speech against blacks. The code had been invoked several times to punish remarks made during class discussions: a black student in a social-work class was punished for expressing the opinion that homosexuality was a curable disease and a dental student was charged for saying that he'd heard that “minorities had a difficult time in the course and that...they were not treated fairly.”

The code was first invalidated by the District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in the decision of Doe v. University of Michigan in 1989:

“The Court held that the code restricted speech well in excess of unprotected ‘fighting words,’ and that, on three separate occasions, the code had been applied to speech protected by the Constitution. The Court ruled that the code was impermissibly vague in that it did not ‘give adequate warning of the conduct which is to be prohibited and...set out explicit standards for those who apply it.’ The words ‘stigmatize’ and ‘victimize,’ ‘interference,’ and the phrase ‘threat to an individual's academic efforts’ were judged to be ‘general and elude precise definition.’ The Court concluded ‘that the University had no idea what the limits of the Policy were and it was essentially making up the rules as it went along.’”

As Robert M. O’Neil points out in his book Free Speech in the College Community, the Constitution fully applies in the public sector, and public schools are therefore constrained by the free speech and press clauses of the First Amendment. For this reason, “campus codes addressed to racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic statements have been repeatedly challenged and uniformly invalidated.” Despite frequent litigation on the matter and the numerous times in which campus speech policies have been struck down, many schools continue to use such speech codes to regulate their students and professors. In an example very similar to the code of conduct at University of Michigan, my boyfriend in college was brought before his school’s honor board for hanging a confederate flag in his room within view of the door. Apparently, it was judged to be offensive because it made students feel that they were in an environment hostile to blacks when they happened to walk by his door as he was going in or out of his room. Administrators at the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa had similar complaints of a Confederate flag hung in the second-floor hallways of Byrd Hall.

The examples in which students were forced to take down American flags after September 11th are even more provocative In October 2001, an administrator at Central Michigan University told several students to remove various patriotic posters (an American flag, an eagle, and so on) from their dormitory. A Residential Advisor told them that their display was "offensive," and that they had until the end of the day to remove the items. That same month, Lehigh University Vice Provost of Student Affairs, John Smeaton, ordered the removal of the American flag from the campus bus. University of Alabama administrators created a blanket ban on all window displays – originally because of the controversy over the display of a Confederate flag, but with the inadvertent effect of preventing the hanging of any flag. Residential Life Director Lisa Skelton said the plan was designed to make students feel more at home on campus, using the argument that, “If they put [a display] on a Burke Hall window, it makes it look like it expresses the entire community’s opinion rather than an individuals’.”

Such attempts to censor expression on college campuses would make one wonder if these administrators forget their days in college – when they were led the free speech movement with protests and flag burning displays on campus. It is almost as if they are now undermining the very principle for which they fought 30 to 40 years ago. The ACLU encourages college administrators to reconsider the methods by which they deal with offensive speech, stating, “Where racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech -- not less -- is the best revenge. This is particularly true at universities, whose mission is to facilitate learning through open debate and study, and to enlighten. Speech codes are not the way to go on campuses, where all views are entitled to be heard, explored, supported or refuted. Besides, when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem. Then they can organize effectively to counter bad attitudes, possibly change them, and forge solidarity against the forces of intolerance.”

Perhaps university administrators don’t want to “facilitate learning through open debate” and do not want “all views…to be heard, explored, supported or refuted.” If administrators truly wanted to promote a campus open to debate of all ideas, they would apply speech policies equally to all members of the college community (which can clearly see has not been the case). The ACLU makes clear that the extent to which we believe in First Amendment rights (which liberals constantly argue in favor of) is most tested “when the speaker is someone we disagree with most.” Clearly, administrators and other members of the college community who charge students and professors with “violating the speech code” are not completely committed to the idea that “the right of free speech is indivisible: When one of us is denied this right, all of us are denied.”

It is easy to be tolerant of ideas and opinions similar to your own, and to recognize as “offensive” that material with which you don’t agree. More and more, though, we see speech codes being used to silence only the people with whom the administration does not agree. Administrators and proponents of speech codes say that the policies are only used to discourage speech that is irrational and unintelligent; that is, speech that inhibits the learning environment through its failure to incite open debate or rationally defend an opinion. They argue that, “speech codes emphasize the need to support convictions with facts and reasoning while protecting the rights of potential victims.” If this were the case, however, we would see examples in which speech codes were used to silence students and professors in their rhetoric against President Bush, against the war in Iraq, and in favor of gay marriage (all of which are topics frequently discussed in such a way as to highlight irrational arguments and dissuade rhetoric defending the opposition).

University of Missouri at Columbia biology professor Miriam Golomb accused David Horowitz of being a racist and offered extra credit to students who protested a speech made by Horowitz on the school’s campus. When students filed complaints against Golomb for such obvious bias (and the fact that all of this took place in a genetics class), professors defended her and the head of the journalism department, Charles N. Davis, instead questioned the motivations of the students.

In the case of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, if speech codes truly were intended to protect the “right not to be offended,” we would have seen Churchill dismissed from his position or at least reprimanded for his controversial public statements on the attacks of 9/11. Instead, we saw 139 professors sign a petition in favor of Churchill’s freedom of expression and the Board of Regents decide that no action should be taken against Professor Churchill for his statements. Why is it that the right to free expression trumped the “right not to be offended” in this case, but not the others? As David Beito, Ralph Luker, and Robert Johnson of the Organization of American Historians put it, “If the defenders of Churchill hope to be taken seriously, they have an obligation to show that they will not play favorites in their defense of academic freedom.”

Churchill is not the only offense against academic freedom seen at CU-Boulder. In his testimony before the Colorado State General Assembly's Joint Education Committee, Student Mario Nicholais reported that his property law instructor, David Hill, said that “the R in Republican stands for racist” and called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom” during the fall semester of 2004. When confronted about such remarks, Hill replied, “There are plenty of other Nazis like you out there.”

At the University of Northern Colorado, students were asked to explain why President Bush is a war criminal in one of the final exam questions for the criminology class offered with Assistant Professor Robert Dunkley in spring 2003. As reported by David Horowitz in Front Page Magazine, when a student instead wrote why Saddam Hussein was the war criminal, she was given a failing grade. He also reported that, after the incident was reported to the department chair, Dunkley claimed that the question read: “Explain why President Bush could be considered a war criminal,” but was unable to produce copies of either the final exam or the student’s final exam essay.

Liberal organization Media Matters counters Horowitz’s claims, stating that the question asked “for a discussion about the disparity between the administration's pre-war claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction versus the fact that no such weapons were found to actually exist,” and for the students “to explain how the war might be explained in terms of research on ‘deviance’ that had been discussed in course readings…[and] how the media and various moral entrepreneurs can conspire to create a panic.” Media Matters claims that the question ended by asking, “Where does the social meaning of deviance come from? Argue that the attack on Iraq was deviance based on negotiable statuses. Make the argument that the military action of the U.S. attacking Iraq was criminal” and that the student had the option of choosing between this question and another question. Again, note that the professor was unable to produce a copy of the exam, even though required to do so by school policy.

Regardless of how the question was worded, I have two qualms with this story.

• First, the student did in fact fail to answer the question asked of her on the final examination. Regardless of how it was worded, it asked nothing about what makes Saddam Hussein a war criminal. Even if she does not believe that George Bush is a war criminal, as a critical thinker (as she should be by the time she is two years into her post-secondary education), she should be able to make a case from that perspective. Since she failed to answer the question correctly, I agree with the decision not to give her credit for her answer (note that she still ended up with a ‘B’ in the class). Furthermore, in an interview with InsideHigherEd.com, Professor Dunkley (who they point out as being a registered Republican) said that he penalized the student for failing to meet the page requirement – writing two pages instead of the required three – and that she still ended up with a passing grade on the exam.
• Second, I would contend that even if the question were worded as Media Matters claims it was, the question on the final examination was inappropriate given the context of the course, of which the course description reads “Survey criminal behavior generally, including theories of causation, types of crime, extent of crime, law enforcement, criminal justice, punishment and treatment.”

Despite all of the attention this received, and regardless of which side is right (Horowitz or Media Matters), I’m astounded that the school’s administration could allow such issues to be raised without any sign of investigation into Dunkley’s performance – especially after he failed to abide by the school policy that requires all professors to keep copies of their examinations. Professor Dunkley is still teaching Criminology at the University of Northern Colorado, although the class is now offered through the Criminal Justice Department instead of the Department of Sociology.

A year later, in 2004, Government professor Tandeka Nkiwane of Smith College got away with telling a ROTC student that soldiers “are horrible, inhuman barbarians” and singling out and mocking pro-American students without any form of investigation or reprimand. She encouraged her students to protest the United States’ “imperialist role” in the war in Iraq, telling them that the United States is the “greatest threat to world stability” and that “the wounds caused by the ‘collateral damage’ [that the U.S.] inflicts now…bleed just as much as those caused during colonial and imperial times.” Again, with no one from the administration rushing to “defend the victims” of her statements.

That same year, when Smith’s Republican Club president Melissa Parham wanted to write a paper on Clinton’s policy toward North Korea, she said she “was told that [she] couldn’t criticize the policy because it would be offensive and hurtful, [but other students were able to write] on why women should have abortions, why faith-based initiatives are wrong, [and] why the Patriot Act is evil” [emphasis mine].

In early 2005, Rhode Island College’s School of Social Work threatened to reduce master’s student Bill Felkner’s grades for not lobbying the Rhode Island legislature for policies with which he disagreed. In his fall 2004 “Policy and Organizing” class, Professor James Ryczek,

“assigned students to form groups to lobby the Rhode Island legislature for social welfare programs from an approved list. If a student could not find a suitable social welfare topic on the list, he or she could also lobby for gay marriage. Felkner did not support any of these programs or issues and asked Ryczek if he could instead lobby against one of them or for the Academic Bill of Rights. This request was refused. Felkner then joined with and participated in a group, but wrote an individually graded paper that argued against his group’s position on the issue. Ryczek failed this paper, writing, “Regardless of the content, application of theory, and critical analysis, you did not write from the perspective you were required to use in this academic exercise. Therefore, the paper is must [sic] receive a failing grade.”

“When Felkner wrote an e-mail to the professor about what he felt was liberal ideological bias at the school, Professor Ryczek responded, “I revel in my biases,” and added, “I think anyone who consistently holds antithetical views to those that are espoused by the profession might ask themselves whether social work is the profession for them.” Ryczek suggested that if Felkner did not agree with the school’s political philosophy, he should consider leaving or finding another line of work. After Felkner made Ryczek’s comments public, the professor refused to communicate any further with him through e-mail.”

Yet another example of students being forced to lobby in the interest of their professor occurred when part-time speech instructor Rosalyn Kahn of Citrus College offered extra credit to students who wrote to President Bush expressing disapproval of the war in Iraq. Student Gina Cantagallo told Bill O’Reilly, "I went home, did the assignment, and I came back, and I had a letter that said I supported Bush, I supported our country, I supported our troops. [Kahn] looked at the letter and said, 'This is unacceptable.' I said, 'What's wrong? You said write a letter on the potential war,' and she said 'Absolutely not, I wanted you to write a letter stating you were against war and against us overriding the U.N.'" Student Chris Stevens asked Kahn not to send his letter to the President because it did not reflect his true opinion, and ended up not turning it in (and not getting the extra credit) when she refused. Stevens also said that Kahn encouraged students to visit MoveOn.org, a website for a liberal political action group that opposed the war with Iraq and was responsible for the “Daisy” television commercial that suggested that war with Iraq would initiate a worldwide nuclear disaster. Additional extra credit was offered to students who wrote letters to State Senator Jack Scott expressing disapproval of proposed budget cuts and signed unaddressed postcards discussing the need for more adjunct faculty. "All of the letters were to somehow benefit her personally or her political viewpoints," Stevens said. "It was really disappointing. It's OK for her to hold beliefs and argue for them, but you have to allow people to disagree.”

After receiving complaints from students at the end of February 2003, Associate Dean Samuel T. Lee emailed Professor Kahn to clarify the Citrus College District’s position that no political activism or political favoritism be allowed in the classroom and instructed her to alter her practice of “discriminating against dissenting students.” After receiving hundreds of phone calls from free speech advocates in early March, Dean Lee dismissed Kahn from the responsibility of teaching her class on March 6th and placed her on paid administrative leave after surveying her students. Superintendent and President of Citrus College, Louis E. Zellers, said that the college will sanction Kahn “in an appropriate manner” after “reviewing that aspect of her appointment.” When asked why Kahn had not been fired, Zellers told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, "In fairness to due process, we wish to continue the investigation. We think there may be other issues that will come forth and at that time, we will take the appropriate action." In reality, because Kahn is a state employee, she had a substantial degree of employment protection that restricted the school’s ability to fire her. If the school was to fire her too quickly, Kahn could have taken legal action against the college for failing to grant her due process; if the school had put her on unpaid leave, Kahn could have used legal action to claim that the college was starving her into a settlement. While paid leave may seem to fail in holding Kahn accountable for her actions, it is the best means by which the college could have dealt with this problem given the laws in California.

Overall, Citrus College handled the situation “swiftly and boldly” in comparison to other schools, but it is still a shame that Kahn has shown no remorse and hasn’t had to pay any price for her actions. Dean Lee was the one to apologize to the students; Dr. Zellers was the one to write letters of apology to President Bush and State Senator Scott. Lee and Zellers were both responsible for distributing a complete list of grades to the students (since many homework assignments “mysteriously” disappeared after Kahn got word that some of the students had filed complaints about her), giving new extra credit assignments, finding an alternate professor to teach the Speech 106 class for the rest of the semester, and outlining actions to be taken by the college for the remainder of the investigation. The extent to which Kahn has been reprimanded thus far is in Dr. Zeller’s statement that, “We believe the instructor did abuse her authority,” and in a statement made by Citrus College Board member Susan Keith, stating that, “from a policy standpoint, what the teacher did was inappropriate.” Kahn was further investigated for political activity in the classes she taught at Pasadena City College, Los Angeles City College, Los Angeles Valley College, and Cypress College, but I have been unable to find the results of these investigations.

Citrus College is at least one example in which the administration acted upon a professor trying to indoctrinate her students. "We don't want to suppress anyone's right to free speech and expression," affirmed President Zellers, "I regret that students were put through this.” However, the teacher’s union, Adjunct Faculty United, still argued in favor of Kahn, saying that the professor did nothing wrong and was not treated fairly by the college system. Jean Culp, co-president of the union, said that there was “a rush to condemn”: “We think Dr. Zellers acted precipitously and the union plans to do everything we can to protect the instructor's due process as well as academic freedom.” Kahn said in a statement during the investigation, “a terrible wrong has been done to me and to the teaching profession.”

It is not surprising, with attitudes such as these, that politicization of the classroom has become so rampant in recent years. “When fully informed of a frightening violation of freedom of conscience, the college administration responded swiftly and boldly to restore liberty and to undo the harm already done,” lauded FIRE’s Thor Halvorssen. “It is a great day for freedom of conscience and a great day for Citrus College. It is heartening to find a college president who defends the principles of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech.” As a columnist for Citrus College's The Clarion wrote, "Apparently Kahn wasn't listening in her U.S. Government class, and missed the historical basis for this country of ours, namely that there is something more important than peace, and that is liberty."

Unfortunately, Kahn is not alone. A study done in 2004 by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that fewer than half of students could easily say that they strongly disagreed with the statement that they had to agree with their professors social and political views in some classes. Nearly one-third of students felt that they had to agree with their professors’ political or social views in order to get a good grade in class. The study questioned 658 students randomly selected from 51 top universities and colleges (U.S. News & World Report’s 25 top national liberal arts colleges and 26 – including a tie – top national universities), with majors ranging from biological science (10%) and engineering (8%) to economics (7%) and political science (11%). The survey also found that 74% of students felt that some of their professors made positive comments about liberals in class, while only 34% felt that some of their professors made positive comments about conservatives, and only 15% of students felt that their professors made negative comments about liberals, while 47% felt that their professors made negative comments about conservatives. Surprisingly, the study had relatively few students representing the majors that are most often wrought with social and political bias: Anthropology (1%), Cultural Studies (2%), Sociology (2%), and Women’s Studies (0%). However, as we saw in the example of University of Missouri genetics professor Miriam Golomb, bias is possible anywhere in the university.

I doubt that the average parent wants to pay $40,000 per year for his child to be taught biology by professors who carry on about political campaigns. Granted, it could be argued that this study has some significant flaws, or at least that it fails to consider the problem in its entirety. Furthermore, if we look at the study more closely, on average, only about 10% of students strongly agreed that there was an extreme liberal bias in the classroom, and that number is approximately equal with the number of students who identified themselves as conservative on the survey. The average “moderate” student, on the other hand, recognizes that there is more liberal bias than there is conservative bias, but does not find it as noticeable or offensive as the conservative students do.

However, the fact of the matter is that liberal bias in the classroom does exist and that administrators at most schools show no interest in cracking down on it. During the 2004 Presidential election, 58% of students said that some professors made negative comments about President Bush, while more than two-thirds of students reported that none of their professors made positive comments about the president. The exact opposite was true when the students were questioned about Senator John Kerry, of whom 62% of students reported that they had professors make positive comments, while 80% reported that they did not have any professors make negative comments about him.

I have heard many stories about professors randomly interjecting negative comments about the Bush administration. Even if these comments are not made with the intention of indoctrinating the students, they still have the effect of undermining academic freedom. While sitting in on a Constitutional Law class at the College of William & Mary, the professor brought up Vice President Dick Cheney’s shooting accident – in which he accidentally shot one of his hunting partners – on three separate occasions. While it was an unordinary story interesting to bring up in everyday conversation, it had great potential within the classroom to make students feel uncomfortable and limited in what they could say before the professor. Do students have a “right” to feel comfortable in the classroom? Are colleges and professors obliged to provide a “comfortable” learning environment? As a proponent of classical liberal arts education in the British model, I would argue that they are so obliged to keep conversation of the Vice President’s shooting accident or any other such drivel out of the classroom. Others, who feel – as I used to – that politics permeates every aspect of life, would say that no conversation should be left out of the classroom because all conversation helps to prepare the student to handle the intellectual and philosophical questions and situations of everyday life in the “real world.” Why do I fail to hold this opinion which seems so easily palatable? I think that it is first and foremost because no matter how organic the conversations that occur in the classroom may be and no matter how similar they may be to conversations that occur in the “real world,” higher education today is stuck – and I believe will continue to be stuck for all of the foreseeable future – in a bubble. Its reflection of and interaction with the “real world” is artificial at best. For as much as college students claim to be in touch with the real world and aware of current-day problems, they often have just read a poster in the student center or written one 20-page paper for a class on the matter. Often without frequent exposure to television news and without the funds to subscribe to a truly representative array of quality news journals or publications, exposure to current day issues for most college students is limited to the snip-its they hear in passing through a common area and commentary made by their professors.

This is why the question of politics in the classroom – both in the form of professor commentary and actual curriculum and course offerings – necessarily becomes a primary concern when looking at extremism in and reform of higher education. Unfortunately, conservatives and liberals alike have failed in answering this question because both sides find themselves torn in how best to resolve it. Conservatives want academic freedom because conservative students feel silenced by liberal bias in the classroom, yet they don’t want their “children” to be exposed to ideas that they are “not ready to hear” (such as those expressed by Ward Churchill). Liberals want “freedom of speech,” but also want to restrict “hate speech,” which they are quickly finding to be applicable to anything and everything – race, religion, gender, political ideologies, lifestyle, sexuality and ethnicity – and often used by conservatives to bring silence liberals. Speakers, artwork, and performances offensive to both sides are protected by “free speech” and the argument for “intellectual diversity.” The only way to resolve this conflict is to decide which is more important: (1) exposing students to a true range of ideas and allowing the realm of academia to develop through the unrestricted exploration of any and all ideas or (2) exposing students to a particular set of facts and ideas deemed necessary to develop their logic and communication skills while protecting them from deviant ideas that they may not have the capacity to think through critically as students. This comes back to the idea that it is not so much important that higher education take on a certain format or look a certain way, so much as it is that institutions of higher education be clear about what they see their task to be and how they intend to accomplish it. The first and the second options each have their value and role within higher education, but few schools have the boldness to make public which they choose to pursue.

Aside from being torn over the question as to whether political conversation and other forms of controversial speech is appropriate in the classroom and in higher education more generally, I feel that our current system is perhaps even more plagued by inconsistency in defending whatever decisions it may make on the matter. As I have pointed out, there are plenty of examples of both liberal and conservative bias in the classroom (although liberal bias has been more common and more noticeable due to media attention). However, as many schools have resorted to implementing speech codes to protect the academic environment on their campuses, they frequently fail to hold liberal professors accountable to these standards, while at the same time using them to completely silence conservatives. If a school is going to decide that speech restrictions are appropriate for the academic environment that it hopes to cultivate, it cannot allow professors such as Ward Churchill to make comments about “Little Eichmanns” being blown up on 9/11 and then deem conservative political views “offensive.”

In 2001, Professor Jon Willand of North Hennepin Community College in Minneapolis was suspended for using "examples which are provocative or inflammatory" and "phraseology which does not manifest a clear concern for student sensibilities and which may promote student misunderstandings," as well as for violating the computer use policy by using computer equipment for the "receipt, storage or transmission of offensive . . . information," when he hung a picture of General George Custer on his office door and told students of a report he found on the official Jamestown website that said that Pocahontas somersaulted naked throughout Jamestown. While I personally would feel uncomfortable with a teacher telling me about Pocahontas’ supposed nude acrobatics and while I may have a hard time seeing how it would be relevant to the coursework, I don’t see how such comments are any more “offensive” than conversations of Barbie doll S&M (Satanist/masochistic) that are supposedly “mind-opening” in a women’s studies course.

It appears that, on many campuses, liberal professors can say anything, but conservative professors have to hold their tongue. I remember one of my professors telling me to close the door while I was in her office so that she could tell me that she thought I was doing a good job with the Dyke Ball Awareness Campaign. I also received anonymous phone calls from staff saying that they supported me, but didn’t want to disclose their identity for fear of retaliation by the administration during tenure evaluations. I’ve heard many others stories of professors not making tenure because of conservative views. How can a school say that it endeavors to cultivate an environment for valuable dialogue and a quality liberals arts education while simultaneously using roundabout methods to silence opposition? Even more troubling for the pursuit of academic freedom are the examples of professors not getting funding or not being published or recognized for their work when their research supports conservative views or runs contrary to arguments that support liberal views.

If schools are truly going to pursue a multicultural curriculum and try to expose their students to an entire range of ideas, this inconsistency in dealing with the politicization of higher education needs to be stopped. The politicization of higher education probably has done the most to undermine the worthwhile goals of multiculturalism, and speech codes render all attempts at comprehensive education useless. Why is my opinion on this so harsh? Because politics has always been about making your side seem more appealing, and if students only learn the pros of one side and the cons of another, they will not be able to think critically about the issue at hand and they certainly will not be able to get a well-balanced “multicultural” understanding from their education. How could a student get exposure to a variety of cultures and perspectives if the political environment on campus is constantly trying to sway them to only see one side of things? Furthermore, how can they get a well-balanced “multicultural” education when the curriculum is not only one-sided, but skewed as well? There are some things that can be taught as one-sided without being skewed; let’s say, for example, that murder is wrong. A teacher doesn’t have to present the other side – to justify murder. However, when a teacher gets into a discussion over a topic such as the war in Iraq, it is unreasonable to say that the war in Iraq is wrong for X, Y, and Z reasons without allowing room for debate over the merits of the war – that would simply be misrepresenting the facts surrounding the debate.

This misuse of the teaching profession to raise up activists and proponents of certain political positions has, unfortunately, plagued higher education since the beginning of the educational system. As K.F. Tiedemann writes in his book All Hail the Death of Truth!,

“The most popular career of a Greek of ability at the time was politics; hence the sophists largely concentrated on teaching rhetoric. The aims of the young politicians whom they trained were to persuade the multitude of whatever they wished them to believe. The search for truth was not top priority…Some, like Gorgias, asserted that it was not necessary to have any knowledge of a subject to give satisfactory replies as regards it. Thus, Gorgias ostentatiously answered any question on any subject instantly and without consideration… In this way, the sophists tried to entangle, entrap, and confuse their opponents, and even, if this were not possible, to beat them down by mere violence and noise. They sought also to dazzle by means of strange or flowery metaphors, by unusual figures of speech, by epigrams and paradoxes, and in general by being clever and smart, rather than earnest and truthful.”

Sound familiar? This is precisely the teaching method utilized by activist professors, most commonly to provide their students with the catch phrases of liberal ideology so that they may become activists for liberal causes. Students are given information without the background necessary to process it and catch phrases without the knowledge to be able to defend them. Proponents of multiculturalism hope “for all students to be educated so that they may examine and deconstruct oppression, and work to eliminate it.” Sounds nice, but how are students to do anything effectively if they are not taught the critical thinking skills necessary to reason through it?

A few months after my graduation from Wellesley, I found myself in an interesting political discussion with a friend in Florida. A waterfront restaurant in South Beach, Miami, with a grilled cheese sandwich and a Diet Cherry Coke may not seem like the typical set-up for a political debate, and I’m not even sure exactly how we got into the debate, but all of a sudden I found myself playing George W. Bush in a debate against my friend Andrew, who took the role of 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry. For 20 minutes we carried on in a heated debate, presenting arguments as each of the presidential candidates would. Finally, we called a truce and decided to get back to eating our lunch. Regardless of our party affiliation or our sentiments about the presidential candidates, we were able to debate from both sides. I could have just as easily taken up the role of John Kerry, and he Bush. If colleges truly want to create students “who will make a difference in the world,” as Wellesley’s mission statement says, the students should be able to be well-versed in both sides of an argument and be able to reason their way to a conclusion about the value and validity of each.

This skill is particularly missing in the realm of multiculturalism that focuses on “oppression.” It is almost as if many professors – speaking more to the social sciences than to the hard sciences – teach their subjects with given assumptions about the oppression and victimization of certain groups in society, without allowing their students time to wrestle with the validity of those assumptions. It is accepted as given that the students already believe that this oppression and victimization exists, and that it is their role to change it by empowering the oppressed and squashing the oppressor. Starting with this as the foundation, no one ever asks if women, minorities, homosexuals, and other groups taken up by the liberal cause truly are oppressed, or if WASP males really are their oppressors. These are just accepted as truth. How can students get an education that empowers them to leave college and actually make a difference and better the world when such fundamental questions have been left unanswered and the foundation for their actions has no reasonable explanation beyond the most common of liberal catch phrases?

As HJ Massingham puts it, “the essence of culture is initiation into wholeness.” It is astounding how multicultural curriculum falls so short of producing “wholeness” within its students when it makes such great claims about helping them understand various cultures. Educators within academic environments that sponsor intentional multicultural curricula have to ask themselves “whether [their] students are graduating with the linguistic, interpersonal, and intellectual expertise which will enable them to feel comfortable and productive in a global society.” While this may be the larger goal of policies and curricula that promote multiculturalism, it is fairly clear that it just hasn’t worked out the way these educators would like it to. Students today are coming out of school less ready to interact with the world than they were before these policies were implemented – some with rose-colored glasses, others still stuck in a phase of teenage angst, both restricted to dialogue revolving around common politicized slogans.

The substantial handicap imposed on students who are taught in academic environments unquestioningly dedicated to “multiculturalism” became most visible to me during the time leading up to and the start of the Iraq War. One day in March 2003, while I was brushing my teeth in the shared bathroom on the second floor of my dorm, a girl from my floor came up to me and asked, “Maribeth, I know that you come from a military family and that you have to support them, but how can you support the war in Iraq when it means that you’re brother is going to have to be sent over there to put his life on the line for oil?”

This question came after a house council meeting in which, as Vice President of Programming (the party planner for the dorm), I was asked to vote on whether or not the school should sign an Anti-War Resolution that had been signed by several other similarly-situated schools. I raised objections to the school signing the resolution on two grounds: (1) I argued that students came to Wellesley to be educated, not to be represented politically, and (2) I pointed out that I had been elected to throw parties, not to represent the dorm residents’ political views. These arguments were completely separate from my views on the war, my feelings about my brother being deployed, and my disgust at the school’s lack of consideration for the students who were in the military or who had loved ones in the military. I made no indication of my actual views of the war, I simply objected in principle to the school signing any political resolutions on behalf of the student body. However, I was then labeled as a “neocon” supporting “American imperialism.”

Given this new reputation, my friend approached me about my support of “a war fought only for oil.” I responded to my friend, without even getting into all of the issues relating to Israel that prompted our action in Iraq, by asking her, “Don’t you think that if it was really just about oil that we would take the $98 billion it is going to cost us to fight a war in Iraq and spend it somewhere like Venezuela?” What was her response? “What’s in Venezuela?”

This is my problem with the catch phrases with which students are being trained. So many students shouted about the war in Iraq being “just about oil” without having any clue of the petropolitics of the Middle East and other regions of the world. Venezuela is the world’s fifth largest exporter of oil, exporting 2.1 million barrels per day (compared to Iraq’s 1.42 million per day). While the country currently has the 7th largest oil reserves in the world with 75.59 billion barrels proven reserves (Iraq, 4th, has 112.5 billion ), there is believed to be an addition 270 billion barrels of unconventional extra-heavy oil in the Orinoco tar belt (equivalent to 90% of Saudi Arabia’s proven oil reserves ), which, if certified and proved commercially viable, would make Venezuela home to the world’s largest crude oil reserves. To not know that Venezuela has oil is about the same as not knowing that India and China have the fastest growing economies. These are very significant realities of our times, and they affect many important political and business decisions.

Yet does any of this matter when debating the validity of the Iraq War on a college campus? No, of course not. The only thing that matters is that “Bush is just mad that his daddy never got the chance to finish what he wanted to do.” I was appalled as I sat in my Congressional and Legislative Politics professor’s office listening to a group of protestors bang on drums and shout “Stop the War!” That was the extent of their argument, that we should “stop the war.” If you asked them why, they would reply with the party line that it was just about oil or that Bush wanted to carry out a vendetta he had against the Middle East. Since when has banging out drums and shouting been an effective way of convincing someone of your position?

The sad thing is that these people think that they are being effective. They believe that all of society cares so greatly about what college kids are doing or saying about various political issues or causes. As one proponent of multicultural curriculum writes, “as people line up on issues like affirmative action, the rights of gays and lesbians, abortion, religion in schools, and sexual harassment, they inevitably permeate the thin veneer which administratively separates schooling from the rest of society.” Do you really think that anyone in the real world all of a sudden decides to stop buying clothes made in sweatshops because they saw a bunch of college kids parading around their campus naked, or that they all of a sudden “realize” that the war in Iraq is a bad idea because a kid walked by them banging on a drum?

Educators keep pursuing multicultural programs and bringing politics into the classroom with the intention of preparing “students for common citizenship in a diverse, democratic state while also nurturing their groups’ cultures, values, and institutional participation,” yet I cannot say that I feel confident in sharing a “common citizenship in a diverse, democratic state” with many of the students with whom I graduated. From what I’ve seen across many of the 55 colleges in the Boston area and have heard in conversations with friends from colleges around the country, it seems that many students have fallen into habits not expected to result from multiculturalism and the politicization of higher education: (1) they feel so jaded with regard to our current society and political environment that they give up on holding themselves or anyone else to any set expectations, going on to live an individualistic, relativistic, and often apolitical life; (2) they go on to hold such extreme views that they feel compelled to act on them and tell them to everyone so as to prove that everyone else is wrong. While I would argue that these responses are equally problematic, the latter is definitely the more noticeable response.

At Smith College, one of the sister schools to Wellesley, two students protested at Westover Air Force Base by physically blocking the entrance to the base to show their disapproval of the war in Iraq. One of the students, Kasha Ho, spoke with typical activist mumbo jumbo, saying, “During the rally, I joined with other members of the community in a planned act of civil disobedience as we wove ourselves together into a ‘Web of Life.’ … I personally felt the necessity to risk arrest by placing myself, my values, in the way of the perpetuation of this unjust war.” Smith junior Amy McDonald encouraged other students to show their sentiments against the war by staging a class walkout, stating, “(W)e must refuse to allow our everyday lives to continue while atrocities are committed in the names of government and liberty.” Would you think that these were among America’s best and brightest liberal arts students? Or believe that they are actually spending $45,492 per year for their education? I’ll leave it up to you to judge the academic value of these comments (and the decision to physically block military operation during a time of war) and decide for yourself whether these girls are getting their money’s worth.

Rebellion and whining: The college student’s solutions for dealing with political issues

One of the interesting ways in which the syncretism of multiculturalism and politics has taken form in higher education is in the new belief and advocacy of the minority as something of superior worth to the norm, what could almost be considered the glorification of grievances. As Berkeley sociologist David Matza has suggested, student movements throughout the 20th century often stemmed from an appeal of populism, “from nineteenth century Russia to the contemporary American glorification of the poorest blacks.” Disguising their causes with phraseology that appeals to the compassionate side in everyone has turned out to be quite a clever political maneuver among college students, making it seem justifiable that they attack the moral position and professional authority of their elders and helping them, the students, to evade and defend against any unflattering assessment that may be made of them. That is to say, by seeming to take up the plight of the less fortunate, students argue that they have the higher ground to those in positions of authority over them and that, whatever criticism may come their way, they are justified in ignoring it because it comes from people who “just don’t understand” their altruistic actions.

In addition to this, college students have also received multiculturalism and the politicization of campus with a new awareness of their own grievances. As S.M. Lipset puts it, “The unconceptualized sense of grievance with their situation, a sense which in many cases is often directed against the university, also may make many students, particularly those with a politically critical background [such as women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities], more receptive to political action directed against trends in the larger society.” I often had to fight from falling prey to this mentality as I was constantly surrounded by the querulous remarks of feminazis and minorities who had been instructed and led to believe that they were being oppressed by society within the social environment and across the curriculum at Wellesley.

The political genius of playing off of peoples’ sense of grievance with their situation and appealing to their sense of compassion has provided tremendous momentum for creating student activism. I’m still not sure how anti-war activists were able to use this tendency towards their advantage in protesting Iraq, but somehow I found myself surrounded by women at Wellesley who felt strongly that the war in Iraq was a crime against humanity and just another example of how President Bush was seeking to take their (the students’) personal liberties away. How this made sense to anyone is beyond me, but somehow the people who know how to start a political movement without adducing any convincing evidence to support their position were able to win over a very large portion of the Wellesley community to stand against the war in Iraq simply by appealing to their emotions.

There are many examples of professors at colleges across the country comparing Bush to Hitler during the War in Iraq. Columbia professor [...] Aptheker proclaimed, “This war in Iraq is an obscenity,” while speaking at a USCS faculty teach-in against the war in April 2003. She went on to note the similarities she saw between Bush’s political strategies and those of Nazi-era Germany, stating, “We should make no mistake between the kinds of diplomacy Hitler’s regime engaged in during the 1930s and the kinds of diplomacy the Bush administration has engaged in. There are direct parallels, and it’s very frightening. …Our agenda should be to overthrow Bush.” Overthrow the President of the United States of America while we are in a war against terrorism? Yes, that’s a great idea. Who should we make the new President…[insert any absurd name]?

The comparison to Nazi Germany has been used in many other liberal causes taken up by professors as well. For example, Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University believes that “there are ‘stark’ similarities between the plight of World War II-era Jews in Nazi concentration camps and contemporary Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons.” This has become a crucial tactic for many extremist political activists. Why compare present-day issues to Nazi Germany? Because the thought of Nazi Germany raises emotions – there was a clear bad guy and clear victims; it was obvious who the wrong-doers were and people still mourn to this day our delay in being able to save the millions who fell innocent before them. If you can convince someone that a present-day issue is comparable to Nazi Germany, you have established an emotional bond between them and the issue enough so that they will be unquestioningly committed to the “cause.” The catch phrases used by political extremists today are emotive specifically so that they can maximize recruitment without having to “waste time” convincing people through rational debate.

During protests, they screamed about “American imperialism,” oil, and the “atrocities” that the U.S. committed against the poor people of Iraq and people all over the world. They never stopped to actually research the issue enough to step away from key phrases, or to consider the fact that the war was about more than Iraq (try asking a student at Wellesley, Smith, or any of the other colleges that signed the anti-war petition about how the war in Iraq relates to Israel and I can almost guarantee you that your question will be met with a blank stare and, perhaps, with the maundering of some emotional and anfractuous argument about how awful George W. Bush is and how the Republican party is greedy and evil).

It’s astounding how limited many college students are in their ability to debate present-day issues, especially given the number of them that claim to be political activists. Yet this problem did not start just in the time since the start of the Iraq war. In his 1984 book The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom writes, “If I pose the routine questions designed to confuse [a student] and make them think, such as ‘If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?’ they either remain silent or reply that the British should never have been there in the first place.” It’s almost as if their ability to think about an issue is completely limited to the catch phrases they hear in class or the limited arguments they are exposed to in the five or ten books on their required reading lists, with a few big words that they don’t understand just to make them sound smart.

Smith sophomore Megan McRobert described the Iraq war as “a war against democracy waged by the military industrial complex,” referring to the United States as the military industrial complex and to the regime headed by Saddam Hussein as a democracy. She continued by saying that, “Financial oligarchy has taken the place of democracy.” Smith senior Erika Nelson described how the innocent people in Iraq would be the biggest losers in the war, saying that, “Our invasion of Iraq is part of a legacy of racially marked U.S. military intervention in the past century that contributes to white, ‘Western’ imperialism and global dominance.” She also described it as an “elitist and racist” war that perpetuated the ways in which minorities are held down in this country by forcing people of color and from the working class, who are “over-represented in the military” in her opinion, to take the bulk of the “harsh economic effects [of the war] at home.”

I heard similar arguments from a girl at Wellesley who told me how her friend joined the military just so he could get money for school and how he was now being forced to go to Iraq against his will. As far as I know (as someone raised in a military family and with several relatives in the military at the time of the war in Iraq), it was by his own will that he accepted money for college in exchange for being committed to serve in the military (which includes during times of war) and he has the option at any time to leave the military. Again, this was just an emotional argument against the war, with no logical or educated reasons to substantiate it.

Supposed “tolerance” on college campuses

It is a shame to see that these “tolerant” and “liberated” students are still stuck in a box and limited to a very narrow view of the world. A friend of mine who did ROTC (the program in which students are trained to become officers in the U.S. military) at the University of Colorado at Boulder recalled to me his experience of being labeled conservative and often being challenged in class (even though he is a fairly liberal Hispanic from Los Angeles) simply because he was wearing his uniform. My friends in ROTC at Wellesley often had the same kind of experience. Particularly as the controversy over the war in Iraq became more heated, students in the military or who were known to have family in the military were treated differently and often looked at with disgust because of their “tie to the Bush administration and the war.” A student who was a Special Forces instructor and had served in Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia, and Iraq was told by one of his professors at Metro State College in Denver that he was a “racist” and “violent” and that his uniform was an “offense to the class.”

As one conservative student at Smith said, “You always hear about the fabled liberal tolerance – but I've never seen it first hand. There is a lot of stereotyping here. If you’re conservative, you’re evil.” Such intolerance goes much further than name-calling and stereotyping, though, and has often extended to actual threats and violence against conservative students. After hosting conservative author and columnist Ann Coulter, members of the Smith College Republican Club were harassed with late-night phone calls around 2 a.m., yet the administration failed to do anything about it or even make any announcement discouraging such action. As the founder of The California Patriot newspaper at UC Berkeley, Kelso Barnett, has said, “There really is an atmosphere on campus where students think their offense justifies criminal acts.” Repeatedly, campus administrators have done nothing to discourage or stop such behavior and, in many cases, have given specific instructions to campus security officers not to act on such issues.

At the other end of the spectrum, administrators at Columbia University specifically charged security guards with the task of keeping students from hosting a conservative conference titled, “A Place at the Table: Conservative Ideas in Higher Education,” after other students began to protest the conference. Despite having signed a contract and paying for the meeting space three months in advance, participants were forced to move off campus and hold their meeting in nearby Morningside Park. There they were met by protestors holding signs such as “Access Denied” and “We Win: Racists Not Allowed at Columbia” and shouting down speakers Ward Connerly and Dinesh D’Souza with comments such as “Ha! Ha! You’re Outside, We Don’t Want Your Racist Lies.”

Ward Connerly, a proponent of replacing racial preferences with a merit-based system, was also met by students carrying signs that read, “Protect Free Speech – Shut Connerly Up!” when he spoke at the University of Texas in Fall, 1999. (How much sense does that make?) The following semester, professors joined in the action to protest a speech by Henry Kissinger that was scheduled to be held on February 1, 2000. Professors and students joined together to form a group called the Radical Action Network, which hosted a “teach-in” during which Journalism professor Bob Jensen labeled Kissinger a “war criminal.” The group formed a “not welcome” committee that planned to shout down Kissinger in the same way that students had shouted down Connerly the semester before. Two days before the event was scheduled to take place, the administration forced the event to be canceled for fear of violence. During one such occurrence while I was at Wellesley, Anthropology professor ___ ____ stood up during a speech made by conservative speaker Phyllis Schlafly and began to curse at the speaker. Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I can recall, cursing has never been a very effective way of making someone change their position on an issue. Students at Syracuse University resorted to burning Bibles, shouting, holding a “kiss-in,” and threatening to burn down the campus chapel when conservative speaker Pat Buchanan was scheduled to speak at the school in 1998.

At many schools, conservative students have also had property – such as American flags – stolen and destroyed, particularly in the time leading up to the war in Iraq. The spring of 2003 was also wrought with other disruptive efforts from antiwar activists such as frequent protests against the war and against President Bush and class walkouts. Smith Republican Club President Melissa Parham noted, “People were running up and down the halls, butting into classrooms, yelling and interrupting class. A lot of anti-Bush protesters harassed students who didn’t leave class (for the walkout).” And, ironically, these are supposedly the same people who are promoting “tolerance.”

When the Wellesley Republican Club organized an event called “Conservative Coming Out Day” to allow students who held at least some conservative views to realize that they were not alone on campus, their efforts were undermined as their advertisements were vandalized and the “Conservative Coming Out Day” pins were stolen from all of the front desks in the dorms (where student organizations are allowed to place such items for on campus advertisements). Many of the pins were found discarded in nearby trashcans and the community message boards were filled with students commenting on how “offensive” the idea of Conservative Coming Out Day was and how the pins symbolized close-mindedness and intolerance. These “tolerant” liberals were particularly critical of the Republican Club for using the term “coming out,” which they argued had been claimed by homosexuals and whose use in this instance was clearly meant to undermine the solidarity of the homosexual movement on campus. Clearly. It is disappointing to think that these “tolerant” students felt justified in throwing away the conservative pins because they were “offensive,” yet would have completely blown a gasket if a “liberal” or “homosexual” pin were ever thrown away. Around the same time, a sidewalk chalking advertising a “Bush Party” to support the President’s reelection campaign was defaced and altered so as to have a picture of a vagina accompanying the words “Bush Party.” Did the administration feel compelled to make any announcements on either of these instances? I am sure you can guess their response, or lack thereof.

An American flag hung on a door within one of the administrative buildings at Wellesley after 9/11 was destroyed – “the door was severely vandalized, the flag gouged out and the door ruined by some sharp instrument” – and I’m sure you can imagine the administration’s response. The administration made sure to cover up the occurrence to keep it from getting attention. I was a student at the school and I didn’t even find out about it until after I had graduated.

All of this is not to say that conservatives have become the victims of liberal violence on campus. Conservatives are guilty of their own extremism and intolerance. When Hillary Clinton (Hillary Rodham, Wellesley Class of 1969) came to speak at Wellesley in early 2002, conservatives on campus rushed to organize protests and design signs to show their dislike of her. I attended her speech and actually found it worthwhile to attend the event, despite any political differences. Other students refused to attend the event, considering it a waste of time. I have a hard time considering an event with a former first lady, senator, and potential presidential nominee a waste of time. Regardless of what you think of her views, it is a good idea to get to know what makes her so influential.

I was also disappointed with the conservative reaction to the debate over gay marriage during my senior year at Wellesley. Being on a campus that is estimated to be 25% lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, the gay marriage debate took on a very interesting dynamic among the students. I saw students from both sides of the issue protesting outside the state house on Beacon Hill in downtown Boston as legislators met to decide how to handle the issue of gay marriage. What was the conservative approach to convince people that gay marriage was a bad idea? Chant “Sodom and Gomorrah” while holding signs that read “One Man-One Woman.” Yes, this is quite an effective way of convincing legislators to not support gay marriage and to convince proponents of gay marriage to change their opinion. The only reaction that I saw from liberals is that they kept moving to block the conservative protestors from being able to get any attention from local media. There was absolutely no productive discussion of the issue – no one was convinced of anything.

There has been a change in the form of politics across our country that would be difficult not to notice. The two main political parties have become so extreme that they have isolated most people who wish to consider themselves moderate and have brainwashed the people who are willing to join one simply out of opposition to the other. This change has been even more radical on college campuses and has the potential to significantly impact the way that students approach politics when they enter the real world. I was a registered Democrat when I entered Wellesley, but quickly joined the Republicans on campus because I was so overwhelmed by the extremism and intolerance of the liberals on campus. Once I joined the Republicans, I got swept away in the extremism of the conservative movement (which I now consider just as bad for our society as the extremism that I saw among liberals). As one student at Smith College said, there are many students who “always considered themselves a Democrat but are turned off by the way-Left and very staunch opinions that they find here at Smith.”

It’s astounding to consider how different the college environment is today than it was sixty years ago. Both were at times of war, both following an attack on American soil. Yet the response of college students today is starkly different from the response of the students of the 1940s. Rather than uniting out of a sense of patriotism, duty, obligation, and anger against the attacker, many of today’s students became anti-American, started to develop a liking of anything European, and did anything they could to discourage and stand in the way of the President, the Congress, and the military after the attacks of 9/11.

This type of behavior would be unheard of on college campuses during World War II. Two days after President Roosevelt declared war on December 7, 1941, Smith College held an all-college meeting and sent the president a telegram pledging “full-hearted support to the President of the United States in the struggle against world-wide aggression and (putting) all its abilities behind the efforts of the government to defeat the forces of destruction and lawlessness endangering the survival of all free people.” Nancy Potter, a student at Tufts University, wrote of her experience as a student volunteer during the war:

“I did work as a volunteer in a hospital in Boston to relieve civilian nurses. We were very convinced that everyone ought to be tremendously involved in the war effort. I enjoyed the hospital volunteering, but I found the experience absolutely terrifying. I had been sheltered, and I had not realized that there was as much pain and misery in the world.”

During World War II, the government made it clear that it needed more help collecting food for the soldiers if it were to win the war. What did college students do? They gave up higher paying jobs in the city to go work on farms for the summer. Would such a response happen today? Not likely. There were not tons of college students rushing to enlist or go through officer training when they found out that the U.S. was going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the Forties, colleges were implementing policies to encourage students to help the military: providing housing for students in officer training, offering classes in the country to allow students to get course credits while they worked on farms, and other such changes. There is extensive information recollecting the Farm Labor Project set up by Brooklyn College to encourage students to help pick peas and beans to be sent to soldiers during the summers of 1942, 1943, and 1944. As one participant wrote, “I knew from my experience at Holcut that they were having a hard time harvesting crops, and this was an organized effort for which you could take an English course, and seemed like absolutely the perfect thing to do. It seemed like a wonderful idea. I was really very excited. And of course, we were patriotic and we wanted to make a contribution to our side in the War and this seemed like a good way.” Isn’t it amazing that this mind-opening experience – completely unlike her life in New York City – came not from protesting and banging drums around campus as students today do, but from giving up her summer to serve her country while at war?

Such action is uncommon – and even scoffed at – on campuses today. Conservative students at Smith report that the college “has churned up hatred for the United States, condemnation of our foreign policy and even disdain for the members of our armed forces.” If you show any willingness to support our country in the war, you are all of a sudden labeled a “Republican” and assumed to be anti-gay and racist. This makes for quite a polarizing atmosphere on college campuses and does much to obstruct any opportunity for discussion and debate.

I found a similar atmosphere when I moved to Washington, DC. If a person made any comment that seemed even quasi-liberal, conservatives would give them a look of disgust that said, “Oh, you’re one of those.” When I spoke with liberals, I was automatically dismissed as a “Republican.” This is a problem across our society today. A CNN special said that “our society is more divided today than ever before… not by race, but by party.” You can imagine what a problem will be caused by the fact that students are being bred into such a great degree of extremism today and that they are not familiar with anything more reasonable than a completely polarized environment.

Interestingly enough, at the same time that many students were becoming extreme, anti-American, pro-UN liberals, a number of students became stubbornly conservative and unquestioning in their support of the President and his policies. Some of these students have escaped to small, conservative schools, while others have just made certain to be more aggressive in articulating their conservative views on liberal campuses. This can be just as troublesome, however, as the extreme liberalism that I have highlighted. Just as I was a Democrat who became conservative because of my dislike of the liberal environment at Wellesley, increased aggressiveness within the conservative movement could do the same to push students further towards liberalism.

A dangerous trend that is happening on college campuses is what I would call the “Freshman 180” (not to be confused with the “Freshman 15”). Except for the few students who come to college intending to rebel against ideas taught them by their parents, most students hold tightly to certain preconceived notions given them by their families, the ways in which they were raised, and the demographics of the area in which they grew up. After a few introductory courses, these students suddenly become “enlightened” and “wiser” and feel compelled to run with their new found wisdom. They feel that, since some of the things that they had believed before college were false, all of them must be. They make a 180 degree turn from all of their previously held political beliefs, discarding their true and reasonable beliefs along with the untrue ones, and begin to embrace trendy political causes and extremist positions that are just as likely to have some untruths in them.