Campus Liberals Get Taste of Their Own Medicine

At a local university banquet last year, a Democratic elected official pledged to a rapt and enthusiastic audience that he would do everything in his power to return affirmative action to California colleges. Race preferences are banned under the voter-approved Proposition 209, but there was no hint that the overwhelmingly passed proposition had any support in such circles. Such is the narrow, nondiversified view on college campuses.

Would any college administrator dare oppose affirmative action? Ask Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who recently came under attack on this issue.

In the wake of Sept. 11, universities are worried about freedom of speech. Seriously. They think the 1st Amendment is swirling down a funnel, lost to the twin dragons of conservatism and patriotism.

A concerned university administrator at Cal State Northridge recently distributed an article from Nation magazine about the plight of a professor who disparaged U.S. military action in Afghanistan and then faced criticism and vilification by his college for doing so. University administrators are shocked by such reactions because they now suffer under the sort of political activism they always encouraged by the left. The left now faces censorship in the mirror.

Campus speech codes and moral platitudes against hate speech are dissolving while swallowing those who championed them. An environment in which bashing the U.S. and attacking its ideals were sacred rites of academia was transformed into a new concern about self-censoring academicians afraid to criticize U.S. foreign policy. Campus activists’ views on political and social issues, once considered normal on campus, are exposed as outside the mainstream.

Living and working in political segregation from the world at large, campus administrators and activists adapted the distorted view that no other meaningful view exists except a religious fervor to stamp out disapproval of liberal social and political ideas. They’ve adapted as moral absolutes the belief that to think outside their narrow box is tantamount to a kind of insanity.

After all, this is the environment where, as at the University of Washington, a proclamation condemning terrorism was voted down as offensive to Arabs. Campuses are accustomed to protesting students demanding special privileges for designated victims’ groups and shouting anti-Western epithets as administrators hide and debate how to placate them.

The post-Sept. 11 intimidation doesn’t differ from the kind that arises from the left, except in its less violent approach. But since Sept. 11, campus speech codes and responses to victims groups’ hypersensitivity have knocked out more speech from the right than the left.

An Arab political science student at San Diego State University was threatened with disciplinary action for arguing on behalf of U.S. military action. American flag displays, moments of silence and prayer, and campus e-mail and Web sites have been attacked and censored. Orange Coast Community College suspended professor Kenneth Hearlson over his anti-terrorist statements. He was reinstated only after an outcry from free speech organizations.

Conservative speakers and programs forced off campus, repression of Christian groups and massive theft of campus newspapers with conservative advertisements or editorial content surround the usual idiocy of banning Christmas carols, marching down the halls, yelling to have demands met and evicting ROTCs (but not military defense of their lives and campus property). This all occurs under the approving eyes of administrators and has been routine up to now.

The Sept. 11 attacks revealed the repression and chaos at universities, which espouse free speech but are the most anti-free speech places in the country. It’s unfortunate it took liberal activists’ own victimization for anyone to notice.