How complete is the far-left takeover of college campuses around the country? Now, even Obama administration members are starting to get worried.
Excerpted from former Obama appointee Cass Sunstein\’s article at bloombergview.com:
As my fellow Bloomberg View columnist Noah Smith pointed out last week, for example, the University of California at Berkeley has signaled its willingness to consider disciplining people for making one of a large number of statements, many or all of which most Americans would consider harmless or even correct. “America is a melting pot” is one of the university\’s own examples. Here\’s another: “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough.” And a few more: “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” “America is the land of opportunity.” “Affirmative action is racist.” “There is only one race, the human race.”
According to a paper that has been used as a discussion item in a seminar for new faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, microaggressions include a “statement made when whites deny their racial biases,” and “statements that indicate that a white person does not want to acknowledge race.”
Before you get too impressed, please note that, if you read his entire piece, you\’ll find that Mr. Sunstein is far from entirely against this crusade against “microaggressions”. He makes a point of assuring us that opposition to many such “microaggressions” is legitimate.
To which I would answer, so what? Many of hitler\’s and mussolini\’s policies legitimate too. hitler stabilized Germany\’s currency and mussolini was said to get the trains running on time. But none of those “legitimate” parts of what they did has a thing to do with why they will go down in history as mass murdering monsters.
But it seems clear that, if we\’re talking about suppressing any voices but their own, the campus brownshirts have learned well from the hitlers and mussolinis of the world.
Even before the current “microaggression” phase, campus brownshirts have worked for years to minimize or entirely eliminate speakers at their universities whose opinions disagree with the hard-left mantra they espouse. Over and over again we have seen politically conservative speakers, and pro-Israel speakers, disrupted by organized groups of these brownshirts, so that their talks are either summarily ended (“for security purposes” – that\’s the lame apologia from university officials who don\’t do a thing to stop their fascist activity) or so broken up that the points they try to make are largely lost.
Universities used to be places that valued open discussion from all sides. Now, all too many of them have turned into de facto indoctrination venues where only one side is heard, because only one side is allowed to be heard.
Just once I would like to read about a University administration standing up and stating, emphatically “No more. This ends now. Students who disrupt and/or prevent the free exchange of ideas will be summarily expelled. Thought police are not welcome at this university.”
I\’m not holding my breath waiting for it to happen….
