Karin Lips writes for the Washington Examiner about a key challenge for college campus conservatives.
Prompted by the leaked draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization majority opinion, first-year Yale Law School student Shyamala Ramakrishna posted to Instagram that “the members of [Yale Law School’s conservative Federalist Society] are conspirators in the Christo-fascist political takeover we all seem to be posting frantically about on Instagram dot com.” She continued, “So why are they still coming to our parties/laughing in the library/roaming these weirdly high school-esque halls with precious few social consequences and without unrelenting daily confrontation?”
This comes across as more of a real threat after an event at Yale earlier this semester. In March, Yale Law School students disrupted a bipartisan panel on free speech. The event was paused when a student told a member of the Federalist Society chapter that she would “literally fight you, b****.”
U.S. News and World Report ranks Yale as the best law school in the country. According to Ramakrishna, conservative students have no place on its campus. Instead, conservative students should be treated as outcasts. Rather than arguing with conservatives, this Yale student is promoting the idea that conservatives should face coordinated social ostracizing.
While this is one Ivy League student’s opinion, it demonstrates the attitude many progressives have toward conservatives on campus. Conservative students aren’t just peers with different views. Instead, conservative students are treated as a threat that must be silenced or eliminated not just from the classroom but also from social spaces.
It is no wonder that more conservative students than liberal students self-censor.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, College Pulse, and RealClearEducation report on free speech on campus, just 17% of students said they never felt they couldn’t express their opinion on a subject because of “how students, a professor, or the administration would respond.” Only 9% of conservative students said they never self-censored. …
