Deion Kathawa offers National Review Online readers an interesting perspective on recent campus craziness.
This weekend, I became one alumnus among thousands of University of Michigan alumni heading out into the world to begin discharging my duties as a citizen: voting, paying taxes, and engaging my co-citizens in the public square. Some have argued that a sizeable number of my fellow graduates will not be able to make it in the real world. Because they have been conditioned to have an “expectation of confirmation” of their ideas, the thinking goes, these “snowflakes” will “melt” upon contact with different opinions. While that is a striking (and horrifying) thing to contemplate, I think we ought to take a step back and try to understand the campus mindset more thoroughly, because if we don’t, we’ll be subject to increasingly extreme displays of illiberalism and anti-intellectualism that will inevitably trickle out of universities and infect the wider society — to our collective detriment.
The first thing to know is that the picture that is painted in the media of campuses as incubators and hotbeds of far-left radicalism is, too often, accurate — and depressing. What’s more, too many of the most politically active liberal students understand neither free speech nor one of its prime functions: to discover what’s true. And why would they? After all, free speech and truth itself are nothing more than oppressive, white-supremacist social constructs! Nearly every liberal college student with whom I have spoken in-person or engaged online believes that the First Amendment proscribes so-called hate speech, by which they seem to mean nothing more than speech that expresses ideas with which they disagree or that offend them. And when they find out that the First Amendment does not actually achieve this, to them, desirable end, they bristle: Well, it should!
