Leftist Intolerance Running Rampant At Universities

The University experience has become more about enforcing ideological purity than about teaching students to think clearly and independently.

The latest conflict in the academy between freedom of expression and ethnic and sexual diversity took place at Vassar College recently when minority students called for the banning of a school newspaper called "The Imperialist" because it criticized the creation of special social centers for minority and gay students.

...As is commonly known, events of this kind have been multiplying at universities over the last decades. The New York Times article that reported the incident reminds us of a low moment in 1997 at Cornell when university administrators defended as "symbolic" speech "the burning of conservative newspapers that printed a provocative article." There have been so many instances of this kind in recent years that an organization called the Foundation for Individual Right in Education (FIRE) was established in the nineties to watchdog campus freedoms.

....the same temperament that issues a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses, or threatens Danish cartoonists with death for insulting Islam, animates the American passion, on behalf of political or religious pressure groups, for suppressing offensive speech. People who believe their feelings have been hurt share the same DNA as those who believe their faith has been insulted. Both groups demand or inflict punishment considerably in excess of the original offense.

....But there has also been a continuing tension between the need to speak what is perceived as the truth and the need to protect minority feelings--between the need to achieve excellence (now known as "elitism") and the need to maintain an illusion of egalitarianism (now known as "political correctness")--and this has inevitably led to some kind of speech suppression.

....Given the history of dissent in the academy, one would have expected that university students and university professors would also have cherished these freedoms, and would also have fought to protect them, but that seems to be less and less the case. In the fifties, the liberties of many universities were suspended under pressure of McCarthyism. Today, they are under siege from their own faculties, administrations, and student bodies.

Source

Those who question the frequency and importance of academic intolerance need to spend some time at the FIRE website. Go through the archives and read the details of the many cases FIRE has undertaken.

At one time, academic freedom and free speech on campus were important to leftists. Now it seems more important to leftists to shut down free speech on campus--in an attempt to create groupthink, clone think--the type of thinking that grew and typified the monstrous genocides of Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and the other social engineers responsible for forced deaths of tens and hundreds of millions.

Given time to grow, leftist intolerance as is seen on modern university campuses would tend to become like those examples. This becomes particularly clear when one observes the growing alliance between leftist groups and islamist groups that support muslim terror. The fact that such alliances appear on the surface to be contradictory and unworkable does not erase their existence. Expediency is a powerful motive, when two apparently conflicting groups share a common enemy.