Higher Education

I don’t have any children, but if I did I would be very concerned for their future college educations. Not so much because of concerns that used to be at the front of peoples’ minds when sending their kids off to college—such as substance abuse and bad behavior—but because of the climate that has been spreading across college campuses like a cancer over the preceding years. This climate has been marked by repressive intolerance of any position that doesn’t align with established orthodoxy, and recently reared its ugly head again at Middleburg College in Vermont, when students at the college shut down a planned speech from a conservative social scientist named Charles Murray. After disrupting his speech with constant shouting and foot stomping, Mr. Murray’s was moved to a private room to have his speech delivered remotely, but that too was thwarted when the protestors repeatedly pulled the building’s fire alarm. When it became clear that Mr. Murray was in real danger, he was evacuated from the campus, but in the process was mobbed by a group of students who seriously injured one of Middleburg’s professors who was trying to escort Mr. Murray from the premises. The crazy thing is, from what I’ve read about the incident online, almost none of the student protestors actually knew who Charles Murray was or had read anything he had written. Maybe Charles Murray is a bad person, but they didn’t even try to understand him before rejecting him. All they knew is that he held views contrary to their own, so he had to be destroyed. I wish I could say that this was an isolated incident, but if you’ve been following the news on college campuses lately you know that this sort of anti-intellectualism is becoming increasingly common. Any dissent against the ideologies prominent on campuses is met not with civil discourse and a free exchange of ideas, but instead with screams, protests, and sometimes violence. I would never want to send a child of mind to a place that treated opposing views with such abject hostility, and if my child held conservative political views I would probably be scared for their very safety, seeing as how conservatives seem to be the primary target for the thought police now roaming campuses nationwide. Perhaps it’s best then that I don’t have children, so that I don’t have to live to see them subjected to this sort of oppression.