College Campuses and Free Speech / by kevin murray

Students that attend college campuses across the United States are almost without exception, adults.  While juveniles may have some of their rights truncated in order to protect them or for other valid or well-meaning reasons, adults are adults and therefore are entitled to all of their constitutional rights.  While on a college campus, one would think, that students would always be given the option to freely discuss, debate, and criticize important issues of the day.  That means, of course, that you are allowed opinions that are not only wrong on the surface, but wrong through and through.  While there are some logical and legal limits on free speech, one of them typically is not whether what you are espousing is true or not.  If we were limited to simply stating true facts, or prevailing opinions, than it would be the government or the college campus that would determine what we were or were not allowed to actually think or speak and that isn't freedom of speech.  Freedom of speech includes the freedom to speak untruths, make defamatory remarks, and to torch conventional wisdom.

 

The fact that it is estimated that over sixty percent of college campuses have restrictions on free speech, and have instituted the ironically named "free speech zones" to restrict free speech to certain physical areas, for certain specific times, and only with previous permission granted by college administrators should send shivers down our collective spines.  If college campuses are no longer bastions of free thought, free thinking, radicalism, and such, than what has our country degenerated itself into.  It appears that colleges want their students to conform to groupthink.  They, the college, will tell what is and what isn't appropriate to think, to believe, to say, to write, and how to behave.  The colleges believe that by doing so, they will make a better America, in which we will all willingly get along, out of mutual respect and love.  What crock!!

 

The true goal of these college campuses is nothing less than intellectual eugenics in which a brave new world of properly indoctrinated students will be our leaders of tomorrow.  Those that don't have the desire or willingness to conform to these predetermined beliefs will be marginalized, and shutdown.  That is why campus liberals make such a concerted effort to preclude or prevent speeches from lay and prominent people who espouse viewpoints that they are not in agreement with.  The type of thinking that believes that only their thoughts,  and only their world view is valid is anti-American, it's unconstitutional, and its demagoguery and totalitarian at its core.

 

When you take away one's freedom of speech, you have taken away one's freedom of choice.  The elimination or reduction of free speech, in which that speech can be inconvenient, intolerant, misguided, hateful, or derogatory, also means that you have precluded speech which can be beautiful, inspirational, meaningful, important, and inspiring.  The free flow of ideas, thoughts, and beliefs are part of the cacophony and freedom of democracy.  Anything that stands in the way of free speech for whatever ignoble or noble purpose it proposes is wrong, and that simply is the inconvenient truth.