The Fight For A College Education
By Gary Aldrich (09/30/03)
Going off to college is one of the most exciting times in the lives of both the new students and the proud parents. As a parent, you have done your best to instill in your children the values and morals required to live a good and decent life. You have taught them to appreciate education, to treasure learning, and to treat everyone equally. As a new college student, you look forward to new experiences, the freedom to say and think whatever you want, be accepted as an equal by your peers, and be treated with respect and encouragement by your new school.
Fast-forward one year and recap that first year of college. If you are a liberal student, you are quite happy with the educational system. You eagerly signed up for the classic liberal arts classes in literature, history, and political science. Your professors proclaim that President George W. Bush is a moron, that America deserved what it got on September 11th, and that America is an imperialistic warmonger whose only interest in the world is getting oil so we can drive our SUV’s and destroy the environment.
You are encouraged to do whatever makes you feel good because the good times of college “won’t last forever”. And nine times out of ten, you, the liberal student, agree with them and are free to voice that agreement without fear of academic reprisals. You are not worried about free speech because your thoughts and ideas are expressed by your professors and imposed upon all students by the university’s administration. You can join any group you want: the College Democrats, environmental groups like Earth Alert and Greenpeace, or you can fight for human rights by joining Amnesty International. You attend protest marches and university-sponsored speakers like Cornell West, Jesse Jackson, and Hillary Clinton. Life is good and you are truly having the “time of your life.”
Now put yourself in the shoes of a conservative student. You arrive on campus excited to meet new people and make new friends, only to be segregated by race, much like Brown’s minority orientation program. You are placed in classes like the University of Michigan’s class on how to be a homosexual. You go to “History” classes that teach you that the America isn’t the freedom-loving country we were taught about in high school, but rather a police state where the FBI and the CIA are monitoring your every move and that freedom has a sign over it that reads “White Only.”
You are also taught by Marxist and Communist professors tenured by your school that morality is relative and meaningless, and capitalism is the reason poor people are poor. You naively believe that freedom of speech and religion applies to you and when you speak out in class, the result is a grade markedly lower than the one you expected. You try to join or create groups that reflect your values and beliefs, like InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, but your school, like Rutgers University, tells you that because only people believing in God and Jesus “feel” welcome, that the group is not allowed. You try to form a local chapter of the Advocates for Conservative Thought, but the University of Miami decides that the College Republicans are the only conservative group that the university “needs” and refuses to sanction the group.
Meanwhile, you watch in amazement as liberal groups like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance form out of nowhere and not only receive recognition from the schools, but get funding from them as well. When you try to protest this unfair treatment, you are restricted to a limited “free speech zone” like the one at Texas Tech University. These zones are extremely small and are located in places on campus so that the protest won’t “disrupt” normal operations. You have to get a permit a week in advance to protest in these zones and are shocked and amazed when the local chapter of the employees union has virtually closed down the campus with their chanting and intimidation; for example what’s currently going on at Yale University.
Unfortunately, the picture painted above is a sad reality for conservative students across the country, but conservatives are finally fighting back. There are now over 100,000 College Republicans in schools across the country, compared to only approximately 43,000 Young Democrats (any Democrat under the age of 36). Compare that with the national average of ten self-professed Democrat professors to every one Republican.
John Adams said, “Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.” Yet everyday on college campuses across America, conservative students’ rights are being trampled. Freedom of thought and expression is reserved for those who are willing to tow the line of the university’s administration. Everyone else is forced to bury their heads and hide their values and principles in order to be “tolerant” of others’ beliefs. Colleges and universities in America are engaged in a practice that is systematically depriving students of their fundamental rights of freedom of thought and expression. Those freedoms are at the absolute center of a balanced education.
College administrators are continually mouthing support for diversity in our American educational system. What they really mean is that only those who believe as they do may apply.
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