Trigger warnings, safe spaces, speech codes and free speech zones; Attorney General Jeff Sessions is less than impressed at what he sees on today’s college campus, and he’s hoping the next generation will put a stop to the nonsense.
In a speech to young conservatives at Turning Point USA’s High School Leadership Summit, Sessions addressed the degeneration of American universities, most notably the rapidly diminishing appreciation for free speech and open dialogue on our campuses.
“Of all places, the college campus should be where debate and discussion should be appreciated and honored. But nowhere has there been more arbitrary and capricious restrictions on free speech than in supposedly educational institutions,” Sessions told the students.
Just look at UC Berkeley, he notes, which actively worked to block conservative thinkers like Ben Shapiro and Ann Coulter from speaking on campus, placing burdensome restrictions on their events and using “security concerns” as an excuse. And let’s not forgot the time students quite literally set the campus ablaze over then-senior Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopolous’ potential visit.
And then there’s the lesser known Middlebury College incident in which a professor was assaulted for inviting Charles Murray on campus for a debate - a debate which protestors effectively shouted down.
Sessions went on to call out a handful of other highly-respected colleges, like Brown University and Virginia Tech, where similar incidents took place.
The University of Michigan and Tufts were also shamed, the former for handing out Play-Dough and coloring books, the other for encouraging students to “draw about their feelings.”
Not even Cornell could escape the attorney general's ridicule, as he reminded us all of the “cry-in” the University held after Donald Trump won the 2016 election.
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“[T]oo many schools are coddling our young people and actively preventing them from scrutinizing the validity of their beliefs,” Sessions explained. “That is the exact opposite of what they are supposed to do.”
College should be the place where students are exposed to new ideas, where they're forced to reevaluate their closely-held beliefs, where they abandon their own prejudices and finally listen to those they didn’t think were worth hearing before.
But, as Sessions so clearly points out, that’s not what college is anymore. It’s a place where people go to have someone else tell them exactly what they want to hear, a place where they can have their beliefs validated by another who thinks just like them, a place where differing opinions are treated like infectious diseases that must be quarantined to free speech zones so an outbreak of new thought doesn’t occur.
As a result, our universities are churning out nothing but “sanctimonious, sensitive, supercilious snowflakes,” as Sessions called them.
“That is a disservice to their students and a disservice to this nation,” he concluded.
You can read the attorney general’s entire speech here.
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