Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a wide-ranging interview on "The Daily Briefing" Tuesday, with Fox News host Dana Perino broadcasting live from the George W. Bush Center in Dallas, Texas.
After weighing in on the Trump administration, North Korea and Iran, Rice offered her two cents on the current silencing of conservatives on college campuses - a topic she knows a little something about. Rice was invited to speak at the Rutgers University commencement in 2014, only to opt out after facing a swarm of student protests. She decided against speaking, she explained, so as not to distract graduates and families from what should be a "joyous celebration."
Rice, who is currently the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told Perino that shielding students from new ideas is not how she conducts business in her own classroom.
.@CondoleezzaRice on campus free speech: When people want to shout down a speaker or...disinvite a speaker, they're trying to silence debate pic.twitter.com/LZ0X065F9t
— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 10, 2017
She's not about making students feel comfortable. In fact, she hopes for the opposite.
"I do tell my students from time to time it's not my job to make you comfortable," she said. "Actually it's my job to make you uncomfortable. Because you're only learning when you're stretching yourself and you're not with people exactly like you are."
It's inevitable you're going to run into some "jerks," she noted, but "you don't have a constitutional right not to be insulted."
The silencing of ideas, she concluded, is "not democracy."
