College: Where free speech goes to die:
In addition to speech codes, many universities have unconstitutional “free speech zones,” which implies that everywhere else on campus does not allow free speech. In the dorms, freshmen must face sensitivity commissars, typically fellow students, who conduct “orientations” to college life that are “mandatory, noncurricular university programs designed to get students to adopt particular ideological and political beliefs.” Those beliefs revolve around race, sex, sexual orientation, and even positions on morality, the environment, tolerance, human rights, and social policy.
All these are suitable topics for free debate in which all sides have an equal chance to make their arguments and counter those of others. But in orientation programs, only one point of view, the progressive-leftist one, is allowed a hearing, and students who resist it are subjected to sanctions and shaming exercises worthy of religious cults. If a student should fall afoul of these codes and programs, he will be hauled before campus administrators for a disciplinary hearing in which the right to due process is trampled.
Pushing into the deep recesses of my memory, it seems to that conservatism wasn't much welcomed back when I went to college, either. The biggest difference was that it was more about attitudes and beliefs than formal speech codes and proframs.
I say "seems to me" because I have no first-hand knowledge of what was going on in cosnervative circles, if indeed there were such. I was pretty liberal back then (but with the same libertarian streak). Obviously my most important learning came after college, not during it.
