The only way to stop the college revolt against free speech – New York Post

Ok, Moms and Dads, listen up. Youre our last hope. The only way to save higher education, and the next generation, is for you to stop paying tuition.

Its been two years since University of Missouri students went on a hunger strike and set up a tent city to force the presidents resignation; since Yale students shouted down a professor who dared to suggest students should be able to decide on their own Halloween costumes without guidance from the administration; and since Princeton students occupied the presidents office in order to demand the removal of Woodrow Wilsons name from its public-affairs school because he was deemed a racist.

Things have only gotten worse. Last year, Cornell students held a cry-in when Donald Trump was elected, and University of Virginia students insisted that the president of the school stop quoting its founder, Thomas Jefferson.

This year we have seen the riots at Berkeley over Milo Yiannopoulos, the attack on Charles Murray at Middlebury and protesters blocking Heather MacDonald from speaking at Claremont. Just this week, Ann Coulter had to cancel her speech because the Berkeley administration could not protect her from violent mobs.

Despite their lifetime job security, the faculty at these universities have done next to nothing to stop this nonsense. Sure, a few of them have signed petitions expressing the importance of the free exchange of ideas on campus. But they have spent decades telling students that political correctness is the highest virtue and the feelings of students matter more than any ideas adults have to get across. (Five years ago when I wrote a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education criticizing black studies, 6,000 professors demanded that I be fired because they were offended.)

Faculty members are sometimes even complicit in the campus takeover. Professors signed the letter regarding Jeffersons racism. A Middlebury faculty member actually apologized this week for inviting Murray to campus in the first place. A Missouri professor grabbed the camera of a journalist covering the schools protests and asked for some muscle to keep him away in order to protect the protesters from public scrutiny.

The faculty at these universities have done next to nothing to stop this nonsense.

Administrators, meanwhile, are just spineless. Princeton caved to protesters demands, offering to remove Wilson from the schools name and promising to consider racially affiliated housing. The University of Missouris president complied with student demands and resigned. Berkeley says it is only trying to protect students by cancelling Coulters speech. NYUs vice provost wrote a piece in The New York Times arguing the parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing.

So where are the grown-ups in all this?

Theyre at home working hard to write tuition checks. Yes, thats right. Parents are the last line of defense against this chaos, and its time they woke up and smelled the burning flags (or the sh-t-in at the University of Massachusetts). So, Moms and Dads, ask yourselves: Is your child making good use of the $60,000 a year you are spending? Are they devoting most of their time to classroom lectures, reading important books or participating in productive extracurricular activities? Or is most of their time spent crying about Trump and demanding more gender-neutral bathrooms?

Are they learning something that might earn them employment after graduation, or are they going to be community organizing from the couch in your basement in a few years? Will they understand the demands that real bosses will place on them, or will they break down in tears every time a supervisor criticizes them?

Perhaps by enabling them to stay on these campuses for years with no purpose besides getting offended and spewing anger, parents are letting their kids become less prepared for real life.

During the original campus protests of the 1960s, many of the participants could have continued their activities without their parents help and probably did. College was much cheaper in 1968, tuition at the University of California was $320 per year. And 18-year-olds were more likely to be seen as adults. After all, many among their cohort were actually going off to war. Sixties radicals did not need much of a cash infusion from Mom and Dad, except maybe to pay for drugs.

No one had a monthly cellphone bill or a $3,000 laptop from which to send out radical missives. Parents today are not only paying exorbitant amounts to send their kids to school, they are funding spring breaks on the beach, summers of activism (or at least unemployment) and gap years for finding oneself.

Parents will say their children need this credential in order to make it in the world, that even if students learn nothing in their four years on campus, they will at least have a diploma with which to find gainful employment. Perhaps. Or perhaps by enabling them to stay on these campuses for years with no purpose besides getting offended and spewing anger, parents are letting their kids become less prepared for real life.

If we really want college to go back to being an educational experience where students hear the free exchange of ideas and are prepared for the real world, parents need to turn off the spigot.

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The only way to stop the college revolt against free speech - New York Post