If you offered to buy dinner for a total stranger, but the minute you got a table in a decent restaurant your guest stood up on his or her chair and began loudly issuing demands, how long would you sit there and listen before getting up and walking out? Most people probably wouldn’t even make it to the drink order.
This scenario may sound cartoonish, yet it accurately describes the relationship between American taxpayers and increasingly radical leftist college students.
Left wing students at schools across the country, many of them publicly funded, are taking it upon themselves to decide who has a right to speak on campus. When they’re not engaging in violent protests against people they don’t like, they’re using Orwellian concepts like safe spaces, microaggressions and accusations of “hate speech” to silence their political opponents.
Leftist college students are entitled to their opinions and free speech rights as guaranteed by our Constitution, but if they’re attending school with loans funded by taxpayers and insist on trampling the rights of others, they shouldn’t be surprised if their host decides not to pay the bill.
In recent weeks, college students at various schools have issued lists of demands to school administrators. In the case of St. Olaf College in Minnesota, the demands were issued after student activists staged a racist hoax which formed the false basis of their protest.
At UC Santa Cruz, students took over a campus building. The administration immediately caved to the students’ demands but met with student activists in a separate location because they feared for their safety. The administration ultimately caved to their demands. A few days later, the same students issued more demands. Who could have guessed that would happen?
At Evergreen State College, students drove a (progressive) professor off campus because he refused to participate in a racist event which would have forced white people off campus for a day. The school’s president is groveling to student demands.
Here’s the question American taxpayers should be asking themselves: Who is paying the bill for this?
Here’s the harsh answer: They are.
There is good news, however and here it is. The people who pay the bills are more entitled to make demands and that’s exactly what American taxpayers should start doing.
Here are a few suggestions which I offer taxpayers as a guide:
1. Public colleges and universities which do not defend the free speech rights of students, faculty or speakers invited by recognized student groups should be stripped of all tax funding.
2. Students at public colleges and universities who participate in riots or mobs which shut down speech through intimidation and or violence should be immediately expelled and declared ineligible for any and all student loans funded by taxpayers.
3. Students at public colleges and universities who engage in any sort of campus building takeover or occupation should be immediately expelled and declared ineligible for any and all student loans funded by taxpayers.
4. Students at public colleges and universities who intimidate other students over politics should be immediately expelled and declared ineligible for any and all student loans funded by taxpayers.
5. Students at public colleges and universities who interfere with the studying of other students by staging loud protests in campus libraries should be immediately expelled and declared ineligible for any and all student loans funded by taxpayers.
6. Professors at public colleges and universities who engage in any similar behavior should be fired.
7. Students at public colleges and universities who are attending school with assistance from taxpayers should be required to maintain a minimum grade point average. How about 3.5?
Again, those are just suggestions. If there are already laws on the books in these areas, they need to be revisited because they certainly aren’t being enforced.
What’s happening at Evergreen State College isn’t an isolated incident. It’s a symptom of a much bigger problem. Academia has been taken over by the radical left and they’re using tax dollars to further their cause. In the process, they are shutting down political debate while making demands which conflict with the values of many of the very people who are paying the bill.
None of this will change until taxpayers start making demands and they are the only people who should be entitled to do so.
College is a place you go to learn, not to launch a career in protests or wage warfare on others because you disagree with them politically.
If a young person wants to learn through serious study, they should be rewarded. Any student who sees nothing more than attending protests as their academic goal should have to do so on their own dime.