ANALYSIS
Colby College, a quiet and preppy elite institution nestled in central Maine, doesn’t produce splashy headlines. But in the last month it has received more national attention for controversy than the last decade.
After the assassination of conservative Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk, hundreds of students “openly celebrated Kirk’s death on our anonymous forum, Fizz, and hundreds more gleefully quoted Kirk’s now-painfully principled statement about the Second Amendment, a statement they saw as perhaps poetically just,” wrote Colby College student Wilson Bailey for The Dispatch.
In response, the Colby Young Republicans Club posted flyers in the wake of conservative Charlie Kirk’s death stating “you should not be killed for having an opinion” and “stop silencing Republicans.”
“This got a rise out of people on a campus that never has posters advocating anything remotely conservative-coded,” Bailey reported, adding that someone defaced the posters to instead read: “You should be killed for fascism” and “stop celebrating bigots.”
Next came the report on Fox News and viral tweets, followed by a bomb threat called into the school.
In his op-ed, Bailey explains why Colby College was ripe for this meltdown:
What we lack in controversy, we make up for in the HOA-style tyranny that imposes a specific, denaturing type of uniformity on both progressives and conservatives. This implicit “Colby Contract” suggests that there will not be leftist excess—so long as conservatives stay invisible on campus.
… College administrators offered no initial statement on the killing or those comments, despite in the past telling me that Colby prizes “community” and emotional comfort so much that free speech commitments like the Chicago Statement are impossible here. And for conservative students with whom I have spoken since, who felt represented by Kirk and have long felt that a feature of Colby’s “community” was soft despotism by the liberal majority, this was disheartening and frustrating.
It is precisely because most colleges, including Colby, have fallen asleep at the wheel regarding pluralism that we are now not equipped with the proper tools to respond to our trying times. My campus’s political culture relied on a bad bet, that nothing could happen here that would demand a little bit of prudence and goodwill from every student.
Read the full piece at The Dispatch.
