Former Fix assistant editor Robby Soave reports for the Daily Caller that liberal students at the University of Michigan interrupted a conservative guest speaker on campus in October.
I witnessed firsthand what passes for “liberal” discourse these days at a guest lecture at the University of Michigan last month. A libertarian student group invited anti-affirmative action activist Jennifer Gratz to give a speech to students about her issue and its recent history at the Supreme Court.
Radical activists — many who weren’t even U-M students — repeatedly attempted to hijack the event, talking over and shouting down Gratz at every opportunity. Never mind that that the event was organized exclusively by members of a libertarian club who wanted to hear from a libertarian-aligned speaker; the mob was not going to let anyone express ideas they didn’t like…
Gratz was eventually able to resume her talk. However, the same could not be said at Brown University, where NYC police commissioner Ray Kelly, attempted to give a speech recently.
left-wing students who oppose stop-and-frisk were so determined to prevent Kelly from speaking that they preemptively formulated a strategy to deny him the opportunity. Hecklers interrupted every second of his speech, eventually forcing organizers to cancel it. In the wake of their success, protest organizers promised a new and emboldened reign of terror in which disagreement with their agenda would not be tolerated. Adding insult to injury, they said that they were exercising their own free speech rights by denying everyone else’s…
It’s ironic that liberals, who pride themselves on “tolerance” and “diversity” reveal their true colors whenever a speaker with conservative views comes to campus. In these cases, they showed themselves to be conspicuously intolerant and uninterested in diverse viewpoints.
Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix and author of the book SEX & GOD AT YALE: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad.
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