The College Fix

It would be nationwide if not global news

Admit it: You’ve grown used to the constant drumbeat of anti-conservative bias on campus. It’s just a regular part of life now. It’s still shocking in a lot of ways, it still has the power to alarm and sometimes enrage, but it is also more or less a daily facet of life. It’s just there, like the clouds in the sky, or Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve: Ever-present.

Just the same: Imagine if, for a second, it was progressives who were being treated with such naked hatred on campus. Take, for example, the recent controversy at the University of Wisconsin, wherein the school’s College Republicans were the victims of repeated vandalism and who were subject to a public shaming campaign where a former student exposed the group’s names on social media. Conservative students had posted flyers advertising an NRA-sponsored event on campus, but those posters were repeatedly torn down and thrown away; a disgruntled former student, meanwhile, publicly smeared the College Republicans as “racists” (providing no evidence whatsoever to back up this claim) and posted their names on Facebook as part of some bizarre and hateful hit job.

This affair has received little media attention. But it is not hard to imagine the circus that would result if the politics were reversed—if conservative students, say, ripped down flyers advertising a Planned Parenthood event, or if someone posted the names of the members of a campus LGBTQ group to social media. In all likelihood, coverage would be wall-to-wall and 24/7; reporters would swarm the campus from all over the country; reams of copy would be published claiming to show how “unsafe” campuses had become for liberals; universities across the country would likely pass ever-more onerous speech code laws in response; college presidents and provosts and chancellors would announce their solidarity with Planned Parenthood; and Republican senators and congressmen would, for whatever reason, be asked to denounce the behavior. It would all play out exactly as you’d expect.

Whether or not such a response would be justified—for either side—is beside the point. The obvious takeaway is this: We have two standards on campus here. Conservative students, who are at many schools deeply and openly reviled, are expected to simply deal with the persecution they regularly face at universities across the country. It’s just become an assumed occurrence, a thing they have to deal with as part of their normal daily life. It barely merits a squib, if that, in most mainstream media outlets. This is a shameful arrangement. Nobody, regardless of his political beliefs, should have to deal with thuggery and violence—not any time, and especially not at an American university in the 21st century. And it is incumbent upon us to treat these things equally, no matter to whom they happen.

MORE: Our campus display explained why we’re conservative. Our peers tore it down.

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