College administrators created a generation of spineless students

UC-Berkeley. The University of Utah. The University of Wisconsin. Columbia University. The University of Tennessee.

Students at these schools have worked with Young America’s Foundation recently to host campus lectures by prominent conservatives, including Ben Shapiro, Herman Cain, and Katie Pavlich. They have faced police state-like security been subjected to extraneous protocols and charged security fees just because the speaker is a conservative.

{mosads}Each time school administrators act as though a conservative appearing on their campus creates a Berkeley-like battleground environment, they are contributing to the problem they, presumably, seek to avoid.

By treating conservative ideas and speech as “threats” to be contained, administrators are becoming as fragile as the leftist students they coddle with safe spaces.

School administrators are encouraging the next generation to become unhinged at the mere mention of different ideas. Today’s students have become so infantilized by administrators that riot police and concrete barricades are deemed necessary to quell the violent outrage of the intolerant Left.

Colleges and universities routinely saddle students with costly charges for this heightened security, then prohibit that security from doing anything to prevent conservative speakers from being shouted down, delayed, or completely blocked. Disrupters are given a free pass when it comes to their ideological censorship via hecklers’ vetoes, a trend that only emboldens leftist agitators.

When vandals attempted a false-flag attack on YAF at the George Washington University, administrators failed to take concrete action.

When agitators stormed the stage during YAF’s lecture with Ben Shapiro at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, no one attempted to stop the rioters.

When hecklers shouted down Rick Santorum at Cornell University, campus authorities refused to enforce the school’s own protest rules.

These inane scenarios plague today’s institutions of higher learning as helicopter administrators fail to provide venues for the free exchange of ideas and embolden violent agitators who run roughshod over the First Amendment freedoms of conservative students.

Before President Trump’s election, around 15 percent of Young America’s Foundation’s on-campus events were disrupted or involved administrators attempting to limit the scope of the event. After November, leftist disruptions at YAF events more than tripled to nearly 50 percent.

Rather than being taught to learn from opposing views, students continue to be trained to resist ideological diversity and silence those who may disagree with their fragile tendencies. Leftists rarely face consequences for their disruptive behavior, and so the escalation of fascist behavior continues.

Now, American higher education finds itself adrift in a sea of future leaders crippled by their own victimhood unable to hear or learn from different views, and protected by universities unwilling or unable to create a venue for the free exchange of ideas. And somehow, conservative students and the speakers they bring in are the ones blamed.

After decades of treating conservatives as a threat and emboldening those who would disrupt, often riotously, conservative events, schools are desperately searching for sympathy as they flail about trying to control the chaos they have created.

Spencer Brown is the spokesman for Young America’s Foundation, an outreach organization of the conservative movement for young Americans. Follow him on Twitter @itsSpencerBrown.