Just this week alone, the great administrative minds leading campuses across this country have shown it’s not just biased professors we need to worry about.
Exhibit A: University of Southern California officials removed pro-life banners showing fetuses growing in the womb from several light posts on campus. The banners had been hung Tuesday morning, and were taken down Tuesday afternoon, with campus officials calling the initial installation an “error.”
“The banners did not identify an academic event but instead advertised the services of an external organization,” which runs afoul of university policy, officials stated. And yet students did not buy that explanation, as they have seen other banners promoting other causes hung from the campus light posts, such as rainbow flags and Black History Month tributes.
The pro-life banners were supposed to stay up for two weeks. USC Students for Life had gone through the proper channels to get their display approved. But mere hours after the images of 11-week-old fetuses in utero were hoisted, the pictures were apparently too much for some on campus.
On one of the light posts devoid of its banner this note was found: “Women deserve the right to choose.” But instead of telling those upset about the display to take a hike—the university cannot and should not assert viewpoint discrimination and silence conservative voices—campus officials swiftly succumbed.
The pro-life community at USC has since expressed heartache over the decision, and many of their peers—even those who are not card-carrying members of USC Students for Life—are on their side. “Stand for free speech or don’t. But do not say one thing and do another. That is a trick for the politicians, not the academics,” stated one USC student in an open letter to administrators.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, those in charge of educating University of Maryland students on how to make their way in the world decided students are too fragile to watch “American Sniper.” A May screening there has been canceled because some Muslim students complained the movie is allegedly a racist war propaganda film.
Anyone who has seen the movie cannot in all honesty make that claim. “American Sniper”—the highest grossing film of 2014—tells the story of the emotional journey our service men and women who go to war face; it isn’t pretty, and it leaves them at best scarred and at worst dead.
University of Maryland administrators have been quick to point out that the screening was student-run, and it was students’ decision to cancel it. They’re just honoring that decision. That response is as disingenuous as it is idiotic. As a parent, when my kids make a really dumb decision, I correct them. Isn’t that the role of campus administrators as well?
As an aside, earlier this month the University of Maryland hosted a “Sex Week” observance that offered 26 events in the span of seven days. Some highlights from the agenda included a documentary screening portraying crisis pregnancy centers’ attempts “to scare and intimidate women,” a scholar who spoke on the Christian Right’s war on strip clubs, and an “exploring kink” workshop.
But “American Sniper” is too much for this campus? Baloney.
Why can’t these campus leaders grow a backbone and show some moral fortitude?
Administrators must stand for free speech and freedom of expression for all students, not just liberal ones. Administrators must stop kowtowing to pressures to silence open debate and conservative opinions. And yet, they don’t. Truth be told, they are as complicit at the leftist professors they lead.