New film shows campus assaults on free speech. How do Missouri, Kansas colleges fare?
How free are area college students to speak their minds on campus?
Fairly so, according to national college free-speech watchdog the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education at TheFire.org, which ranks colleges’ and universities’ speech policies using the red, yellow and green of stoplights. Kansas State University does best in the region, with all green lights, while the University of Kansas, University of Missouri and University of Missouri-Kansas City join the majority of schools nationwide that earn mostly yellow lights — meaning policies may be vague and subject to misuse.
It could be much worse, as you will see below.
Even so, a fired former University of Missouri communications professor makes a prominent, albeit brief and uncredited appearance early in the new free-speech documentary “No Safe Spaces,” which opens in a few select theaters here Friday. Perhaps you remember the professor asking for “some muscle” to remove a reporter from a protest on the Columbia campus.
As much as that moment lives in First Amendment infamy, there have been a whole lot more assaults on free speech at colleges across the country, some of the worst now documented in disturbing detail by “No Safe Spaces.”
While many victims of speech suppression are conservative speakers and the students who invite them to campus — such as Cornell College Republicans president Olivia Corn, who was physically assaulted the night after the 2016 election simply for being Republican — left-of-center students and faculty members also have felt the rage of their fellow liberals.
Olympia, Washington’s Evergreen State College liberal biology teacher Bret Weinstein was blindsided by the hatred coming from the left when he dared to defy a discriminatory “Day of Absence” decree that all whites stay off campus for a day in May 2017. He and his wife, also a biology teacher, were tormented until they left their tenured positions.
Ironically, a sign at the college advertised the climate there as “diverse, inclusive, accepting, welcoming, a safe space for everyone.”
When Weinstein patiently tried to engage the student mob in dialogue, “What shocked me was that they were not at all interested in that discussion,” he told the “No Safe Spaces” filmmakers. “In some ways, Evergreen is a preview of what’s coming. … Evergreen is describing a future that is rapidly approaching.”
Commentator Dave Rubin, who identifies as a classical liberal, agrees, warning liberals: “If you have any spark of individualism in you, and if you have anything about you that’s interesting or different, they will come to destroy that, too.”
Other liberals such as former President Barack Obama, comedian Bill Maher and commentator Van Jones also have decried the far-left’s fascism, though they don’t label it as such. “Whoever told you you only had to hear what didn’t upset you?” Maher once said into his show’s camera.
Conservatives right now are thinking, a la Bruce Willis in Die Hard, “welcome to the party, pal.” They have felt it necessary to document on film the left-wing hatred they’ve long been subjected to — for they’ve often not been believed that it’s happening, even when it’s caught on camera as when left-wing rioters silenced a conservative speaker at Berkeley, the birthplace of the modern free speech movement.
“If you are conservative, then you are not wrong. You are evil,” says commentator Dennis Prager who, with comedian Adam Carolla, is the star of “No Safe Spaces.” The left-wing’s attempt to silence speech it disagrees with “is brand new,” Prager says. “This is one of the few things one could say we have no precedent for in the United States.”
Prager and Carolla themselves had an event canceled at California State University, Northridge, in 2016. The topic was to be intellectual openness.
Carolla has called on college administrators and faculty to be the adults in the room. Absolutely. Besides following both Constitution and conscience, protecting free speech would clearly be in the best interests of not just students but academic institutions themselves: In multiple cases, colleges have handed over five- and six-figure settlements to conservatives who’ve had their First Amendment rights violated. Some liberals, too: Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying won a $500,000 settlement from Evergreen.
News that Evergreen’s freshman enrollment plummeted after the outrageous attack on Weinstein inspired the first applause of the evening at a promotional screening of “No Safe Spaces” in Olathe last Thursday.
Steve Snitz, chairman of the Northeast Johnson County Conservatives, found the film horrifying in its archiving of assaults on the First Amendment — but inspiring in the bipartisan condemnations of them. Such as when liberal former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz proclaims, “No university should ever create a safe space for an idea.
“If you want to feel good, get a massage.”
This story was originally published November 13, 2019 at 5:00 AM with the headline "New film shows campus assaults on free speech. How do Missouri, Kansas colleges fare?."
