As the National Field Coordinator for CFACT, I have traveled all over the country to work with students in challenging liberal bias and radical environmentalism on campuses.
When I visited the University of Southern California, however, I ran into something that disturbed me.
I met up with a student activist to help him perform an outreach initiative called “Drought Jeopardy!” The intention was to ask passers by a question on the California drought to challenge their conceptions on the topic. If they got it right, they got candy. Spoiler alert, not many got it right.
When we were talking about a place to perform the event though, Xiao Liu, the student I was working with said, “We have to be careful. We should do it near the fountain because that is where the free speech zone is. We might get in trouble if we do this anywhere else.”
I was astonished. USC, a nation-wide and even world-wide figure for academia, limits where a student can freely express themselves to a place the size of a baseball diamond? (not including the outfield).
Regardless, I took his advice, and we performed the event near the fountain and it was a huge success. We helped many students realize that what they thought they knew about global warming, fracking, and water use and how it related to the drought was fundamentally wrong.
But what if we wanted to do the event near the science building? Or near some of the dorms? The whole point of college is to get students to challenge their conceptions and encounter some ideas that might offend them or surprise them. As a conservative, when I attended Lafayette College in Easton, PA, that happened to me everyday, and I’m glad most of it did. It helped shape my opinions and even make me more confident in the ideas I held that were counter to the liberal narrative.
The left already has a stranglehold on curricula and professor positions. Why should we let them box freedom loving students in to a small space on campus? We shouldn’t. And CFACT’s collegians are going to start challenging those policies.
Are you with us?