A conservative lecture is set to take place at the University of California, Berkeley, on Thursday. The school is shutting down six buildings, establishing a perimeter of blockades, and ushering ticket holders through barriers just to make sure the event doesn’t devolve into street violence. The university is also offering counseling services to students who feel “threatened” by the speech.
It’s worth noting that the year is 2017, the country is the United States of America, and the speaker coming to campus is Ben Shapiro, a respected and mainstream conservative whose views are nowhere near the political fringe.
The security measures are so extensive it took Berkeley 1,400 words just to describe them on its website.
Read this description of the security from The Daily Californian:
In a campuswide email sent Thursday, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Paul Alivisatos announced that at 4 p.m. on Sept. 14, UCPD will be establishing a closed perimeter around six buildings, shutting down the César E. Chávez Student Center, Alumni House, MLK Jr. Student Union, Sproul Hall and Eshleman Hall. Shapiro is scheduled to speak from 7-9 p.m.
The perimeter will consist of both officers and concrete blockades, according to campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof. Mogulof also said the campus will be implementing new strategies and tactics based on recent campus events.
All of this, plus counseling services, for two hours of conservative speech from a respected mainstream thinker on a college campus.
All of the cliched (but accurate!) assessments apply here about the sorry state of free speech in higher education and student oversensitivity and hypocrisy among those who say they champion tolerance and the value of ideological diversity. But repeating them right now feels futile. Reasonable human beings don’t believe that two hours of Ben Shapiro talking poses a threat to anyone’s emotional safety. Unfortunately, a lot of people on campuses are not reasonable, and believe that simply listening to the rest of us puts their mental and physical health at risk.
For decades, higher education indulged radicals to the point where their worldview has been institutionalized. Rather than merely being embraced by wacky but provocative coteries of eccentric professors and students, the universities themselves have embraced the radical notions that speech is violence and conservative thought is equivalent to white supremacy. Our country is already suffering for it, and will likely suffer much more.
At this point, it’s not maddening so much as it is saddening. Let’s pray nobody gets hurt tonight.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
