It’s college commencement season, which means it’s also dis-invitation season — the time of year when schools summarily rescind invitations to speakers who might challenge their students’ opinions.
Jason Riley is the most recent victim, though he’d probably reject that label. Virginia Tech had invited him to deliver remarks to a group of business students, but then fretted that he’d upset the delicate young things who each bring that institute of higher learning nearly $40,000 a year.
But Mr. Riley is a conservative, a Wall Street Journal columnist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow. He’s also black and often writes about race, applying conservative prescriptions to that knotty national problem; he wrote a book titled, “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.”
You’d think that the college would know about this, given that the book was published in 2014, but it seems to have taken this little corner of academia by surprise. So a few days ago, the head of the Tech’s finance department notified Mr. Riley that he was no longer welcome.
Riley joins an growing list of public figures prevented from speaking on college campuses because of their conservative opinions. The list includes such people as columnist George Will, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the bravest and most outspoken opponents of Islamist extremism in the world.
But it also includes figures who can’t be considered conservative, such as Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Smith College students pressed Lagarde into backing out of a commencement address in 2014.
By one tally, 300 disinvitations have been issued in the past 16 years. The suppression of opinions that challenge left-liberal orthodoxies has reached such an absurd level that a group of Yale students started an annual “Disinvitation Dinner” featuring remarks by people whose speaking invitations have been revoked.
Invitations are usually rescinded to appease a small, loud group of protesting students. But in some cases, as in Riley’s, the rude withdrawal of the invititation is pre-emptive — adminstrators disinvite a guest merely because they fear that the speaker’s remarks might spark objection. What fearful, mewling, unprincipled people such administrators are, capitulating even before their loudest and nastiest charges have made their tyrannical demands.
Students are more shut off than ever before from views with which they disagree. One study found that just 5 percent of colleges and universities uphold the First Amendment right to free speech.
In a column about his experience, Riley highlighted a 2010 study by the Association of American Colleges and Universities that found just 40 percent of college freshmen “strongly agreed that it is safe to hold unpopular positions on campus.” By senior year, only 30 percent of students strongly agreed.
Happily, some prominent liberals are starting to realize that this sort of bullying to shut down expressions of conservative opinion is the antithesis of tolerance and open mindedness. Last year, comedian Jerry Seinfeld said he no longer performs at college campuses because the students are too politically correct. President Obama has warned of the increasing illiberalism on college campuses.
No one has made the case more persuasively than Michael Bloomberg. The former New York City mayor delivered the commencement address at the University of Michigan last weekend. He told students that cooperating with people they don’t agree with and exposing themselves to new and uncomfortable ideas is not only useful but among “the most important skills in the working world.”
He called “safe spaces,” and “trigger warnings” a terrible mistake and lambasted administrators who “bow to pressure and shield students from these ideas.”
He was booed for his remarks. But, as the Washington Examiner‘s Ashe Schow noted, those students will learn very quickly once out of school that he was trying to prepare them for the real world.
College campuses are supposed to be the opposite of political or intellectual “safe spaces.” If they aren’t places where young people can learn something new, then what are they for?
