While speaking at a town hall in Iowa on affordable college education, a student asked President Obama about Ben Carson’s proposal to cut off funding to universities who were allegedly biased. After slamming Carson’s idea, he then argued the liberal university culture had grown deeply intolerant of opposing viewpoints. Obama suggested the “right-wing equivalent” of Bernie Sanders delivering a speech on a liberal campus would initiate cries outrage and accusations of insensitivity. President Obama said,
“Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too. I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women.
“And you know, I’ve got to tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. You know, I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, ‘You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.’ That’s not the way we learn either.”
There are numerous examples of what President Obama was referring to. On several occasions, students have made angry demands that conservative speakers not be allowed to give talks on campuses. There was an attempt at the University of Michigan to ban the movie ‘American Sniper‘ from being shown because it made students feel unsafe. Brown University created a “safe space” with coloring books and videos of puppies for students too sensitive to handle a debate on sexual assault. An online forum at Oberlin was developed for students to report “microaggressions,” a word for subtle ways some students might feel marginalized or intimidated by others.
Functional adults need to be aware of the broader phenomenon of college students venting, much as they have for generations. In South Korea, fall protests against “something” are a tradition. Political correctness is closely associated with campus life, because, not yet jaded by the redundancies of life, students are striving to make a better world. This, however,does it mean their concerns are frivolous. Nor does not mean colleges and universities should become a separate idealized environment.
College is supposed to be a preparation for the real world, not a way of hiding from it.
President Obama criticized the trend of “extreme” political correctness spreading across American colleges. He said “that’s not the way we learn” and college students shouldn’t be “coddled and protected from different points of view.”
