How the American academy helped create the alt-right

This year, when students who support Donald Trump started chalking Trump’s name on campus sidewalks, schools responded by comparing the chalking to mass murder. At the University of California at San Diego, for example, the provost sent an email to students threatening the school’s “fullest sanctions” against the chalkers. Never mind that UCSD’s policies explicitly state chalking is permitted “on sidewalks of the university grounds that are exposed to weather elements.”

The Left’s tendency to shame and silence its opponents is ultimately self-defeating, “When has anyone been persuaded by being insulted or labelled?” British comedian Jonathan Pie says. “That’s why people wait until they are in the voting booth. No one is watching anymore. There’s no blame or shame, and you can finally say what you really think and that’s a powerful thing.”

If academics are concerned about the degraded state of American politics, they should begin engaging, debating, and discussing politics with their political opponents instead of setting up echo chambers where only progressive points of view are allowed. The American experiment in human liberty depends upon universities that transmit to future generations respect for free speech and open and honest debate. To sustain our republic, we need desperately to recover the healthy intellectual habit of learning from opinions that we find offensive. A people that ceases to educate in freedom will cease to live in freedom.