OPINION:
Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines is going to sue and demand consequences for activists who assaulted her at San Francisco State University, where she discussed the impact of men competing in women’s athletic events. It should start a trend.
Whether it’s any judge appointed by former President Donald Trump, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, commentators such as Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro, or an NCAA swimmer who had her title stolen by a man, disrupting conservative and Republican-aligned speakers on college campuses has become as common as happy hour at the local dive.
Unlike in decades past, this isn’t a limited phenomenon. It isn’t a matter of angst-riddled teens and young adults just being rebels without a clue. It’s a coordinated and celebrated tactic of the radical left to stifle speech on campuses, now assented to and encouraged by college administrators.
The flower children who likely never left campus are running these schools today and bringing their romantic notions of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture with them. The results have been devastating to American higher education.
Academics and college administrators have become a de facto protected class in the U.S., and that hands-off approach has led to a culture of intimidation, censorship and even violence. Conservatives, right-of-center activists and influential donors have allowed this to happen by not using the levers of the law and appropriate political pressure to stop it.
To be sure, if the individuals disrupting the events were conservatives, there would be a line of liberal groups and funders stepping up to sue these institutions and demanding action. There would be professionally made signs, days of protests, national interviews galore, and perhaps even television commercials.
Students and influencers on the right have put up with it all for far too long.
Our institutions of higher learning have been co-opted by teachers unions, tenure that all but eliminates accountability, more than $1 billion from China in the last decade, and corporate funding that serves commercial purposes rather than academic discourse.
Large percentages of ideologically conservative and moderate students and faculty are self-censoring out of fear, according to surveys. But that culture and the repression of speech on America’s college campuses created by the left is even backfiring on the very people who hijacked the system to drive their agenda. According to a 2023 report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, even some 40% of liberal faculty members also feel intimidated.
The result of all this is an authoritarian environment where there is open hostility to ideas. Those ideas and the discussion that they engender are the bedrock foundation of our country and our now broken university system.
Many of these schools are taxpayer-funded. Others have endowments in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. They need to feel the financial and legal pain of their discrimination.
Conservatives cannot be afraid to sue civilly or press charges against schools and individuals that discriminate against them, assault them or cancel them.
State governments have tools at their disposal to restore American higher education, including accreditation, tax dollars and regulations over corporate or foreign donations.
States must take action to ensure that any college or university that is accredited within their borders is held to intellectual diversity standards and doesn’t discriminate in grading, hiring, events or curricula based on political or religious beliefs. They need a credible, unbiased internal review process of teachers who are accused of discriminating against students’ beliefs.
There must be new laws that protect students and faculty alike and requirements that schools take affirmative steps to maintain an environment that is respectful of dialogue.
Accredited universities, especially those that receive tax dollars, must be require to have standards of conduct for students to allow differing points of view and penalties for behavior that is excessively disruptive and violent.
Bullying conservative or religious students should not be tolerated, and physical assaults of students or guest speakers should result in expulsion and prosecution.
States should also immediately restrict schools from taking any money from China or businesses linked to China.
It is increasingly clear that school administrators don’t understand America or are willing to blindly cast aside their responsibility to foster dialogue for the sake of an agenda that is ultimately self-destructive.
For all their supposed education, many are weak-minded spirits who believe words are weapons and hate speech is anything that doesn’t fit their worldview.
It’s time to make them pay. It’s time to stand up to the bullies in the schoolyard.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV, an author and a former Bush administration official.
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