College Goes After Patriotic Student Group

New in PJ Media:

Remember when our nation’s colleges and universities were actual institutions of higher learning, where ideas were accepted or dismissed on their merit, and rational, evidence-based discussion and debate were encouraged? Yeah, I know, I’m dating myself, as those days recede ever farther into the distant past. Davidson College in North Carolina has just demonstrated yet again that today, these once-great institutions are nothing more than radioactive wastelands of far-left indoctrination: it has rebuked the school’s Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter for daring to distribute a pamphlet refuting some of the pro-Hamas crowd’s lies about Israel.

That’s right. Davidson didn’t make any attempt to show that the pamphlet, “The Five Myths About Israel Perpetrated by the Pro-Hamas Left” (which I wrote), was wrong. It didn’t encourage students to engage in mutually respectful discussion of the issues at hand. Instead, according to YAF’s communications chief Spencer Brown, it claimed that merely by making the pamphlet available to Davidson students, YAF members were guilty of “harassment.”

Yes, it has come to this. After decades of hard-left domination of our academic institutions, even just disseminating ideas that depart from the leftist line constitutes “harassment.” Never mind whether or not those ideas are true. A Davidson apparatchik wrote to the chairwoman of Davidson’s YAF chapter, reminding her that “a priority at Davidson College is to provide a holistic student experience focusing on students’ well-being and college success.”

This apparently involved sheltering students from unwelcome thoughts: “My office received information that, if accurate, may indicate that you violated the Code of Responsibility and thus go against this priority.” The official went on to speak of what happened as if a crime had been committed: “The information is regarding an incident that occurred on or around Sunday, October 6, 2024 at approximately in or near Davidson College campus.”

The official then kindly went on to detail the nature of the crime: “The Dean of Students has received several complaints that leaders of the student organization Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) distributed a pamphlet entitled ‘The Five Myths About Israel Perpetrated by the Pro-Hamas Left’ which allegedly includes misinformation that promotes islamophobia.” Now, Hunter Biden’s laptop taught us all we need to know about what it means when the left starts claiming that something is “misinformation,” and “Islamophobia” is another propaganda word that is designed to shut down speech about Islam that the left dislikes. And so all that Davidson actually established was that the YAF chapter had done something it didn’t like, and was going to be punished as a result.

There is more. Read the rest here.