Anarchy At Texas State University
The climate that prevails on today’s college campuses can only be described as chilling.
The one institution that is designed to serve as a bastion of critical thought, a marketplace of ideas, has been reduced by many faculty, student, and administrator alike to a so-called “safe space,” a space designed to immunize the campus against any and all ideas that its self-appointed gatekeepers deem a threat to their hard leftist orthodoxy.
Of course, this is not news to anyone who has been paying any attention. And conservatives regularly and loudly complain about the attacks on “free speech” in the University.
However, this way of characterizing the situation, though accurate as far as it goes, doesn’t go nearly far enough. Thus, its focus on the abstraction of free speech grossly understates the real danger that concrete flesh-and-blood human beings risk when they dare to entertain alternative views.
Principles, like the principle of free speech, don’t bleed. People do.
It isn’t an intangible, airy concept that is under attack on today’s campus. It is those speakers, faculty, and, most concerning, students who militant leftist SJWs deem insufficiently “progressive” who enjoy this dubious distinction.
A recent incident at Texas State University is all too representative of the atmosphere with which those who deviate from the Creed of identity-politics must contend.
Connor Clegg, a young white Republican student and student body president, was impeached just two days before his term was set to expire. Those students from such organizations as the Pan-African Action Committee, Latinas Unidas, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Unit 6875-B, Texas Rising for LGBTQIA Equality, and the Student Community of Progressive Development who had been pushing for Clegg’s ouster erupted in cheers when his impeachment was announced.
The reader will get one guess as to the charge that these groups brought against Clegg and that led to his removal.
The College Fix reports that Clegg was ousted “following allegations of racism,” allegations that in turn fueled the charge that he failed to represent “all students.” At least two pieces of evidence had been submitted as proof of Clegg’s “racism.”
First, four years ago, Clegg left posts on Instagram in which he mocked Asian tourists in Europe. He has since apologized repeatedly, referring to his actions as “stupid” and “locker room talk.”
Second, he called for the defunding of the campus newspaper, the University Star, after it had published an opinion piece that equated “white death” with “liberation for all.”
Tellingly, the student who authored the drivel on “white death,” Rudy Martinez, was among Clegg’s most vocal detractors.
Equally telling, but, tragically, all too predictable, Clegg was impeached hot on the heels of “several days of racial tensions on campus during which student protesters aggressively confronted police and experienced visible meltdowns [.]”
There was supposed to have been an impeachment hearing a month or so ago, but an insufficient number of senators were on the scene. This prompted a three day campus sit-in during which, as per their standard operating procedure, the leftist disruptors issued demands to the administration. And per the standard operating procedure of administrators, the latter all too eagerly made concessions to the squeakiest wheel.
Texas State University will now release a “campus climate survey,” develop an “African-American Studies minor” that will be on the books by the fall of 2019, and search for ways in which to add more “diversity courses” to “the school’s core curriculum.”
According to the Austin American Statesman, Clegg actually “urged senators to vote against him, saying that some senators had received threatening text messages, and that he worried for their ‘safety’ if they voted for him.”
Other conservative students attest to Clegg’s take on the hazardous atmosphere on campus for those who dare to defy the agents of the Racism-Industrial-Complex. According to The College Fix:
“Collin Pruett, a student at Texas State and a College Republican, told The College Fix in an interview Tuesday that he knows several conservative students who fear for their safety, as well as some student government members who told him they felt they would be in danger from peers if they did not vote to impeach Clegg.”
Pruett himself, being “a well-known conservative on campus,” relayed that he was stalked.
Some “right-leaning students have been doxxed,” i.e. their personal contact information had been rendered public for “malicious” purposes.
Pruett adds: “It’s out of control. There’s a professional infrastructure of activists here.”
More concerning, these activists have “the backing of the administration.”
Note: Conservative students are blasted as “racist,” stalked, exposed, and threatened with violence by left-wing students—and yet it is the latter to whom the college lends its support.
This is a toxic state of affairs against which all people, and especially parents, of good will must be willing to take a stand.