Brown University students claim the First Amendment doesn’t include ALL speech, only views they agree with

(Freedom.news) The American college campus used to epitomize the “free speech zone,” but lately more and more students – influenced by Left-wing academics who resent any challenge to their ideology – are becoming less tolerant of viewpoints that differ from their own.

As reported by Campus Reform, five students from Brown University, an Ivy League school, wrote recently in the campus newspaper that free speech ought not to apply universally.

“The right to free speech is a protection against the abuse of power, not a guarantee of a platform for all ideas,” a group of students wrote in an op-ed for the Brown Daily Herald.

That assertion was in response to outrage over two recent op-eds that some Brown students found offensive and racist in nature, including one that dared to infer biological differences between races and one that defended Columbus Day (which many liberals are attempting to change to “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” – which, of course, has nothing to do with the man who discovered America).

The “offending” articles led to the issuance of ultimatums from a pair of minority student organizations, which demanded that the paper apologize formally for publishing the two op-eds and endorse left-wing efforts to change Columbus Day to “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”

Those demands, in turn, led to the publishing of an open letter from school administrators, including Brown President Christina Paxson, deeming the article valuable in producing dialogue and constructive discussion.

In the most recent op-ed regarding free speech, five Brown students argued that improving race relations among the student body was more important than speech protections (though they didn’t offer any evidence that “race relations” were “damaged” by the “offending” op-eds).

They further argued that the original Daily Herald columns inflicted pain and harm on Brown students and was a blatant use “of color as teaching tools.”

Though many students agreed the so-called “scientific racism” piece should be protected by the First Amendment, the five authors insisted that “these freedom of speech arguments actively prevent much needed conversation about race.”

“These arguments for free speech are often deployed to silence voices of color. Colonial histories of civility aside, calling for ‘civil discourse’ implies that expressions of pain and anger by people of color are not civil and have no place in the conversation,” they continued. “In the past two weeks, students of color have not only protested against the intentional circulation of words that deny their humanity. They have also pushed the campus to grapple seriously with how legacies of racism and colonialism endure at Brown, and we have failed to rise to the occasion” [Brown was founded in 1764, officially, as “The College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations).

Brown students have a history of stifling free speech. In October 2013, a speech by then-New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was canceled 30 minutes in because students were disrupting it.

The expansion of Left-wing ideology on campus – extreme by its very nature – will spread throughout American society, as graduates take their intolerance with them.

See also:

http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6913

http://www.freedom.news/2015-10-29-dont-be-fooled-by-the-political-game-the-illusion-of-freedom-in-america.html

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