I have seen that any thought or speech coming from conservatives on campus receives much backlash and disparaging remarks. This is something I have noticed ever since I started attending North Dakota State during my undergraduate years.
I have taken a number of religious studies and philosophy courses in my undergraduate years. With this, I have heard similar remarks come from the mouths of professors. As a freshman, I enrolled in Introduction to Religion. Throughout the semester, the professor (who is now retired) had continually equated anyone who believes in the infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible as fundamentalists.
I no longer find this surprising. In fact, it’s no different from any other campus anywhere in the country. Just look at Ben Shapiro’s book “Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth.”
Reminiscing past experiences
Last fall, Jake MacAulay came to NDSU to give a talk on Christianity, religious freedom and the Constitution. What naturally happens is that people get all offended and call him racist and homophobic. Yet they cannot provide a single quote or anything else to prove such a claim.
Another example is that when one of our writers, Ezra Gray, writes an article giving his views on a specific topic and calling various things into question that others may just accept as is without thinking about it, many people automatically flip out. There are even comments saying it is an embarrassment to NDSU in general that he continues to write for The Spectrum.
When I first started writing for The Spectrum, I made a comment in a Letter to the Editor. I noted that when someone in a public setting displays sympathies to conservative politics, the Bible and conservative Christianity, that I could almost guarantee that people would cry foul. So far, what I have seen is something as of late is something that backs that up.
Double standards
I find it humorous that diversity is a doctrine throughout campus. Yet those who preach tolerance may not necessarily be practicing it. Ever notice that people blow up over anything that relates to whites, males and patriarchy? It’s like white males are supposed to feel bad about themselves to make up for decades of racism and sexism that they had nothing to do with.
It’s silly that people want all sorts of diversity, such as ethnic and gender diversity. But they don’t want to put a damper on religious and ideological diversity. For example, as of 2004, 45 political science professors in Colorado’s state universities identified as Democrat. Only nine identified as Republican. More recently, a study was done by Econ Journal Watch in fall 2016. It showed that among the top 40 leading universities in the United States, Democrat faculty voters greatly outnumbered Republicans. The ratio was an astonishing 12-to-one. This is what the doctrines of “diversity” and “tolerance” are bringing us.
Professor Robert Maranto of Villanova University has this to say, “While colleges strive for ethnic diversity, they actively oppose ideological diversity. Surveys find that only about 10 percent of social science and humanities faculty vote Republican.” Maranto brings up the case of a conservative sociologist. When this sociologist came out as a conservative, he said,
“When I decided to come out as a registered Republican, it was a sensation. It was as if I became a child molester. You don’t want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts.”
Let’s not forget the Ben Shapiro issue across the river at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. Do people really need such trigger warnings and to get therapy over a speaker coming to speak? It’s not like anybody is forcing anyone to listen to Shapiro.
Conclusion
With all the hate spewing from the left all over the country, it’s not a surprise to me anymore. There’s so much drama that one can argue that it be considered “hate speech.” Pretty soon one may not be able to say “man” or “woman” anymore without somebody getting offended.
A new trend that is happening now is a “trans-racial” movement. There is a white man that is identifying as Filipino. So watch out, you may start receiving a lot of hate mail and other forms of backlash pretty soon if you refer to someone by a particular race and that person suddenly doesn’t identify with that anymore. Perhaps Morgan Freeman is right; to combat racism, you could simply “stop talking about it.”
It feels like conservatives, politically and theologically, are now becoming more of a minority. Many of them who work in places like universities have to keep quiet about it due to the potential for liberal backlash. The difference is, theological and political conservatives have not needed a “safe space.”