By Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner;
Call in the cops. Release the tear gas. Make arrests. Convict the arrested. Give the convicts real punishments.
Repeat those steps, again and again.
That’s how colleges and the civil authorities with jurisdiction over them should react to campus protests that turn violent, or that block free access to public spaces, or that physically interrupt people’s work or “occupy” their workspaces, or that shut down the right of others to speak.
It is long past time to overrule mob rule, to protect the rights of interested listeners to listen, to insist that words and viewpoints are not violence and should not be met with violence. And it’s time to teach spoiled brats that they are the ones abusing an unearned privilege — the privilege of higher education — if they use force or its threat or even their vocal cords to deny free speech to others that the agitators denounce for being
It is long past time to overrule mob rule, to protect the rights of interested listeners to listen, to insist that words and viewpoints are not violence and should not be met with violence. And it’s time to teach spoiled brats that they are the ones abusing an unearned privilege — the privilege of higher education — if they use force or its threat or even their vocal cords to deny free speech to others that the agitators denounce for being “privileged.”
These conclusions are catalyzed by the growing trend on college campuses in which hoodlums who consider themselves students assert the spurious right, of their own volition and without appeal to duly constituted authority, to deny others the benefit of long-established rights.
The most recent and perhaps most disturbing of these incidents occurred Thursday when Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., closed down for the day due to a serious threat of violence. The closure came after weeks of tension stemming from an April 12 “Day of Absence” in which all white people were “invited” to leave campus for a 24-hour period….
[For the rest of this column, including a discussion of how Ronald Reagan handled such incidents when he was governor of California, please follow this link.]
