Two wrongs don't make a right - but where has this happened? And I'm talking about conservative colleges, not public venues. Has any speech suppression like this happened at Hillsdale, TCU or Oral Roberts? Granted, there are very few large conservative colleges in this country.
I don't know. I do not track the event calendars of any college. How often does it happen that a conservative college invites controversial, big-name liberal speakers on campus to speak?
Now that you have shifted away from the meaning of indoctrination, I don't want to quibble much about campus speaking events. In every case, it is wrong for an invited speaker to be booed off the stage or shouted down. As far as the teaching of liberal or conservative views go, private colleges have every right to do as they please. The question is different for public colleges as they are publicly funded.
I would caution you about painting any college with a broad brush, or defining everything a college does by using a single event. I attended a private Christian college that you would likely consider liberal. At the time, one of their hailed board members was a Democratic US Congressman whose views were so far left it made my skin crawl.
Granted this is years ago and things may well have changed. But in my experience, the only place on campus where politics was formally discussed in a college-sanctioned way, was in the political science classes where it was common for people from the left and right to loudly square off against each other. In our student body, Sanctioned talks by guest speakers at various events also happened and the speakers, often elected officials, represented a wide variety of views, and none of them were shouted down. In that college, in those days, a student that tried to shout down a guest speaker would be themself shouted down by the students and be in trouble with the faculty.
While it would be an unfair exaggeration to say my college is as liberal as they come, it is a liberal college. But in our student body, we had numerous Republican and conservative students who were fully capable of thinking for themselves and maintaining their views.
Consider another aspect ... the fact that people think for themselves and change their minds.
At age 17 I enlisted in the US Army and volunteered to go to Viet Nam. At the time, I took a ton of heat for that from many of my high-school classmates because they were against the war. At the time, I saw myself as a loyal patriot willing to put my life at risk to fight the evils of godless communism and keep the world safe for democracy. You could say I was a conservative, and I acted like I meant it.
To my great disappointment, the Army did not send me to Viet Nam because the war was winding down and they were bringing the troops home. But as I met and worked with those troops, and they told me what went on over there, my views began to change. At the same time, the Nixon Watergate scandal was developing and my views of government further changed. My parents were part of the "Greatest Generation." I was raised to trust and respect our leaders. But as this boy became a man, I learned to be more careful about who and what I trust.
My views changed and I found myself growing more sympathetic to the students we saw in the news who were protesting in the streets. This all happened before I enrolled in college. The reason I picked the college I did was a girl I had the hots for had enrolled there, as did a couple other friends. I followed along simply because that was the comfortable choice. Together our small group toured a few campuses. The college we picked felt right for us. (I never dated the girl, she fell in love with someone else she met at college.)
In college, my views did not change much. But because of the education I received, I became highly skilled in researching a topic, applying what I learned in life, and expressing my views.
Later in life, I returned to military service by joining the National Guard where I served as an infantry officer for several years. And I became a self-employed business person and unabashed capitalist.
If you judged me solely by my college diploma, you would say I was an indoctrinated liberal ... and you would be wrong. College students think for themselves. They are not the hapless, easily molded vessels some seem to think they are.
katiecouric.com
www.statista.com
