Yet the requirements for open dialogue, objective research, and honest criticism are in peril. Campus activists, social justice faculty, and administrators who compromise every academic value imaginable have created a climate that is sometimes hostile to the search for truth.
The consequences attached to this climate extend far beyond the narrow confines of academic research. As we place more and more constraints on speech, as we limit tolerance for competing ideas, and as we accept the cascading calls for censorship we create a generation unable to reason, unable to accept criticism, and unable to critically examine their own biases.
Along comes an excellent essay on the topic. Some quotes:
Intolerance for free speech among student groups reveals their disregard for reason. Any opposition to or skepticism of their cause is met with anger, threats, and possibly physical harm. This is because free speech honors man’s rational faculty, presuming it is the genuine commonality among human beings.
As such, progressive pieties often foreclose respect for humility, decency, and honest inquiry. Rather than persuading the mind, they command and shame it. Liberal education to the contrary requires a spirit of reverence aiming to liberate the mind from prejudice—the prejudices of birth, public opinion, one’s own distorted and inflated opinions of oneself—in preparation for citizenship.
The perspective of anger is incapable of understanding our nation’s needs and its common good. Neither is it capable of creating productivity, decency, self-respect, or political freedom. A public whose passions are its sole animating feature is unsuited for rule by laws.
Read the essay here: http://dailysignal.com/2016/02/25/why-have-universities-been-overtaken-by-mob-rule/