We’ve reported quite a bit on the disastrous state of free speech on college campuses. For the most part, we’ve seen students begging administrators to protect them from anything that might be the slightest bit controversial, be it a Confederate flag or a Dora the Explorer Halloween costume. For the most part, the outrage has been administrators either joining with these students in the war on speech, or going to outrageous lengths to accommodate them. Until now.
Recently, an Ohio State student began receiving threats for a pro life piece she authored in the campus paper. When she attempted to report the threats to administrators, she got more than she bargained for:
All Madison Gesiotto wanted to do when she met with the dean of her law school was report a threat prompted by a newspaper column she wrote pointing out the high abortion rate in the black community.
She assumed the meeting would last 10 minutes. Instead, she said, she was there for about an hour as three deans at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law critiqued her on what they saw as problems with her Oct. 23 column in The Washington Times, “The number one killer of black Americans.”
“This is my freedom of speech, but they kept going on and on about how, ‘This is a flawed article, it’s not a good legal piece, it’s not a good journalistic piece, either,’” Ms. Gesiotto recalled. “They asked me to explain to them why I would put that [line] in, what that means, and how I should have followed that up by saying other things to support these black women.”
A second-year law student who writes the Millennial Mindset column for The Washington Times online opinion pages, Ms. Gesiotto said she tried repeatedly to steer the conversation back to the threat made against her, but that the deans appeared to “blow it off.”
“I’m a very tough person. I very rarely get upset or sensitive about things,” said Ms. Gesiotto. “But I was crying in that meeting for about 30 minutes, I was so shocked. I’ve never been in a situation with people I respected and looked up to and felt so violated.”
Ms. Gesiotto knew that many of her peers at the law school would disagree with the column. She expected to take some flak. What she didn’t expect, she said, was having administrators show less interest in her safety than in tearing apart a column entirely unrelated to her coursework.
This is a new low for campus culture, but the message is clear. The most reasonable conservative opinions are not to be tolerated, and the most loony liberal hallucinations will be coddled and encouraged. Which begs the question: why bother going to college anymore?
AAN Staff
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