By Luke Kusick
“We must do away with all newspapers. A revolution cannot be accomplished with freedom of the press”~Che Guevara.
The radical group Students for Change has the same mentality. Similar to Che, they have a revolution of their own that they want accomplished and that revolution is one in which no one anywhere is offended. They want a world where contradictory opinions, scary thoughts, micro-aggressions and anything that some arbitrary decider deems inappropriate are able to bring up the committer of such heinous thought crimes against a judiciary committee and face punishment. In order to accomplish this, the group has essentially decided that on a public university’s campus freedom of speech is no longer necessary and that the first amendment need no longer apply.
Speech codes are placed into this radical progressive groups list of demands. All twenty-five points found within their list can be attacked and scrutinized; however, the easiest point to call the students for change out on is point nine which states: “Added to the Student Code of Conduct, students caught using offensive or subjective language to an individual or group based on age, color, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, martial status, national/ethnic origin, religion, veteran status, sex (pregnancy), political affiliation or family medical or genetic information and university status should be subject to prompt and severe sanctioning for violating a University policy.” Now what does this say? This states simply that they want students who use languages that anyone could subjectively find offensive should be brought up on a student tribunal for immediate sanctioning by the University. The specific sanctions that they want to be brought upon the students are not clear, but the amount of words or sayings that can be counted in the students for change’s demand is countless. They literally included so many types of sayings, words and phrases within their demand that almost anything any student says can be considered a violation. Not only will this needlessly drag innocent people before the school tribunal, but it also limits the speech of everyone.
Their demand is a speech code for words that normally would not incite violence, be considered threatening or harasses people. The student conduct already has rules against such actions, so what this group wants is to ban speech that they simply do not agree with. Not only do they want a thought police to sanction what we say and how we say it, the rules seem to want to protect the emotions and feelings of people on campus. It is a new trend to see university students becoming more and more sensitive to anything and college campus’s going to extreme methods to “protect” their emotions. This group is willing to go as far as banning freedom of speech in order to get what they want. Hopefully, fellow students will remember that they have a right to the first amendment, a right to free speech and not live in fear that what they say will be brought up by some thought police tribunal who will prosecute them for simply speaking.