On the afternoon of Friday February 28th, I received an email with a letter from the Director of Right & Responsibilities within the Davidson College Dean of Students’ office informing me that I, as the president of our college’s Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter, had violated the Davidson College Code of Responsibility.
The letter stated that me and my YAF chapter had allegedly harassed unnamed students by distributing a pamphlet entitled “The Five Myths About Israel Perpetrated by the Pro-Hamas Left.” According to the administration, telling the truth about Israel to counter the lies from Hamas sympathizers meant we were promoting Islamophobia.
The school, of course, feigned ignorance when a massive “Ceasefire Now” banner was previously hung on campus to show sympathy for the barbaric Hamas terrorists responsible for murdering the most Jews in any day since the Holocaust.
In addition, Davidson College said I was promoting transphobia because of an Instagram post “speculating the sex/gender identity of Imane Khelif, an Algerian boxer.” With these absurd thought crimes against the woke Left, school administrators tried to shame me by claiming I had made individuals feel “threatened and unsafe.”
As a result, administrators presented two options to right the supposed wrongs I had committed: to concede to a Mutual Resolution Agreement that would require me to accept my punishment and waive my right of appeal, or attend a Code of Responsibility Council Hearing. Neither of these options are tenable. The first would be falsely admitting wrongdoing while the latter would likely involve presenting my case in the school’s kangaroo court to the very individuals who made the complaint — or, at the very least, biased persons who support them.
The letter I received and the reaction that precipitated it demonstrate two characteristics of the current state of Davidson’s administration: its oppression of free speech and its double standards.
My YAF chapter’s distribution of the pamphlet and posting on social media were simply an exercise of First Amendment freedom. I had not forced any student to read the contents of the pamphlet nor click on our Instagram account. It is thus not only illogical but completely false to define our actions as harassment.
Moreover, as Americans, we possess the God-given freedom of speech that is not contingent upon whether others disagree or are offended by our speech. Some might argue that because Davidson is a private institution, it should have greater authority over students’ speech. However, I would argue that Davidson is not its own nation; it is still part of America and must abide by the U.S. Constitution.
No college president nor administrator can nullify my basic liberties. What’s more, Davidson has previously claimed to have adopted the Chicago Principles as a commitment to free speech and open debate. My school also claims that it “dedicates itself to the quest for truth” and “intends to teach all students to think clearly, to make relevant judgments, to discriminate among values, and to communicate freely with others in the realm of ideas.”
Davidson’s commitment to free speech, as I have now repeatedly seen first-hand, only applies to those with whom the college agrees.
For example, when I published an opinion piece expressing my pro-life values during the fall semester and received death threats from my fellow classmates, Davidson College took no action.
Even worse, when I had mentioned such occurrences to the Director of Right & Responsibilities during our meeting, she expressed that she was aware of them. Although she communicated that she was sympathetic and would be willing to speak with me about my concerns, it seems odd to me that she knew of my circumstances and made no effort to intervene. Instead, she seemed to be more concerned about students who felt “threatened and unsafe” by literature that did not target any individuals but simply contained facts.
From the perspective of most reasonable people, it would seem that the blowback to my pro-life views constituted “harassment.” I was truly “threatened and unsafe,” and yet the college did not care because mine are the supposedly “wrong” ideas.
Meanwhile, Davidson continues to allow abortion to be promoted to its students while doing nothing to protect pro-life students who seek to present the other side.
With this latest show of intolerance, Davidson again demonstrated a willingness to infringe upon the freedoms of conservative students in order to protect the mere feelings of leftists. In doing so, my school disregards the “quest for truth” and instead aims only to push an illiberal, leftist agenda, seeking to silence anyone that contradicts them. Davidson not only allows for student organizations that promote abortion, transgenderism, lawlessness, and other leftist causes with which conservative students disagree, but their faculty partake in promoting these ideologies themselves.
Despite Davidson College’s claims about promoting diversity and inclusion, they only support the Left’s flawed definition of diversity at the expense of true intellectual diversity. For Davidson, it is not about “teaching students to think clearly or make relevant judgments,” but about indoctrinating the rising generation in the ways of radical leftists.
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