The university was once a bastion of free speech and freedom of thought, but that was a long time ago. Today the university is on the forefront of the progressive attempt to throttle free speech and thought wherever they can.
The latest instance of this movement to impose a stifling conformity upon the public has come to light at the University of Minnesota. U of M is establishing a policy whereby students applying for admission to their teacher education program will be screened to assess whether they hold the correct ideological commitments. Apparently, if you wish to be a teacher you will not be allowed to be a conservative and probably not a religious person. Such is the world the progressives would have us inhabit - a world in which freedom is something to be found only in intellectual antique markets.
Fortunately, FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), a free-speech activist group that fights political-correctness codes on college campuses, is on the case. You can read about this shameful attempt to impose ideological uniformity on Minnesota's public school students at Hot Air, and you can find other examples of academia's intolerance by doing a Viewpoint search for Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
Young people growing up in the post WWII era took their freedom to hold dissenting opinions for granted, but there are many people in the contemporary left, in universities and in government, who see that freedom as an enemy. They want to be able to dictate what you'll be able to say and, if they can, even what you think, and they're relentless in their push to get their way. If they succeed students will one day be saying the 21st century equivalent of Heil Hitler before classes each morning just as today they recite the pledge of allegiance.
It really is true, as the 19th century abolitionist Wendall Phillips once said, that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
RLC
