The decline continues

If today's American college students are tomorrow's lawyers and judges, then this country could be sliding towards complete totalitarianism. 

From Brad Polumbo at Newsweek: 

The (college) kids are not alright.

A new poll from the Buckley Institute surveyed students at four-year colleges—and the results are deeply alarming. Young Americans are turning their backs on basic American principles of free speech, tolerance, and due process, in a way that's so drastic it genuinely endangers the future of our political order. And this disintegration is only accelerating.

The Buckley Institute has conducted this poll for nine years, yet this year, for the first time ever, more students support shouting down speakers they disagree with than oppose this kind of mob censorship. In another first, a whopping 51 percent of students support speech codes, a drastic shift from last year, when a plurality opposed speech codes.

What's more, 46 percent of students now believe that "offensive" opinions should get other students reported to the university administration. Oh, and more than 50 percent of students literally believe certain topics should be "banned" from being debated on campus.

There's also an alarming violent twist to the censoriousness rising among Gen Z college students. A whopping 45 percent of students told pollsters it is justified to use physical violence to prevent people from expressing "hate speech" or making "racially charged comments." This radical, un-American idea is only becoming more popular: Back in 2017, for example, only 30 percent of students supported this same proposition.

See the pattern yet?

Indeed I do. 

Today's young adults have been convinced that they are under zero obligation to be exposed to a worldview or basic ideals that may fly in the face of their deeply held beliefs. As such, it's inevitable one's intellect will atrophy when it's never used to form a rebuttal to rhetoric which they find objectionable. Why I'm old enough to remember when students were willing participants in spirited debates with their college professors, an exercise the profs themselves welcomed. Not only did such discourse assist in the learning process, it was invaluable in helping students form their worldview. This idea that today's college kids will tuck tail and run to an administrator at even the slightest perception of a "microagression" doesn't bode well for America's standing on a world stage over the next several decades. 

In short, we've expedited the notion that the movie Idiocracy is actually a documentary. 

--------------------------------------------