The College Fix

One student earned a C on an otherwise perfect paper because his opinion was “wrong.” Another put the word “dictator” before the name Hugo Chavez in an essay, but the professor crossed it out. A third heard from her professor that she couldn’t write a paper on America.

It’s the small, insidious stuff that conservative students face every day on college campuses that a new social media campaign aims to expose.

The College Republican National Committee recently asked college students to share their anecdotal evidence of harassment and viewpoint discrimination via Twitter, using the hashtag #MyLiberalCampus. The campaign, launched last month, has given thousands of students a common outlet to Tweet about their experiences.

The response has been overwhelming- and not at all surprising, its organizers say.

“It would be funny if it weren’t so sad,” Alex Smith, chairwoman of the committee, said in an email to The College Fix.

The idea behind the campaign was to highlight how bad things have gotten on campuses. Liberal professors and administrators are not used to having their authority challenged, Smith explained, and their ideologies are being undermined by the Internet.

“More and more students have open access to information on the internet and these strongly liberal professors and administrators are having to dramatically overcompensate and really force their beliefs on students as they see their power fading,” Smith said.

“We know that college professors and administrators have always been more liberal and out of touch, but we’ve seen the problem of indoctrination-over-education actually get worse in recent years as these out-of-date structures lose their traditional grip on students,” Smith told The Fix.

“We felt that if we could utilize the internet and social media, the tool that students are already turning to for rapid information, we can help students share their stories and help to once and for all break down the liberal intolerance and indoctrination that students have to put up with on campus.”

The campaign has produced shocking reports of liberal bias on campuses across the country. For example, one UCSB student told of how her professor “warned Ted Cruz-supporting ‘teabaggers’ to get the hell out of his classroom before he sent them home to their mother in a body bag.”

Of course, the campaign has prompted criticism and ridicule. Many people chime in with fake or satirical #MyLiberalCampus examples in an attempt to mock the effort.

“My College Forced Me To Think,” stated one. “My Chem Professor Hasn’t Mentioned Benghazi Once This Whole Semester,” joked another.

Ultimately, though, the naysayers are part of the process, in a roundabout way.

The CRNC says it hopes to restore a real exchange of ideas on campus – the purpose of universities in the first place.

“We’d like to see an end to the liberal indoctrination pushed on students by professors and administrators, to have a more open and tolerant environment for conservatives to disagree and create a real open dialogue on campus, and for these extreme and inappropriate attacks that undermine a healthy and thriving academic debate to end,” Smith said.

College Fix contributor Dominic Lynch is a student at Loyola University Chicago.

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