Donald Trump recently visited Saudi Arabia, an oppressive regime with little respect for human rights. In Saudi Arabia, an activist blogger was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for establishing an online forum with the purpose of creating debate on religious and political matters, according to an Oct. 19, 2016 BBC article. Yet, the Google search “where is free speech under attack?” yields a page where virtually every article is about college campuses. Spurred by firebrands such as Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos, the right wing has converged on academia with indignation and ire. Their claim is that the liberal consensus at most universities is stifling and victimizing to conservative students. Not since the ‘War on Christmas’ has an ideological crusade been so pointless.

Conservative speech is actually quite loud on campuses; students voice their anger for being denied spaces to talk through editorial columns, speaker events and campus events. For all the conservative media frenzy surrounding Middlebury and Berkeley, riots and protests at a couple schools do not make some sort of uniquely liberal trend. Take Brigham Young University and Liberty University, for example, which have consistently infringed upon the free speech rights of their students, shut down protests and refused to recognize political groups on campus. According to Inside Higher Ed, a Liberty University student was even directly prevented from publishing an anti-Trump article by the school’s administration. 

What makes the current state of discourse so tragic is that conservatives throw away their abilities to have meaningful impacts. To Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, “provoke campus, get response, blame liberal oppression” is just a rinse-and-repeat cycle; right-wing media gets a talking point, their ratings go up and they move on to a new college. Everyone wins, except for the students.

When Ann Coulter’s speech at Berkeley was canceled due to threats of violence on campus, the administration offered to reschedule her talk for another date at a secure venue, according to an April 21 Washington Post article. Rather than reschedule, Coulter chose to walk away and blamed Berkeley for censoring her. This is provocation, not legitimate conservatism, and media coverage that obsesses over violent confrontation and ignores peaceful discourse only hardens minds. As the conservative minority gets ever more strident, ever more insistent on the counterattack and ever more unlikely to interact with the liberals who they are told, time and again, they will reject any attempts at dialogue.

Liberal students lose out too. Instead of principled or eloquent conservatism, left-of-center students are wading through a sea of speakers determined to either belittle or insult them. Listening to these sorts of thinly veiled partisan attacks will never “expand the minds” of liberal students nor open them to conservative thought. Speakers such as Coulter and Yiannopoulos are coming to campus for the entertainment of the right, not to educate or discuss real issues. Saying “the left is against speech” tells you nothing about what the right is for. 

When Dinesh D’Souza came to speak at Brandeis University this spring, he decried the supposed deafness of the left to other viewpoints. He claimed that none of the speakers who are coming to campuses “are here to engage in yelling racial epithets or in any way violate the normal civility of the campus” and that protesting them was therefore wrong, according to a May 2 article from the Justice.  

Yet students are not protesting legitimate conservatives from coming to campus, only ones such as Milo Yiannopoulos, because he harassed a trans student in his audience at University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, according to a Dec. 16, 2016 article in the Cut. The riots at Berkeley, justified or not, were a result of the fact that Milo Yiannopoulos, according to a Feb. 3 article in the Independent, intended to publicly list the names of undocumented students on the campus. In fact, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, over 25 percent of all college dis-invitations for speakers in 2016 were directed at one man: Milo Yiannopoulos. 

Speaking one’s mind and facing disagreement are integral to the college experience, and these values can absolutely be promoted without relentlessly insulting liberals or conservatives. Get rid of legacy admissions, for a start. The same families, generation after generation, march into elite schools like Princeton or Villanova, certain that the same views, the same pastimes, the same beliefs will circulate. Let’s shake up that certainty. Add in class-based affirmative action. According to  Jan. 18 New York Times article, more students enrolled at Tufts University belong to the top 1 percent of the income scale than the bottom 60 percent. Conservatives want “the out-of-touch coastal elite” to stop dominating these schools? Invite poorer students in. Yale University will have a more robust debate on “clean coal” if more students are the sons and daughters of coal-miners. Discourse and debate will come when conservatives drop the pretense that what matters in the student body is not diversity of race, class, or gender, only how they react to Milo Yiannopoulos.