Sep 15, 2015 3 min read

Not too long ago, we took note of the hubbub surrounding a “bias-free” speech code at the University of New Hampshire that would have turned everyday interactions into a minefield where offense could erupt at the slightest utterance. It suggested that students, faculty and employees at the institution refer to overweight people as “people of size,” that someone who is wealthy should be described as a “person of material wealth” and a “tomboy” should be referred to as “a child who is gender noncomforming” or “a child who is gender variant.” Speech codes of this ilk, along with a vogue for “trigger warnings” to let students know if something on a syllabus might offend them, a cataloging of campus “microaggressions” and the creation of “safe spaces” where students can sequester themselves from anything that might stir up memories of trauma, have become potent fodder for critics of academia. They have argued that campuses are becoming places where students – many of whom are still watched carefully by so-called “helicopter parents” – are being cosseted and indulged, rather than intellectually challenged and provoked. Rather than being of hotbeds of unrest, as they were in the 1960s, critics argue that campuses have become like childproof nursery schools.

It might come as a surprise to some of his critics on the right, but President Obama is also no fan of campus political correctness.

According to the website Vox, Obama was asked Monday at an event in Iowa for his response to a proposal by Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson that funding be cut for colleges that demonstrate political bias. Obama, correctly, opposes it – how exactly can such “bias” be measured, and what kind of “bias” would come in for approbation? As the president explained, “That might work in the Soviet Union, but that doesn’t work here. That’s not who we are.”

However, he went on to take a few well-aimed jabs at political correctness.

“It’s not just sometimes folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem,” he said. “Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too. I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to – anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ’em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, ‘You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.’ That’s not the way we learn either.”

Of course, campus debates must be conducted with respect and decorum. And, no, places of higher learning are not free-fire zones where any and all cockamamie ideas should be given equal weight – no one should feel compelled to book Holocaust deniers or the folks who still peddle the notion that the moon landings were staged. But colleges and universities should be places of lively and vigorous debate, and the students who attend them should be treated like the adults that they are.