One Part First Amendment, One Part Politics with a Dash of Individualization

At this point in a college freshmen’s life, they have been in school for 14 years. Throughout those 14 years, freshmen have learned the Bill of Rights like they’ve learned how to walk and the first amendment the way they’ve learned to talk. The first amendment has been engrained in a child from the first history class in 5th grade, to the fifth history class in 9th grade and the eighth class in their senior year. In those eight years, a student has the first amendment in their head to bring to college and express themselves how they see fit and how they have been socialized to do so. According to Dinesh D’Souza, Stuart Taylor and Tim Robbins freedom of speech has been inhibited and taken out by politics and political correctness and fueled heavily by the societies need for preferential treatment.
In the beginning of Dinesh D’Souza’s book Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, he gives enumerable examples of preferential treatment to certain races, ethnicities, sexualities and genders on college campuses and in the work force. D’Souza focuses primarily on where people have been denied what they feel is deserved, such as admission, a job or a place in a sorority/fraternity. On page three of D’Souza’s book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, he gives the point of the University of California at Berkeley’s admission:
“Ernest Koenigsburg, a Berkeley professor of business…asks us to imagine a student applicant with a high school grade point average of 3.5 and a Scholastic Aptitude test score of 1200. “For a black student…the probably of admission to Berkeley is 100 percent.” But if…the student is Asian American… “The probability of admission is less than 5 percent.” Koenigsburg…is satis...

... middle of paper ...

... Students, Archibald Epps, could have pointed out clear pieces of hate speech and defamation, he did not.
Free speech. Affirmative action. Political correctness. These three things all have at least one key thing common and that one thing can be summed up as this: To you, the reader; to me, the writer; and to anyone and everyone you talk to about those three things, they will have a different meaning with a different story with a different reason for them being defined that way. The discussion cannot end simply with our own stories, but begin with those stories and transcend into something new with being exposed to different ideas and viewpoints that may or may not match our own. D’souza, Taylor, Robbins and all other authors mentioned in this piece can help everyone to grow in their personal definitions of free speech, affirmative action and political correctness.