College Professor tells Conservative Student "F**k* Your Life
College Professor tells Conservative Student "Fuc* Your Life and is caught on video. While this incident is not a major event itself, the story is going viral and it exemplifies the idea that colleges are biased against conservatives.Is there really a crisis on college campuses? What even constitutes a crisis?SUPPORT JOURNALISM. Become a patron athttp://www.patreon.com/TimcastMy Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnewsMake sure to subscribe for more travel, news, opinion, and documentary with Tim Pool everyday.Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
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A conservative college student is being targeted by a progressive professor.
Does that sound at all surprising?
I think a lot of people believe that university campuses are not welcoming of conservative ideas, and there's a lot of reason people believe this.
We had the entire free speech battle, which is still ongoing, where several conservative speakers were protested and Ultimately cancelled their speaking events at various universities.
We saw one instance where Ben Shapiro couldn't even go onto DePaul property, otherwise he would be arrested for trespassing because protesters had made the space unsafe.
If I were to ask you, do you think there is a bias against conservatives in various tech companies or universities, I think a lot of people, even on the left, would say yes.
Now, a lot of people would also say, not really.
But we do have one instance that is going viral.
A video captures a professor telling a conservative student to F your life.
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From app.com, Brookdale professor to student Trump supporter, F your life.
Brookdale Community College is investigating a sociology professor after one of his students said the teacher was targeting him for being conservative.
The situation came to a head last week during a discussion about sexual harassment, Brookdale student Christopher Lyle said.
During the exchange, professor Howard Finkelstein slammed his head on a desk and told Lyle, F your life, which was caught on video by another student and can be seen at the top of this page.
Brookdale's spokeswoman, Avis McMillian, said she could not comment because of the ongoing investigation.
Finkelstein was not immediately available for comment.
How's In the video, you can see the heated exchange between this conservative Trump-supporting student and the professor, who slams his hand on the desk saying, F your life, because they're having an argument.
Lyle said the harassment has been happening all semester in Sociology 105, intercultural communication, the person and the process.
He said he believes he's being targeted because he's a conservative who supports President Donald Trump.
He said he also believes that the negative attention has impacted his grade in the class.
I respect people no matter who you are, and I expect the same for me, Lyle said.
Instead of practicing against being biased, he's being biased himself.
I think it's important to understand the context of the situation before jumping to conclusions.
Why did the professor slam his hand on the desk and say, F your life, and question whether or not the student was thinking about how his statements impacted others?
According to the Miami Herald, Lyle told the outlet that he argued people can be sexually assaulted regardless of gender, and that Finkelstein went into a rant after the student tried to give a personal example.
The student said that he was talking about how you can be sexually assaulted regardless of gender, and this triggered the professor to go on a rant.
Ultimately, you see him slam his hand on the desk and yell, F your life.
But this isn't about the one incident.
The story is actually a bit deeper than this.
This is just the one time it's been captured on film.
According to the student, he's constantly called me into his office.
and told me I can't speak in his class because of my beliefs.
He constantly talks about white privilege and how I have privilege because I'm a white male.
I don't believe that.
I work 50 hours a week and I attend class and he tells me to shut the F up.
But the student, Christopher Lyle, is obviously going to defend himself.
He's obviously one party to a two-party conflict.
However, in this instance, we actually have another student who has come to his defense.
Joey Smith, another student in the sociology class, said he sometimes disagrees with Lyle's conservative beliefs, but the 26-year-old student told the Esprit Press that Finkelstein has a fixation on the conservative student that reduces the quality of the class.
Chris is part of his lesson plan, Smith said.
He'll ask Chris a question, then try to convince Chris in front of the class what is right and wrong.
I'm paying to get an education, and I'm watching him preach to another student, he added.
I'm not learning anything here.
Now I'm just gonna come out and say it.
This is one incident at a community college in New Jersey, and I really don't think this story is that important.
But the reason I'm talking about it, for one, for whatever reason, this story is actually kind of going viral.
There's a lot of people talking about it, and I think it paints a bigger picture.
It's just one small tidbit.
It's one grain of sand in a larger heap as to why people believe certain ideas are not welcome on college campuses.
But make sure you do keep that in mind.
Just because you hear about a story like this doesn't mean it's how every class and every university is.
Often, when you hear this one outrageous incident, you immediately just... it paints a picture in your head of something that might not be true.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, so when we hear stories like this, we tend to overestimate its impact.
But I think this is part of a larger issue on college campuses, and I do think there is an ideological bias, and I think a lot of people would agree with me.
me. Melissa Chen is the managing director, ideas beyond borders, classical liberal, and
staunch defender of enlightenment values, former scientist who studies genes. Now I
focus on memes, she says. In a tweet yesterday, she said, please join us today at Harvard
University for an ideas beyond borders campus event on free speech titled, Dissent from
minorities within minorities.
You might have noticed the unnecessarily convoluted topic reminiscent of 4D chess, this is deliberate.
These are two stories about certain ideas being suppressed at different colleges.
the phrase free speech in naming our event lest the student union disapprove it. The rationale?
Free speech is now a dog whistle to the far right. These are two stories about certain ideas being
suppressed at different colleges. One's just a community college and maybe it doesn't really
matter that much. But this next story is actually Harvard University, that the student union might
actually disapprove an event where minorities dissent and talk about free speech issues if
if they put free speech in the title.
There actually is a concern that by saying free speech in your event, you are dog whistling to the far right.
The interesting thing to me is that the idea of a dog whistle is that it's supposed to be a secret message to a particular political group, but it's often the left accusing the dog whistle of being for the right when it's the left who is noticing or insinuating that there is some kind of ulterior motive or hidden connotation to these statements.
The Knight Foundation last month published this paper called Free Expression on Campus, What College Students Think About First Amendment Issues.
In it, they say students value both free expression and inclusion, though their commitment to free expression may be stronger in the abstract than in reality.
Majorities of students say protecting free speech rights, 56%, and promoting a diverse, inclusive society, 52%, are extremely important to democracy.
Students continue to prefer campuses be open learning environments that allow for a wide range of views to be heard than to prefer environments that prohibit certain types of potentially harmful speech, though not as widely as they did in 2016.
In my personal opinion, I do think there is a free speech crisis.
I do think there's ideological biases at these universities, in tech industries, and things like that.
But that doesn't mean that most people disagree with free speech, and most people want to shut down speakers.
When we look at the numbers from the Knight Foundation, and we can see that there's a majority of students, 56%, who believe that free speech is important, and then 52% believe diversity is also important.
What that means is there is still a substantial group of people who disagree with that.
Now, of those people who disagree, do you think they're all out wearing black masks and shutting down speaking events?
No, of course not.
Most of them are probably minding their own business and just saying, I personally disagree.
However, this is still a large group of individuals, and within that, you're going to have an even smaller fringe group of radicals who want to shut down speakers.
And I think this is where the free speech crisis comes from.
Going back to our first story about this professor, this is just one incident, but it is part of the problem at universities.
We don't need to have every single professor, every single student, saying, you're not allowed to speak, your ideas are wrong, to have a crisis.
If 15 people show up with Molotov cocktails, baseball bats, and black masks, and they keep doing it, and they keep shutting down certain ideas, that is a fringe minority creating a serious problem at universities.
And if universities and various other industries aren't going to deal with these fringe, radical groups, we do have a problem.
The problem is twofold.
A group of people who would shut down free speech, and the authority who is supposed to actually say, this is what you can and can't do, like the police, for instance, or the administration of these colleges, Not doing anything about this or not doing enough.
I feel like when it comes to these small fringe groups of violent extremists, no matter what side they're on, people are too afraid to actually stand up to them and say, that's not okay.
When I was at Berkeley during the Milo Free Speech Week event that wasn't really a week-long event, I spoke with some very progressive students, and they told me they didn't mind if there were controversial ideas at their campus because they're spending a lot of money to learn and to expand their views.
They personally disagreed with a lot of conservative speakers, but actually expressed that they were angry that protesters kept disrupting events and shutting down the school, shutting down classrooms.
These were students who were very progressive.
You could even call them social justice activists.
And they didn't like the radical fringe group disrupting the university.
So even though we see that there is almost a majority of people who disagree with the idea of free expression in universities, these people are not necessarily shutting these events down.
One of the biggest mistakes people make when talking about a crisis is they assume simply because most people agree with free speech, there's no crisis.
But all it takes is ten people.
Seriously, it could take one person super gluing the locks shut at various stores, and if they keep doing it, you do have a problem.
That person needs to be stopped because you can't do that.
In this instance, when it comes to free speech, we actually have dozens of individuals, many of which who don't even attend Berkeley.
Using Berkeley as an example, when these events were going on, you had people from upstate.
You had people from Oregon, from Washington, coming down to California to protest conservative speakers.
This is a problem.
We can do these surveys.
We can find that college students overwhelmingly do agree with free speech, and at the same time, diversity, but it's not necessarily the majority that's causing the problems.
So these news outlets can say it over and over again that there is no crisis.
But really, the idea of a crisis is just an opinion, because at what point does a situation, a circumstance, become a crisis?
At what point does a series of events become a controversy or a crisis?
It's really...
In the eye of the beholder.
And some people think there is, and some people think there isn't.
Personally, I think if you've got groups of individuals wearing black masks, throwing firebombs, firecrackers, bringing poles, bats, and weapons, and actually physically assaulting people, you do have a crisis.
And when you look at other events, like even Charlottesville, when you have these clashes in the streets, the crisis isn't one-sided.
Albeit when talking about free speech and free expression at universities, it tends to be just the left shutting down conservative events.
But when it comes to these street battles, No one's innocent.
Everybody's showing up knowing there's going to be a fight.
They're engaging in these fights.
And it is, in my opinion, a crisis.
Many people have talked about an upcoming potential civil war because of this.
Many people on the left are saying that they have to win.
There was an article recently that Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, tweeted out saying that we have to win.
We, in reference to the left, must win.
One side must prevail.
And this kind of rhetoric scares me.
The first story is just a viral incident that's kind of offending everybody.
Because the student was arguing that anybody can be sexually assaulted regardless of your gender, and that's not a conservative opinion.
That is widely accepted as true, that anybody can be sexually assaulted.
And to have this professor go on a rant and argue with a student and seemingly target him...
Because of his conservative ideas, then, I mean, that's pretty egregious, and so that's gonna get highlighted.
But it does lend itself to the larger picture of ideological bias and a crisis in American colleges.
So let me know what you think.
How do you feel about the first story?
How do you feel about Harvard and this person saying they can't include free speech in their event title because it's a dog whistle to the far right?
We'll keep the conversation going in the comments below.
