The film Indoctrinate U is a no-nonsense look at how college students and faculty are trying to socially engineer their college campus environment. Part of that is overbearing restrictions on free speech to appease a group of students or faculty who want to keep you from saying, showing, or doing anything they disagree with.

I had hoped my alma mater and current university, N.C. State, was open-minded enough to resist such unreasonable bigotry. Yesterday, though, I saw that there are students opposing certain types of free expression in the Free Expression Tunnel. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your opinion, if you show open intolerance to someone of a different opinion, that’s bigotry. The artist may be a bigot, but the artist isn’t trying to take away the rights of other students through his expression. The protesters are the ones taking their bigotry too far by assuming that the artist should not have a right to this type of expression.

The unfortunate reality is that these students see what they’re doing as “the right thing” against what they see as “hate speech.” I can’t blame the students, really; most have been indoctrinated into this bigotry and closed-mindedness from school experiences. I understand where they are coming from, but I also live above the influence of hate speech. I know that if we have to qualify speech based on its emotional response, we essentially lose the freedom of expression. What’s my freedom of speech without my freedom to say something you might not like?

I hope that, in time, these students will put aside their bigotry, toughen up, and learn to live above the influence of hate speech.

Sidenote: Terms like bigotry and closed-mindedness were often used by those seeking social justice for certain social and racial groups with regards to how they were treated by law. Now that the law has made significant strides in repairing old discriminatory practices, it’s interesting to see this new “reverse” bigotry and closed-mindedness toward private individuals who disagree socially or politically.