Palm Beach State College activities director (and Michael Moore Facebook fan) Olivia Morris-Ford is on camera shutting down a Young Americans for Freedom booth during the school’s rush week earlier this month. The reason? The students were handing out Heritage research at a student event. Specifically, it looks like the school’s administrators were allergic to Heritage Fact Sheet #72, titled “The Obama Tax Hikes: Killing Job Creation.” Who would have thought that free speech could be so easily snuffed out on an American college campus?
One would think The Heritage Foundation and its research may get students shut down by College Campus Political Correctness Police more often, given Heritage’s reputation as being “the beast of all think tanks.” In addition to running one of the world’s premier internship programs, Heritage’s Young Leaders Program has been distributing Pocket Constitutions and Heritage research to student groups around the country.
What’s next? Will the guardians of campus-progressive sensitivities forbid the works of Heritage’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies from appearing on campus because they conclude that Obamacare’s health insurance mandates are unconstitutional? Heritage’s Dr. Matthew Spalding’s bestseller We Still Hold These Truths spoke of reclaiming America’s founding principles, but who was the “we” he wrote about? Obviously not liberal college administrators around the country. Like progressives’ assertion that the Constitution is a “living document”, it increasingly appears that campus speech codes, rules, regulations, and approval processes are equally malleable — provided conservatives aren’t the beneficiaries.
Conservative intellectuals have been sounding the alarm on liberal campuses for years. But they can’t be on every college campus. Heritage’s research can. The Young Leaders Program and its interns are capable of leading the charge. Olivia Morris-Ford seems to have used selective red-tape to shut down a Young American’s for Freedom’s voice on campus. Now, she’s in hiding (try finding her Facebook page now that the story broke). The response by conservatives should be to hand out the offensive material on campus. Everywhere. Luckily for students, The Heritage Foundation’s research and promotional products are readily available.
