Andrew Kloster: Tolerance has Created a Marketplace for Bad Ideas

CHICAGO, May 3, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Tolerance on college campuses is a good thing, but there comes a time when administrators must say, "You're done talking; it's time to be educated," says Andrew Kloster a First Amendment specialist and legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation.

He was interviewed by Dan Proft for the Upstream Ideas blog.

"There's a deep difficulty among classical liberals and on the conservative side as well," Kloster said. "And I think one of the ways we've ceded a lot of ground has actually been relying on tolerance of so many ideas."

Kloster explained that throughout the 1990s society "treated everyone with kid gloves," and poor education at the elementary level gave rise to this notion that whatever issue or complaint a young student had they could just take it to a president or a social worker, and they would solve it for them.

Colleges are now dealing with the aftermath of this approach today, and the "classically liberal response" of encouraging people to air out their grievances so the truth can rise to the surface sometimes backfires, Kloster said.

"Unfortunately, I think what we've seen is with a lot of this marketplace for ideas, sometimes the bad ideas rise to the top, and I think that's a lot of what's happening at the college campuses," he said.

Other thoughts that Kloster shared with Proft include:

• University students are "eating their own" when it comes to the sharing of ideas. "If you look at Yale University, they're physically surrounding their professors and shouting them down, and it's horrifying," Kloster said.
• University administrators need to enforce the educational mission of the schools and to take serious action against such behavior. "I'm certainly not saying go full Kent State here," Kloster said. "There's a way you can go in the other direction, obviously."

"There's no enforcement of the rules until the rules start strangling the people who are actually there to learn," Kloster said.

The full audio and transcript of Kloster's interview are available here.

About Upstream Ideas
Upstream Ideas, under the leadership of Dan Proft – one of Illinois' sharpest political minds, provides expository content with new information and fresh perspectives meant to inform policy discussions, debunk faulty premises and challenge accepted orthodoxies. Proft is one of Chicago's most-respected talk radio personalities and a senior fellow at the Illinois Policy Institute, a free-market think tank. He is also a frequent editorial contributor to the Chicago Tribune.

SOURCE Upstream Ideas

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