Berkeley Student Blasts School for Protecting Free Speech

Berkeley Student Blasts School for Protecting Free Speech

This student was apparently appalled that Ben Shapiro was allowed to speak on campus.

Campus Reform reports:

Student op-ed blasts Berkeley for protecting free speech

A member of the Black Student Union at the University of California-Berkeley recently penned an op-ed complaining that she felt “violated” by Ben Shapiro’s appearance on campus.

“If your perceived definition of violence is limited to the confines of physical contact, that’s probably because you’ve never had to experience the psychological trauma that comes along with being a Black person in America,” declares Shelby Mayes, who serves as Membership Development Director for the BSU, in an op-ed for The Daily Californian. “I didn’t need to be physically harmed to feel violated by my school [on September 14].”

She then notes that she is “not alone in my feelings of betrayal, disappointment, and embarrassment” over the way that UC-Berkeley has handled both the Shapiro lecture and the subsequent “Free Speech Week” featuring Milo Yiannopoulos.

Mayes then points out that black students “are a severely underrepresented minority on campus,” and that “African American/Black students are also one of the main targets of the harmful rhetoric spewed out by various ‘alt-right’ hate speakers who have made appearances on campus under the protection and defense of the campus administration.”

Specifically, she says the BSU “has demanded a Task Force sector of UC Berkeley’s administration be devoted to the recruitment and retention of Black students on campus to combat this crushing and shameful under-representation [sic] of the Black community,” but instead saw the university spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on security for the Shapiro event.

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