Conservative Boston College Student Says School Paper Won’t Let Him Contribute

Conservative Boston College Student Says School Paper Won’t Let Him Contribute

Sadly, this is easy to believe. We’ve documented countless cases of conservatives being silenced on campus.

The College Fix reports:

I’m a conservative, and my campus newspaper won’t let me contribute

When I first arrived at Boston College as a rosy-eyed freshman, I was interested in politics and journalism, and I wanted to join both the College Republicans and the school newspaper, The Heights.

I am a conservative (economic and social, I always clarify), and have been ever since I first decided not to simply believe what my teachers pontificated but rather to think for myself—a classically liberal virtue, needless to say.

I had heard The Heights was (unsurprisingly) left-leaning, and it was. But I was pleasantly surprised when in October 2015 it published a letter to the editor I wrote criticizing the paper for a biased story about Ta-Nehisi Coates.

My letter drew ad hominem attacks, vulgar language, and physical threats from my peers, but not from the newspaper staff themselves.

In The Heights’ comment section, I was called “ignorant,” “a lost cause in matters of human decency,” “stupid,” “racist,” “bigoted,” “privileged,” “goddam blinded,” “hateful,” “a piece of shit,” and a whole number of even nastier terms. One person wrote, “…you should feel bad for who you are…” and “…watch your back whenever you leave your cozy Gonzaga [my residence hall at the time].”

There was a response-letter that mocked my writing style (“The Only Race We Should Be Talking About is NASCAR”) and one that accused me of not being a true Christian (“An Alum Addresses Salzmann’s Letter on Coates Coverage”). My friends informed me that the reaction was even worse on social media, from which I was happy to keep away.

But something changed when I attempted to apply for a columnist spot earlier this school year. I noticed some words in small print in the application, to the effect that political columnists need not apply: columns could only apply to matters connected directly with Boston College.

When the first edition came out this year, I noticed a highly political piece by a Heights columnist named Joshua Behrens, a self-styled socialist agitator who last year wrote panegyrics for Sen. Bernie Sanders and declared that we need a revolution in the streets.

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