Public College Harasses Conservative Students

Officials at a public college in Colorado are investigating allegations of bias, harassment and bullying by a professor who ridiculed Republican students and forced the entire class to write an essay critical of the party’s vice presidential candidate.  

The English professor (Andrew Kent Hallam) at Denver’s Metro State College, a taxpayer-financed institution with an enrollment of about 21,000, singled out Republican students in his freshman composition class and encouraged the majority liberals to repeatedly deride them.

Then he gave his new class its first assignment; an essay criticizing Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. In the piece, the students were to contradict the “fairy tale image of Palin” presented at the recent Republican National Convention. The Alaska governor was to be compared to Sleeping Beauty, according to written instructions. 

The school initially defended the assignment, saying that the teacher was fulfilling his faculty responsibility of providing opportunity for “critical thinking and civic engagement.” The support weaned a bit after some students went to the media and administrators obviously felt pressured to launch an investigation.

This sort of liberal bias is commonplace at academic institutions nationwide, even those financed with tax dollars like Metro State College. In the last few years alone a public university in Wisconsin hired a notoriously radical Islamic Studies professor that said the 2001 terrorist attacks were committed by U.S. operatives, a public college in Minnesota that banned Christmas displays used taxpayer dollars to construct facilities for Muslim students to pray and a group of Florida college professors sued the state for passing a law banning the use of public money for “academic” travel to terrorist countries.