Santorum Greeted by Protests, Hissing at Yale

Former Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum met avid protests Tuesday evening when he delivered a lecture at Yale University, according to the Yale Daily News.

The protests are causing some at Cornell to wonder what will transpire when Santorum takes the stage next month alongside Howard Dean.

The former Pennsylvania senator was hissed at as he spoke his message of preserving the traditional family despite the government’s attempts to destroy it. Yale students in the audience asked tough questions, while graduate students held signs outside the auditorium that completely missed the point of what Santorum was attempting to convey.

According to the Yale Daily News:

“Tonight, Rick Santorum will take our university’s grandest stage and continue to spew ignorance and hate about all kinds of people, including many members of our community. He may be a guest on this campus with a right to voice his opinions, but that does not mean we have to listen,” the flier reads. “We will walk out and refuse to engage in this spectacle. We ask you to join us in sending a message to Santorum, the YPU and your fellow students that this attempt to legitimize ignorance and bigotry is unacceptable.”

Apparently, this group of students believe that a viewpoint different from their own is rooted in “ignorance and bigotry.” Their response? Refuse to listen and be informed. Ignorance.

The group of students, called Y Syndicate, went a step further by walking out in the middle of Santorum’s presentation and encouraging others to join in their ignorance and “refuse to engage in this spectacle.”

One columnist at the Yale Daily offered a particularly insightful explanation for his University’s reflective fear and anger toward Santorum. He claimed that Santorum’s message will never ring true with Yale (or other modern institutions like Cornell) because it is fundamentally contradictory to everything institutional liberals believe to be the purpose of academia. The author claims, “Santorum’s problem is not with intellectualism but with modern academia’s lack of diverse thought, and, though he may not say this directly, its slide toward the desire to control.”

The Yale community naturally responded fearfully to this linking of modern academia to the controlling desires of big governments. They refused to listen to such an argument and consider its potential merit.

Similar reactions could occur when Santorum takes the stage at Bailey Hall next month.