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Buy a freedom cookie, offend a liberal

Bake sales by student Republican clubs where white males have to pay higher prices than women or minorities can get you in trouble on America's campuses. The left has no sense of humor.

"Nothing makes the campus censors angrier than someone who dares to question race and gender preferences, especially if he uses satire to do it. That’s why the anti-affirmative-action bake sales that conservative students have sponsored at many schools—white male customers can buy cookies for $1, with lower prices for women and various minorities—have provoked such ferocious responses from campus authorities.

Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, provides a typical example. A Republican club there staged a bake sale, and several students then said that they felt offended. This amounted to a powerful argument, since hurt feelings are trump cards in the contemporary campus culture. . . . The College Republicans at Northeastern Illinois University canceled an announced affirmative-action bake sale after the administration threatened punishment. . . the cookie sellers would be violating university rules and that “any disruption of university activities that would be caused by this event is also actionable.” . . . Schools will use almost any tactic to shut the bake sales down. At the University of Washington, the administration said that the sponsor had failed to get a food permit. At Grand Valley, the university counsel argued that the sale of a single cupcake would convert political commentary into forbidden campus commerce. At Texas A&M, the athletics director argued that a satirical bake sale would damage the sports teams by making it harder to recruit minorities."

Read about campus speech codes at the Winter 2007 City Journal.