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The Tennessee Conservative [By Jason Vaughn] –
Vanderbilt University has been ranked #7 in the top ten most fascist universities in America by Front Page Magazine, published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The article “Top Ten Fascist Colleges and Universities” targets those campuses who have instigated disciplinary proceedings or investigations of faculty or students who have challenged leftist narratives and causes, those that censor conservative and libertarian speech on campus, and those campuses that maintain and enforce unconstitutional speech codes that restrict free expression.
Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University in Nashville ranks as #7 because of the school’s of shaming of doctors with conscientious objections and the threat of termination if they don’t embrace the medical center’s focus on radical gender ideology and “gender affirming” surgeries and hormones marketed to minors and their parents. They also rank because of recent implementation of new policies to chill free speech of students and faculty.
In September, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh uncovered multiple videos from the Medical Center that presented a clear motive for the doctors at the university to promote gender “transition” surgeries, including irreversible procedures performed on children.
Vanderbilt’s Transgender Clinic was opened in 2018. In a lecture that Vanderbilt’s Medical Director Dr. Shayne Taylor gave the same year, she claimed to have helped convince the hospital to begin providing “transgender care” in large part because trans-affirming surgeries are “big money makers” due to follow up care.
Taylor said that a mastectomy performed on a female who is transitioning to male can bring in $40,000. Individuals on hormones alone can bring in several thousand dollars a year. “Bottom” surgery is especially lucrative bringing in anywhere between $100 thousand to $200 thousand per patient.
To illustrate how much money can be made from preying on people with gender dysphoria, Taylor cited an example of one clinic that funds itself entirely on the revenue it generates from performing phalloplasties, surgery that creates a fake penis, on women.
In 2019, in a followup lecture, Dr. Ellen Clayton said doctors who have “conscientious objections” to these types of surgeries are “problematic” and will face consequences.
“If you are going to assert a conscientious objection, you have to realize that that is problematic,” she said. “You are doing something to another person, and you are not paying the cost for your belief. I think that is a… real issue.”
Clayton went on to say that those doctors with religious beliefs that conflict with performing transgender surgery should face consequences. “If you don’t want to do this kind of work, don’t work at Vanderbilt.”
After Walsh’s exposure of these materials, Vanderbilt quickly deleted the Pediatric Transgender Clinic’s website, a move that Front Page Magazine calls “a sure sign that the university feared ramifications from its exposure as a profit-seeking mutilator of children’s bodies.”
Front Page Magazine also calls out Vanderbilt for steps taken by the university last year to “deliberately restrict speech on campus and institute kangaroo courts to handle potential violations.”
In November of 2021, the university updated its Student Handbook with an altered “Student Discrimination” Policy.
The updated policy allows Vanderbilt’s Equal Opportunity and Access office to take action against conduct that doesn’t actually violate the policy, but it determines that an individual’s action or speech is judged to be “inconsistent with the University’s values.”
Should a disciplinary action be decided upon by the University for the student, there is no avenue available for the student to appeal the ruling.
The policy is vague about what sort of action the administration might actually take after determining that conduct is inconsistent with the university’s values, merely stating, “the University may take action to mitigate the effects of the conduct and to prevent its recurrence.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a non-profit group focused on the protection of free expression, called the handbook update a “chilling new policy.”
FIRE explains, “This means that if a student is reported for harassment over their subjectively offensive speech and an administrator determines that their speech doesn’t actually constitute harassment, the student can still be subjected to whatever ‘action to mitigate the effects of the conduct’ the school wishes to take, without the chance to appeal the decision.”
Front Page Magazine states, “Vanderbilt’s promotion of child-mutilation, its threats against doctors who refuse to comply with such procedures, and its increasingly punitive speech codes, all combine to make it one of the most fascist American universities.”
Vanderbilt makes the top ten list with other notable American Universities including Georgetown University #1, University of Washington ranking #2, University of Illinois-Chicago #3, Syracuse University #4, University of Central Florida #5, University of Southern California #6, University of California-Los Angeles #8, Duke University #9 and University of New Mexico #10.
According to their website, the David Horowitz Freedom Center is “dedicated to the defense of free societies whose moral, cultural and economic foundations are under attack by enemies both secular and religious, at home and abroad.”
About the Author: Jason Vaughn, Media Coordinator for The Tennessee Conservative ~ Jason previously worked for a legacy publishing company based in Crossville, TN in a variety of roles through his career. Most recently, he served as Deputy Director for their flagship publication. Prior, he was a freelance journalist writing articles that appeared in the Herald Citizen, the Crossville Chronicle and The Oracle among others. He graduated from Tennessee Technological University with a Bachelor’s in English-Journalism, with minors in Broadcast Journalism and History. Contact Jason at news@TennesseeConservativeNews.com
4 Responses
The education system in America is nothing more than a breeding ground for l*ft ideology. They are turning America into socialist and communist country. America wake up before it’s too late.
In God we trust not government or man.
Have a blessed day.
These WOKE liberal universities need to be defunded and sued out of existence.
This is bitterly ironic. Vanderbilt in the 1970s was a classical, traditionalist liberal arts university. The professors were mostly on the left, but they generally kept their personal views out of the classrooms and lecture halls. It was such a conservative college that they largely sat out the 1960s protest movements and sailed through without a ruffle.
Now? the alumni magazines are full of hard-left articles. By my count, the last one had nearly two dozen such, and I believe there was ONE engineering article that didn’t focus on the “DIE” ideology.
Their eager participation in mutilating and sterilizing children and adults for money is horrific. They are now a garbage school, intellectually and morally.
My daughter is currently at a summer camp at Vanderbilt and can’t wait to come home. She said there are trans flags all over the place, feminine products in the men’s rooms, her professor stated that he wants to become a medical doctor so that he can help kids transition, and everything is about liberal politics. With a 5.6% acceptance rate it would’ve been very difficult for her to get into the school, but at least she now knows she has no interest in attending. A lot of the kids she’s met there are also not impressed and are rethinking applying.