The University of California – Berkeley student newspaper, The Daily Californian, is featuring a special “Millenials Issue” that offers student opinion pieces related to the current generation of scholars.

Articles include:

• Editorial: Stop treating millennials like a punchline
• A generation politically dissastified
• The youth will save American government

Brendan Pinder, the president of Berkeley College Republicans, offered the following analysis for the special edition.

…The birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, UC Berkeley seems to have taken a sharp turn in the opposite direction. Walk down our famed thoroughfare of Sproul Plaza, and you will see the most segregated place on campus, as groups representing every conceivable combination and permutation of identities exist, ever classifying and stratifying the student body to the point of obsession. Students come and go through this university year after year, many joining their one respective group, surrounded all four years by the people who are in nearly all ways similar to themselves.

Look at our celebrated student government, and more often than not you will find bills condemning specific groups on campus — authored without any attempt at prior dialogue. And, while the student government labors under the pretense of hearing out both sides, very often a guilty verdict is passed long before any real dialogue can occur.

Many groups on campus who espouse conflicting views are unfortunately not in contact as they fruitlessly shout past one another. Meanwhile, in the absence of dialogue, emotions build and build and get discharged only in explosive displays, such as last year’s divestment bill.

This hyperinsulation on campus, through which we self-isolate ourselves by culture, race and political ideology, brings with it a strong and constant temptation to never bother associating with the other side. And, as we see daily in Washington, echo chambers make it easy to demonize — the faceless enemy is so much easier despise.

Millennials are faced with an increasingly divided political world. It is a world that criminalizes pragmatism, poisons debate and weakens democracy. The other side is no longer “wrong” or “naive” or “irrational” but is now “hateful,” “evil” and “racist.” Opposing arguments are no longer refuted in political debate, but now opponents are discredited with monikers, slogans and memes. Some call us the “ME Generation,” and this seems quite dreadfully accurate, for we are today so arrogantly sure in our convictions and certain of our moral superiority that we will not deign to dirty ourselves by hearing out the other side.

This is the problem facing our generation. This is the problem facing this university and nation. Without respectful dialogue, without actively seeking out people with whom we do not agree and welcoming challenges to our beliefs, our convictions, however noble, will be weak and foundationless. If we refuse to understand the other side and instead consign them to caricature and contempt, we reject the very beauty of free speech….