We recently noted that Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg accused the entire Ivy League of liberal political bias during a particularly fiery commencement address at Harvard University.

Southern Methodist University student Hayley Waring expresses her gratitude for the defense of speech, especially in light of a personal experience with progressive repression tactics.

Michael Bloomberg gave one of the best, most timely, and utterly necessary commencement speeches I have ever heard.

I actually can’t believe I just wrote that, but it’s true. Mayor Bloomberg touched on an issue in his speech at Harvard last week that conservatives have been voicing concern over for years.

The issue he so passionately warned graduates of? Suppression of ideas on college campuses. He didn’t take the typical leftist approach to the idea of tolerance; he didn’t insist that the right needs a lesson in tolerance. He also didn’t reprimand the right for our “closed mindedness” while simultaneously insisting we abandon our principles and beliefs and adopt a more “evolved” worldviews, and didn’t speak down to conservatives as if we were small children incapable of complex thought in the way that many leftists seem to do these days. In fact, Mayor Bloomberg did quite the opposite: he criticized the repression of conservatives on college campuses.

… Last semester, I took a public policy class with a professor who often let her left-leaning views leak into her lectures while assuring us she would keep her personal bias a secret. A large portion of my final grade relied on a term paper due at the end of the semester; I received a 67 on that paper. Upset and confused, I sought my professor, asking for an explanation. She brushed me off explaining that I’d gone a bit off topic. A bit off topic? Sure, a paper that strays from the topic assigned should be docked a few points. But being given a nearly failing grade didn’t seem fair to me, especially considering the fact I didn’t actually venture off topic. I continued to email her and visit her office, asking her to reconsider the grade. Ultimately, she did, and she raised the grade to an 87. Essentially, she raised my grade by 20 points, and I never changed a single word in the paper. I’ve always had a feeling that the original grade might have been directly related to the fact that the majority of my research came from the Heritage Foundation.

…What Bloomberg is touching on transcends the college campus. He is absolutely right that listening to a spectrum of views helps foster fruitful discussions and effective learning. But what he doesn’t admit is that many leftists don’t want a diversity of views, they don’t want a market place of ideas, and they only want one idea….