A few weeks ago, the Yale Daily News featured an article announcing the formation of a group of students supporting Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid on the front page. As a member of Yale for Obama, I was a bit taken aback by what I saw as unfair publicity. Then I remembered the school paper had run a front page story on the Obama group when it formed - nearly six months ago. It’s a telling sign of where students’ support lies in the 2008 election when three months before the first primary, student groups supporting nearly every Democratic candidate - Gravel supporters are taking their time getting off the ground - are up and running, while just one group has formed backing a GOP candidate and they have yet to meet.

One could argue this has less to do with students in general and more to do with students at Yale, where the student body is overwhelmingly liberal. Yet, in a Democracy Corps poll, 61 percent of all young voters said they would likely vote for a Democratic candidate compared to 34 percent who said they’d vote for a Republican; that 27 point lead stretches to 32 points in “battleground” districts. Rock the Vote’s sixth volume of their bimonthly summary of polls examining young voters’ “level of interest in the 2008 elections, political party identification, and preferences for president and Congress in 2008” is filled with more revealing figures. Senators Obama and Clinton continue to be the frontrunners among young voters and still come out on top in head-to-head matchups against Giuliani, the most popular Republican among 18-29 year olds. This is not, as some conservative pundits like John Stossel allege, because young people are uninformed voters who don’t bother to learn about the candidates or the issues. A survey from the Pew Research Center found that Millennials are paying attention to the presidential campaigns and debates as much as the general electorate and at a higher rate than 30-49 year-olds.

It comes as little surprise that young voters are leaning Democratic after earlier polls like the often-cited New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll showed that Millennials lean left. Indeed, young voters’ values are generally better aligned with those of the Democratic candidates than of the Republicans. Poll after poll confirms that young people care about protecting the environment and our civil liberties, about supporting gay and women’s rights and winning back respect for America through a multilateral foreign policy. These values are embraced, with a rare exception here or there, by the Democratic Party and disregarded by Republicans with similar frequency. Perhaps that’s why Democracy Corps also found that young people believe Democrats do a better job than Republicans handling every policy issue, from health care to Iraq to energy independence to the war on terror to managing the budget.

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At work in the Yale Admissions Office today, I spoke with a prospective student about some of my favorite parts of college life. “Every week it seems there’s another prominent figure or great mind speaking on campus,” I said, recalling one week last year when I had a chance to hear Antonin Scalia and Howard Dean. What makes those events so special and such an integral part of a college education is that students have a chance to ask questions that matter to them, not some talking head conducting a television interview.

I still remember seeing John Bolton engage in heated debate with a student who challenged Bolton’s views on international law at a forum my first month on campus. So when I saw the video of a University of Florida student manhandled, tasered and arrested by police for asking Senator John Kerry a series of questions about the 2000 election, the footage hit close to home.

Watch it:

I watched in disgust as Andrew Meyer, 21, was dragged by police through the auditorium and tasered repeatedly after he pleaded, “Don’t tase me!” while Kerry did nothing to intervene. Every time the taser’s shock caused Meyer to shriek, I didn’t just hear a defenseless young man screaming in pain, I saw a fellow student becoming the victim of police brutality and unconstitutional censorship. Sure, Meyer’s rant was getting a little long-winded, but while his verbal diarrhea may have deserved the ire of the audience, it certainly did not justify the violent arrest that prompted one onlooker to shout, “This is Rodney King all over again.”

Obviously an overstatement, but the police’s use of force was undoubtedly unwarranted.The media has flocked to this story because of the shocking footage of campus police attacking one of the students they were hired to protect. But what alarms me and the classmates I spoke with on campus today is the crackdown on students’ free speech rights. You can argue that the police tried to get Meyers off the mic simply because he was hogging the stage too long, but it’s unlikely that they’d have arrested him if he were asking Kerry about the Gators rather than questioning his actions during the election.

Watching the police silence Meyers was particularly worrisome after a summer in which the Supreme Court limited students’ rights in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case. As David Horowitz and Co. continue their campaign to restrict free exchange of ideas on campus, I can’t help but fear for the future of students’ rights to question authority and express dissenting opinions, exercises that are fundamental both to students discovering what values are important to them and to the vitality of our democracy.

When politicians address college students, they constantly return to the same theme: “Be an active member of your community, be politically engaged and speak up for what you believe.” John Kerry’s lecture at the University of Florida predictably delivered this message. What a shocking disgrace that when Andrew Meyers took Kerry’s advice, he ended up getting electrocuted.