Uncategorized

Hundreds of Leftist thought control campuses encourage students to turn in fellow students for offensive speech

Tickler Leave a comment

Universities are the cradle of free speech, where ideologies and ideas clash, where academics and activists can agree, disagree, or be disagreeable. This is particularly true in the United States, where the First Amendment zealously guards against government surveillance and intrusion into free speech. Yet at hundreds of campuses across the country, administrators encourage students to report one another, or their professors, for speech protected by the First Amendment, or even mere political disagreements. The so-called Bias Response Teams reviewing these (often anonymous) reports typically include police officers, student conduct administrators and public relations staff who scrutinize the speech of activists and academics. This sounds like the stuff of Orwell, although even he might have found the name Bias Response Team to be over-the-top. Over the past year, I surveyed more than 230 such reporting systems for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and asked dozens of schools for records about their Bias Response Teams. What I found is detailed in a new report describing how universities broadly define bias to include virtually any speech, protected or not, that subjectively offends anyone. On many campuses, administrators are called upon to referee whether speech is polite.

Source: Hundreds of campuses encourage students to turn in fellow students for offensive speech | Washington Examiner