Universities shut their doors to inquiry and free exchange of ideas, by Claire Lehmann.

When Lindsay Shepherd, a master’s student and teaching assistant at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, showed her communications class a TV clip debating gender pronouns, she was not prepared for what followed. Called into a meeting with her academic supervisors, she was accused of creating a “toxic” and “problematic” environment and was told that she had broken the law (Canada’s Bill C-16).

Her sin, according to her two academic supervisors and one university administrator, was to show the clip without expressly condemning the conservative side of the debate. She was told it was equivalent to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler”.

While it is common knowledge that humanities and social science departments lean to the left, it’s a relatively new phenomenon for universities to be openly hostile to debate and inquiry. Or at least it’s relatively new for the hostility to be expressed in such unequivocal terms. …

What’s at stake:

Echo chambers on campus give rise to extreme views … And such extreme views trickle down into broader culture when students who have been inculcated into ideologies graduate and find employment in the media and professions.

Such extreme views include the opinion held by the president of the American Sociological Association, who argues that colour-blindness (that is, not judging people by the colour of their skin) is a racist idea that needs to be dismantled. Or the ideas promoted within “whiteness studies”, as taught at the University of Melbourne, including concepts of “white privilege” and “white fragility”.

The left is getting ever pushier. Will anybody be able to say anything against their ideas in a few years time? Maybe next year? If you’re white and disagree with any PC idea, do you even have a future in the future socialist nirvana?