Some 100 American colleges encourage their students to report offensive occurrences of non-criminal bias on campus.
Writing in The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell tells us that the University of Oregon’s “bias report team” counted 85 incidents in the past year. including these:
- A poster featuring a “triggering image” displaying “body size” bias.
- Sexually explicit doodles on Post-its.
- Too little coverage of transgender students in the newspaper.
- A professor joking that a nontraditional student was “too old to answer a question about current events.”
One student “reported that a tutor consistently ignores him,” and tagged the incident as “Bias Type: Age, Ethnicity, Gender, Race.” Students have also asked administrators to regulate speech in other ways.
The University of Minnesota’s recently introduced free-speech code, for example, has been opposed by students who want the school to guarantee “special opportunities for those who are not well-spoken.”
Rampell writes, “I applaud students who want to create a diverse, welcoming atmosphere on campus. I admire their drive to make the world around them a better, more inclusive place. What puzzles me, though, is this instinct to appeal to administrators to adjudicate any conflict. Rather than confronting, debating and trying to persuade those whose words or actions offend them, students demand that a paternalistic figure step in and punish offenders.”
If you want a degree from a state school in Oregon, and you can’t get into the highly selective, prestigious Oregon Institute of Technology, you don’t really have a choice. OSU is the college for most- programming and computer science is apparently more highly rated from U of O- STEM field studies.
Oh no.
This ‘Accusation Circus’ assembled by the University of Oregon is not, in any way an attempt by the Offended to “make the world around them a better, more inclusive place.” This is a part of a continued and concerted effort to make the world around them an absolutely intolerant place.
Big Brother (and all his various toadies and minions) is watching…and watching very carefully there at Oregon’s Stepford U. And for what do all these Informers, these newly minted Handicapper Generals watch? Why they watch for Error: they listen for Offense; they note Bias in all its various forms & shapes and they tally the offenders.
And what is the source of this omnipresent Error? It is freedom, of course. For when the Unenlightened…the Wrong Thinkers…the Flawed and the Foolish are given freedom, they think bad things….they use inappropriate words in uncomfortable ways and they do what must not be done. As a result, when we encounter their wrong thoughts & ill words, we feel bad, or hurt, or offended, or discomfited, or uncomfortable, or just a bit out of sorts — our bellies all woosie.
And obviously that must stop if we are to achieve the paradise envisioned by those who bless & staff these glorious Bias Response Teams.
Of course, like all those who believe the world can be perfected in the here & now, they fail utterly to understand that Life, itself, is offensive. Its slings and arrows, full of outrageous fortune, beset us all, every single day. We see things we find disconcerting; we hear things which disturb our increasingly fine-tuned sensibilities — worse, we do and say things, in our deluded freedom, that inevitably someone, somewhere will find to be offensive. But, thank God, that is how it should be.
Indeed, that is how it must be. Freedom guarantees that our world is full of people doing and saying things that we might not …. just as we do and say things that the Other might not. That is the beauty of Freedom. And what we see at Oregon and the rest of the totalitarian one-hundred is, tragically, the furthest thing from freedom.
As the Chief Reporter for one of the very first Bias Response Teams put it, “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.”
Most college students today have never been in a situation where they had to deal with adversity on their own.
Helicopter parents, participation trophies, zero competition in primary education, 1001 anti-bullying campaigns, and a host of other protections from reality. These people have either had someone else to deal with any difficulties, or they were so coddled that those difficulties were squashed before they even realized they were there.
It’s not surprising that they not only lack the skills to deal with problems themselves, but also expect authority figures to immediately fix every minor difficulty they run into.