I have no idea whether Orwell’s 1984 is still permitted on American college campuses anymore. While it used to be mandatory or near-mandatory reading, I can see it easily offending today’s snowflake “students” and make-work professors and administrators.

One thing is certain: those administrators and their faculty allies seemed to have used the novel as a blueprint for many of their pathetic anti-freedom programs and plans.

Milo Y., recently in the news, caused a ruckus traveling the U.S. in an attempt to stir debate on various college campuses. Many students and many more Soros Rent-A-Mob hooligans reacted violently. Milo summed up the base problem at his press conference yesterday:

Don’t think for a moment that this will stop me being as offensive, provocative and outrageously funny as I want on any subject I want. America has a colossal free speech problem. The land of the First Amendment has some of the most oppressive social restrictions on free expression anywhere in the western world. I’m proud to be a warrior for free speech and creative expression.

I want everyone in America, the greatest country in the history of human civilisation, to be able to be, do, read and say anything. I will never stop fighting for your right to do that.

A colossal free speech problem – a freedom problem,really – and nowhere more evident than at our failing colleges. Here’s proof: hundreds of American colleges have snitch programs to combat “offensive” speech:

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.

Correction: universities were the cradle of free speech. Today they are bastions of newspeak, debt, and the secret police – and little else.

Here’s a link to the F.I.R.E. Report.

In Appendix B they list out every offended, offensive school, by state.

I was pleased that neither of the two schools I procured degrees from were included. However, based on my experience with them, I could see them having something similar if they don’t already. The sheer volume of these programs is troubling. The whole thing is troubling.

Open Culture.

There’s no need to look into any of these schools specifically – they usual suspects. Use this list as schools to avoid, if you’re in the education market. If you’re at one, and you get targeted, contact F.I.R.E. It’s time to drive the shrieking Nazis back into fiction.