The user’s manual for today’s universities

Persecution is now cool! From June 1, 2021 to May 31, 2022, students, teachers, and administrators on college campuses nationwide made 186 attempts to blackball or censor either other individuals for having wrong opinions or to cancel history and facts because that history or facts offended them.

These numbers come from a database, available to read here, is that is maintained by the news outlet The College Fix, which focuses on reporting on the corruption, intolerance, and bankruptcy that is now endemic on most American college campuses.

There have been 112 speakers, signs, statues and other targets completely canceled on campus during the last academic year, and another 74 attempted cancelations, according to The College Fix’s Campus Cancel Culture Database, which tracks such incidents. That amounts to a total of 186 campus cancel culture incidents from June 1, 2021 to May 31, 2022. Put another way, there have been almost four campus cancel incidents per week over the past school year.

“For people who claim that cancel culture is a made up right-wing phenomenon, I invite them to scroll through page after page after page of our Campus Cancel Culture Database,” said Jennifer Kabbany, editor in chief of The College Fix. “You can’t go a week without something on campus being memory holed, erased, fired, renamed or what have you,” she said.

Nor has there been any slow-down in new incidents. Since the end of May, the number of blacklisting incidents in the database has grown from 1550 to 1570. These new incidents include student resolutions at the University of North Texas and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill banning any club that dares express opinions opposing the queer agenda, the censorship of a student news article at the City University of New York because the article elicited “strong negative emotions in some readers,” the demand at two colleges (Rhodes College and George Washington University) to blacklist two different conservative Supreme Court justices, and the cancellation of building names or sports teams at three colleges (George Washington University, the University of Pennsylvania, Wheaton College) because those names might be linked to some past sin, and were thus not perfect, pure, and completely sin-free like the leftist mobs of today.

The database does not play favorites, listing acts of oppression from both the right and the left, though an honest review of the list reveals that most are coming from the intolerant left.

The horrible extent of blacklisting in education in the past two years is underscored by the fact that this database specifically excludes any similar events that have occurred in the public schools, the number of which is quite gigantic on its own and would probably double or triple the college count if included. Nor does the list include any of the numerous examples of blacklisting in the business and political communities.

The most appalling aspect of these stories however is their root. We are not seeing the imposition of oppression by a small minority of individuals who happen to have power, but the widespread popular enforcement of censorship and blacklisting by large numbers in the general student population, aided and abetted by their leftist school teachers and administrators. Nor are these events one-time events at these colleges. For example, both George Washington University and the University of North Texas have been cited multiple times in my daily blacklist column, for incidents not listed above.

This is a grassroots movement, focused on destroying any opposition or dissenting views. And it is becoming increasingly aggressive. While a few years ago these brown-shirts might have simply tried to silence their opponents, now they are trying to get them fired and removed from society entirely. And worse, this close-minded grassroots movement is springing from academia, the very place which is supposed to encourage open-mindedness and a wide competitive marketplace of ideas.

No more. Most of American academia is now utterly bankrupt intellectually. In a sane world it would also quickly become financially bankrupt. It is no longer doing its job, so why send your kids to these colleges? Either find them the few colleges that encourage free speech, or help them choose other careers and futures that do not require a college degree.

The College Fix‘s database is a perfect tool for making these choices. Use it. Don’t send business to these corrupt institutions.