Snitch U: Survey shows 56% of colleges encourage students to rat on one another

By Monica Showalter

Now that the wokesters have taken over, universities and school administrators outnumber professors. How's life in academia these days? How are things now that diversity staff outnumber history professors?

The Daily Caller has a report:

Over half of the U.S.'s private and public colleges encourage students to snitch on each other, according to a report released Monday by a free speech non-profit.
Of the 821 higher education institutions surveyed, 56% of them are reported to have some form of a "Bias Reporting System" (BRS), according to the report from Speech First (SF), a free speech member organization. The report surveyed 441 private schools, or 23% of all private four year colleges in the U.S. and 380 public schools, or 49% of the country's four-year public universities.
BRSs are university teams or procedures that aim to solicit, receive, investigate and respond to reports of "bias incidents," which are used to "silence dissenters," "stifle open dialogue" and "encourage students to turn informant on speech they seem unacceptable," according to SF. The BRSs typically invite students and faculty to report "biased" speech on the basis of protected characteristics such as race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age disability or someone's "political affiliation."
"BRSs frequently define 'bias incidents' in vague and overbroad terms, making them difficult for students to interpret and easy for administrators to employ at their discretion," the report stated. SF said this "opens the door to arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement."

Turns out that snitching, like what the East German Stasi used to do with citizen-collaborators, has become a way of life at Wokester U. At more than half of America's very well endowed universities, students now are urged to snitch on each other in order to police thinking and actual free speech. That's what all this flood of money going to universities has bought for America's young people — full conformity with wokesterthink, policed with the diligence of the Stasi. So much for universities being a haven of the free exchange of ideas, as they are in places today like...Venezuela.

That was yesterday's radicals, though. Once upon a time, U.C. Berkeley in the early 1960s was the home of the "free speech movement." That was back in the days when soggy liberals such as Clark Kerr ran the establishment and truly radical '60s fixtures such as Mario Savio and Bettina Aptheker (daughter of Community Party USA éminence grise Herbert Aptheker) declared universities havens for the free expression of ideas. Free speech, including filthy speech, rapidly gave the movement the nickname of the "filthy speech movement" among the general public. It was the opening match for the ruinous conflagration of left-wing radicalism that defined the 1960s. Big piles of federal cash rolled into universities back in those days, and that was the result.

Today, the result is even more disgusting. Now we have student Stasi members monitoring one another at college dorms, at the student newspaper, at basketball games, in classrooms, at science labs, in on-campus beer-drinking sessions, for any evidence of wrongthink. Penalties can extend from black marks on student transcript records to full blown expulsion, complete with media exposure. Talk out of turn, try out a new idea, and the confidential phone calls, texts, and emails begin.

This is a grotesque enforcement of conformity from the administrative class that has taken over university institutions in the wokester era. It is not at all different from the kinds of snitching that went on during the Mao and Soviet era. It reeks of Stasi surveillance of locals and mass citizen collaborators as depicted in The Lives of Others. Yet the arrogant administrative class, bloated as it is by massive endowments and government spending, revels in the power it bestows on them. Is it any surprise that universities are going downhill, innovating less, producing less art and literature, drawing fewer students and turning out way too many activists? This is the net impact of tons of federal money rolling into universities and the cash going to diversity and other administrative programs.

It's time to pull the plug on this crap the minute Congress is retaken by Republicans in November. Any university caught spending federal dollars on wrongthink censorship snitching programs would be in violation of the First Amendment, which would be automatic grounds for yanking the funds. It seems like a reasonable course of action, because this kind of activity debilitates what should be dynamic institutions like parasites sucking the life out of a green plant.

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