The onslaught against free speech on our college campuses continues apace. The latest news comes from Wesleyan University, once a respectable school, now a ludicrously overpriced politically correct backwater where the university maintains special dormitories for fragile sexually exotic snowflakes, but the student government cannot abide any opinion that does not cleave closely to this week’s list of orthodox dogmas. In The New Criterion last spring, I reported on the university’s creation of “safe space” for some of its more extravagant charges, those who are proud members of the LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM “community.” I thought it might be a joke, but, though funny, it is no joke; it’s meant in earnest. The silly acronym stands for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderfuck, Polyamourous, Bondage/Disciple, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism and people of sexually or gender dissident communities.” As I noted, it’s all beyond parody, but not beyond a tuition, room and board bill of nearly $63,000.
So, it’s perfectly OK for Wesleyan students to behave as walking illustrations of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, but just let someone emit an opinion contrary to the reigning orthodoxy on any touchy subject and, Pow!, the censors are there faster than you can say Mrs. Grundy. So it happened that when the student newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, ran an op-ed mildly critical of the preposterous “Black Lives Matter” movement, the student government unanimously voted to cut its funding by more than half. As Boston Magazine, which reported the story, noted, “Cutting funding for a school’s primary news organization because of a disagreement over something it published is a disturbing snapshot of the state of free speech on college campuses in the United States.” Indeed. Argus is appealing for donations. I have contributed a little something. You can as well by going to their donations page.
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