Madness at Reed

We reported here last month on the classroom disruptions at left-leaning Reed College in Portland, where apparently anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders is considered a white supremacist oppressor.

The journalist who wrote up the story for The Economist, Joe Kolman, has returned to the story in greater detail for Spiked Online. Very much worth reading the whole amazing tale of how the craziest students are hounding anyone for expressing the slightest puzzlement—not necessarily even disagreement—with the Maoist slogans that pass for political thought at Reed. For readers in a rush here are a couple of excerpts:

I received a letter from two Reed students of colour that was being distributed among alumni like a piece of samizdat. The students didn’t reveal their names for fear of being ostracised, but they described a campus that had been overtaken by militants who routinely shamed as racists anyone who didn’t agree with them. One of those singled out had been a freshman named Hunter Dillman who had been branded a racist after asking the organiser of a Latina student group an innocent question. He was ultimately hounded off campus. . .

At the beginning of the first semester, as [Dillman] was going to dinner with a friend, he read a Facebook post from the leader of a Latina group who wrote that her group planned to ‘Stop Trump’ and asked fellow students for support in a school funding survey. He was curious and considered getting involved. After he asked her a couple of times to be more specific about how the group planned to stop Trump, she accused him of being a racist for challenging a Latina student support group. He responded that if her group called people racist just for asking questions, he had no intention of voting to fund it.

A few minutes later, when the Latina activist happened to meet him waiting in line at the dining hall, she continued her accusations and called him a ‘little white boy’. Shaken, he took his food back to his room and tried to eat as he watched in horror as comment after comment about him appeared on Facebook, denouncing him as a bigot.

The next day, as he was walking across campus, a student screamed ‘Racist!’ at him. The accusers never came up to talk to him, but the online abuse kept coming.

It gets even worse from here (especially the actions of Reed’s administration, which sided with the mob against Dillman), and Dillman ended up withdrawing from Reed. He’s a construction worker now, and likely will have a much happier life for it.

I repeat for the umpteenth time: Liberals run universities. When are liberals going to start defending liberalism?

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