Steven_Bukal comments on Irrationalism on Campus? - Less Wrong

3 Post author: HalMorris 20 November 2014 07:17PM

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Comment author: Steven_Bukal 23 November 2014 01:26:20PM *  6 points [-]

I am a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, where we've seen that talks on campus that are viewed as opposing or questioning feminism will have their advertisements torn down and mobs organized by the student union will show up to harass and physically block attendees and take other disruptive actions like pulling fire alarms. I expect this would generalize to suppression of other forms of un-PC speech and thinking.

That said, the administration at UofT seems to respond to these incidents more reasonably than the UCLA administration in the article (i.e. they didn't thoughtlessly capitulate), and my experience from taking courses across science, social science, and humanities faculties is that the atmosphere in general is definitely not extreme to the level of fire alarm pulling. I would guess that the extreme elements are mostly local to a small number of particular academic subject areas like women's studies, but that this minority has significant power to influence what is acceptable speech and thought.