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College Insurrection Tag

Recently, the Yale Corporation renamed one of its residential colleges for computer scientist Grace Hopper, dropping the name of John C. Calhoun, whose political philosophy included a defense of slavery. The decision came after months of campus protest over honoring Calhoun whose beliefs many find abhorrent. Tampering with the historical record, however has its dangerous side. Similar demands for renaming buildings honoring historical figures have been made at other institutions including Princeton University, where students took issue with the use of President Woodrow Wilson's name because he did not share modern sentiments on race and supported certain segregationist practices.

Of all the free speech problems we have on college campuses, one of the most chilling ones comes in the form of "Bias Response Teams." Under such a policy, a student can be anonymously reported for saying or doing something deemed offensive, and then get visited by the bias response team. Adam Steinbaugh of the Washington Examiner wrote about this recently:
Hundreds of campuses encourage students to turn in fellow students for offensive speech Universities are the cradle of free speech, where ideologies and ideas clash, where academics and activists can agree, disagree, or be disagreeable. This is particularly true in the United States, where the First Amendment zealously guards against government surveillance and intrusion into free speech.