I was handing out flyers for a campus debate on fossil fuels. A security guard told me I needed a permit from the student activities office. I had to take them all down. The office said the topic was 'too divisive' and could 'cause disruption'. This was at a state school in Ohio just last semester.

2 comments

2 Comments

That whole "too divisive" excuse is a real problem. It makes you wonder what else they would shut down using that logic. A debate on campus is the exact right place for tough topics, not the wrong one. Letting the school decide what ideas are safe just kills the whole point of going to college in the first place.

linda6581mo ago

My university canceled a talk on free speech last year for the same reason. It was a visiting professor from Chicago, and they pulled the funding a week before. The whole point was to have a hard talk about where lines get drawn. Now we just get the same safe topics every semester, and it feels like a waste. If you can't wrestle with messy ideas here, where can you? They're treating us like kids who can't handle a real conversation.