Those of us who went to college before the "Great Awokening" will probably have a hard time grasping how much the current campus environment resembles East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It simply doesn't compute, so to speak. Or not speak, as is the case.
The problem goes much deeper than the speech codes we used to worry about; it has reached the point where it's not just the Stasi-like university bureaucrats who are enforcing speech restrictions; students have become informers, enforcers, and apparently watch each other like hawks to detect wrongthink.
Source: https://t.co/Zuo28JG7cZ
— The Missing Data Depot (@data_depot) September 28, 2026
More than 80 percent of liberal students believe a professor should be "reported to the university" for saying something students find offensive. And among those who'd report, here's what counts as reportable:
- 37 percent say a professor should be reported for saying there's no evidence of antiblack bias in police shootings
- 35 percent for saying DEI practices do more harm than good and should be eliminated
- 23 percent for saying biological sex is a scientific fact — two sexes, male and female
For comparison, 55 percent of conservative-leaning students also say they would report offenses, and 72 percent of independents. It's not exclusively a Left thing, although the left is much more on the lookout, apparently. The campus climate is all about surveillance of speech.
And it's not just surveillance. FIRE recently released a report indicating that a large percentage of students think actual violence is appropriate to suppress wrongthink, which is just a confirmation of what we have seen with all the actual celebrations of Charlie Kirk's murder and the lists published of others who deserve to get "Kirked."
Speech vigilantes, you can call them.
30% still think a bullet is a valid rebuttal a full year after they watched it happen live. That’s not a “speech climate.” That’s a factory defect. Chicago first, NYU last is the only part that tracks.
— Primrose (@Primrose771646) September 23, 2026
They murdered Charlie Kirk and 30% of students still think violence is a valid way to silence a speaker.
FIRE surveyed 63,000 kids across 262 schools and the national average only crawled to a D-, the best mark in 7 years and still a fail by their own scale.
Chicago took first again.
NYU finished last.
At 61 campuses, more than 50% now say his name is too dangerous to discuss at all.
9 schools lost ranking points for punishing faculty over comments on the killing, including FAU, which left an untenured professor hanging for months after she called celebrating it “self defense” while two tenured colleagues were reinstated.
The report called the climate “dismal.”
The other day I wrote about Warren Smith's visit to Brown University as an invited speaker. It was surreal, because the very students who invited him to discuss speech and other issues demanded that their voices be altered and their faces blurred or blocked, lest the conversation be used against them.
Even then, when the subject of Charlie Kirk's execution came up, they demanded to go off the record. No recording, because the subject was too dangerous.
It’s stunning to see such a stark example of the fear.
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) September 25, 2026
To even mention Charlie Kirk at Brown University is so verboten that it ends the conversation.
The students’ faces and voices must be hidden.
It’s like Warren is trying to persuade cult members to escape to freedom. https://t.co/fv2LXDfcvt
It's The Lives of Others, only people are paying almost half a million dollars over four years to be as oppressed as an East German citizen. They are choosing to go behind the Berlin Wall to get a credential, and then adopting the norms of their oppressors.
Every commencement speech begins with the required "You are the leaders of tomorrow" spiel, and I have to say, nothing scares me more than the fact that this is true. Our truth-seeking institutions have become evil mirror images of their ideal, and our youth are being trained to be good little members of the Stasi.
— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) September 10, 2026
Who would have expected that the great aspiration of many students is to become an informant for the bureaucrats? But apparently that is what colleges now expect, and it has created a culture of fear that I am not certain many students even recognize. It is normal for them.
When I went to college, the campus was overwhelmingly left-wing. But it wasn't scary. There was room for conservatives to speak, and there was even a certain caché to being a conservative. You stood out, and while that was sometimes bad, it certainly wasn't scary.
Times have changed, and not for the better.
Editor’s Note: New York City is now facing the consequences of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist takeover.
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