June 29, 2021 - 11:52am
Last week’s announcement that Oxford University students are establishing a group of “sensitivity readers” to review articles is yet another sign that student journalism is at a precarious moment.
From now on, the university’s student publications could be subjected to external vetting for potentially harmful content, which not only puts their editorial independence at risk, but would surely lead to self-censoring among writers and editors.
Worrying though the external arbitrators in Oxford are, the vetting within student papers should also give cause for concern. Take The Student, a fortnightly newspaper based at the University of Edinburgh which balances editorial independence with student union funding. Having both edited The Student within the last two years, we were privy to the internal standards by which contentious material is judged.
The most recent version of the paper’s ‘Guide to Sensitive Reporting’, updated in 2021, tells writers to “remember that racism is structural and by definition affects only people of colour”. In vivid bold are the words, “’Reverse-racism’ does not exist”, while attention is drawn to “a climate of racism and rising fascism fuelled in great part by mainstream media”.
Perhaps this didacticism is why hundreds of unthumbed copies of The Student — a large portion of the print run — line the recycling bins of Scotland’s capital every other week.
The same guide reminds writers of their “size privilege; if they are not obese”, and recommends avoiding the words ‘male’ and ‘female’, as they are “medicalised binary terms which exclude trans people”. Also on the list of banned terms is “women’s rights”. This, apparently, is what now passes for progressivism.
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SubscribeMany thanks to Rob Lownie and Sam Bayliss for daring to put their heads above the parapet in order to provide us with this piece and good luck with the Free Speech Champions project. I note that the Guide denies the existence of ’Reverse-racism’, but what about inverse racism? By this, I mean the Woke Squad finger-wagging at the white community, whilst turning a blind eye (oops, I accidentally used a verboten word there!) to problems in other communities.
” but what about inverse racism?”
Loved that line, and so will continue the thought
Imaginary racism? you know, not inverse, but multiplied by the sq root of -1, (√(−1) = i) (this is called an imaginary number, and exceedingly useful in science too) But when an imaginary number (i) is used with a real number (3 + 8i) it becomes a ‘complex’ number
so reverse racism(i) = is now not irrational, but merely complex, and thus could exist, just at a state the simpler minds of the sensitivity readers can not comprehend.
Dig deep enough into physics and philosophy and all existence gets fuzzy, and all possibilities exist, even if infinitely improbable, but in an infinite reality they must exist, Zeno-esk.
Then there is converse racism. In logic, the converse of “All X’s are Y’s” is “All Y’s are X’s”. This is what the Woke Squad do. They start from the (false) premise “All racists are white” and they make the (false) deduction that “All whites are racists”.
Snowflake censors. Heaven preserve us. Best of luck to the authors of this piece.
The Book, ‘Stalin’s Informers’:
“The teenager was a “Pioneer”, a member of the Soviet youth movement, a perversion of the Scouts, which trained its members to believe that to inform against the people’s enemies represented a high ideal, that to betray one’s own family was the highest good of all.”
“Every apartment block, every village, every collective, every factory had its corps of official informers who, to justify their existence and often to survive themselves, needed a steady flow of denunciations.”
“historian Orlando Figes chronicles in terrifying detail in his new book, The Whisperers.”
“That phrase, “the whisperers”, embraces two realities.
First, every citizen learned never to utter their thoughts aloud, even in the bosom of their family, and never to express the mildest criticism of the regime. It was safe to speak only in murmurs.
The second kind of whisperers were, of course, the great legion of informers, who told their mad tales to the NKVD (Moscow’s enforcers) and then watched their victims swept away to their fate.”
Oh, yea, the whisperers are filling the hallways and classrooms once again…..
To add to the list of (sinister) absurdities: a colleague in Cambridge was taken to task after a meeting for using the phrase ‘queering the pitch’….
It’s encouraging to see the pushback from students. May there be many more!
‘Les Tricoteuses Jacobines’ are watching as the high are brought down. They began with desire to struggle for good change, but become ghouls. History is scary.
For “sensitivity readers” read “Thought Police”.
I imagine that ‘police’ is now a banned term.
“Hi*l er-Jugend, Bund deutscher Arbeiterjugend” (Hi*l er Youth) (must use * here to say that forbidden word, or the ‘Awaiting for Approval’ will fallow, as it is an ‘Unsensitive Word’ I suppose.)
History is rhyming like a rap song or a 12 year old kid’s poems, badly and loudly, as this time is 1930’s deja-vu all over again. (Wiemar money printing leading to hyper-inflation possibly waiting in the wings and all is about race, and Brown Shirts police the mobs and schools are now all about ideology and not education, and…..)
Your paper’s really been crippled by this.