PC Hell In The New Century

Greg Lukianoff examines the enduring pattern of censorship on college campuses, beginning with this egregious example:

In 2007 a student working his way through college was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book in public. Some of his co-workers had been offended by the book’s cover, which included pictures of men in white robes and peaked hoods along with the tome’s title, Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The student desperately explained that it was an ordinary history book, not a racist tract, and that it in fact celebrated the defeat of the Klan in a 1924 street fight. Nonetheless, the school, without even bothering to hold a hearing, found the student guilty of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”

Just this week, a school district in California barred dictionaries from the classroom after a parent complained about a child reading the definition of "oral sex". And in Texas, the state board of education accidentally banned a popular children's book, among others, due to confusion over the author's name. For good measure, a county in Virginia just withdrew an unbowdlerized edition of Anne Franks' diary because of homoerotic themes.