Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, has shut down a controversial pilot project in which eavesdroppers could intervene in campus conversations deemed to be objectionable, according to an announcement by the university’s vice president, Patrick Deane.
In the project, six students, known as “dialogue facilitators,” were given the authority to step in if the talk in private conversations contained offensive language, showed any form of disrespect, or trashed ethnic, gay, or religious groups.
The so-called language-police project was widely condemned, not only on free-speech grounds but also because it had been imported from the United States without “assessing its appropriateness on a Canadian campus,” according to The Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper.
The university acted to terminate the project immediately after a panel of experts recommended canning the language cops. —Karen Birchard
