Joseph Ben-Ami on Queen's University's "intergroup dialogue program"

Queen’s University must think its students are all stupid. How else do you explain its new “intergroup dialogue program”?

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The “intergroup dialogue program” instituted by Queen’s University, and more particularly the ease with which it and other initiatives like it are accepted these days – even defended – is symptomatic of a deeply anti-intellectual and undemocratic malaise infecting Canadian society. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, we are becoming a police state, where passions rule and reasoned debate is disdained; where thoughts are crimes and common sense is dismissed as the petty prejudice of the ignorant or naïve. The danger in this is not the intent, which is more often than not worthy, but the habituation to being told what and what not to say, think and do that sets in, and the construction of an apparatus of power to enforce those rules. No-one should suppose that democratic procedure can be an effective check on such arbitrary power. As Friedrich Hayek pointed out in his classic essay The Road to Serfdom “It’s not the source, but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.”

Indeed, the exercise of arbitrary power – confirmed by democratic process – is more insidious and more difficult to restrain precisely because it’s garbed in the robes of democracy.

Students at Queen’s University are not children – they’re adults who can control their own private conversations without the benevolent hand of an omnipresent, omniscient, and inevitably omnipotent thought police. They would be doing themselves and the rest of us a great favour by saying so quickly, before expressing objection to the policy is added to the list of offensive speech.