TRIGGER WARNING: this blog entry may cause feelings of frustration with university bureaucracy and irritation towards coddled university students.

As CTF’s Ontario Director, I have been doing a speaker series at campuses across Ontario to engage with our your wing on university campuses. Or at least, I’ve been trying to.

CTF’s student wing is called “Generation Screwed”. GS engages students across Canada about generational debt and the expanding size of government entitlements. It’s crucial that the next generation knows that government spending today is their debt tomorrow. It’s why we have established GS clubs on campuses across the country, and why we run GS Action Forums. Amok

But the task of dealing with university student unions to establish clubs and book university space can be a Herculean. My April 6^th speech at Brock University was cancelled because the club had not been approved as having completed certain training, including political correctness training.

That’s not to say they had not done the training – they had. Three weeks before my scheduled speech. But the requisite box approving the GS Club had not yet been checked by the student union, and therefore the club was not officially approved and therefore not allowed to book a room to host the event. My event was scrapped at the last minute because of the student union’s bureaucratic ineptitude.

This situation is not unique to Brock. At the University of Guelph, where I am scheduled to speak on April 7^th, the club was required to undergo “Anti-Oppression” training. The club was even told that their name – Generation Screwed – may not be approved because of the “anti-oppressive framework” of the student union.

To be clear, my speech deals with how students have the power to uncover waste themselves, by being engaged, asking questions, and by using specific tools like Freedom of Information legislation and by writing for student newspapers.

Relative to the issues I typically engage on, my campus GS speech is actually quite benign. It is designed to empower and engage students. But that didn’t stop my speech from being cancelled at Brock.

Universities are supposed to be places where there is debate and discourse. In fact, universities are where I should be able to push the envelope the furthest in my speeches. Instead, university student unions feel the need to protect students from our very name. Things have simply gone too far.

The ideologies of “safe spaces”, of “political correctness” and of “anti-oppression” are killing thoughtful dialogue on campus. Student unions desire to control their small fiefdoms with this dogma, and it is at the expense of students who want to learn. Generation Screwed, indeed.