The controversial conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos was the most likely person to be disinvited to college campuses in 2016.
The finding was part of a larger conclusion from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education that the number of attempts to keep speakers off college campuses because of political views doubled this year.
Overall, FIRE’s study tracked 42 politically-related disinvitations at colleges, which broke the previous record of 34 disinvitations in 2013, reports Forbes.
FIRE counted an incident as a disinvitation if it fell into one of the following three categories:
- A formal decision by a university to rescind an invitation
- The withdrawal of a speaker following protests
- When protesters prohibit a speaker from addressing an audience
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“The resurgence of disinvitation attempts… is a disturbing development,” FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program Director Ari Cohn said in a statement. “The increasing unwillingness to allow anyone on campus to hear ideas with which one disagrees poses a grave risk to students’ intellectual development. Rather than seeking to banish controversial or offensive ideas from campus, students would be far better off if they confronted, grappled with, and rigorously debated the views that they find disagreeable.”
Campus Safety has reported on Yiannapoulos, who was involved in 11 disinvitations in 2016, being disinvited to the University of Central Florida following the Orlando night club shooting. Yiannapolis also criticized DePaul University after his event was overrun by Black Lives Matter protesters in May.
Yiannapoulos, who has been travelling to American campuses as part of his “Dangerous Faggot” tour, writes for the Breitbart.com.
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