The implacable determination of today’s campus enforcers of conventional opinion is nowhere better illustrated than in the rise of berts—Bias Education Response Teams. These are administrative bodies now common at colleges and universities that stand ready to swing into action at the drop of a gender-insensitive pronoun. berts are empowered to seek out and torment alleged malefactors; to comfort the afflicted; and to raise alarm throughout the community when its norms have been transgressed.

berts enforce not justice in the plain old sense, but the marvelously flexible concept of “social justice.” And social justice authorizes seven types of suppression of free speech. To keep these seven in good marching order, I propose the mnemonic outrage: ostracize, usurp, train, repress, aggress, group, and exalt.

Ostracize those who dissent from political orthodoxy; usurp the curriculum; train students to be activists; repress topics that are ruled unfit for discussion; aggress against anyone and any custom that embodies the old order; group people by race, sex, and ethnicity into categories stigmatized as privileged or celebrated as oppressed; and exalt certain ideas and beliefs so that they are exempt from questioning or critical examination, while expressions of dissent can be suppressed as acts of malignity.

Ostracize

Ostracism is most visible in the disinvitations sent to famous and sometimes not-so-famous people. But the more profound forms of ostracism are the invitations never sent in the first place and the culling from the candidates for graduate