EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION/ANALYSIS
Cancel culture isn’t just an American phenomenon, far from it. Just ask Boone Simms, a graduate student at the University of St Andrews. The American student traveled to the Scotland university to continue his education and found shrieking feminists live there, too.
Simms, who hails from Dallas and earned his bachelor’s degree at Clemson University, traveled the 4,000-plus miles to experience a campus with one of the oldest debating societies in Britain.
But one recent experience showed him discourse is not completely welcome there. Writing in the Telegraph, Simms — who also contributes to The College Fix — described his experience with the fledgling Reform UK group there.
Reform UK supports immigration controls, tax cuts, and deregulation.
“Even before we formed, a petition circulated online that demanded that the university block the society from becoming affiliated,” Simms wrote in his March 25 op-ed, noting it claimed Reform UK “was racist and a danger to the campus.”
“Our critics used statement-of-interest online forms to call would-be members ‘f—ing Nazis’ and encourage suicide.”
Then came the pub incident.
“In the back room of a local pub, a group of Left-wing agitators, spearheaded by the ‘St Andrews Women Against the Far Right,’ hijacked what was intended to be a casual social event for members and those interested in the nascent Reform society,” he wrote. “The protesters congregated between us and the exit. They approached the table one by one, giving false accusations and heinous insults.”
Then things escalated, he wrote:
Their attacks were not only against the Reform Party but were personal from the start, as they repeatedly called us racists and asked how we could sleep at night. They had also distributed flyers before we arrived that claimed Reform UK is “a racist party” and “a danger to us all”. As a speaker whipped up the agitators, some in our group became concerned about our ability to leave the pub safely. …
The whole scene felt scripted in the way the protestors advanced, spouted their dubious facts, and slandered us. Others recorded us on their phones to post on social media. To put it mildly, the agitators were not there to engage in respectful disagreement. There were no questions about what we thought, why we thought it, or why we were there.
Simms and his peers did make it out safely, and the students’ union also allowed the Reform UK society to affiliate, he wrote.
“. I remain a proud member. The events at the pub do not need to define the political culture at St Andrews. They should instead be a wake-up call to the community that hostility to nonconformity has no place at a university,” he concluded.
MORE: Bangor U. debate society refuses to debate conservative Reform UK, prompting backlash
