Season of the Snitch

Creating a nation of rats.

Colleges and universities are setting up networks of anonymous student informers reminiscent of the conditions in Communist countries, write Stanford [University] Classical Liberalism Initiative cofounder Iván Marinovic and University of California, Santa Cruz German literature professor emeritus John Ellis in The Wall Street Journal.

The current effort is a massive expansion of higher-education administrators’ increasing denials of fair treatment to college students accused of assaults over the past two decades, moving on from physical assaults to microagressions:

According to a recent study by the free-speech watchdog organization Speech First, 56% of American universities have adopted schemes that encourage students to report on one another anonymously for “bias” or “protected identity harm.” This means that anyone who falls short of campus orthodoxy on “pronouns,” transgenderism, microaggressions and proscribed language might soon be denounced and deprived of basic due process, including the right to face an accuser.

It also means, the authors note, that students will deploy the universities’ diversity, equity, and inclusion departments to do the bidding of small-minded people with personal grudges:

Anonymous reporting has a self-selection component: Decent people won’t do it because they consider it morally repugnant. A system that rewards spying on friends and neighbors will disproportionately attract cowardly people motivated by the worst of human nature—resentment, jealousy, grudges and dogmatic intolerance. The snitches will be people who don’t understand the damage Stasi-like behavior will do to our universities.

The authors are right to compare this situation to Cuba, East Germany, and other benighted places past and present. Even more frightening is the fact that the U.S. government and activist groups have increasingly been encouraging everyone, not just college students, to become informants. (In addition, federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies routinely coerce people into becoming informants.)

The campaign to normalize snitching about non-offenses—“suspicions”—has graduated far beyond the “If you see something, say something” admonition from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Increasingly common are nongovernmental efforts such as the Say Something “anonymous reporting system” developed in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings. Say Something encourages children and teens to “submit secure, anonymous safety concerns to help someone who may hurt themselves or others” through a website, telephone hotline, and mobile app.

“Sometimes it’s not always easy to spot the warning signs of violence,” the Say Something website admits, so the organization provides a list of “some of the most common behaviors and incidents to report.” The organization says it has prevented “105 acts of violence with a weapon” and saved “406 lives with crisis interventions” based on 171,000 anonymous tips. Preventing even one life from being taken via violence is laudable. What happens in the tens of thousands of cases that prove unfounded ought to be a concern as well.

In any case, it appears that program participants will be well-prepared for college, where the informant culture has come to full fruition.