A college-level challenge: When free speech sounds like cyberbullying

A University of Chicago student who happens to be white objected to an undergraduate anthropology class titled "The Problem of Whiteness."

- Clarence Page

Daniel Schmidt, a sophomore who didn't know the lecturer, was outraged — and he showed it in a tweet that happened to include the lecturer’s photo and email address.

If you know anything about the bottomless hunger of the online culture, it won’t surprise you to hear that a storm of hate mail inundated the inbox of the lecturer, Rebecca Journey, after Schmidt’s description went out into cyberspace.

Contrary to the insistence of Schmidt and other misreaders of her class title, Journey was not promoting anti-white hatred.

“Anti-white hatred is now mainstream academic inquiry,” Schmidt said of her class.

Not quite, although I am sure that mislabeling innocent academic study as “hatred” helps to wake up the fearful masses. Conservatives have generated similar mileage from insisting that a “Black-supremacist” version of critical race theory is lurking under every bed.

With inflammatory rhetoric aimed at her from the Twitterverse and other social networks, it’s understandable that Journey, a new Ph.D. recipient, postponed her new class to the spring while the university addresses safety concerns.