According to the Globe and Mail, Queen’s University has hired and is intensively training student “facilitators” to monitor private conversations among students for homophobic slurs, remarks bashing women, racially tinged insults, and other language that could be judged offensive.

But never mind. University administrators give assurances that such interference will be carried out “skillfully” and “very respectfully,” and that students will be engaged “spontaneously.” Objections to this program as oppressive and stifling, he says, are signs of “‘a beneficial tension.’”