The Worst Thing About Censorship is ███████████████████████████████████████████████████

I’m doing a Masters in Management & Leadership at Lancaster University at the moment. Academia is quite alien to me, I did college but I did Army College, which is something a few light years away from University. However, I am enjoying it, mostly.

The last assignment was about Influence and Negotiation. Most of the interactions between University and student take place online and at the start of the module everyone was asked to:

Tell us something about you.  Share one fact about yourself - something amusing, surprising or humdrum

I was a little late to the party on this one but as I was reading the current facts that people had added most were ‘humdrum’. Knowing that sometimes groups need a little catalyst to get the energy going I told the story that I have told on this blog before, ‘The Ball Bearing Incident’. The tale got a good response and a few people said that was the funniest thing they had read in a long time. Before publishing the story a changed the word ‘arse’ to ‘bum’

Shortly afterwards everyone received an email regarding being mindful about language on the forums and then shortly after that my post was removed. I was furious, I still am to be honest with you. The worst language used in the post was ‘Anus’ and ‘Bum’ and here I was being censored and reprimanded. I can’t understand how a University could be so backward, or is this just me. I’m tempted to say ‘This is PC gone mad’ but that’s usually said by people who aren’t necessarily racist but don’t understand the lingo and use terms like ‘Coloured’. On a separate note, you can’t say ‘midget’ any more either!

Any road, I argued my point but was shut down by a doctor. I know I have to move on but I won’t be letting this go unnoticed whenever I have the appropriate opportunity to bring it up.