You may remember Warren Smith as the teacher who was booted from a private school because his YouTube videos demonstrating the Socratic Method triggered liberals.
Warren had been teaching and making videos for some time, with the school and everyone involved’s permission, but one video went viral because he prompted students to think about their beliefs. Here is the conversation that got him fired:
Warren Smith: “I’m not going to say what is right or wrong or which way to think. The whole point is to learn how to think not what to think.”
Smith, who was recently fired, went viral in the attached video for questioning why a student thought JK Rowling held bigoted opinions.… pic.twitter.com/qgZXXJkoFd
— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole) May 14, 2024
Warren Smith: “I’m not going to say what is right or wrong or which way to think. The whole point is to learn how to think not what to think.”
Smith, who was recently fired, went viral in the attached video for questioning why a student thought JK Rowling held bigoted opinions. He demonstrated the Socratic Method proficiently and guided his class through a productive conversation.
It sucks students at his old school now have one less teacher who values critical thinking.
Warren has mostly landed on his feet because a lot of people thought, hey, that is what a conversation should look like between a mentor and a student. He wasn’t telling the student what to think, but how to think for themselves. To go from “people say” to “here’s what I think, for these reasons.”
While Warren is not exactly Charlie Kirk in celebrity, his YouTube Channel does well enough, and he gets a fair amount of love. Enough to get invited to speak occasionally at campuses, including Brown University.
And that is where things get interesting for the purposes of this post. His conversation was being taped, and he is speaking to a group of mostly, nominally, conservative students. But in order to record the conversation, these students requested to have their faces blurred, their voices altered, and when the subject moved to Charlie Kirk, they stopped the recording.
It’s stunning to see such a stark example of the fear.
To even mention Charlie Kirk at Brown University is so verboten that it ends the conversation.
The students’ faces and voices must be hidden.
It’s like Warren is trying to persuade cult members to escape to freedom. https://t.co/fv2LXDfcvt
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) September 25, 2026
The subject was the state of free speech and debate on campus, and the need for more of each.
This gives you a sense of just how scary it is to go against The Narrative™ on campus. Students are afraid enough to express their opinions that they demand anonymity. And anonymity is not enough when a touchy subject comes up. Everything has to go off the record — be memory-holed — lest the world come crashing down.
It’s not just censorship — in fact, this case wasn’t censorship at all — it’s the fear that creates self-censorship. People are literally so afraid to speak that they refuse to do so, at least in public.
There is so much wrong with this, but before you aim your ire at the students in the room, think for a moment: they are being very rational about making this decision.
Attending Brown costs $100,000 a year, and despite all the highfaluting’ excuses for why one would go there, the top reason is getting a credential that will return millions over a lifetime. Or at least, that is the hope.
So what happens if saying the wrong thing derails your plans to get a return on that huge investment? It is a personal catastrophe; that’s what. Not everybody can throw away the better part of half a million dollars in order to take a stand. Better to keep your head down and endure, right?
There’s a reason why people fantasize about doing a “take this job and shove it” stand but almost never do; in the real world, you need that job. Ben Shapiro might be able to stand out, take on the mob, and thrive in college, but for most people, being the rebel only leads to bad outcomes. That’s also why there are so few whistleblowers, even when people know things are totally off: whistleblowers almost always get ground into dust.
College is supposed to be just the sort of place where being the oddball, the outside-the-box guy or gal, is rewarded. Society benefits from free thinkers, whether right or wrong, because the alternative is everybody nodding along even when things go off track.
College is where those people are essentially trained to take a stand. Few people ever truly get there but enough do that society benefits from free thinkers.
Not anymore. If anything, colleges punish free thinking more than almost any place in society. If conformity is valued in corporations, it is positively worshipped in colleges and universities. Performative dissent is worshipped, but the “dissents” are all in the same direction, meaning not dissent at all. The true dissenters are scared to be even seen or have their voices unaltered.
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