While most of the nation were celebrating the Fourth of July, administrators at DePaul university were trying to slime their way out of a PR debacle while no-one was watching.
The university has removed all public user ratings from their Facebook page after the college was hit with a wave of one-star reviews following their failure to protect Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos’ event from near-violent disruption in May.
Following the event at DePaul, where Black Lives Matter protestors stormed the stage, forcibly took the microphone, and threatened to assault Yiannopoulos whilst security refused to intervene, the college was hit with over 7,000 one-star ratings. The reviews, which heavily outnumbered all positive ratings, meant that the college received a median rating of just 1.1 stars, the lowest possible.
Now, all sign of the entire reviews and ratings section has vanished on the Facebook page, with attempts to access the previous section’s URL returning a 404 error message.
“Wow. This university doesn’t care at all about free speech and has no interest in education. Not only was a speaker attacked by a mob while security looked on (administrators ordered them to), but the president’s “apology” was 80% defending why the mob had a right to be upset and why the speaker’s views were wrong” wrote one user in a one star review before the ratings section was disabled and censored entirely.
After attempting to justify the violent protesters who shut down Yiannopoulos’ event and grovelling to the campus leftists for forgiveness, DePaul President Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider resigned from his position as president of the university in June. DePaul University’s Gender Studies Department also sided with the protesters following the event, condemning Yiannopoulos for his “violent, sexist, transphobic, and racist rhetoric”.
Now that ratings have been removed, dissatisfied attendees and students alike have taken to posting their criticism on the Facebook page’s wall, though it is a much less obvious and striking section to warn potential students at DePaul of the university’s anti-free speech rhetoric.
Milo is due to speak again at the university in the fall semester. Perhaps DePaul were worried that they’d be hit with another wave of one-star ratings?
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech and former editor of the Squid Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.