Cancel culture has come for Communist Manifesto author Karl Marx at the University of Florida, whose “Karl Marx Group Study Room” has been renamed “Group Study Room 229” in protest of Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.
At the study room, a sign was displayed crediting Marx as being the “founder of scientific socialism”: “The unique extent of the influence of Marx’s materialist explanation of the workings of society, economics and history, inevitably saw Marxist theory extend its influence to literary criticism,” the plaque read.
Despite Marx’s “influence” leading to the murders of over 100 million people and untold misery for countless millions more, the study room’s name remained unprotested until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted the school to remove Marx’s name.
“Given current events in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world, we determined it was appropriate to remove the name of Karl Marx that was placed on a group study room at the University of Florida in 2014,” Hessy Fernandez, director of strategic communications, said.
The Karl Marx study room was one of 14 spaces that students could reserve. The room, now dubbed Group Study Room 229, also holds the largest occupancy available. Other study rooms are named for Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and authors William Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Jane Austen. Shockingly, cancel culture has not yet come for those icons of the Western civilization that is so despised on college campuses.