Even the Left is getting frightened of the brown-shirted monster they’ve created. I find it interesting that this professor has such a lack of self awareness:
Personally, liberal students scare the shit out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a facebook page calling me a communist or else seek to formally protest my liberal lies, the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, so long as I did so respectfully, and so long as it happened in the course of legitimate classroom instruction.
The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip—not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery—and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.
He keeps using that word “liberal.” I don’t think it means what he thinks it means.
[Update early afternoon]
The wrong time to coddle:
Between the infantilizing of campus culture and the growing global harshness, something has to give and—hint, hint—it won’t be the real world. The worst thing about the current climate of PC stupidity and mandatory cocooning on campus isn’t the ugly repression it entails. The destruction of free speech and free debate in the institutions that ought to be the citadels of intellectual liberty is a terrible thing and a horrible betrayal of everything universities are supposed to be about. But there is yet a worse consequence: the catastrophic dumbing down and weakening of a younger generation that is becoming too fragile and precious to exist in the current world—much less to fight the real evils and dangers that are growing.
These are the great-grandchildren of The Greatest Generation, corrupted by that generation’s children in the academy and public schools. How we have fallen.
I’d like to know what percentage of students actually gets their panties in a bundle.
From my college experience, the protests were filled by the same group of angry lesbians and brain-frozen freshmen girls accompanied by their desperate boyfriends–with hippie (tenured) professors leading the way.
A small percentage of the campus.
I think you may be correct.
Of course, it’s been 25 years for me, but the impressions I have are:
99% of male students and 50% of female students are just putting in their time. waiting to get their Four-Year Union Card so that they can get a job that doesn’t involve asking people whether they want fries with their order. A significant number of female students, but probably not the majority of them, couldn’t care less about anything anyone says in the classrooms and don’t understand any of the big words–these girls are out to identify future high-status alpha males and pursue their M.R.S. degree.
It’s always been a tiny number of vocal kooks, mostly female, with a sprinkling of fruity, pussy-whipped beta-males, who go to every class listening hard for anything anyone says that gives them a chance to feign outrage and throw a public tantrum. And it’s always, always, always a liberal arts/womyn’s studies professor–either a grey-bearded juvenile delinquent or some hateful morbidly obese lesbian hag–who puts them up to it, who tells them they have to “challenge insensitivity” and “call out racism” wherever they imagine it.
To the extent that there’s anything new, it’s the racial angle. On a college campus near me a meeting of the board was interrupted by a chanting mob of wonderfully diverse cultural enrichers, who stormed into the meeting room, interrupting and disrupting the meeting, chanting “black lives matter, black lives matter.” And the college president went hat in hand, crawling on his knees, to hold a news conference in which he announced plans to create “safer spaces” for “diverse urban yoots,” etc., etc. Does anyone remember when these sort of moronic shenanigans would have resulted in someone dialing 911, a visit from the riot cops, and a mass expulsion and criminal charges for all the troublemakers?
We’re already seeing the fruits of this (and harbingers of the future) in the rapid decline of American power through the infantile actions of our infantile President and his minions. If more like him are on the way, the Republic has no future.