The intolerance so often displayed on college campuses is not some psychosomatic outgrowth of incessant coddling, it is a consequence of ideas designed to suppress criticism of a progressive belief system. Most college administrators have refused to condemn even the most offense claims, and have effectively formed alliances with student radicals.
On Campus / Viewpoint Diversity
Millennial attitudes toward free speech provide good reason to fear the time that they eventually assume power.
The left leaning ideological orthodoxy does not sufficiently explain the current state of the American university. Another factor, one that falls upon actual conduct that runs contrary to so-called progressive beliefs, should be taken into consideration.
To Bloom, whose bestselling book, The Closing of the American Mind, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, something much worse had happened: The university had been seized by the absenceof values. “The university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. He finds a democracy of the disciplines. … This democracy is really an anarchy, because there are no recognized rules for citizenship and no legitimate titles to rule. In short there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is.”
A horde of bêtes noires had stampeded through the gates, and the resulting noise had drowned out the proper study of both nature and humanity. Nihilism had conquered. Its chief forms were cultural relativism, historicism, and shopping-mall indifference, the humanities’ lame attempts at a holding action that “flatters popular democratic tastes.” Openness was the new closure; elitism had become the worst of all isms.
Just how this happened, however, Bloom was uncertain. He was not a stickler for historical causation. When in doubt, he pounded the table and ranted about his next talking point, dotted with references to Great Books. Closing read more dyspeptic than lamentational. But the lamentational note was there. Once the university had been a crucible of truth; then it had been seized by, or sold to, the utilitarians; finally, it had collapsed in the face of nihilism. (Never mind that universities were training schools before they were Platonic academies.)
This January, a week before rioting, vandalism, and tear gas overtook the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, its chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, sent a lengthy message to the university community. He explained why the visit of provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos could not be stopped, but ought not be welcomed, and in the process highlighted the “tension” between political rights and academic values. Dirks noted that the university, as a public institution, is prohibited from banning expression based on its content or viewpoint, no matter how hateful or hurtful. But, he continued, “we regard Yiannopoulos’s act as at odds with the values of this campus.”
A political science professor at Boise State writes a piece about transgenderism and the university tries to tie him to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
Political correctness in higher education has been much criticized, but there have been distressingly few suggestions for how to address it. This brief article proposes a strategy.
When my group, the American Enterprise Institute’s Michigan Executive Council, a student organization affiliated with the public policy think tank where Mr. Murray works, announced in early September that we were bringing him to talk about his most recent book, “Coming Apart,” it was immediately met with resistance from campus organizations. From there, things followed the now familiar script.
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On Campus / Viewpoint Diversity
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Ben Shapiro: Faculty Witch Hunt at Boise State
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