"... that anyone who has spent time on a college campus in the last few years knows what this author is talking about. There is an ever-narrowing range of permissible opinion, and any apparent divergence from it risks serious social repercussions. No one really speaks their mind, except those who are most religious in their adherence to the favored ideology. I taught a university seminar recently where students repeatedly thanked me — in private — for putting tough questions to guest speakers. The students were afraid to challenge the speakers themselves — not because they were afraid of them, but because they were afraid of the other students in the room."
From the most-liked comment at "I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead" by University of Virginia senior Emma Camp (NYT).
ADDED: Some of that backlash might be envy, as in: Why does this college kid get a NYT op-ed when I could have said the same thing? But the fact is, you have say it! There's real place in the world for people who just plainly state the obvious. If you can do it too, do it too!
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There is an ever-narrowing range of permissible opinion, and any apparent divergence from it risks serious social repercussions.
You don't say...
Politics has co-opted and put itself in the place of the religious system, with all the usual sort of outcomes that fundamentalisms bring.
The underlying problem, as illustrated by the classes Emma writes about, is the proliferation of bullshit courses where opinion is called "theory" and treated as "fact."
One of the folks mocking the op-ed on Twitter is an NBC News "senior reporter."
That's the main difference between censorship efforts today and yesteryear. Today's efforts to stifle speech are supported by writers, academics and members of the "arts." That's a complete inversion.
Paddy O said...
"Politics has co-opted and put itself in the place of the religious system..."
The three allowed religions on campus are Diversity, Climate Change, and Islam.
Daughter is a college freshman and taking an elective “Cultural Pluralism in the United States”. Syllabus says a balanced look at cultural differences in the US. She showed me the reading list. Nothing even approaching what I would call “middle” in terms of sources. All left and far left. Says she commented a couple times in class but mostly keeps her comments to self based on what she has seem from instructors viewpoints. Takes the class with her roommate whose dad was a police officer. Says she doesn’t say much either....took is because she needed credit and it fit in her schedule.
There's real place in the world for people who just plainly state the obvious.
That place is althouse.blogspot.com (to state the obvious (plainly))
Wish I could read the comments. I imagine comments like 'You can't say that! There is no censorship!'.
For the last 5 years it has been heartbreaking to see the bright, energetic children of friends become political and cultural zombies as they progress through the educational establishment. Oddly enough, from my personal experience, some do rebel against the cultural/religious indoctrination in high school but once they move on to college they become indoctrinated. It's literally like a different person comes home for Thanksgiving break. One friend who had just lost her mother and is also going through intense chemo treatments, found that her previously caring daughter would not speak to her unless she recanted her Republican thoughts. She was called vile names by her daughter at the lowest moment in her life. It's like a sci-fi movie with pod-people 30 years ago only it's reality now. We all used to laugh at these stories and assume that once they graduated, real life issues would change them back to normal. But in my work life, I see them as viruses that now are attacking the business world. I constantly tell my small business clients to look at more senior, mature people for their openings. Some are starting to listen.
You get cancelled if you don't do group think in college. Hell, you get cancelled in America now if you don't group think.
At some point a college degree will be seen as an indicator that the graduate is a snowflake and likely unsuitable for many roles in society.
My (lefty) brother thinks all efforts to squash speech is by right-wingers.
Of course he also thinks things like the Seattle riots were almost exclusively "proud boys".
WK: thanks for the personal note and best luck to your daughter. I hope that the kids who endure this brainwashing don't succumb to it but also don't become utterly cynical. Outside the curriculum they have to find, or build, an Underground Railway of better ideas and more honest thought, or we really are finished. Why spend any more time, or one more dime, on this crap? The price of the credential keeps climbing even as its value plummets.
How are law students faring in this environment? Are they not asked to argue for a side they may not have chosen personally? Are law students graduating not knowing how to make a cogent argument?
Blogger WK said...
Daughter is a college freshman and taking an elective “Cultural Pluralism in the United States”. Syllabus says a balanced look at cultural differences in the US. She showed me the reading list. Nothing even approaching what I would call “middle” in terms of sources. All left and far left. Says she commented a couple times in class but mostly keeps her comments to self based on what she has seem from instructors viewpoints. Takes the class with her roommate whose dad was a police officer. Says she doesn’t say much either....took is because she needed credit and it fit in her schedule.
3/8/22, 9:35 AM
My daughter graduated from college over ten years ago now and it probably wasn't nearly as bad as now but I still recall her coming home all excited about her English Lit class. The teacher took a queer studies approach and had kids believing that Shakespeare was a gay man who wrote his sonnets to his male lover. When I pointed out that he was known to have a wife and children daughter just kind of brushed it off. What irks me is how unquestioning our kids can be when they hear the garbage spewed by people in authority. I tried to get her to question what she was being taught, at least to herself, but she just seems to have soaked it up like a sponge.
She still says she is a socialist and would like to live in a place like Singapore. I just have to keep my mouth shut. I can't see her giving up her $1.2 million house for a two bedroom flat and raising her kids in cramped conditions like they do in socialist countries. Yeah, never going to happen. She likes the things her Ivy education and capitalism provide far too much.
What never ceases to amaze me is how our own educations were all about fighting for speech, against fascism -- Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, 1984. All those brilliant teachers, all their fatuous words, words, words.
All their self-regard. All the "never forgets." All the sociologists claiming to inoculate future generations against totalitarianism.
I look at my bookshelves, and I have to ask myself: what was all that for? The very same people either became the fascists they warned us about, or they cowered like sheep, knowing ten, twenty, thirty years ago that the radical Left wanted this to happen. What was the point of education itself, without belief or courage to act when it mattered? Just as the Russian poets tried to disappear into sterile structuralism to avoid Stalin's camps, the academicians of the 1980's disappeared into sterile post-structuralism to try to keep their comfortable lifestyles.
You would have to have been deaf, blind, dumb and willful to not see where this was going by 1990. Yet the good professors stayed silent, even as the evil ones literally told us what they were going to do to us.
I suppose fate is all a matter of timing.
Also complacency.
Obviously, the last seventy years of education didn't take.
It's nice when the top rated comment confirms what we all suspect--that even on the left, there is not much support for the leftist agenda. For all their control of our institutions, they have no base of popular support. They survive on misdirection and intimidation alone. When the time comes, their edifice will be easy to topple
The first rule of Cancel Club is that you don't talk about Cancel Club.
I am kind of surprised that the Times printed the piece.
Diversity of color judgments, class-based bigotry, conformance, not individuals, not conscience, not thought. One step forward, two steps backward.
Looked her up on twitter to see if she seemed normal. Very normal. Will be working at Reason after a graduation, so will be paid to be immersed in this stuff.
"there is an ever narrower range of permissable opinion"
What is meant by the term "permissable" here?
The government outlaws it?
Students get expelled or punished by the universities for it?
Students are graded negatively if they present "impermissible" opinions?
Or is it that students may experience disagreement with their opinions, even vehement disagreement?
I read that Times op-ed. I saw a lot of soft pushback, discomfort, etc, but nothing approaching impermissible. Aside from eliminating liberal arts and ensuring that the only discussions are about math, science and engineering (yay free speech!), what are the proposed remedies?
"When the time comes, their edifice will be easy to topple"
Really? When will that be?
But the fact is, you have say it! There's real place in the world for people who just plainly state the obvious. If you can do it too, do it too!
Like the Harvard senior who wrote about Harvard's oppressive Covid policies, and the students who just went along with them, a couple of weeks ago in the WSJ. Just saying what a lot of people were thinking but not saying.
Harvard Students Are Covid Sheep
Probably behind the pay wall, so I'll quote her last sentence:
My peers and I are often told that we are the future leaders of America. We may be the future decision makers, but most of us aren’t leaders. Our principal concern is becoming members of the American elite, with whatever compromises, concessions and conformity that requires. The inability of Harvard students to question or oppose these irrational bureaucratic excesses bodes ill for our ability to meet future challenges.
JAORE said...
My (lefty) brother thinks all efforts to squash speech is by right-wingers.
Oh, you mean like these horrid right-wingers censoring the Canadian libraries?
https://tnc.news/2022/03/07/trudeau-appointed-librarian-ordered-purge-of-online-historical-archives/
Oh, wait, those are left-wingers doing the purges.
Offer your brother the link, then ask him to explain. it shoudl be funny
Well, to add something else, Ann, what did you do? Your university is well among the worst offenders. You had tenure for decades. You could have done something. And not here at your blog. You must have seen the danger and could have taken it on intellectually, and based on what I've seen you write here, without a master or a desire for praise.
So, frankly, where the hell were you? This is a war for intellectual freedom, and you must have known that. You went to work every day well-educated enough to know where this would end if you did nothing. A blog isn't enough. You have to risk something. And as far as I can tell, you risked nothing.
They couldn't have fired you. You just let the later generations of even mild iconoclasts cease to exist.
That's what I mean when I talk about intellectual sterility. I deeply enjoy your insights and the community of this blog. But you did nothing when you had substantial power to do something. And now that chance will not come around again.
Do. Something.
This was far, far too important for nothing, and nostalgia and humor is thin intellectual gruel now.
Ann sat on her thumbs when the Mob went after Memories Pizza.
WK said...
Daughter is a college freshman and taking an elective “Cultural Pluralism in the United States”. Syllabus says a balanced look at cultural differences in the US. She showed me the reading list. Nothing even approaching what I would call “middle” in terms of sources. All left and far left.
______________________
Back in the early 1970s, CBS radio started a show called “Spectrum,” with six people giving their opinion every day on some current issue. They were supposed to express a wide variety of different view points. All six of the starting lineup were mainstream liberals.
The rot wasn’t as deep fifty years ago, and so CBS was embarrassed into replacing four of them with a leftist, two conservatives, and Nicholas von Hoffman, who was always hard to classify but basically leftist. But I’m sure the CBS honchos were sincere in their original lineup. A “variety” of opinions from those worth taking seriously, fellow liberals.
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