“The universities have done this to themselves. They created the whole phenomenon of modern identity politics and Politically Correct rules to limit speech. They have fostered a totalitarian microculture in which conformity to those rules is considered natural and expected. Now that system is starting to eat them alive, from elite universities like Yale, all the way down to, er, less-than-elite ones like Mizzou. They created this Frankenstein monster, and it’s up to them to kill it before it kills them.”
— Robert Tracinski, The Federalist
Yesterday, I wrote about Yale students who decided, in the name of creating a “safe space” on compass, to spit on people as they left a talk with which they disagreed. “In their muddled ideology,” I wrote, “the Yale activists had to destroy the safe space to save it
—Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic
Some friends (at the University of Missouri) tell me they are afraid to voice their opinions lest they come under fire from the administration or peers – or the police. The University of Missouri police department sent an email urging students to report offensive or hurtful speech – not because it is illegal – but so the Office of Student Conduct could take disciplinary action against these students. Several of us are afraid to disagree with other students, who in turn may report us to the authorities so we can be “dealt with.” Many students have told me they are also afraid to speak out against the protest narrative, afraid they will be called “racist” and become campus pariahs. What’s lost is honest dialogue.
—Ian Paris, U. of Missouri student, The College Fix
“I have a question for the hand-wringers, the media people, academics and liberal thinkers who are so disturbed by what they’re calling the ‘Yale snowflakes’: what did you think would happen? When you watched, or even presided over, the creation over the past 40 years of a vast system of laws and speech codes to punish insulting or damaging words, and the construction of a vast machine of therapeutic intervention into everyday life, what did you think the end result would be? A generation that was liberal and tough? Come off it. It’s those trends, those longstanding trends of censorship and therapy, that created today’s creepy campus intolerance; it’s you who made these monsters.”
— Brendan O’Neill, Spiked
I do not understand the student demands at the University of Missouri. From the published reports, the students are mad that University System President Tim Wolfe refused to get out of his car during a homecoming parade when protestors physically blocked his car. Where I come from, blocking his car is illegal and hostile. What would be the response if a group of white students surrounded an African-American administrator’s car and demanded instant dialogue? Is the new standard that when some redneck students hurl disgusting racial slurs at minority students the president is responsible and loses his job? Is demanding the president step down simply because he is white not a toxic form of bias and prejudice itself?
— William Choslovsky, letter to Minding the Campus
What truly terrifies me is the extent to which we are now starting to see something quite similar to the Soviet concept of “Sluggish Schizophrenia” — the belief that failure to think the “correct” thoughts constitutes prima facie evidence of mental illness.