Radical sex warriors at Reed College tried to shout down Kimberly Peirce, partly because she didn’t use a trans actor in her 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry, about the murder of a transgender male. This is an excerpt from Robby Soave’s blog on the event at Reason.com:
“The most revealing comment came from Lucia Martinez, an assistant professor of English at Reed who identifies as a “gay mixed-race woman.” Martinez wrote:
“I teach at Reed. I am intimidated by these students. I am scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues up in any way—and I am a gay mixed-race woman. There is a serious problem here and at other [selective liberal arts colleges], and I’m at a loss as to how to begin to address it, especially since many of these students don’t believe in either historicity or objective facts. (They denounce the latter as being a tool of the white cisheteropatriarchy.)”
How many professors must confess that they live in terror of their far-left students before we start taking them seriously? Before we recognize that a thin-skinned, easily-offended super-minority of students has gained the power to censor academics and other students for broaching controversial subjects before we are prepared to do something about it? This is the elite American college campus: a place where even queer, leftist professors and filmmakers are afraid of being sent to the guillotine by self-professed radical students.
The bloated and bloatifying university administrations stoke the fires of adolescent insecurity as a means of solidifying administration dominance over faculty. Of course that coalition was not going to confine its operations solely to those faculty members that the erstwhile faculty enablers of the child inquisitors wanted to punish. Now even politically correct faculty are in the crosshairs.
The only way now to defeat the administrator-tyrants is to cut off all federal funding for anything other than STEM majors: no grants, no loans, no loan guarantees. Anyone wanting to “study” post-colonial this or queer that can pay their own way. Of course this will also result in the dismissal of many “faculty” in those “subjects” (quotes are not scare quotes but intended to identify the quoted terms as fictions), but soldiers had to die in order to drive the Germans out of their pillboxes.
I concede that some professors are living in fear.
However, other professors have created this problem, particularly those Marxists who inject their racial, sexual, and class ideologies of oppression into their curriculum. And in the case of racial & gender studies, the ENTIRE curriculum is devoted to such ideologies.
These Marxist professors have cultivated thugs who feel justified – and jubilant – to persecute others and deny them rights. Students don’t respect freedoms of speech, assembly, or conscience for those with a different opinion.
And what does the Department of Education do about it? They have an Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which appears to do nothing about civil rights violations on campuses.