Political correctness is now a caricature of itself.
"As college campuses have become bastions of rigorously enforced political correctness, the limits on speech have come crashing down in the real world, with the presumptive Republican nominee for president dishing out macroaggressions on a daily basis."
That's why some people on college campus are genuinely afraid when they here Trump speak, or even hear the word "Trump" spoken. Students scrawled "Trump" and some of his slogans in chalk on sidewalks at DePaul, including “Don’t feel the Bern,” and university administrators had janitorial staff wash off the "Don't" part and leave behind just the "feel the Bern" part. Huh? Yup.
The chalked phrase "All Lives Matter" was obliterated, because it invokes thoughts of "Black Lives Matter" which invokes feelings of anxiety and fear.
Unwanted, uncomfortable or disagreeable free speech is now being framed within the constraints of "verbal conduct." Free speech cannot be censored, per se, but your conduct sure can. So if you say something bad, it's not what you said that's the problem, it's the conduct of saying it that's on trial now. And the trial consists of a Star Chamber of judge, jury and executioner without due process.
The cover story of Newsweek which is due to hit the newsstands on June 3 is “The Battle Against ‘Hate Speech’ on College Campuses Is Harboring a Generation That Hates Speech.” It's a comprehensive story, relatively lengthy, but boy is it a good one. As Newsweek's Editor in Chief Jim Impoco put it, this article shows how colleges fail students in the Age of Trump.
It's hard to fathom that today's college students are just one generation removed from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 60s. My, oh my, has the pendulum ever swung. Wow. But it's gotten so bad that even liberal progressives in academia are starting to push back, if you can believe that.
A Dartmouth fraternity tradition of holding a “Phiesta” on Cinco de Mayo was canceled recently because the made-up word was deemed a “cultural appropriation.”
The Vagina Monologues, can no longer be performed at Mount Holyoke College, one of the nation’s oldest and prestigious women’s colleges, because it was deemed, mostly by students but also by faculty, as being offensive to "women without vaginas." (I'd like to say that I got through that without laughing, but I can't).
The article is a really, really good read.
And once you get to the end of it, you'll realize the article is nearly a perfect playbook for "How to piss off today's young people." Then again, just follow Trump's lead. Same thing.
“What we are seeing is not just phobias about language,” Kaminer says. “We have gone way beyond political correctness and are seeing a real decline in critical thinking. If you don't know the difference between quoting a word and hurling an epithet, then you don’t know how to think.”
I know it's an old cliché, that children are the future. But they are. And they're our future leaders. And the rest of us are just laying in fox holes, praying.
"As college campuses have become bastions of rigorously enforced political correctness, the limits on speech have come crashing down in the real world, with the presumptive Republican nominee for president dishing out macroaggressions on a daily basis."
That's why some people on college campus are genuinely afraid when they here Trump speak, or even hear the word "Trump" spoken. Students scrawled "Trump" and some of his slogans in chalk on sidewalks at DePaul, including “Don’t feel the Bern,” and university administrators had janitorial staff wash off the "Don't" part and leave behind just the "feel the Bern" part. Huh? Yup.
The chalked phrase "All Lives Matter" was obliterated, because it invokes thoughts of "Black Lives Matter" which invokes feelings of anxiety and fear.
Unwanted, uncomfortable or disagreeable free speech is now being framed within the constraints of "verbal conduct." Free speech cannot be censored, per se, but your conduct sure can. So if you say something bad, it's not what you said that's the problem, it's the conduct of saying it that's on trial now. And the trial consists of a Star Chamber of judge, jury and executioner without due process.
The cover story of Newsweek which is due to hit the newsstands on June 3 is “The Battle Against ‘Hate Speech’ on College Campuses Is Harboring a Generation That Hates Speech.” It's a comprehensive story, relatively lengthy, but boy is it a good one. As Newsweek's Editor in Chief Jim Impoco put it, this article shows how colleges fail students in the Age of Trump.
It's hard to fathom that today's college students are just one generation removed from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 60s. My, oh my, has the pendulum ever swung. Wow. But it's gotten so bad that even liberal progressives in academia are starting to push back, if you can believe that.
A Dartmouth fraternity tradition of holding a “Phiesta” on Cinco de Mayo was canceled recently because the made-up word was deemed a “cultural appropriation.”
The Vagina Monologues, can no longer be performed at Mount Holyoke College, one of the nation’s oldest and prestigious women’s colleges, because it was deemed, mostly by students but also by faculty, as being offensive to "women without vaginas." (I'd like to say that I got through that without laughing, but I can't).
The article is a really, really good read.
And once you get to the end of it, you'll realize the article is nearly a perfect playbook for "How to piss off today's young people." Then again, just follow Trump's lead. Same thing.
“What we are seeing is not just phobias about language,” Kaminer says. “We have gone way beyond political correctness and are seeing a real decline in critical thinking. If you don't know the difference between quoting a word and hurling an epithet, then you don’t know how to think.”
I know it's an old cliché, that children are the future. But they are. And they're our future leaders. And the rest of us are just laying in fox holes, praying.
