Your Children are in Good Hands
At DePauw University, Indiana, someone may have said something unkind to a student with brownish skin. And so, inevitably,
Professor of Sociology David Newman stated, “I’m a white man. I’m a white middle-class man. I’m a white middle-class heterosexual man… This is my fault. I didn’t do anything directly, but this is my fault. My silence makes this my fault.”
Because what’s education without a little Maoist pantomime?
Manufacturing Difference: The Social Construction of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality.
In other words, “diversity” is a fraud?
It’s fine to see the world’s problems as your responsibility. But what kind of arrogance does it take to see them as your fault?
David, the definition of chutzpah:
https://twitter.com/AgeofMockery/status/536227160768647168
the definition of chutzpah
Heh. But of course. It’s almost as if the student in question has a profound, possibly terminal, lack of self-awareness, but it’s a standard pattern for such people. It’s very much in fashion and has a long, if hardly honourable, history on the academic left.
The students, with their unilateral sense of entitlement, are simply enacting the advice of, for instance, the Marxist academic Herbert Marcuse, whose essay Repressive Tolerance denounced as “oppressive” the custom of hearing out one’s opponents and engaging with their arguments, and instead urged leftist radicals to be “intolerant towards the protagonists of the repressive status quo.” (Marcuse’s essay is an extended, self-flattering whine about the far left’s failure to convince the broader population of it virtues, supposedly because “radical minorities” have “unequal access to the means of democratic persuasion.” In other words, it’s apparently unfair that totalitarian leftists aren’t given free airtime – as much of it as they wish – unchallenged by contrary views and uninterrupted by commercials, which are capitalist propaganda.)
And we’ve seen this arrogance and obliviousness enacted many times. In March 2009, the writer Don Feder tried to engage students at the University of Massachusetts in a discussion on the subject of free speech versus so-called “hate speech.” Within 20 seconds Feder had been shouted down, called a racist and assailed with epithets about his daughter. Despite his repeated calls for civility, Feder wasn’t allowed to speak for longer than three minutes without deafening interruption or further personal abuse – from people who want to show the world just how much they care.
The following month at UNC Chapel Hill, retired congressman Tom Tancredo tried to begin a discussion on the subject of illegal immigration. Students refused to let him speak for more than a few seconds. The university’s geography professor Altha Cravey – whose interests include “critical thinking,” “gender, race and class,” and “progressive social change” – saw fit to add her own voice to the jeers and chanting, to make sure everyone saw her leftist credentials. Soon the students were physically harassing the astonished guest and smashing windows to ensure he couldn’t speak. Fearing further escalation, campus police escorted Tancredo from the room, then, hastily, from campus. He was practically chased away.
And more recently there was this stunning display of intellectual wherewithall.
The widening of minds, see. It’s what education’s all about.
Not entirely unrelated
I’ve only just got round to reading this, but the real horror was listening to the podcast on the page, where Brendan O’Neill attempts to debate the issue with an Oxford student feminist, who clearly doesn’t think free speech all that important (apart from her own, obviously)
I do vaguely remember meeting this type of feminist – the type who simply will not stop talking, aggressively interrupts, and contradicts every sentence you utter. What a joy.