This report in WaPo is distressing. It concerns the mandatory introductory Humanities course taught at Reed College:
This academic year, the first lecture was to be a panel introduction of the course: Along with two colleagues, I was going to offer my thoughts on the course, the study of the humanities and the importance of students’ knowing the history of the education they were beginning.
We introduced ourselves and took our seats. But as we were about to begin, the protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the lecture.
The right to speak freely is not the same as the right to rob others of their voices.
Understanding this argument requires an ability to detect and follow nuance, but nuance has largely been dismissed from the debates about speech raging on college campuses. Absolutist postures and the binary reign supreme. You are pro- or anti-, radical or fascist, angel or demon. Even small differences of opinion are seized on and characterized as moral and intellectual failures, unacceptable thought crimes that cancel out anything else you might say.
It seems to me that if they don’t like what is being taught, then don’t attend that college.
But I suppose that probably doesn’t fit in with the ideology of the students, since racism – or what they would like to label racism – must be stamped out wherever it may be exist.
Sadly, it appears that their definition of racism is the only one that matters, and they will enforce their decision by force, if necessary.
Which just makes them another in a long line of authoritarians, or fascists, if you will.
I suspect in ten years the movement will have broken its back on one of the many contradictions which tend to cling to the hides of such movements, and be merely an academic subject in and of itself, of interest mainly as a question as to how to prevent it from occurring again.
Which, in itself, is a bit of a contradiction in a free society. Freedom doesn’t mean we always get things right, now do we? So we have to endure stupidity, we have to consider how children are brought up so poorly, or how political predators, if you will, are allowed to take advantage of them.
But it doesn’t make this moment, for the author of the above piece, “… an eminently replaceable, untenured, gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD …”, any more palatable. The force and violence merely leads to more violence.
And the worst of it is that the academic institutions are those most likely to sympathize with the issues at the heart of the protest movement, most likely to favor changing society. It’s large segments of society which are most likely at fault.
If this isn’t just some bullshit infused into the gullible.
