All right, you're laughing at those silly college
kids carrying political correctness into la-la land. Me too. And then I realize that, to be
consistent with what I wrote in my last post, I have to want us all to rejoice.
What, you're not laughing at what's going on in universities
now? Maybe you're not up. Let me refresh you, out of the
September (2015) issue of The Atlantic:
* During the 2014–15 school
year the deans and department chairs at ten University of California system
schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions
with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included:
“America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person
should get the job.”
* By some campus guidelines,
it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were
you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American.
I hear
laughter, but I'm not sure about the rejoicing.
*
Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis found a white student
guilty of racial harassment for reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the
Klan. The book honored student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan when it
marched on Notre Dame in 1924. Nonetheless, the picture of a Klan rally on the
book’s cover offended at least one of the student’s co-workers (he was a
janitor as well as a student), and that was enough for a guilty finding by the
university’s Affirmative Action Office.
* Last year, at the University
of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, an event called Hump Day, which would have allowed
people to pet a camel, was abruptly canceled. Students had created a Facebook
group where they protested the event for animal cruelty, for being a waste of
money, and for being insensitive to people from the Middle East. The group organizing the event
announced on its Facebook page that the event would be canceled because the
“program [was] dividing people and would make for an uncomfortable and possibly
unsafe environment.”
Any rejoicing yet? I don't hear it.
Well, let's try these.
* Last fall, Omar Mahmood, a student at the University of Michigan, wrote
a satirical column for a conservative student publication, The Michigan
Review, poking fun at what he saw as a campus tendency to perceive
microaggressions in just about anything. Mahmood was also employed at the
campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily. The Daily’s editors said
that the way Mahmood had “satirically mocked the experiences of fellow Daily
contributors and minority communities on campus … created a conflict of
interest.” The Daily terminated Mahmood after he described the incident
to two Web sites, The College Fix and The Daily Caller. A group of women later
vandalized Mahmood’s doorway with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages
such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.”
* At
the University of Central Florida in 2013 Hyung-il Jung, an accounting
instructor, was suspended after a student reported that Jung had made a
threatening comment during a review session. Jung explained to the Orlando
Sentinel that the material he was reviewing was difficult, and he’d noticed
the pained look on students’ faces, so he made a joke. “It looks like you guys
are being slowly suffocated by these questions,” he recalled saying. “Am I on a
killing spree or what?”
After the student reported Jung’s
comment, a group of nearly 20 others e-mailed the UCF administration explaining
that the comment had clearly been made in jest. Nevertheless, UCF suspended
Jung from all university duties and demanded that he obtain written certification
from a mental-health professional that he was “not a threat to [himself] or to
the university community” before he would be allowed to return to campus.
Well, if
those examples, from "The Coddling of the American Mind," by Greg
Lukianoff, a constitutional lawyer, and Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist,
don't test you, maybe this, by Caitlin Flanagan ("That's Not Funny,"
in the same issue) will. She's
summarizing the conditions student organizations set for stand-ups:
They wanted comedy that could not trigger or
upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly
scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on
campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would
fall on him like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to
toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep—not
text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke.
And I want you to be glad for such a weirdo? I can't believe it. Yet I'm forced to. Here's the paragraph from my last post
that forces me:
In the eighteenth century
Christian love, with the help of affluence, made its breakthrough. Care for the widow and orphan became
care for the imprisoned, the enslaved, the mentally ill, and the incapacitated,
as well as for the closer loved ones.
The Age of Sensibility, but of rough categories. Now love makes a leap. Care for the lesser capacitated, the
mentally fragile, the vulnerable, the marginal, the potentially oppressed, the
incipiently persecuted. The Age of
Sensitivity, with finer categories.
Powering it is the vision of a slippery slope, with Auschwitz at the
bottom. The victims and their
terrible victimizers. You put
yourself on it by demeaning, depreciating, dismissing people different from you.
That's how our great-grandparents started, and that's how we could start. Catch yourself early.
How
early is too early? Flanagan's
imagined kid is way too early, but real cases are not far behind him, and my
memory of the casual anti-semitism of my parents and their friends in the thirties,
of their assumptions in business dealings, of their easy jokes, and of the
resemblance of that to the more sophisticated anti-semitism of educated,
literary Europe, tells me to err on the safe side. Catch it early.
The slippery slope is not just a fallacy in logic; out in the world it's
real.
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