Thursday, December 31, 2015

2015: The year of self-criticism for leftist speech codes?

By ROTW Guest Contributor: Mary Grabar

**This blog post was originally published December 23, 2015 at FrontPage Mag **

“The whole thing seemed symbolically incoherent,” she mused, claiming that most of her academic colleagues, including “feminists, progressives, minorities, and those who identify as gay or queer,” live “in fear of some classroom incident spiraling into professional disaster.”
Kipnis noted, “It’s astounding how aggressive students’ assertions of vulnerability have gotten in the past few years. Emotional discomfort is regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.”
Todd Gitlin, proud veteran leader of the 1960s “youth movement,” also criticized the youth, after some students at Columbia had proposed that syllabi contain “trigger warnings.”   He told them You Are Here to Be Disturbed.”  By “here” he meant the college classroom, a place where many veterans of the 1960s campus takeovers found themselves comfortably ensconced with tenure.  Gitlin himself is at Columbia.  In character with those of his generation, he referred back to the “changes for good” they had instituted, including recognizing that speech acts can lead to a hostile environment and accordingly changing word usage, for example, replacing “girl” with “woman,” and “Negro” with “African-American.”  But, Gitlin warned, that does not justify “censorious policy.” 
“While watching the illiberal left in action, it’s easy to forget that it was the political left that championed free speech in America.  During the Vietnam War era, the targeting of left-wing anti-war activists at the University of California-Berkeley for their dissent launched what came to be known as ‘The Free Speech Movement.’”    
“The origins of today’s student complaints are deep and in many cases intractable, and the more accustomed activists become to protesting, the more readily they will mobilize in response to new provocation.” 
Indeed. It is a wonder that left-wing professors should complain now that their intellectual progeny have turned the p.c. microscope on them, and increasing its magnification. 
“If the university is conceived as an agency of action to transform society in behalf of a cause, no matter how exalted, it loses its relative autonomy, imperils both its independence and objectivity, and subjects itself to retaliatory curbs and controls on the part of society on whose support and largesse it ultimately depends.”   
Rudd recounts, “This was a frightening image, even to us in SDS.  ‘What if every small group had the power to silence whomever they wanted—such as you?’ asked the old liberals.  ‘Isn’t there an absolute right to free speech?’” 
The eight-day occupation of Columbia University was repeated metaphorically in faculty votes in the ensuing decades. As dissenting professors like Sidney Hook retired they were replaced by hires who put up barricades to traditionalists. They even held workshops on how to get past the old “mossbacks” on hiring committees.  I experienced this as a graduate student at the University of Georgia in the 1990s.  The Chronicle of Higher Education gave space in the 1980s and 1990s to “Ms. Mentor” for a column in which she advised aspiring feminist academics on how to get through the academic gates with subterfuge that ranged from altering modes of dress to scholarly papers.  As a result, the humanities have been transformed.  History specialization that focuses on the environment, gender, and sexuality predominates.  My field, English, is now an auxiliary for gender and ethnic studies.

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