Posted on 11/12/2015 7:29:35 AM PST by SeekAndFind
It seems like every week there's a new horror story of political correctness run amok at some college campus.
A warning not to wear culturally insensitive Halloween costumes sparked an imbroglio at Yale, which went viral over the weekend. A lecturer asked in an e-mail, "Is there no room anymore for a child to be a little bit obnoxious . . . a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?"
Students went ballistic. When an administrator (who is the lecturer's spouse) defended free speech, some students wanted his head. One student wrote in a Yale Herald op-ed (now taken down): "He doesn't get it. And I don't want to debate. I want to talk about my pain."
Washington Post columnist (and Tufts professor) Daniel Drezner was initially horrified by the spectacle but ultimately backtracked. Invoking Friedrich Hayek's insights from "The Use of Knowledge in Society," Drezner cautions outside observers that "there is an awful lot of knowledge that is local in character, that cannot be culled from abstract principles or detached observers."
As a Hayek fanboy and champion of localism, I should be quite sympathetic. But this time, I think Drezner's initial reaction was closer to the mark. The notion that the Yale incident is an isolated one defies all the evidence.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, and Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, recently wrote a sweeping survey titled "The Coddling of the American Mind" for The Atlantic, in which they cataloged how students are being swaddled in an emotional cocoon.
Taco bars at sorority fundraisers are considered offensive. A group at Duke University deemed phrases such as "man up" too horrible to tolerate. And so on.
The suggestion that the tempest at Yale is an isolated incident reminds me of my favorite line from Thoreau: "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk."
So what is going on?
Well, a lot. Many conservatives want to put all the blame on political correctness or cultural Marxism. And though I think such ideologies certainly belong in the dock, political correctness is now quite old.
Lamentations about it were commonplace when I was in college 25 years ago. Does anyone, other than a few campus hotheads, actually believe universities are more intolerant, bigoted, and racist than they were a generation ago?
What has changed are the students. Yes, there has been a lot of ideological indoctrination in which kids are taught that taking offense gives them power. But, again, that idea is old. What's new is the way kids are being raised.
Consider play. Children are hardwired to play. That's how we learn. But what happens when play is micro-managed? St. Lawrence University professor Steven Horwitz argues that it undermines democracy.
Free play --tag in the schoolyard, pickup basketball at the park, etc. --is a very complicated thing. It requires young people to negotiate rules among themselves, without the benefit of some third-party authority figure. These skills are hugely important in life. When parents or teachers short-circuit that process by constantly intervening to stop bullying or just to make sure that everyone plays nice, Horwitz argues, "we are taking away a key piece of what makes it possible for free people to be peaceful, cooperative people by devising bottom-up solutions to a variety of conflicts."
The rise in "helicopter parenting" and the epidemic of "everyone gets a trophy" education are another facet of the same problem. We're raising millions of kids to be smart and kind, but also fragile.
And what happens when large numbers of these delicate little flowers are set free to navigate their way through life? They feel unsafe and demand "safe spaces." They feel threatened by uncomfortable ideas and demand "trigger warnings." They might even want written rules or contracts to help them negotiate sexual relations.
In other words, this is the generation the mandarins of political correctness have been waiting for.
--Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review.
Ahhhhhh... the students, always sheltered from all perceived 'harm', never challenged as children, always receiving a trophy, raised by hovering 'helicopter' parents.
Those victims??!!
Correct, 10 years after the fact my mother did not want me to go to Kent State. Number one, I really had no idea what had happened at Kent State as I was a child. Number 2, we lived in NE, Ohio and it was one of many state schools I was looking at.
What worries my a bit is that in a few years some of these delicate flowers and snowflakes will likely be elected to office, or hired as bureaucratic regulators.
My boss (from years ago in the AF) attended around a decade after the event, and related how almost no one on the campus talked of the event....it was like a forbidden topic, and the Chancellor had a strong thumb on all activities...nothing was approved unless it came from his own personal desk.
It's no wonder we have a generation of young people on college campuses who are afraid of Halloween costumes who can't tell the difference between truth and lies.
Comes the zombie apocalypse, unfortunatelly, they will be the first to be eaten.
Millennials —> SnowFlakes
Fatherless, entitled, ignorant, propagandized adult children getting their way.
this will not end well.
This is less about "fragile" kids than it is, as Rush says, an ongoing, unrelenting attack against America and the values that make her great. That in itself creates the victim culture.
Those “fragile kids” would have no problem
sending you, me, and anyone else who doesn’t
agree with them off to re-education camps.
Yep, I don’t believe this theory at all. The theories that Goldberg poo-poos are much more accurate. We didn’t get gay marriage because of “fragile kids.” We got it from decades of liberal indoctrination through the schools and media, coupled with the decline of religion, that keeps consolidating its gains year after year. The older generation is dying off while layers and layers of liberal youth get older and stack on top of the next generation, which they teach. And the more liberal the students start out, the further left the professors get to push them. This is a cultural shift.
Obama and Bernie Sanders are not viable candidates because of coddled children, they’re viable because leftism is a much bigger religion with more followers in the U.S. than it was 20 years ago. And its percentage of followers increases the younger the age group is.
“Smug in the wooly cotton brains of infancy”
And you know they will be the first to convert to Islam as the latest 'movement'.
As I mentioned on another thread...we are now living under an ancient Chinese curse:
"May you live in Intertesting Times"
The kids who are screaming the F-word at their administrators and demanding they be fired are not weak and coddled. They’re fire-breathing radical leftists. Yes, they’re arrogant, spoiled brats with a sense of entitlement. But there’s nothing fragile about them. These aren’t people who want to be coddled and protected. They’re leftists who want to dominate and control everyone else. These PC, anti-speech policies are NOT coming from people who want to be censored. They’re coming from the beasts who want to do the censoring and control everyone else.
pathological oversensitivity + stuck on stupid + can't handle the truth + pathological obsession with offended card, political correctness card, victim card, race card, oppression card, and blame game = assault on free speech by post modernist libtards
Interesting, your former boss and I must be around the same age. I ended up down the road at YSU.
Well, I don’t see the younger ones doing any better. We are kind of going into the second generation of these wimpy kids.
Appears to me that many "breathing radical leftists" may just be outside agitators. Same as the 1960's. Was on campus when either Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin was on campus...swearing up a storm, literally spitting as he shouted...but for the most part, the 'fly over country' occupants did little to participate.IMHO, just that the present coddled students just go along with the latest 'movement'. Sure there are some that are caught up in the moment and others may have been successfully recruited by these outside agitators. Remember the occupy movements of a few years ago...most proven to be outside anarchists. But these onsite students are products of the decades old education system. Boys/men have been emasculated since the 1990's.
I agree the last two generations are ingrained with an enormous sense of entitlement but for themselves, not necessarily to control authority. They exist within their self contained cell phone/social media world. I do acknowledge that with present day social media, young minds are so malleable. Outside billionaires (NWO) are an ever encroaching disease on our way of life.
The map is dated for 2012. Certainly it is FAR different today.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.