Greg Lukianoff, writing in Reason:
In 2007 a student working his way through college was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book in public. Some of his co-workers had been offended by the book’s cover, which included pictures of men in white robes and peaked hoods along with the tome’s title, Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The student desperately explained that it was an ordinary history book, not a racist tract, and that it in fact celebrated the defeat of the Klan in a 1924 street fight. Nonetheless, the school, without even bothering to hold a hearing, found the student guilty of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”
The incident would seem far-fetched in a Philip Roth novel—or a Philip K. Dick novel, for that matter—but it actually happened to Keith John Sampson, a student and janitor at Indiana University–Purdue University Indiana-polis. Despite the intervention of both the American Civil Liberties Union and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE, where I am president), the case was hardly a blip on the media radar for at least half a year after it took place.
[…]
For many, the topic of political correctness feels oddly dated, like a debate over the best Nirvana album. There is a popular perception that P.C. was a battle fought and won in the 1990s. Campus P.C. was a hot new thing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, but by now the media have come to accept it as a more or less harmless, if unfortunate, byproduct of higher education.
But it is not harmless. With so many examples of censorship and administrative bullying, a generation of students is getting four years of dangerously wrongheaded lessons about both their own rights and the importance of respecting the rights of others. Diligently applying the lessons they are taught, students are increasingly turning on each other, and trying to silence fellow students who offend them. With schools bulldozing free speech in brazen defiance of legal precedent, and with authoritarian restrictions surrounding students from kindergarten through graduate school, how can we expect them to learn anything else?
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Is it just me, or does this whole article read a bit, you know, racist…?
Let me know what you think. Polling is open in the comments.
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related: deja vu-er (h/t DarthRove, via Reynolds)
Sometimes, I feel as though I’m the blog equivalent of Crack the Sky…
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update: Let me add one brief observation. While I agree with Lukianoff that the P.C. impulse “often has nothing to do with left or right,” I disagree with his conclusion that, because left-wing protests are often disproportionately affected by censorship, political correctness as a linguistic imperative cannot be tethered to leftist ideology.
What Lukianoff is arguing is that because the ideology that creates speech codes is more often used against left wing protesters, this somehow serves as proof that the ideological impulse behind the speech codes cannot be left wing.
This doesn’t follow.
I have been critical of those on the conservative side of the political divide who deploy (whether naturally or conveniently) certain linguistic ideas that have been demonstrably supported by leftist intellectuals — ideas that have, by repetition and indoctrination, insinuated their way into our current epistemological paradigm both for what constitutes “interpretation” and where meaning is located in the communicative chain. But just because these ideas are being deployed by some on the right doesn’t make them “conservative,” just as their invocation and marshaling against individuals on the left wouldn’t make them any less leftist in their ideological and linguistic assumptions.
The political inevitabilities that follow from certain assertions about how language functions and who controls it — assertions embraced by the progressive Left as an integral part of its ideological foundation — I have often documented on this site. That self-professed leftists can become ensnared in their own linguistic web doesn’t change the nature of the web itself. All it does is reinforce the fact that, for progressives, the individual can and must be readily sacrificed to the will of the collective.
RAAAAACIST! With all five As, of course. It was written by a non-Leftist, it’s racist. QED.
No one has ever suffered more indignities than this middle aged white man. Except for me. I should smite those motherfuckers who did that to him.
Jesus? Son? What have I told you about hanging around blogs and annoying nice folks? Get back here This! Instant!
And watch your mouth, mister, or I’ll smack the black off your face.
I don’t blame Jesus for needing to get away from SEK’s tripe every now and then. Slumming it? Sure. But it feels so good to walk around in sandals for a change.
Yo, JC! C’mere gimme kiss!
She’s a Dancer Crack the Sky or Robots For Ronnie Crack the Sky? Great fucking album. You are the John Palumbo of Protein Wisdom. Poast moar.
It’s not censorship when the left… oh fuck it.
Let’s nuke the site from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
That must be the gay Jesus Elton John was talking about.
Oh, wait, Elton mentioned highly intelligent. Never mind.
I have a question. How are left-wing protests disproportionately affected by censorship? Unless there is some weighting to the word “protest”, I would think the right is disproportionately affected by PC speech censorship.
Jesus Christ, shut the door! What, were you born in a barn?
LBascom
IMHO I believe the lefties by quantity protest more. So, you’re right. They are “disproportionately” affected, it’s just that most college non-leftists usually keep a low profile and count the days until they get out.
I always lose my head over shit like this.
And I definitely did not look like Paulie Shore.
Lefties are censored more because their protests are all about Speaking Truth2Power™, which, since they control the elite institutions and — for now — both houses of Congress and the Melanin-Deficient House, means they have to make all their Truth2Power™ protests a lot less truthy, and aim them at people that don’t actually have power.
AND IT’S ALL THE RETHUGLIKKKANS’ FAULT for, um, not having power.
What is PC depends on who is in power, and can use that power against others.
PC – more than McCarthyism ever was.
BTW – Right Wing News linked to a video of a college professor. He seized a student’s laptop because he didn’t like students working on other stuff during his lectures.
Then he brought in liquid nitrogen, froze the laptop, and shattered it. Do not know if it was true or just a stunt.
Repeat that warning. I do not know if it is true or just a stunt.
If true – asshole professor needs to be fired and observed for the rest of his natural life. If a stunt – well, some observation is still required due to a hearty WTF? being around.
Most of the examples of squelched Lefty speech seem to be less content driven than Leftie students applying their bullshit to the Leftie administrators, who don’t put up with that sort of thing. In other words, if the same speech was directed to BushMcChimpyHalliburtonFundiesDarthCheney, (i.e. Leftist content) I doubt it would have been discouraged.
Also, I wonder how much of the censorship of Leftie speech is really just overaggressive use of the free speech zones, which, if reasonable, could be legitimate time/place/manner restrictions. Leftists tend to blur the line between the freedom to speak (protected) and the demand to be heard by people who don’t want to listen – and therefore their approach seems to be designed to restrict the rights of others to go about their business in peace while ignoring them. (I was once stuck on the Atlantic Expressway in the summer heat as a kid while Al Sharpton “protested” in such a way as to block the weekend Jersey shore traffic from reaching its destination) If I was blocked from entering the cafeteria or something and eating lunch because a group of spoiled dreadlocked weirdos wanted to raise awareness about some silly Left wing cause, I’d sure want the administration to get those fucks out of my way and into some place where I could avoid them.
I just stopped by, after not really checking out this blog for months, and you’re still obsessed.
And you’re still an opponent of the free and open exchange of ideas.
I’m sorry you’re not doing well financially (this is sincere), but if you’re going to pose as an intellectual supporter of free speech, you can’t delete and distort and lie about people’s comments on your site, and threaten to fulfill your graphic violent fantasies.
Oh, and you’re an overwriter. Get to the point. The stuff you’re arguing is too banal and obvious to require all this inflated diction.
You forgot that he also still attracts the most vapid trolls on the internet.
There’s nothing quite like being told to “get to the point” by a ponderous douchebag.
Wow. I got my blockquoting completely backward.
All of which is kinda sorta implied in what I said, if you think about it.
This has got to be some kind of prank, doesn’t it? I mean, what thinking being could write something like that and not be absolutely cracking up at his keyboard?
This has got to be some kind of prank, doesn’t it? I mean, what thinking being could write something like that and not be absolutely cracking up at his keyboard?
Some poseur who thinks banging a Russian hooker qualifies him to bloviate on all and sundry?
I think it was two Russian hookers, actually.
Left on Left hostility has been a feature of the Left since the days of the guillotine. Bolsheviks > Mensheviks > Social Revolutionaries > etc.
“Split, split, and split again. Split at all stages of the movement! Go on splitting until you find yourself a tiny clique–but nonetheless the Central Committee. Those left in it may be the most mediocre, the most insignificant people, but if they are united in a common obedience you can achieve anything!”
— “Lenin”, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin in Zurich
I’m sorry you’re not doing well financially (this is sincere), but if you’re going to pose as an intellectual supporter of free speech, you can’t delete and distort and lie about people’s comments on your site, and threaten to fulfill your graphic violent fantasies.
BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
[deep breath, wipe tears]
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!1!1!
::snort:::guffaw:::
I think it was two Russian hookers, actually.
Yes, the extra $10 made all the difference. My bad.
Lou Tolstoy is not thor.
He’s worse. He’s earnest.
So let me respond earnestly. If you don’t like my overwriting, don’t read it. If you don’t like it — yet you feel compelled to comment — I’d begin reexamining who, precisely, is “obsessed.”
You’re welcome.
Oh. And I should add that I can’t recall “Leo Tolstoy” even once engaging arguments made in a given post.
Instead, he mostly just drops in to tell people how disappointed he is with either their tone, or subject matter, or syntax, or what have you — juxtaposing against such unfortunate lapses in merit his own implied proficiencies and genius.
He’s a giver, you see. And what he gives — without fail — is himself, as an example of proper humility, diction, and attitude.
Where would I be without him?
I’m deeply disappointed that Leo is commenting in that most mongrel of tongues, English.
He should be saying everything in the original Russian.
Crack the Sky.
Brings back sweet memories of my college pot-smoking days.
Let’s lift our hearts up, let’s let our hair down,
Rangers at Midnight cleanin’ out all of the town.
Where would I be without him?
Your eyeballs would get less exercise, without the rolling and all.