The New Activism of Campus Life

The professor who says, “But then, at some point, it became really solipsistic” really gets to my issues with the rise of ‘Social Justice’ politics this decade. As a non-​white guy, I understand and sometimes agree with claims like: “Your literary canon&#x2F;​history&#x2F;​point of view&#x2F;​etc. is rooted in Western hegemony.” That’s a claim that can be analyzed. It’s another to just say: “You’re [Various Identifier Here]-Splaining.” What can someone really do with that? At that point the claim becomes pure politics, you have to just support the person making the claim or not.<p>(Not to get on a soapbox but the theatre prof joking “I’m thinking, Oh, God! I’m cast in one of my least favorite plays of all time, ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller!” gets to another issue I have. People don’t seem understand that the tools they use to oppose others should be applied with proportionality and good judgement, if for no other reason than that in another circumstance those same tools can be used against them as well. In general I think when people are ensconced in any ideology, they begin to overlook Kant’s reminder to “treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.”)

It&#x27;s great that people are exploring themselves and their world in college, but to be frank, I avoided those people along with the hard partiers, and everyone else who wasn&#x27;t really at school to work and learn.

Remember how Occupy America didn&#x27;t have an easily articulated set of politics? It was mostly an expression of anger at the current state of things? I think this is something similar, an acknowledgement that things are fucked up but no knowledge of where to go from that statement.<p>That seems really similar to this. I sympathize with what I&#x27;m reading here. Trigger warnings, for instance, seem like a good idea: we do the same thing for our movies (Deadpool is rated R, maybe your kids will have a Bad Time) and our food (has tons of carbs! lots of processed sugar!). And I think there&#x27;s value in giving people the choice in what adversity they face day-to-day if they&#x27;re already struggling (people with suicidal ideation don&#x27;t need a lot of exposure to more suicidal ideation).<p>OTOH, I <i>really</i> agree with what Wendy Hyman from the article says. When you bend that far backwards you end up on the far right, circumscribing what people can think or say because you think you know better. For instance, outrage&#x2F;call-out culture has made it a crime to be <i>called</i> a racist, so now everyone doesn&#x27;t want to talk about race for fear of being <i>called</i> a racist. But if we can&#x27;t talk meaningfully about race as an issue then it won&#x27;t ever be untangled. It&#x27;s okay to be angry about this stuff but using that as a foundation to halt all discussions forever just guarantees that the problem won&#x27;t go away.<p>My mom is a Chicano activist and she&#x27;s always warned about what she calls the &quot;más que tus&quot;: people who used their identities and politics as cards in a game of one-upmanship rather than as ways of understanding and ultimately changing the status quo. I&#x27;m worried that we&#x27;re feeding that now in our search for a progressive means forward.

<p><pre><code> Hyman started college in the eighties. Her generation, she said, protested against Tipper Gore for wanting to put warning labels on records. &quot;My students want warning labels on class content, and I feel-I don&#x27;t even know how to articulate it,&quot; she said. &quot;Part of me feels that my leftist students are doing the right wing&#x27;s job for it.&quot; </code></pre> The current generation entering college in the US has grown up in a time of authoritarianism-as-the-norm. Parents that hover too close. Schools with zero tolerance policies. A nation that goes to war against people who they shouldn&#x27;t, when they should be pursuing criminal investigations and charges. Torture as the norm. Surveillance as the norm.<p>It&#x27;s not terribly surprising, then, that the current generation of leftists don&#x27;t see liberal democracy as a solution. Rather, they expect a continuation of what they&#x27;ve grown up with, but applied to their particular ideological preferences.

SJWs have done more to set the race discussion back in this country than anything else in recent history. Identity politics is ruining this country.

David Sacks and Peter Thiel wrote an excellent book &quot;The Diversity Myth&quot;. They report on how corrosive impact have certain ideologies on higher education and academic freedom. I recommend to read it just to get a boarder view into the problem no matter on what side you are now.

Note to self: Avoid contact with Oberlin grads at all costs.

So called &quot;progressive&quot; campuses have become mini Orwellian dystopias because of demented leftist ideology run amok.

&gt; “You include Black and other students of color in the institution and mark them with the words ‘equity, inclusion and diversity,’ ” it said, “when in fact this institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy.”<p>Black is written with capital b in the middle of sentence like some title, while white is not. Nice to see that one race is finally being recognized as superior over the other. New &quot;Aryan&quot; race. Can&#x27;t see anything wrong neither with it, nor all the other very meaningful and truthful terms told by this intelligent man.

New activisim? Last time I checked, Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth with his activism against the prevailing politics, was tried and sentenced to death. So, um, new?<p>Granted I don&#x27;t think this particular strain of activism has such high stakes, but come on, impressionable youth-becoming-adults is a really lucrative demographic for &quot;buy in&quot; to lots of different ideologies (see also: &quot;extremism&quot; in the name of one cause or another). Those flames tend to burn out rather on the quick side, personal experience as my reference point.