Why College Professors Are Afraid of Their Students
There is a new strain of fear on college campuses.
Ed Morrissey explains in a new column at the Fiscal Times.
Why College Professors Are Afraid to Teach Millennials
Hungry for love and it’s feeding time, Alice Cooper wrote in his 1991 classic song, “Feed My Frankenstein.” Academia has created its own Frankenstein with its speech codes, groupthink enforcement, and discouraging of dissent. This Frankenstein isn’t hungry for love – it’s hungry for power. And academics themselves have belatedly discovered that they’re on the menu.
The most recent to find himself not the last up against the wall in this anti-free speech revolution is “Edward Schlosser,” a professor writing under a pseudonym at Vox, for reasons that become apparent almost immediately. Schlosser admits that he lives in fear of students who share his political point of view, and has to change his curriculum continuously to keep from running afoul of their potential for hurt feelings.
The relationship between students and teachers has changed, he says, thanks to the same hypersensitivity that Academia uses to silence dissent and debate. “The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective,” Schlosser writes, “giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.”
Read it all at the link below.
Comments
Very odd article by Morrissey. The actual problem is grossly misdiagnosed.
The precious snowflakes themselves aren’t the problem; even when feeling at their most rabidly PC, all they can do is grouse. They can’t fire anybody; they’re not forming mobs with pitchforks and torches to drive professors out of town.
The problem is administrators; they’re the ones doing the firing, for purely PC and anti-intellectual reasons.
Of course the guy who wrote the original piece in Vox is an intellectual pig; he shouldn’t be on any faculty anywhere. Consider this beauty:
“What about Fannie and Freddie?” he asked.
This was said in his class by the student who filed the only official complaint against him.
The prof’s spin, while being questioned about the complaint:
The student’s question had been about whether or not the economic collapse was caused by poor black people.
That’s not even apples vs. oranges. But it is a standard Leftoid tactic; when you can’t deal with the question, pretend that it’s actually a different question, and answer that.
It’s hard to believe that either the prof himself, or the administrator to whom he’s making excuses, could possibly be so dumb that they’d miss this bit of cheap razzle-dazzle. The conclusion; they both know it’s crapola, and both want it to succeed. They’re colluding in the Grand Plan to reduce American “higher learning” to a useless propaganda mill. The prof’s complaint is that rather than demolishing learning and rational discourse, the monster is in danger of demolishing him.
History repeats. Early 20th century history makes clear the bewilderment of good Bolsheviks, Comrades from the early days, who could never understand why Uncle Joe’s police eventually came after them too.
The remainder of the Vox column continues in the same vein; “ideas can and should be judged both by the strength of their logic and by the cultural weight afforded to their speaker’s identity.”
Outstanding. The Grievance Industry, in a nutshell. But it gets better –
“Feminists and anti-racists recognize that identity does matter. This is indisputable.”
The school would be in much better shape if the students did chase after people like this with pitchforks.
“The problem is administrators; they’re the ones doing the firing, for purely PC and anti-intellectual reasons.”
Absolutely.