Americans have by now witnessed the frantic disruptions deployed by social justice agitators
to shut down their opposition. But a larger question looms over their never-ending campaign
for equality: who mobilized these fanatical students? Who fed them the radical doctrines
they screech into the sky? And how is that universities, once held to a high esteem by
most Americans, are now met with such suspicion and scorn?
Not until the last two years has the public's opinion of universities diverged so radically
across party lines. In just 2015, 54% of Republicans believed that higher education had a positive
impact on the country. Though Republicans generally lag behind Democrat support of higher
education, the figure did reflect a bipartisan support universities enjoyed.
And yet today, the public perception of these institutions have deeply soured among Republicans — as
58% now believe that the doctrines of higher education are hurting the country. This stands
in stark contrast to the 71% of Democrats who approve of them. The knee-jerk reaction
among pompous cosmopolitans may be to take this data as yet more evidence of conservative
anti-intellectualism. Among the very academics who whittle away the hours rejecting basic
evolutionary biology, it's taken as a given that conservatives and their supposed anti-evolution
biases simply can't tolerate truths that transcend their backwards way of thinking.
But there are a few factors that render this deeply flawed understanding of the modern
university utterly null. In reality, the modern university has both consciously and unconsciously
become an environment hostile to diversity. That is, the only diversity that makes an
actual difference: viewpoint diversity. The idea that the institutions of higher learning
are becoming monopolized by progressives isn't just the opinion of Republican partisans.
It is corroborated by all of the available data on this rapidly worsening crisis. In
the case of history departments, there are 33.5 registered Democrat professors to every
1 Republican and three times the number of Marxists as Republicans in the social sciences.
For comparison, in the 1960s the Democrat Republican divide was only 2.7 to 1
In a rich bit of irony, many leap to the ill-considered conclusion that conservatives' unscientific
biases account for their underrepresentation in academia. Of course, this disregards all
manner unscientific doctrines much of the humanities have adopted and its long documented
quarrels with evolutionary biology. Much to the alarm of their natural science colleagues,
humanities professors entirely dismiss the reality that evolution plays a role in human
behavior. As a consequence, they label anyone who accepts this reality as "adherents to
'biological essentialism'" — the idea that all human behavior can be reduced
to biologically determined explanations. This is an argument that no serious biologist makes.
In fact, nobody who recognizes the role evolution plays in our behavior thinks all of it can
be reduced to biology, but this is the brush with which they tar anyone who makes this
acknowledgement. This is done to legitimize the humanities' social construct view of
human nature. The storied history of the humanities' frustration
with science is the subject of much discussion and literature within academia. But the aforementioned
may serve as a window into the world of scientific denialism that appears to be replacing evangelical
creationism with social justice orthodoxy. When you take into consideration that creationism
carries no currency within academia, you begin realize that radical social justice faculties
pose a far greater threat to the integrity of our educational institutions. Radical left-wing
science deniers who control the humanities actually enlist students in their warped idea
of an ideological war, while the trope of the creationist, evolution-denying conservative
teacher has long been relegated to history. Instead of exposing their ideas to criticism,
our institutions of thought have taken it upon themselves to march down the path of
radically militant egalitarianism. While not only ridiculing, but deriding the value of
Christian teachings, they have cloaked their own social theories in a quasi-religious orthodoxy.
While the punishments may not be as harsh as the Catholic Church of centuries' past,
heretics nonetheless tremble at any hint of faculty or student retaliation. These retaliations
have already come to a head on many campuses, (Mizzou and Evergreen), but will only grow
more systematic as older faculty retire and are replaced by a new breed of radicalized
academics. From the earliest stages of education, these younger academics themselves have been
run through the very same social justice centric system they will now be charged to administer
and further develop. Within the History courses themselves, "the
overwhelming majority of America's most prestigious institutions do not require — even
the students who major in history — to take a single course on United States history
or government." Even while these academics instruct their students to tear down a so-called
unjust system, they refuse to teach them the basics of its history or the structure of
its government — largely because they self-admittedly don't see the value in learning
it themselves. Consequently, these students are deliberately kept ignorant of the very
country they are taught to hold with such disdain.
This isn't by accident; it's by design. This much is demonstrated by the budding movement
to replace traditional civics departments with the harmless-enough sounding "New Civics."
As opposed to traditional civics, which aims to educate college students on the basics
of American civic institutions and traditions, New Civics openly broadcasts their goal to
create activists out of students. As a consequence, these New Civics departments sidestep their
obligation to actually educate them in the process. If this is in fact that case, it
can be read as nothing short of malpractice. A January report by the National Association
of Scholars identified several case-studies of universities that now have New Civics bureaucracies
that dwarf traditional civics education. And this problem only appears to be getting
worse. It should come as no surprise that the few conservatives represented in academic
circles tend to be older. This begs the question of who's next in line to take their place.
Today, professors under the age of 36 are divided at 22.7 Democrat to 1 Republican.
Though Democrats and Republicans have always had strong differences, they were reconcilable.
But the unprecedented divergence of their beliefs in 2017 paints a nightmarish scenario
for the university. It's no coincidence that while in the last few years higher education
has become such a partisan issue, the political divide itself has widened into a proverbial
Grand Canyon. This means that not only is one point of view
so grossly overrepresented, but that the substance of what is believed is more polarizing. A
positive feedback loop has been created by which those on the radical-left feel morally
bound to obstruct aspiring academics who view the same issues from a different temperamental
vantage. This, of course, stems from the academic left's Kyriarchal view that other views
are tantamount to actual violence. This far left feedback loop (FLFLtm) within academia
is ultimately fueled by the belief that political opponents are not only wrong, but evil for
holding the beliefs they do. The epidemic of authoritarian social justice
orthodoxy isn't remotely constrained to the United States. It has begun to spread
across the Anglophone academic world. In a recent and flagrant example at the Wilfred
Laurier University in Canada, a grad student by the name of Lindsay Shepherd was censured
and interrogated by her Supervising Professor, Nathan Rambukkana. This was for her crime
of playing a 5 minute clip of Professor Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto. During
the course of the panel's interrogation, Lindsay Shepherd revealed that she disagrees
with Peterson and was only hoping to represent both sides fairly. For this, she was told
that she should have presented the clip "critically," as in, prefacing it by spoonfeeding the students
that Peterson's views are contemptible and transphobic.
In a twist of irony, Professor Rambukkana patently intimidated the student by claiming
that she was in violation of the Canadian Law Bill C-16. The very same law that Dr.
Peterson was criticizing in the video that landed Shepherd before the Orwellian panel.
In fact, Peterson's primary concern is that the bill would compel certain forms of speech.
This is exactly what unfolded over the course of the panel. Shepherd got into trouble, not
just for featuring Peterson, but for failing to criticize him before doing so. Not only
would it be malpractice on the part of any educator to form the opinions of their students
for them, but it is textbook tyranny to force one to express that opinion. These academics
had become the epitome of the slow crawl into censorious totalitarianism that Peterson was
trying to warn progressive Canadians of in the video she featured.
Ultimately, Rambukkana concludes that to play the words of a tenured professor from an esteemed
university is equivalent to playing a Hitler speech. Shepherd had inflicted "violence"
upon the students. This exercise in authoritarian censorship of ideas can serve as a prime case-study
into the ideology that motivates this brand of academia. So convicted of their righteousness,
to even think about an alternate point of view is to support it. From the perspective
of radically left-wing academics, the function of the university is not to investigate, debate
and discuss ideas, but to flush wrong thoughts out of their students' minds. In their pursuit
of a student body free of bad thoughts, they force scholars to conform and paint those
challenging their biases like Shepherd as engaging in hatred or even violence. This
results in an environment toxic not only for conservatives, but anybody who even attempts
to deviate from their orthodoxy. The result of this decentralized academic
machine working toward the same end is predictable — groupthink completely insulated from corrective information.
If every member of a given university's faculty is in alignment, the flaws in their
reasoning will remain unchecked. Even if you don't like differing perspectives, there
is no denying that every perspective should be subject to rigorous scrutiny so that only
the most thoroughly considered ideas survive. If we fail to seriously re-establish the proper
function of universities as being the workshop of ideas, the end result is that free speech
will slowly be erased — the relic of a dead civilization. After all, when the next
generation of politicians, lawyers, and every other stripe of authority inherits the reins
of power beholden to these authoritarian ideas, we will traverse down the vary same path that
has led all too many ordinary men to do what was once unthinkable — all the while
convicted of what their warped, distorted lexicon calls justice.
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