{"id":8475,"date":"2015-06-12T05:49:29","date_gmt":"2015-06-12T12:49:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8475"},"modified":"2015-06-12T05:49:29","modified_gmt":"2015-06-12T12:49:29","slug":"progressive-academics-shocked-that-their-creatures-turn-on-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/progressive-academics-shocked-that-their-creatures-turn-on-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Progressive Academics Shocked That Their Creatures Turn on Them"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When the cult of sensitivity begins to eat its children.<\/em><\/h3>\n

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

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Photo via FrontPage Magazine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Recently several progressive professors have publicly complained that their students are hounding them for failing to consider their tender sensibilities by straying beyond the p.c. orthodoxy on sexual assault, sex identity, linguistic correctness, and a whole host of other progressive shibboleths. Northwestern \u201cfeminist\u201d professor Laura Kipnis found herself in a Title IX star chamber for an article she wrote decrying the immaturity of her legally adult students. Over at Vox, another progressive confessed (anonymously, reminding us that academics are an invertebrate species) he was so \u201cscared\u201d and \u201cterrified\u201d of his \u201cliberal\u201d students that he self-censors his comments in class and has changed his reading list.<\/p>\n

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These incidents follow the complaints of other progressives like Kirsten Powers and Jonathan Chait that the intolerant ideology at the heart of progressivism is now getting out of hand\u2013\u2013something that many of us have been writing about for nearly 3 decades. That these progressives should now be shocked at such intolerance and persecution after decades of speech codes, disruptions of conservative speakers, campus inquisitions which ignore Constitutional rights, cancellations of commencement speakers, and ideological litmus tests imposed on new hires and curricula, bespeaks not principle, but rather indignation that now they are on the receiving end of the bullying and harassment long inflicted on conservatives and people of faith.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the campus intolerance progressives are now whining about is the child of the progressive ideology many of the complainers still embrace. Modern progressivism is at heart grievance politics, the core of which is not universal principle, but identity predicated on being a victim of historical crimes like sexism and racism, and on suffering from wounding slights defined as such by the subjective criteria of the now privileged victim who is beyond judgment or criticism. Once acknowledged by the state, victim status can then be leveraged into greater political, institutional, and social power. The mechanism of this leverage is the state and federal laws that empower students whose feelings have been hurt by their teachers\u2019 challenging or provocative questions and ideas.<\/p>\n

Sexual harassment law, for example, with its \u201cintimidating, hostile or offensive work environment\u201d language, guarantees that subjective, irrational, or even lunatic standards of what constitutes an \u201coffense\u201d will be used to justify limits on academic freedom and expression, and to punish transgressors. The overbroad and elastic language of Title IX, the law used to haul Kipnis before a campus tribunal, likewise has invited subjective and fuzzy charges from anybody who feels that \u201con the basis of sex\u201d she has been \u201cexcluded from participation in\u201d or \u201cdenied the benefits of\u201d or \u201csubjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.\u201d Finally, the Department of Education\u2019s 2011 \u201cdear colleague\u201d letter, which instructed schools investigating sexual assault complaints to use the \u201cmore likely than not\u201d or \u201cpreponderance of the evidence\u201d standard of evidence rather than the \u201cclear and convincing\u201d one, ensures that any complaint no matter how preposterous or irrational will have to be investigated, and the guilty punished.<\/p>\n

Yet the obsession with the victim and his suffering, and the need for everybody else to cater to his sensitivity, reflects wider cultural trends. Robert Frost recognized this development in 1942 when he spoke of \u201cthe tenderer-than-thou\/Collectivist regimenting love\/with which the modern world is being swept.\u201d In this therapeutic vision, the cultural ideal now is Sensitive Man, who revels in his superiority to others based on his sensitivity to suffering, and his public displays of what Alan Bloom called \u201cconspicuous compassion\u201d for state-anointed victims. Consequently, as Charles Sykes writes in A Nation of Victims<\/em>\u2013\u2013which in 1992 detailed the cultural shifts that have led to today\u2019s hyper-sensitive and litigious students\u2013\u2013\u201cOne must be attuned to the feelings of others and adapt oneself to the kaleidoscopic shades of grievance, injury, and ego that make up the subjective sensibilities of the \u2018victim.\u2019 Everyone must now accommodate themselves to the sensitivity of the self, whose power is based not on force or even shared ideology but on changeable and perhaps arbitrary and exaggerated \u2018feelings.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In my 1999 book Plagues of the Mind,<\/em> I drew out the implications for higher education of this cult of sensitivity, which has made \u201cinfants of people, particularly college students, who are led to believe that the world should be a place where they will never feel bad or suffer disappointment, where they will be coddled and indulged and mothered, and where their already overinflated estimation of themselves will be continually reinforced . . . No one seems concerned about what will happen to these adults when they have to enter the real world and discover that it can be a cold, uncaring place where their anxieties and psychic fears are not the prime order of business.\u201d Sixteen years later Kipnis made a similar point in her article when she observed, \u201cThe myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes [of sexual behavior] are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Kipnis\u2019s troubles show, today this obsession with the feelings of students and their demands that they be protected from anything unpleasant or \u201churtful\u201d has manifested itself in the hysteria over an alleged epidemic of sexual assault of female college students. (Professor Kipnis got into trouble for calling this phenomenon \u201csexual paranoia.\u201d) Yet this is nothing new either. In the late 90s commentators were warning of the \u201cNew Puritanism\u201d and the \u201cnew Victorianism,\u201d the title of Rene Denfeld\u2019s 1995 analysis of this corruption of feminism. This phenomenon is a m\u00e9lange of intolerance for inherently predatory males, the proliferation of \u201ccodes\u201d governing courtship and sexual encounters in order to protect fragile women, the ever expanding list of prohibited words that might traumatize the \u201coppressed,\u201d the establishment of tribunals judging the accused without the benefit of Constitutional protections, and the noisy protests, shaming, and invective like those aimed at Professor Kipnis, all in order to enforce orthodoxy through fear and self-censorship a la Professor \u201cSchlosser,\u201d the pseudonym of the poltroonish professor mentioned earlier.<\/p>\n

Worst of all, the spread of this intolerance throughout universities makes impossible the very purpose of higher education: to broaden students\u2019 minds by allowing what Matthew Arnold called \u201cthe free play of the mind on all subjects\u201d and by familiarizing them with the \u201cbest which has been thought and said in the world.\u201d That ideal has now become scarce on our campuses. As Sykes wrote over 20 years ago, \u201cOnce feelings are established as the barometer of acceptable behavior, speech (and, by extension, thought) becomes only as free as the most sensitive group will permit.\u201d This is precisely the state of affairs in American universities today, where the old notions that truth is a liberating force and that suffering teaches, and the great classics that embodied these and other verities of the human condition, have been sacrificed on the altar of victim politics and its aggrandizement of institutional power. So our universities now produce \u201csnowflakes,\u201d as some have called them, students with fragile psyches and empty minds.<\/p>\n

The big noise being made over the Kipnis affair is a dog-bites-man-story for anyone familiar with the American university. The only difference now is that the progressives\u2019 children are devouring their creators, the inevitable outcome of revolutionary passions and utopian goals that lack coherent principle and intellectual rigor. That\u2019s why progressives suffering the wages of their ideology deserve no sympathy.<\/p>\n

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Copyright \u00a9 2015 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the cult of sensitivity begins to eat its children. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Recently several progressive professors have publicly complained that their students are hounding them for failing to consider their tender sensibilities by straying beyond the p.c. orthodoxy on sexual assault, sex identity, linguistic correctness, and a whole host of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[842,22,145,86,216],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2cH","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8347,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/l-ron-obama-and-the-church-of-progressivism\/","url_meta":{"origin":8475,"position":0},"title":"L. 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More useful is the film\u2019s description of Scientology\u2019s ideas, techniques, and tactics, for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Religion"","block_context":{"text":"Religion","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/religion\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/obama1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7978,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/election-day-whats-at-stake\/","url_meta":{"origin":8475,"position":1},"title":"Election Day: What\u2019s at Stake","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 5, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. 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First was the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Religion"","block_context":{"text":"Religion","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/religion\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/85-433x350.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8124,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/8124\/","url_meta":{"origin":8475,"position":3},"title":"The Progressive Racial Narrative and Its Beneficiaries","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 11, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Debunking the lies about race in America. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine A recent NBC\/Wall Street Journal poll reveals that nearly 6 in 10 people believe race relations are bad, with 23% saying they are \u201cvery bad.\u201d The causes of these perceptions are many, including nationally publicized police\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Our Contributors"","block_context":{"text":"Our Contributors","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"al_sharpton_speaking_reuters-450x337","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/al_sharpton_speaking_reuters-450x337.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7538,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-progressive-gitmo-myth\/","url_meta":{"origin":8475,"position":4},"title":"The Progressive Gitmo Myth","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 9, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton\/\/ FrontPage Magazine The swap of probable deserter Bowe Bergdahl for 5 \u201chigh-risk\u201d Guant\u00e1namo detainees is about more than political public relations. 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