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From The Atlantic: Deconstructing the ‘Liberal Campus’ Cliche

The author, Jason Blakely, start with admitting that yes, there might be a problem:

Are American universities now spaces where democratic free expression is in decline, where insecurity, fear, and an obsessive, self-preening political correctness make open dialogue impossible? This was a view voiced by many at the start of the month, after the University of California, Berkeley, canceled a speech by the right-wing provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, when a demonstration against his appearance spun out of control. Yiannopoulos had been invited to speak by campus Republicans, but headlines the next morning were dominated by images of 100 to 150 protesters wearing black masks, hurling rocks, fireworks, and Molotov cocktails en route to doing $100,000 dollars of damage to a student center named after the great icon of pacifist civil disobedience, Martin Luther King, Jr.

But you see it’s all just part of a false narrative:

Such reports have in turn reinforced a longstanding political narrative, which seeks to demean America’s universities as ideologically narrow, morally slack, hypersensitive, and out of touch. For example, commentators like the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat have argued that America’s “university system” is “genuinely corrupt” in relying on “rote appeals to … left-wing pieties to cloak its utter lack of higher purpose.”

But does this widespread portrait of universities as morally weak and anti-democratic—circulating at least since the time of Allan Bloom—really hold true? This vision of American universities is largely inadequate in at least two ways. First, it incorrectly blames increased fragility exclusively on the university system itself and, second, it relies on a reductive caricature of America’s institutions of higher learning.

And then starts with numerous hand-waving and deflections.  And leaves the question unanswered: is the “conservative-identity” group merely responding in kind because of the left?

Identity politics places individual and group notions of selfhood at the center of politics. As the philosopher Charles Taylor has argued at length, the main goal of identity politics is “recognition” or validation of a given identity by others in society. I have written elsewhere about how identity politics (normally associated with American liberalism) is actually a major engine fueling the rise of Trump. The categories of left and right often distort the ways in which cultural trends, like those associated with identity politics, are far more widely shared across American life. While some left-wing groups on campus are guilty of retreating from open dialogue, a conservative-identity movement has likewise tried to buffer students from having to hear ideas that upset them.

And a summation:

Any society that routinely attacks and undermines the institutions that support its greatest minds is caught up in an act of either extravagantly naïve or profoundly sinister self-sabotage. America’s college campuses remain places of astounding diversity in which democratic exchange of the highest kind still routinely takes place. The country’s university system remains, with all its imperfections, the best school for American democracy.

If the United States is to flourish in the coming generation in the way it did in the prior century, it will need to embrace and even learn from the diversity and dialogue of its universities—not destroy them through simplistic grabs for popular power.

It’s been over two decades since I’ve been in college, and yes, there were both liberal and conservative groups on campus.  But neither were rioting; that was for after the homecoming game when the student body burned sofas and overturned cars.  Now that was a honored tradition!

Today one doesn’t see right-wing or moderates shaking their fists, chanting, or throwing stones in response to someone from the left visiting campus.  Instead we have a “progressive” movement that not only riots when someone they don’t like visits, but also expects the universities to enforce their limited belief system.  And very often they do.

Mr. Blakely fails to address the First Amendment issues and also the growing concern that higher education are hardening into leftist enclaves.  If we truly want the country to flourish, then free inquiry and freedom of speech are a necessity, not an option.