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Adrienne Scott's avatar

I appreciate this commentary, especially after trying to converse with my extremely woke niece, who is a junior at Northwestern, the place you both teach. When I dared to raise objections to some of her most cherished beliefs (I told her looting and rioting does not serve ANY cause well for example), she told me that was my white privilege speaking. I'm sad to say we now talk very little.

I will be quite interested to see if the halls of academia actually do open to other opinions. I have an Ivy League college degree (1986), an M.A. from a state school in the Midwest, and classify myself as an old-school liberal who believes in free speech. Not allowing speakers with unpopular opinions on college campuses because their beliefs "cause harm" is a betrayal of everything the university used to stand for. If students don't like an opinion, they should learn how to argue and reason against it. I have always been proudly left of center, but but the woke left does not represent me at all.

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C. Scala's avatar

I agree with the authors' concerns. But I also detect naivety that we can ill afford. In discussions of the decline of tolerance for intellectual and political heterogeneity on university campuses, I've often seen some version of the following statement: "So far as we can tell, the majority of faculty avoid imposing their own political views on students and strive for impartiality." Whenever I've seen this kind of statement from an academic who's become aware that there's a problem with a particular kind of woke, fundamentalist, radical, "queer," postcolonial, etc., "monoculture," what I hear is: I'm sure that most of my colleagues--whom I know from coffee, serving on college or university committees, or attending university events--aren't responsible for this phenomenon. This must mean there are a few rogue actors out there, perhaps equally spread among all the units, certainly people I don't know from dinner or the curriculum committee. Fun fact: when they're among their own, for instance in faculty meetings, radical faculty often mock administrators like you because you're so clueless about what's going on.

So, let me break that bubble: there are not just a few rogue actors. Have you met women's studies? The English department? Ethnic and racial studies? Probably religious studies. History and the law school are likely sites of a culture war that everyone just ignores. If you could be a fly on the wall of most classes in the humanities, you'd see what you're expressing concern about. The phenomenon has also spread through the humanities subfields of the social sciences. One result of defunding and marginalizing the humanities is the radicalization of the humanities. And I'll bet you that most of their students are on board, not just playing for pay; that's why they're there! And I have one more tip: when these faculty say they teach all sides or some such thing, what they mean is that they tell their students that anyone who doesn't agree with the one right interpretation or belief is racist or some colorful variant of reactionary. I know this because students tell me all the time that Professor X has explained what people on the other side of issue Y believe. Do tell! I think it's my job to explain the range of ideas and arguments--usually the best version of those ideas and arguments--in order to help my students "test" what I understand they believe. I'm constantly introducing my students to ideas they've never heard of before because they've so consistently been given the most binary (a fave term in the radical academy, usually associated with all things white and Western) version of reality. I've also spent years reading manuscripts submitted for review and observing my colleagues teach--education about what critical thinking means in vast tracts of the contemporary academy.

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