“It’s Going To Get Much, Much Worse.”

JONATHAN HAIDT ON CAMPUS CRAZINESS: “It’s Going To Get Much, Much Worse.”

Like all far-left political movements, the new PC has shown a tendency to devour its own. That is, PC crusaders often save their most vindictive attacks for people who were formerly leftists in good standing. The response so far from professors and administrators who come under attack has generally been to fold, apologize, and try to make amends. But history shows that this kind of process can’t go on forever; there must be an endpoint somewhere down the line. PC activists probably imagine the endpoint to be a harmonious world ridded of triggers and unsafe spaces. But this, like Marx’s notion of a dictatorship of a stateless society, is an ideological fantasy. More likely, PC will collapse under the weight of its own excesses. Haidt doesn’t expect this to happen anytime soon, though. . . .
We’ve said before that there are two campus crises—a crisis of political culture, and a crisis of affordability. These crises could converge if high-profile PC incidents make the American public question whether the existing college economic model, complete with its massive diversity bureaucracy, is actually worth it. However, we are less optimistic than Haidt that the upper-middle class parents who send their children to elite schools will be swayed substantially by stories of campus coddling run amok. If PC does generate a backlash that forces the universities to change their ways, it is more likely to come from state governments, which have historically not responded kindly to extreme campus movements. The American people as a whole stand behind their Bill of Rights, even if college students don’t.

I think that universities are going to need a lot more external supervision — from state legislatures, from alumni, from trustees and donors, from Congress, perhaps even from Pres. Cruz’s Department of Education — to ensure that rights are respected and that educational dollars produce education.
If only someone had issued some sort of warning.

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Posted at 7:50 am by Glenn Reynolds