Sound familiar?
"How did this happen? It has become increasingly clear that one of the primary reasons for this descent into irrationality and chaos was the virtual elimination of conservative professors from higher education. It may be true that most academics are by instinct liberal, but conservatives were their speed bump. With them gone, it has been a race to the intellectual bottom."
“For me,” former ESPN vice president Roxanne Jones wrote on CNN’s website this week, “Biden, as chair of that all-white-male Senate committee — intentionally, or not — helped to uphold the misogynistic culture that would ultimately allow Donald Trump to win the presidency. Then there’s Biden’s mass incarceration problem.”
Maybe Joe Biden really has overstayed his welcome.
In simpler political times, the litmus test for being an acceptable Democrat was support for Roe v. Wade. The one certain thing we have learned about the politics of the modern Democratic Party is that if you are accused of having done, said or written anything that violates an array of recently identified progressive values, you are disqualified from public life. You will be denounced and shunned.
Last week, to atone for chairing the Clarence Thomas hearings nearly three decades ago, Mr Biden prostrated himself before his progressive accusers and said “the white man’s culture” has “got to change.”
A week later, Mr Biden became trapped in the spider web of gender politics. Days have been spent debating whether his public squeezing habits should disqualify him from the presidency. To confess his sins, he posted a video on Twitter.
A few months ago, liberals were about to decapitate their government leadership in Virginia for racial and sexual violations. As described by the enforcers at the New York Times, “Democrats moved swiftly to send a zero-tolerance message.”
House Democrats couldn’t agree on a resolution condemning anti-Semitism until it also addressed “Islamophobia, racism and other forms of bigotry.” Check, check, check.
Students at George Washington University this week voted on a proposition that the school’s nickname, the Colonials, “has too deep a connection to colonisation and glorifies the act of systemic oppression.” Some 54 per cent of the student body agreed. The GW mascot is, at least for now, still George Washington.
People wonder how it got this crazy. Somewhere along the line, what began as decent ideas, such as respect for differences, degraded into political weaponry and cultural paranoia — seeing offence where none existed.
Liberal and progressive professors have been driven from classrooms and made to apologise for imagined offences against the new orthodoxies, such as reading from the works of James Baldwin and thereby saying the N-word out loud in class. Forbidden.
Disputes over Halloween costumes, which began on campuses, have migrated to households, where mothers struggle with whether their child’s costume will be criticised for cultural appropriation.
Today in politics, universities, the media and corporations, people are routinely told to conform or get out for violating ideas that lack logic, reason or proportion.
How did this happen? It has become increasingly clear that one of the primary reasons for this descent into irrationality and chaos was the virtual elimination of conservative professors from higher education. It may be true that most academics are by instinct liberal, but conservatives were their speed bump. With them gone, it has been a race to the intellectual bottom.
Free speech is important to productive inquiry. As important is the related tradition of intellectual challenge. Any serious academic exposes his ideas to colleagues who know — or knew — it is their responsibility to weed out weakness and illogic. Excepting the ignored mad geniuses, the system has worked for centuries. Discovering and testing ideas is why smart people used to go into academia.
Liberal professors could have protected this tradition of intellectual rigour, but they didn’t. They let it erode. Ideas that would have stayed in the faculty lounge as thoughts swiftly rose to orthodoxy.
The left — being the left — saw an opening and transformed vague ideas into instruments of power. Notions such as “systemic” and “unwelcoming” mean whatever they need to mean. They have turned ideas into useful idiots.
An exhibition of this decline is on view right now at Villanova University. Last weekend, these pages published an article by Profs. Colleen Sheehan and James Wilson, criticising the university for adding “diversity and inclusion” issues to its teacher-evaluation questionnaire. The form asks, for instance, whether a teacher has created an “atmosphere free of bias based on individual differences or social identities.” Ms Sheehan and Mr Wilson called such phrases an “ominous catchall.”
It was a serious, respectful statement of disagreement. Within days, a faculty petition of pushback appeared with nearly 100 colleagues’ signatures. It states: “We believe that ensuring that students have an educational environment free of racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ sentiments, ableism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and other forms of discrimination is essential to providing students with a liberal arts education.”
Villanova should have thanked Professors Sheehan and Wilson. Instead, on instinct, it has ring-fenced their opinions.
Maybe Joe Biden will survive his trial by progressive ordeal. But there will be more Bidens. Liberals drove conservative ideas out of academia, politics, the culture and the media. What’s left of liberalism is now consuming its own.
