A regime-imposed ideology, tolerating no dissent, enforced by a surveillance state and thought police, with transgressors punished. Welcome to Nineteen Eighty-Four. China? Yes. But increasingly such illiberalism has infiltrated America’s “liberal” universities. If nothing else, surely liberalism means promoting human liberty, with freedom of thought and expression essential. Yet over the past decade college campuses have seen the rise of speech codes, speakers disinvited or shouted down, professors offending against the approved catechism forced to apologize, submit to re-education, or even to resign. And an obsession with “diversity” while suppressing the kind that should matter most—diversity of viewpoint.
Documenting these disturbing trends is Robert Boyers, who has taught in academia for half a century, currently at Skidmore. He’s the longtime editor of Salmagundi, Skidmore’s quarterly magazine of politics, culture, literature and the arts, and he is very much a man of the left. His 2019 book, The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies, calls out the perversion of liberal ideals he sees in American universities—political correctness metastasizing into a rigid party line that brooks no dissent, while plunging down rabbit holes of absurdism. The book is full of horror stories from the author’s own experience. Contradictions and ironies abound. The reader enters a hall of mirrors.
The book’s main theme is dismay at the suppression of argument, with key issues deemed settled beyond dispute, no discussion allowed. How to justify this? Postmodernism promoted the idea that argument itself is suspect because nothing is really true and reason cannot surmount that. Hence a refusal to countenance debate. And while postmodernism encouraged a fetish for nonjudgmentalism, in academia this strangely transmogrified into a judgmentalism of the harshest sort—against any deviation from the canonical ideology.
Boyers relates a cautionary tale of how his own younger self once swallowed an apologia by Herbert Marcuse that freedom of speech must yield to an enlightened minority whose virtue entitles it to suppress divergent views deemed harmful. Fortunately, Boyers himself ultimately gagged on this bilge. Unfortunately, such intellectual arrogance is at the heart of today’s academic culture.
If the PC catechism is really as manifestly correct as its woke minions seem to think, then how is it threatened by debate? Maybe they fear they’ve built a house of cards that cannot withstand scrutiny, so scrutiny is barred. […]
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