A comment on a New York Times article about the alumni backlash to the social justice crybully takeover of campuses and the accompanying enforcement of political correctness.
“I am an Asian lesbian professor of the humanities, and am increasingly weary of my profession because of the ludicrous touchiness and ignorance of many students and faculty. A colleague teaching an LGBT film class was hauled up because two students complained he had failed to issue a “trigger warning” before showing Boys Don’t Cry. I have taught Coetzee’s Disgrace (which I consider a masterpiece) for several years but am now thinking of dropping it because I perceive several students gearing up to declare that they feel offended. More important, because of the lack of an adequate core curriculum, English majors and even MAs graduate without ever having read a Victorian novel or a Romantic poem. One has to begin every class, whatever its theme, with a potted history lesson, because one cannot take for granted that students know when the World Wars or the American civil war occurred, or when Socrates lived or Shakespeare wrote. But all of them know the laundry list of ideas that should offend them. And all they can really write about is their own limited lives. As one colleague of mine says, the educational system is highly successful – it set out to inculcate self-esteem and it has done so.”
The irony of the whole situation is obvious in that the left has created its own monster of ignorance and entitlement. It created Maoists who enjoy terrorizing faculty using political correctness, but who are not only fundamentally ignorant, but also uninterested in the actual acquisition of knowledge.
Even the ability to teach identity politics texts is disrupted by claims of offensiveness. Meanwhile she finds that trying to teach anything at all remotely classical is stymied by the basic ignorance of a student body which is educated into emotional intelligence, yet have the knowledge and emotional intelligence of small petulant children.
And yes indeed, they've largely been reduced to fascination with their own limited lives and have little interest or comprehension of bigger ideas. Some of this is the social media panopticon, but it's also what the left really wanted. A blank slate that they could draw anything on. The blank slate is there, but like Memento's protagonist, it also comes with its own malicious agenda.