Pity American society and the fragility of the American mind. Whether at elite universities or in legacy media, intellectuals and journalists have their collective panties in a bunch over just about every infraction of political correctness.
New York Times journalists rose in revolt, for example, when Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) published an op-ed in their publication calling for the deployment of troops to prevent unrest in America’s cities. More recently, about 50 NPR employees wrote a letter to the president demanding she both punish dissent and circle the wagons of their diversity infrastructure. Talk about inmates running the asylum!
Those who should be the gatekeepers of the First Amendment now fumble free speech. The presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University resigned after a particularly egregious performance before Congress, but what resulted was little more than a Chinese fire drill as like-minded administrators simply shifted posts.
Ask former Harvard President Claudine Gay why she resigned, and she may claim the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers scapegoated her. In reality, she had simply been caught red-handed in both her lack of moral clarity and plagiarism. Perhaps her act worked at Harvard, but in the halls of Congress, the emperor wore no clothes.
Administrators and deans continue to turn a deaf ear to intellectual diversity and prevent real reform. When students or even professors disrupt conservative speakers, meanwhile, the university response is often limp-wristed. University damage control is often akin to the blind leading the blind, as university professors and lawyers detached from the real world offer advice when students, professors, and even college presidents go off the reservation.
Rather than illuminate or challenge, college panels play to the peanut gallery. Such is the result of a lack of intellectual diversity. Perhaps some conservatives will take a shot at an academic career, but they are destined to remain as the low man on the totem pole as tenured faculty turn a blind eye to free speech. If an openly conservative graduate student asks departmental leaders for a recommendation, the answer is always, “No can do.”
Universities, meanwhile, become conveyor belts of crazy. At Yale University, the ratio of administrators to undergraduates is now 1-to-1. Many of the deans and assistant deans rose out of liberal arts or social science departments, specializing in fields more political than real and more indulgent than rigorous.
The protests at Columbia University should be a tipping point. President Minouche Shafik may declare her opposition to antisemitism, but her actions are schizophrenic. A rule of thumb should be when students throw a collective hissy fit or act like hooligans, it is time to call the paddy wagons. If students do not want to study hard to achieve the American dream, let the entitled brats become homeless. If they begin hunger strikes as some sort of demonstration of political anorexia, ignore their tantrums.
University campuses should not be banana republics. Professors may view academic histrionics as sophisticated, but the public will see through the charade.
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Intellectual diversity should be the seminal issue on campus. Students should be brave and not submit to political pressures, even if they come from unelected administrators who seek to impose their own views under the guise of anti-racism or countering privilege. Illegal immigrants are illegal. Math is not racist. Common sense must triumph.
Languages evolve naturally, drawing color from both good times and bad. Scrubbing them free of color, gender, and even offense is to leave society and literature poorer. George Orwell was prescient, but it is time to return him to the realm of fiction rather than our contemporary reality.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.