Robert Weissberg writes: The Social Justice Warriors and thin-skinned “communities of color” among others will continue to throttle lively classroom conversations and any professor who insists that matters have improved, still risks his career.
The reason for this dismal prognosis is that frank, often disconcerting exchanges celebrated by Chicago’s Dean of Students are mentally beyond many students and ideas that professors consider “thought-provoking” will be deemed “hateful” for the simple reason that countless students cannot grasp them or just garble the professor’s point. That students are perplexed by intellectually demanding discussions is hardly new; what is new is that their bewilderment, misperceiving black as white, is now taken seriously by boot-licking administrators. Take my word for it—even at decent schools innumerable students lack the intellectual agility and knack for abstraction necessary for free-wheeling, enthusiastic debates. Faced with these students, a savvy professor will continue to avoid anything that might, however unlikely, be misinterpreted as “hate.” Even if everything is explicitly hypothetical and the lecture’s purpose is just to explore possibilities, why risk student outrage?
Keep in mind that it takes only a single student to complain to the Dean to launch a time-consuming investigation and even if cleared, this investigation itself will remain a blot on one’s academic record in a world where even a suspicion of insensitivity can be costly. And the odds of having one such hyper-sensitive student unable to grasp subtle arguments can only grow as universities diversify their recruitment pool to those who would normally fail to make the academic cut. If American higher education all resembled the high-IQ University of Chicago, and no admission exceptions were made for the doltish, the PC pox would vanish.
In an environment where even the slightest misstep can be a micro-aggression, forget about playing Devil’s Advocate to stimulate re-thinking a seemingly settled orthodoxy. Woe to the professor who to get the intellectual juices flowing, said, “Just for the sake of argument, let me suggest that most of today’s former colonies, nations such as India, Nigeria and Kenya, would be economically prosperous, less violent and enjoy a better standard of living if they lived under colonial rule. Does anybody here disagree?”
