Political correctness gone wild

Political correctness got Trump elected, that is, the opposition to it. PC has gone overboard in institutes of higher education and preventing students from actually getting educated.

In the last decade, however, the obsession with minorities and their victimhood may have gone overboard. In a much-discussed opinion piece for the New York Times last month, Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University, argued that American liberalism in recent years has been seized by hysteria regarding race, gender and sexual identity. Lilla says it was a strategic error on the part of Hillary Clinton to focus her campaign so heavily on African-Americans, Latinos, the LGBT community and women. "The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups," he wrote.

Political correctness ignores the really significant issue: class

With their focus on skin color, gender and sexual orientation and the microaggressions associated with them, he argued, students were overlooking what Trump was able to recognize: Most people in the United States aren't unhappy or angry because of their gender, their personal pronoun or the lack of a trigger warning in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (due to misogyny). They're angry because they aren't able to pay their rents, and they have the feeling that nobody cares -- that the liberal-progressive public is more concerned about whether the bathrooms used by transsexuals should be those of their biological or perceived gender. Shouldn't the discussion be about the fight for wealth redistribution rather than definitions and identities? 

Sidestepping such issues often underscores just how helpless many of these students have become, Blecher says. Still, he doesn't want create any misunderstandings. "They are not spoiled sons and daughters. Oberlin's brand is social progressivism. The school wants to admit students from financially weaker families, students from Hispanic or African-American families, some are kids from the streets. Some have spent the last five years trying to get in and then their guidance counselor at high school gets them into a place like Oberlin. They were the most promising students we could find. And you know what? They arrive here and it is hell for them!"

Academic expectations are high, which he says makes the students feel like they don't belong here -- and, in a way, they don't. "At its core, Oberlin is a highly exclusive place that wants to be inclusive. It's an unavoidable contradiction. So some lash out." And how do they do that? They look for a discourse, for a language. What they find is language like "microaggressions," "safe space" and "intersectionality," meaning the traits that some minorities have in common. "Their frustration keeps growing to the point that they start attacking the food in the cafeteria!"

What happened to freedom of speech?

In places where microaggressions lurk and trigger warnings become necessary, certain things can simply no longer be discussed. The children of the 1968 student protest generation took for granted the freedoms that their parents fought to obtain, holding them to be self-evident. The grandchildren of the 1968 generation now want to retract some of those freedoms. Free speech -- once the highest achievement the leftist student generation had fought for -- is now largely and paradoxically being invoked by populists and the right-wing.

The roles have been completely reversed. Whereas today's leftist student movement is willing to sacrifice the freedom of speech -- fought for by their political predecessors - on the altar of trigger warnings and "safe spaces," this right is now being defended by the very same right-wing whose political antecedents sought to prevent it back in the day. 

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