Free Speech and the Modern Campus
Provocative modern culture philosopher, Camille Paglia takes on PC and and historical perspective. (I do not agree with everything in this article btw) from the article: "Today’s campus political correctness can ultimately be traced to the way those new programs, including African-American and Native American studies, were so hastily constructed in the 1970s, a process that not only compromised professional training in those fields over time but also isolated them in their own worlds and thus ultimately lessened their wider cultural impact. I believe that a better choice for academic reform would have been the decentralized British system traditionally followed at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, which offered large subject areas where a student could independently pursue his or her special interest. In any case, for every new department or program added to the U.S. curriculum, there should have been a central shared training track, introducing students to the methodology of research and historiography, based in logic and reasoning and the rigorous testing of conclusions based on evidence. Neglect of that crucial training has meant that too many college teachers, then and now, lack even the most superficial awareness of their own assumptions and biases. Working on campus only with the like-minded, they treat dissent as a mortal offense that must be suppressed, because it threatens their entire career history and world-view. The ideology of those new programs and departments, predicated on victimology, has scarcely budged since the 1970s. This is a classic case of the deadening institutionalization and fossilization of once genuinely revolutionary ideas."
should make David Kelley's "Art of Reasoning" as mandatory reading as a prep for college entrance...
great job Mr. Halling...
The problem gets even worse as education gets higher and higher. Colleges are often completely reliant upon public funds, and the students themselves are inundated with government funds.
Paint it with this brush, and PC will die the death it deserves.
The problem is that the paint on this brush attaches to other nonsense as well...
Free Speech and the Modern Campus... in most cases today, that is an oxymoron.
You know things are not good when a self described liberal democrat makes note of PC bullying from her own ilk that results in silencing dissent. The PC police are no better than those that burn books.
"The progressive 1960s, predicated on assertive individualism and the liberation of natural energy from social controls, wanted less surveillance and paternalism, not more." Some things do change... not for the better. Even Ms. Paglia's nostalgic view of what a liberal democrat was is not the same as it now is. Her party has left the building.
Great article.
Thank's
O.A.
I was glad to see the author include the impact of Lenny Bruce during the beginning phases of the 'free speech' movements. I never liked his humor, but I was pulled into the concept of free speech, particularly the battle of how a specific word could carry so much negative weight compared to the scientific descriptor or even latinized translation. That was during the early days of my awakening to the control of words as a method to control thought, and the true depths of the evil of control and manipulation.
Good find. Txs