“Liberal Professor: My Liberal Students Terrify Me” — so naturally, he goes to Vox.com, the home of Matt “Fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing for advocates to do” Yglesias and Ezra “Not everything the Nazis touched was bad” Klein to spill his worst fears. In response, Ace of Spades writes, if a leftwing professor is feeling terrified by his fellow leftists still in the larva stage, “Then all is right. Terror is virtue, Robspierre said. It is through terror that we compel virtue”:

I say it’s sort of worth reading because the writer is such a leftist coward. The entire piece is framed around the argument that this New Reign of Terror is bad chiefly because it limits the potential for leftist political victories. He’s such a scaredy-cat he cannot go two paragraphs without coming back to his major point — or, possibly, his chief defense at the academic kangaroo court which will be investigating him for his heresies — that his real problem is that this gonzo identity politics militancy just blocks us from effective action to protect abortion rights. (No really, he says that.)

I’ve cut that twaddle out. Not just because I’m anti-leftist, and thus this argument bothers me on a subjective level. But because the argument is basically this: Terrorizing people into political conformity could be or would be a valid form of “arguing,” if it actually advanced leftist political goals, but it doesn’t, so it isn’t.

I tend to think that stupidity, solipsism, and social cruelty are objectively bad things, and not just bad because they fail the Marxist Ends Justify the Means test.

I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me

by Edward Schlosser on June 3, 2015

I’m a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now…

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

As I said, read the whole thing, especially Ace’s take-no-prisoners response to Schlosser’s Robespierre-like cri de coeur shortly before the revolution really devoured him. By the way, is the article at Vox yet another terrified academic, or was it written by the same professor who wrote anonymously this back in March? [Same author; see update at end of post -- Ed]

Personally, liberal students scare the shit out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a facebook page calling me a communist or else seek to formally protest my liberal lies, the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, so long as I did so respectfully, and so long as it happened in the course of legitimate classroom instruction.

The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip—not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery—and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.

Is this paranoid? Yes, of course. But paranoia isn’t uncalled for within the current academic job climate. Jobs are really, really, really, really hard to get. And since no reasonable person wants to put their livelihood in danger, we reasonably do not take any risks vis-a-vis momentarily upsetting liberal students. And so we leave upsetting truths unspoken, uncomfortable texts unread.

There are literally dozens of articles and books I thought nothing of teaching, 5-6 years ago, that I wouldn’t even reference in passing today. I just re-read a passage of Late Victorian Holocausts, an account of the British genocide against India, and, wow, today I’d be scared if someone saw a copy of it in my office. There’s graphic pictures right on the cover, harsh rhetoric (“genocide”), historical accounts filled with racially insensitive epithets, and a profound, disquieting indictment of capitalism. No way in hell would I assign that today. Not even to grad students.

Beyond that recent experience of deja vu, we’ve seen all this before, haven’t we? (And much more recently between the national and international socialist revolutions in France, Germany and Russia.) Back in December, after the left all-but-destroyed Ferguson, Ben Shapiro tweeted:

Trigger warning: we’ll have more painful ’60s flashbacks right after the page break.