Posted on 12/08/2015 7:54:55 AM PST by Academiadotorg
I don't know how much time you have spent on university campuses. I have spent my whole life in academia and I can tell you I have witnessed the deterioration over the course of time.
It is no longer to be assumed that freedom of speech prevails on a university campus. Instead, there are codes of speech. I would say codes of conduct except that the conduct that is most restricted is speech on our campuses and it is not because the speech is of the outrageously obscene variety which we might be perhaps sympathetic trying to control.
After all, a society in which obscenity, vulgarity and profanity is rampant is not one that would be pleasant to live in. But no, it is rather these speech controls over expressions of opinion about social and even personal relationships which some declare to be offensive to them, not because they are offensive in themselves not because they violate standards of decency long established through millenia of practice but out of an excess of political correctness.
Now, that is not merely a problem of the academy. This is the point of my remarks and they can perhaps sum up the whole conversation this evening. What I am suggesting to you is not that there are outliers, a few extremists who at college campuses especially in elite institutions who the rest of us can look at as perhaps, in their own way, testaments to our virtue because they are so unlike us. No that is not the case. What they are illustrating is what is becoming pervasive. We are imposing it.
We are imposing it through the hand of authority. It descends from campuses to police departments. It invades bureaucracies of every stripe. It invades corporations. We invest huge sums of money in administrative budgets to seek to impose these kinds of sensitivities throughout the society.
In short, we're trying to so calibrate the society that we've stifled the potential for individuals to express themselves freely. This is radiating out from the campuses, I say, throughout the society at large. This accounts for the polarization and people are being riven by it. It has often been remarked that today people don't participate in common sources of information. They tend to isolate themselves into their niche market. They listen to particular outlets for news or they read particular variants of literature. They don't expose themselves to diverse views and understanding.
It is ironic, of course that as we celebrate diversity, the one diversity that we cannot tolerate is diversity of opinion.
Dr. Allen, a professor emeritus at Michigan State University, is the former chairman of the U. S. Civil Rights Commission. This article is excerpted from remarks he made at Accuracy in Academia’s last author’s night of 2015.
An immoral people are the easiest to rule over and control
yes they are
I watched a movie this weekend called “Battle Royale.” It is a Japanese movie about how societies breakdown is the result of kids lack of respect for their elders.
It is Hunger Games on crystal meth.
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