In the classroom, backlash for unpopular opinions is so commonplace that many students have stopped voicing them, sometimes fearing lower grades if they don’t censor themselves. According to a 2021 survey administered by College Pulse of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges, 80 percent of students self-censor at least some of the time. Forty-eight percent of undergraduate students described themselves as “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with expressing their views on a controversial topic during classroom discussions. At U.Va., 57 percent of those surveyed feel that way. (Source)
Any wonder why it's hard to get a robust class discussion going these days?
A few years ago, I was called into the dean's office for a little chat. Apparently a complaint was made against me about something offensive I had said in class. I tried to think what inadvertent thing I might have said that would have caused offense, but could think of nothing. I was eventually told that a student overheard me chatting with an international student before class. He said that I asked where she was from. He said that made him uncomfortable because he felt that this would make the foreign student uncomfortable to talk about how she was different. There was nothing more than that. I'm not exaggerating.
What's particularly striking here was not that some insecure student felt the need to make a complaint, but that the complaint was considered by the dean worthy of bringing me in to talk about it. The dean, a good guy, was somewhat embarrassed to have this conversation with me, but new rules from a diversity committee forced him to be diligent in following them. There were no negative consequences for me except a warning to watch out, to be on my guard, that the rules have changed. About a year later, one of my colleagues was fired for something he said in class, and, who knows, it could have been something nasty, but given what I know about him, I have reason to doubt it. Clumsy, maybe. Truly offensive, unlikely.
What's going on here? Why are students so fragile, and why are administrators so lacking in common sense to sift the serious from the unserious?
The mob mentality used to be mainly a conservative thing, and liberals used to be the great defenders of the clash of different opinions, of open, rational discourse. But now the mob is shaping what is acceptable among Liberals as well. Why? I think it goes to the heart of my critique of the the Liberal Order. When people don't really know what they think or believe, when they have no foundation for thinking independently, they simply go with the flow, and the flow is usually shaped by the loudest, most indignant voices in the room. And then they create committees that develop rules that reflect the mores of the current moment and which they apply with what gives them a false sense of impartiality, no matter how inapt in a given situation.
It's complicated, but I think many Liberals no longer have any confidence in defending reasoned discourse in the gray areas of life where reality rarely presents itself unambiguously. Some confuse their mob-endorsed opinion of the moment as a conviction. Clearly it's not; it's just going with the flow. Very few have the courage of deeply grounded convictions, because very few have them anymore, and they lack them because they have no place to set their feet. They feel instead the ground shifting beneath them and see their task as mainly to adapt if they are to keep their balance. There is no way to judge whether my fired colleague said something that was truly offensive by any standard except the one that currently prevailed. My colleague's biggest mistake, I suspect, lay in that he was not nimble enough to shift with the changing terrain.
The current prevailing terrain in recent decades, especially in the social sciences and humanities, has been that all discourse is compromised by white privilege or patriarchy. The idea that there is any discourse that is not one way or another utterly tainted by such diseases of the mind is unthinkable, because it has become unorthodox to believe that there is any truth that transcends our social conditioning.
The biggest difference between Liberals and Conservatives in the current culture war is that Liberals adapt to the changing terrain and Conservatives refuse to. Conservatives also feel the shifts, but they choose to set their feet in the old customary values and to blame the causes of the shifting terrain on Liberal nonsense. But Conservatives are no more grounded in transcendental values than the Liberals are. They are simply adapting to changing terrain by grounding themselves in an obsolete, 19th-Century social imaginary.
So if there's no ability to stand outside of our cultural programming, then there is no recourse to transcendent values like Justice to shape the conversation. The idea of Justice becomes exhausted by concerns about truly awful stuff that has happened to oppressed minorities. Of course, Justice demands that that history be reckoned with, but justice without compassion, justice that dehumanizes the oppressor, the oppressor himself oppressed by the role he plays in an oppressive system, becomes something other than Justice. MLK understood this.
It becomes vindictive mob rule that is integral to the logic of oppression. It changes nothing for the better; it just flips the roles of oppressed to oppressor, and on it goes. And the new Liberal norms seems to have evolved in such a way that mob rule, if it is in the name of the oppressed, is justified. But, you know, it's just not. It's just the same old, same old.