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HOME ABOUT BIO REBUTTALS ARCHIVEGuest Column: Are There Any Adults Left in the Room?(Editor’s note: The piece below on the Missouri situation was submitted to Jason Whitlock by writer Tully Corcoran. Follow him on Twitter @tullycorcoran.)The likes of Melissa Click, the University of Missouri assistant professor of mass media who yesterday attempted to “muscle” a student reporter out of a public space, are a coalition of self-appointed cultural babysitters superficially bound together by liberal interests. They see themselves as noble liberal warriors. In actuality they have more in common with 17th-Century Puritans, who sought to restrict expression through shame, and turned piety into a contest.Zeb goes to church every day, but, lo, I skip church, for the walk to and fro only separates my nose from the Bible.Puritans, of course, did not call themselves that. They referred to themselves as “the godly,” and you can infer what that was meant to say about those who disagreed with them.Similarly, modern-day Puritans reject attempts at formal classification (PC Police is a particularly bitter pill) but are no less impressed with themselves. Members of the movement self-identify as liberal, but their liberalism is only cosmetic. Classical liberalism is permissive. It encourages expression and holds the right to free expression as sacrosanct.On American college campuses in the 1960s, people like Melissa Click were known as fascists.Today, they’re “protecting safe spaces.”Safe from what, exactly?This weekend on Missouri’s campus, there was a student literally willing to starve to death over racial injustice, and his alleged supporters are afraid of a student reporter with a Nikon.I was born in 1983, which by most definitions puts me at the front end of the so-called Millennial Generation. The subject of endless thinkpieces, Millennials are commonly distinguished from our Gen X forebears by a reluctance to mature, a less cynical worldview, and that we can’t remember where we were when we heard Kurt Cobain died. If the generation before us was the generation of the Latchkey Kid, ours swung all the way to the other side. Millennials were raised by a generation of helicopter parents who fed us a diet of self-esteem and cosmetic diversity, and tried to insulate us from failure and hurt feelings with aggressive management of our lives. (Please forgive the broad brushes, here; I am speaking in generalities. My own upbringing was not like this.)Naturally, a lot of Millennials left for college unprepared to reconcile with adult life, and expected college to nanny them just as Mom had. Well, colleges – like all businesses – reliably respond to economic incentives. Administrators and staff at most American colleges are under pressure from university presidents and regents to improve graduation and retention rates. For some, this is how their job performance is measured. So the students must be kept happy. For this generation that means having a glossy rec center, an easy path to graduation and a campus environment where they never hear anything that makes them uncomfortable. This week, it’s Missouri’s #ConcernedStudent1950 activists acting like they’re entitled to privacy in a public quad, last week it was Colorado College students protesting a film about the beginning of the gay rights movement, directed by an openly gay director, on the grounds the film was “discursively violent.”In other words, college has jumped the shark.Actual liberals – people with real progressive bonafides – are catching on. Bill Maher rails against this constantly. South Park has devoted an entire season to making fun of PC culture. Jonathan Chait attempted to address this problem in a column and, predictably, became the tail eaten by the snake. Jerry Seinfeld won’t perform at colleges because, he says, they’re “too conservative.” Jerry Seinfeld’s comedy cuts too deep. Seinfeld.The so-called liberals populating college campuses today would have run screaming from 1960s Berkeley.This would all be easier to laugh at if it were contained to college campuses. But it has escaped, and the babysat are now the babysitters, and a lot of them hold influential positions in the media. They publish dopey, faux-intellectual columns for HuffPo and Gawker and Slate that get lots of likes and retweets, the currency of relevance. Critics can barely get a word in before somebody is putting words in their mouth and dismissing them as a bigot. Substantive ideas get buried by never-ending deconstructions of verbiage. The effect is that problems are concealed, not solved, and what appears to be progress is only a candy coating on a rancid nut. If I am right about this, PC culture is a passing fad, or if not exactly that, doomed just the same. An administration concerned about the rights of its students to gather, speak and publish – as Constitutionally granted them – would fire Melissa Click and hope it stops them from being sued.The adults in the room – if there are any left – have to stop acquiescing to the children, so the children can grow up.s
I was thinking today of all the parallels you could draw between the neo-liberal social justice militias and the groups of people, past and present, they hate. Puritans didn't pop in my head, but it's a good one.
I liked the part about dopey faux-intellectual columns
wow just wow
