I'm sure it can be exhausting having to deal with such people. But I hope you can take at least take some solace in that outside of academia, they do not have political power.Kishkumen wrote: ↑Mon Apr 03, 2023 8:43 pmTo my shame I was not aware of God and Man at Yale, or I long ago forgot it. Yes, I agree that this is an old GOP/conservative playbook. I agree with you that the concerns are overblown. They are still overblown. That said, I have observed too many circular firing squads among liberal activists to dismiss the concern as made up and wholly irrational. I remember when a pedagogy course I was teaching came close to complete collapse because certain SJW grad students were pushing not to have certain topics taught in our classes for ideological reasons. Thankfully I had the presence of mind and fortitude in the moment to prevent their bullying tactics from dividing the class into camps.The far right has been whining about godless, communist, politically correct, marxist, woke professors for more than 100 years. According to Republicans, American universities have been controlled by nefarious communists for decades, always supposedly just a few years from turning everyone into a violent communist revolutionary.
This nonsensical claim was the subject of William F. Buckley's 1951 book, "God and Man at Yale," which claimed that godless socialists were poisoning children's minds and that they needed to be forcibly canceled and brought to heel by authoritarian Christians.
Very obviously, if Buckley's claims had been true, the United States would have long ago become an atheistic Stalinist dictatorship. That did not happen because Buckley was fearmongering about non-Christians being allowed to have free speech and to challenge dogmatic fundamentalist notions about the Bible and evolution.
Since then, Christian fundamentalist reactionaries have repeated Buckley's grift many times, trying to scare moderates and conservatives into seeing communists under every dorm room bed.
That isn't to say there's nothing to these complaints, but rather that they are dramatically overblown. And as I said earlier, whatever merits they may have, it is obviously the case that Donald Trump and other Republicans are far more totalitarian in their ambitions and actual enacted policies.
The emergence of the small "woke" subculture is basically the only type of leftism that multi-millionaire university chancellors have allowed to emerge because it does not present a threat to their rule. Universities almost without exception exploit their students and employees with low wages and oppressive employment rules. Within the University of California system, for instance, many employees have been making less than minimum wage based on hours worked and they received zero help with living or transportation costs until they went on strike last year.
The small woke subculture also exists because young adulthood is when people are really beginning to find their personal identity and so they are more prone to excessive rhetorical policing.