We have covered for a decade the campus shout-downs and shut-downs of speakers, the incessant thought policing, the political correctness run amok, and in recent years, the cancel culture and repression of free expression. We also have documented how the campus culture has migrated to the broader culture, reflected in Big Tech censorship and repression.
It’s not just us noticing the destructive impact of this campus-to-culture phenomenon.
French leaders are worried that the American campus culture poses a threat to the national cohesiveness not just of the Unites States, but of France.
The NY Times reports:
The threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism. Gnaws at national unity. Abets Islamism. Attacks France’s intellectual and cultural heritage.
The threat? “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ said President Emmanuel Macron.
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.
Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.
The article goes on to note how France is going through a similar situation in its own universities:
Pitted against them is a younger, more diverse guard that considers these theories as tools to understanding the willful blind spots of an increasingly diverse nation that still recoils at the mention of race, has yet to come to terms with its colonial past and often waves away the concerns of minorities as identity politics….
The publication this month of a book critical of racial studies by two veteran social scientists, Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel, fueled criticism from younger scholars — and has received extensive news coverage. Mr. Noiriel has said that race had become a “bulldozer’’ crushing other subjects, adding, in an email, that its academic research in France was questionable because race is not recognized by the government and merely “subjective data.’’
There is a lot more at stake than a shout-down of a speaker, or banning of people from Twitter. It’s a national death spiral.
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