College campuses are becoming dystopian nightmares where people are all too ready to report each other for wrongthink.
Jeff Jacoby writes at the Boston Globe:
Informers on campusAs an undergraduate in 1977, I took a course on 20th-century European diplomacy with the historian Roderic Davison. The material was absorbing but challenging, and I had to work hard to earn a B. Davison’s lectures were unfailingly interesting, but after all these years I have only one specific memory from my time in his classroom.He was describing the breakdown of German society during the Weimar Republic and explaining the lure of the Nazi movement under Adolf Hitler. Suddenly he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a small black comb. With his right hand, he quickly combed his hair forward across his brow, then held the comb horizontally against his upper lip. His left arm he shot stiffly outward and began declaiming in German. Most of my classmates laughed at the unexpected impersonation of the Führer. But I was shaken. For me, the son of an Auschwitz survivor, Hitler was no laughing matter. Davison’s spoof upset me badly.My response? I did nothing. I knew that my professor had intended no offense. I didn’t think his behavior had been improper. I may have been taken aback — “triggered,” in today’s parlance — but I assumed that my discomfiture was my own problem. The lecture resumed, the course went on, and to this day I regard Professor Davison’s course as one of the best of my college years.What brings that long-ago episode to mind is the latest poll of undergraduates conducted by researchers from the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State University. The annual survey, which involves 2,000 students at 130 colleges and universities nationwide, gauges the views of students on multiple subjects, including viewpoint diversity and how higher education is influencing their views.What the new poll reveals is a generation of college students deeply committed to the belief that if they are offended, someone ought to be punished.In one eye-opening finding, 74 percent of undergrads endorse the view that a professor who says “something that students find offensive” should be reported to the university. By a majority almost as lopsided, 65 percent believe that a fellow student who says something they consider offensive should be turned in. That informers’ mindset is especially pronounced among students who identify themselves as politically liberal, fully 85 percent of whom would report a professor who offends them. But even among self-identified conservatives, a solid majority, 56 percent, are of the same mindset.
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