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College Insurrection Tag

The University of Chicago has the distinction of being recognized by FIRE as a model for free speech in higher education. At the same time, the school is home to a number of BDS activists who typically engage in the shouting down of people with whom they disagree. This dichotomy has led to an ironic impasse on campus. While the administration is committed to free speech, some members of the student government are not. This struggle has been going on for some time. In April, the College Council passed a resolution to divest from Israel. The Chicago Maroon reported:
College Council Passes Resolution Recommending Divestment College Council (CC) approved a resolution last night calling on the University of Chicago to divest from 10 companies that the resolution’s proponents say enable Israeli human rights abuses in Palestine.

Campus culture has drifted so far to the left that students at Georgetown are protesting Obama's secretary of homeland security Jeh Johnson, who's slated to deliver the commencement address for their School of Foreign Service. Students have decided Johnson is too conservative on immigration to speak at the university. Blake Neff reports at the Daily Caller:
The Latest Campus Speaker Denounced As Too Conservative Is An Obama Cabinet Secretary Students at Georgetown University are protesting against the school’s choice of commencement speaker because he enforced the law by deporting illegal immigrants. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson is scheduled to deliver the commencement address May 21 to graduates of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. Some student activists are dismayed by Johnson’s selection, because his role as secretary places him in charge of monitoring the country’s borders and deporting illegal immigrants.

Last week we covered the story of three students at the University at Albany who were facing charges for staging a race hoax. The school has now expelled two of the students and suspended another. FOX News reports:
Two New York college students who claimed to be victims of racist attack expelled Two black female college students who claimed to be victims of an assault by a group of white men and women reportedly were expelled from the University at Albany. University at Albany President Robert J. Jones said in an email to The Albany Times Union Thursday that Ariel Agudio and Asha Burwell were dismissed from the college. A third student, Alexis Briggs, was suspended for two years.

Harvard clearly thinks single sex organizations are a bad thing and they're taking extraordinary measures to discourage students from joining them. Let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that progressives believe in choice. The FIRE blog reports:
Harvard Brings Back the Blacklist for Final Club, Fraternity, Sorority Students BOSTON, May 6, 2016—In a stunning attack on freedom of association, Harvard University announced today that members of independent, single-sex, off-campus organizations will be blacklisted from Rhodes and Marshall scholarships and banned from leadership of on-campus organizations or athletic teams.

Earlier this week, we reported at College Insurrection that Virginia Tech disinvited conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley over concerns about offending students and protests. Riley addressed the situation at the Wall Street Journal:
I Was Disinvited on Campus ‘Progressives rule higher education,” write political scientists Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn Sr. in “Passing on the Right,” a new book on the dearth of conservative professors. “Their rule is not absolute. But conservatives are scarcer in academia than in just about any other major profession.” Profs. Shields and Dunn aren’t exaggerating. In the humanities and social sciences, they note, surveys show that the percentage of self-described Marxist professors is around 18%, or nearly double that of self-described Republicans...

A decidedly progressive student group at Cornell University called Black Students United has sent a letter to school administrators saying they want the entire faculty to undergo training in diversity and a host of other garden variety issues in identity politics. The Cornell Daily Sun has the story:
Cornell Black Students United to Submit Faculty Training Resolution to Student Assembly Black Students United will present a resolution prompting the Faculty Senate to examine how Cornell’s faculty members are educated in diversity issues at the Student Assembly’s meeting on Thursday. The resolution originated from one of the demands BSU delivered to Cornell’s administration last semester regarding faculty training, according to a BSU facebook post.

Three students from the State University of New York at Albany claimed in January that they were victims of assault on a bus and that the motivation for the crime was racism. They are now being charged for filing a false claim. CNN reports:
N.Y. college students accused of fabricating racially motivated attack Three New York college students who said they were targets of a racially motivated attack face multiple charges for what prosecutors are calling a false claim. A grand jury on Monday indicted Ariel Agudio, Asha Burwell and Alexis Briggs, all 20, each on a charge of third-degree assault and multiple counts of falsely reporting an incident, the Albany District Attorney's Office said.

Political correctness gets crazier and crazier, but it does so in a way that seems to  represent the development of something that was there right at the beginning. I've been trying to make sense of it, from a psychoanalytic point of view, and the theory has, gratifyingly, developed apace with what it is trying to explain. The current edge of the theory is what I call the "pristine self," which is a self touched by nothing but love, and I am pleased to suggest that it gives us some insight into the current edge of political correctness, which is built around the concept of "microaggression.' In this post, I'd like to lay out that connection. Microaggression is a key element of what has been called the "new pc," whose newness Megan McArdle renders this way:

Student protesters at Ohio State University recently learned a valuable lesson. Mainly because the administration drew a line in the sand and told them calmly that if they persisted, they would be arrested and possibly expelled. The way it was handled was brilliant. An administrator explained to the students that the people who work in the building they were occupying deserve to feel safe too, a concept which blew their minds. The Atlantic reported:
Ohio State Turns the Concept of 'Safe Space' Against Student Protesters At Ohio State last week, a sit-in and protest inside a university building was cut short when students were warned that they would be forcibly removed by police, arrested, and possibly expelled if they did not vacate the premises within a few hours, by 5 a.m.

Bill Whittle's new Firewall video is inspired by a recent incident at San Francisco State University which we also wrote about. As usual, Whittle does an outstanding job of dismantling the left and exposing them for the hypocrites they are. Here's a partial transcript via Truth Revolt:
Firewall: Appropriate This! Well, “Cultural Appropriation” is the latest form of combat used by Social Justice Warriors: a term used by crybullies to describe themselves as fighters against prejudice and privilege. They are the first warriors in history to burst into tears and require weeks of therapy at the mere sight of an actual weapon.

We have been documenting a clear shift in tactics by anti-Israel campus activists, led by Students for Justice in Palestine joined by other groups. The shift is towards disruption of Israeli and pro-Israeli speakers on campus in order to create a hostile campus environment. We have reported on several such recent disruptions, including at UC-Davis, University of ChicagoUniversity of Minnesota Law School, UT-Austin, Kings College (London), U. Windsor, University of South Florida, and anLGBTQ Shabbat Event in Chicago. Even events that are not disrupted are protested, such as the appearance of actor Michael Douglas and human rights hero Natan Sharansky at Brown University. It happened again yesterday at San Francisco State University, where anti-Israel activists have co-opted student protests over proposed budget cuts. International Business Times reports:

Thanks in large part to the Emory University students who pathetically panicked after seeing pro-Trump messages written in chalk on campus sidewalks, pro-Trump messages are now appearing on other college campuses. The whole thing is going viral on Twitter under the hashtag #TheChalkening. Here are some choice examples: