My colleague and friend @lara_schwartz posted a thread about political correctness and civility. I want to say something about the political correctness part of her argument. Things to say about civility too, but later.
Lara writes: “When people complain about political correctness they're saying opportunities for kindness are oppressive.” And then later: “Make no mistake: complaints about PC are objections to human decency. That's it.”
Now, I agree that complaints about PC and free speech are sometimes, even often, used in the ways Lara criticizes. There is a section of the right dominated by hucksters and manipulators who use these complaints as fund-raising tools. But!
There’s a big difference between sometimes and always. There are many students who will complain about PC if you give them a chance, and by no means only students who identify as conservative. Ask them; they will tell you about it.
So far as I can tell, many of these students aren’t OK with racism; they aren’t OK with keeping immigrants in cages; they aren’t OK with presidents who only seem to come alive when they are making nasty, racially tinged statements.
They are profoundly uncomfortable with being lumped in with real creeps. They don’t think they are saying the same thing as those people. We risk missing what they are saying if we say, complaints about PC are ONLY racism and nothing more.
Now, one doesn’t have to accept the students’ interpretation of their experience (much less the FOX news interpretation) to accept that they are reporting their experience. And in fact, I don’t accept their usual interpretations of this.
For example, it is NOT true, so far as I can tell, that our universities are generally indoctrinating students with any kind of explicit left teaching. I don’t think faculty generally set out to punish conservative or anything like that.
I admire my colleagues!
On the other hand, it is true that the institution often assumes that a certain left leaning politics is the norm, that everyone in the community shares that politics. Just look at the banners and the posters in the building where we work.
Or how about the call that comes up every once in a while to make social justice one of our learning outcomes?
Or how about this tshirt from freshmen orientation this year? 
You can’t tell me that that shirt isn’t signaling pretty hard that as a community we’re on one side of today’s political divides. Are you surprised that kids who don’t identify with that side might feel, hey, maybe this isn’t the place for me?
You might well have a lot of sympathy with those different causes as a person (and I do); and obviously these complaints are in no way as serious as the stuff that other groups have to deal with.
Still, is it really a good idea for the university to identify itself with one side in our political fights today?
I said above that I don’t agree with the usual interpretations of this whole issue. I don’t; at the end of the day, I don’t think what we see on campuses is really a left/right issue (the rest of American politics is different).
Let me explain why, briefly. The truth is, we live in a culture that is *deeply* resistant to serious conversation about fundamental issues of value and identity. We try to avoid those conversations, and when we have them, we are bad at it.
It seems that we can’t have these conversations without hurting each other’s feelings. Partly because of that, we tend to think about higher education as a purely vocational endeavor: Come to AU, because we’re in DC and you’ll get a job
But if education is all about and only about skills you’ll need for your job, then you aren’t talking about existential questions: Do I believe in God? What’s more important, liberty or equality? Should I be an activist or a truth-seeker?
Just think about it from the point of a conservative student, or really any student at odds with whatever the mainstream is. In a situation where fundamental questions are off the table, it could easily *feel* like you’re being shut out.
Even if you’re not!
But you know who else often feels shut out of these conversations, and for basically the same reason? Folks on the left!!! The unstated assumption that we’re all on the same side, and that side is basically center-left shuts down
radical alternatives!
We should be reading, wrestling with, Marx, Du Bois, de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone!! Heck, we need to recapture the radical critique of our kind of society in Plato and Rousseau! Yes, alongside and in conversation with conservatives.
The TL;DR version: conservatives are right that there is something messed up about campus culture, but they have a skewed understanding of the problem. We can imagine a better university, an intellectually wilder, weirder, more alive university.
Just to bring this around to something @Lara_Schwartz and I agree about: bringing Dinesh D'Souza to campus probably doesn't get us very far toward this goal!
