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9 tweets,
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"It’s rare to see a critique of campus politics based on the damage it can do to the educations of college students. In fact, many commentators seem eager to blame students for various problems in the American university system, depicting them, as “snowflakes,” “crybullies”...
... and so on. But this is a deflection. Students are the victims, not the perpetrators, of campus censoriousness, politicization, and political bias, and academics should think hard about the skills their charges are failing to acquire as a result."
"What are some of the “conservative” intellectual skills that are worth teaching? One of them is the positive genealogy of institutions, a kind of secular theodicy, which we can counterpose to the negative, revolutionary genealogies of leftists (which also have their place)."
"Another conservative skill is the anticipation of unintended consequences, especially consequences that run diametrically opposed to our intentions."
"More than their own desire for safe spaces or trigger warnings, what’s endangering college students isn’t manias they bring to campus but the prevailing curriculum and methodology in the contemporary academy...
... By and large, the most politicized fields, with the highest proportions of left-wing professors, adhere to a very strong form of social constructivism. They view all the categories of our experience, cognition, action, and valuation as products...
... of history, culture, socialization, and so on; and in their crudest forms they purport to be able to analyze the modes of that production and to tell people who they are based on them."
"To the extent that their educations consist only in being trained to see such awful determinism everywhere, to track it from high art through pop culture to political theater, they will be genuinely harmed."
