Thread by @biblioracle

This whole students are coddled, anti-trigger warning, anti student protest thing that's metastasized into the anti-anti-racism movement that's coming for public higher ed was just supposed to be a little internecine culture battle for primacy in elite colleges.

Faculty at elite privates got a little salty about how they were being checked by administrators/bureaucracy over issues of diversity combined with the rise of students agitating over these issues. It was looking like they may have to change the status quo.

Quelling that unrest meant pathologizing student protestors as defective and their protests therefore as unjustified. The substance of what students were protesting over was almost never discussed. They were just said to be doing it wrong by those in power.

The motive was to shut students up, and through the "we need viewpoint diversity" canard, to put administrations on the defensive to allow elite faculty the attitude they've become so accustomed to. Every contretemps you read about was at an elite private school.

But of course the narrative of coddled, woke students took root and became a convenient cudgel with which to strike all students regardless of institution. The campaign painted institutions as captured by the defective, so they need remedying and control.

The internecine battle got out of control as conservative legislatures have found cover to complete a project they've long desired, to bring public institutions to heel. That's nothing new, but they couldn't muster the public sentiment for it.

Conservatives think that the anti-anti-racism backlash is sufficient to exert control over institutions that would normally be viewed as an overreach by the public. UNC is a great recently example of the battle manifested at the institutional level.

It's awesome that some of the folks who fanned the flames of the panic over woke students and trigger warnings are now speaking out against authoritarian anti-speech laws being passed by state legislatures, but a little reflection of how we got here would be nice too.