Thread by @biblioracle

For those who don't want to believe that Coddling the American Mind was the gateway to the current right wing freakout targeting free speech and academic freedom at public universities, look at how those right wingers revere the book. chronicle.com/article/presid…

I've got a blog post I'm trying to land on this topic. It's tough to get at exactly what I want to argue, but essentially, it's always been a power struggle. Student questioning problems of access and equity made some faculty uncomfortable, so they worked to silence them.

Go back in time and look at how student protest was responded to circa 2015-2016. The substance was never discussed. It was always an attempt to police how students were protesting. They weren't doing it correctly according to the people in charge.

So Coddling argued that students must be more willing to be made uncomfortable, but it was clearly projection. Many faculty at elite institutions could not stomach the hard work it would take to listen to students and have each side move to consensus.

Student protest was literally pathologized as a psychological disorder, an attempt to delegitimize whatever complaints students might have. The narrative paved the way for all of this.

At the time of the early protests, I argued that the fact of the protests should be embraced as students seeking agency over their lives. This didn't mean giving in to student demands, but it did require genuine engagement. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…

Not to toot my own horn too loud, but I said this in 2015 and I gotta say, I was right. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…

Am I the only person who remembers in 2014, one of the chief criticisms of students at elite institutions was they were "excellent sheep," docile in the face of the striving inside the so-called meritocratic competition? A year later, students are protesting, & that's bad too?

It was all a rigged game meant to keep the status quo in place. The pro-Coddling narrative crowd didn't get what they were playing with. They thought they could fight the internal battle and prevent any further loss of their own status and power, but the monster escaped the lab.

Let's not forget that all this pushback from the pro status-quo was centered around issues of diversity. It's always been a anti-anti-racism movement. Coddling dresses it up in respectable clothes, but it's not accidental that the open anti-anti-racists embrace the book.

This is not just hindsight. Coddling claimed to be trying to preserve the values of free inquiry and search for telos, but it did it by explicitly marginalizing student voices. It had the opposite effect of its claims. This was obvious to many at the time. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…

Maybe this wouldn't have been a problem if the fight remained confined to the Ivy Leagues, but the inevitable end was hostile state legislatures taking advantage of the culture war to bring their public institutions to heel. This is what's happening now.

Read the full piece from @vimalpatel232 about what the new president of Boise St. is facing from a hostile legislature. This is what the forces representing by Coddling have wrought. chronicle.com/article/presid…

Okay, time to stop drafting this piece on Twitter.

Here's an interesting coda. One of the chief figures who helped unleash this shitstorm praises an attempt to corral the monster and bring it back to the lab. Look at the replies. Very telling.

https://twitter.com/glukianoff/status/1412147123425001472