E-Pluribus | September 30, 2022
Can't we all just get along, on campus, anyway; some cultures get more "sensitivity" than others; and what is upstream from totalitarianism?
A round-up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Samuel J. Abrams and Pamela Paresky: An “Us” vs. “Them” Mentality on Campuses Turns Potential Friends into Allies — or Enemies
With all the talk of preferred pronouns these days, it’s too bad more people don’t prefer “we” over “us versus them.” In an essay for the Boston Globe (via AEI), Samuel J. Abrams and Pamela Paresky write that colleges should be making a greater effort to foster friendships and discussion rather than distrust by policing “microaggressions” and “harmful” speech.
Students can become balkanized around identities and perceptions of power — an “us” vs. “them” mentality that turns potential friends into “allies” or enemies and contributes to both political self-censorship and an avoidance of personal self-disclosure. When it comes to sharing their views, 80 percent of students say they self-censor, according to a joint survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and RealClearEducation. The primary reason students say they don’t express their authentic views, according to a Heterodox Academy survey, is fear of peers taking offense. Many even worry that sharing their thoughts will cause others “harm.”
Clearly this undermines viewpoint diversity on campus. But perhaps the pervasive experience of keeping their thoughts to themselves also helps explain why more than two-thirds of students in the NBC poll reported “intense, persistent, and excessive worry and fear about everyday situations.” Common campus practices may be engendering mutual fear and distrust, impeding interpersonal connection, and preventing the development of meaningful relationships — the very things that buffer against feelings of isolation and loneliness.
[ . . . ]
Slights and indignities do occur on campus, as do even blatantly racist speech and behavior — and those should be addressed. No student should ever be threatened or harassed. But orienting students toward vigilance to every potential, even minor, offense has not been demonstrated to decrease prejudice and has even been found to reinforce biases. A recent study found that rather than diminishing harm, labeling speech as harmful may worsen the perception of being harmed.
Read the whole thing.
Robert Pondiscio, Elli Lucas: Cultural Sensitivity for Me, But Not for Thee
Religious individuals and groups often face misconceptions and stereotyping by those on the outside, but some fare better than others in the media. Robert Pondiscio and Elli Lucas at City Journal argue that the New York Times dropped the ball in a recent article on the community of Hasidic Jews in New York.
Adult life has many dimensions, and schooling has many aims. Nonetheless, it would be hard to deny that some things are going very right in such a community. Yet the New York Times, in a recent blockbuster report, chose to attack one such community and its schools: the Hasidic community of New York—or rather, the Hasidic communities of New York, for there are many.
[ . . . ]
The Times report’s biggest elision is its failure to account for why parents choose to send their kids to these schools in the first place. Hasidic schools are private schools; the parents sending their children there could instead send them to public schools or non-Hasidic Haredi schools. Of course, some parents in these tight-knit communities might worry about ostracism. Many others may take issue with the poor quality of secular education provided in Hasidic schools, even if they are otherwise satisfied with the quality of these schools. But nothing suggests that most parents who send their kids to these schools are anything less than happy with them.
Over the last few years, schools have increasingly focused on “decolonizing” curricula and “culturally relevant” pedagogy. The same paper that brought us the 1619 Project has given warm coverage to such efforts. But support for culturally sensitive curricula should not just be limited to cultures that don’t offend the Times’s sensibilities.
Read it all.
John Fraim: The Academic Basis of Modern Totalitarianism
Whether you ask the left, right or middle, almost everyone agrees totalitarian and authoritarian tendencies are on the rise, though there is little agreement as to the source and worst offenders. For Minding the Campus, using Mattias Desmet’s book The Psychology of Totalitarianism and the pandemic as a starting point, John Fraim says that sloppy academic and scientific research in recent decades has fueled a “radical contempt for facts” that has given aid and comfort to authoritarian movements throughout society and around the world.
In June, Desmet’s book titled The Psychology of Totalitarianism was published by Vermont’s Chelsea Green, one of the nation’s leading independent publishers. It expands on his Mass Formation theory and places these ideas in historical context. Desmet argues that much of the nation was under a form of hypnosis. He cites past thinkers on totalitarianism like Hannah Arendt and Gustave Le Bon to suggest that the pandemic response resembles the beginnings of totalitarianism.
Even now, almost two and a half years since the beginning of the pandemic, few mention the word “totalitarianism” when discussing it. As it was during the pandemic, the word “totalitarian” still seems to be taboo. Whether this will change remains to be seen, but hopefully Desmet’s excellent book will help foster a new dialogue about totalitarianism in the modern world. It seems to be an obvious “elephant in the room” for many today.
While The Psychology of Totalitarianism focuses on the pandemic, for Desmet, factors causing Mass Formation were at work as early as 2005, relating to a crisis that erupted in the sciences. It was a crisis he explored in his doctoral dissertation, in which “sloppiness, errors, biased conclusions, and even outright fraud” had become prevalent in scientific research. The result was that a staggeringly high percentage of research papers reached wrong conclusions. The most fascinating thing of all to him was that most researchers were utterly convinced they were conducting research correctly. Somehow, they failed to realize that their research “was not bringing them closer to the facts but instead was creating a fictitious new reality.”
Read it all here.
Around Twitter
The Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression says we shouldn’t try to de-fun the police:
Although the students themselves missed out on a chance to engage and learn, Erika Bachiochi of the Ethics and Public Policy Center praises Harvard Law’s handling of a student protest of her appearance:
And finally, presumably in response to the Washington Post’s Sahaj Kaur Kohli’s recent thread about name-mispronouncing microaggressions, Sonny Bunch would like a word:
