The Regressive Left Is Losing The Campus War
Photo credit: Edwin Gano
By Allum Bokhari
A turning point is underway in the culture wars over American universities. Dismayed by their wild-eyed radicalism and anti-intellectual demands, college faculties, administrators, and much of the media are turning their backs on the regressive left.
Left-wing activists have been running rampant on college campuses for years. In 2014, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) found that the number of speaker disinvitations on campus, typically prompted by the allegedly “offensive” views of a visiting speaker, had more than tripled over ten years. Activist crusades against cultural appropriation, sexism and racism have led to the banning of an eclectic range of items on campus, from Charlie Hebdo to mini-sombreros.
In one low point, student leaders at the University of Minnesota blocked a proposed annual moment of remembrance for 9/11 on the grounds that it could promote “Islamophobia.”
Previously quick to take the side of students demanding “safety” from offensive speech (Minnesota’s faculty quickly complied with activist’s demands to censor Charlie Hebdo, for example), it now seems that colleges administrators have had enough with the regressive left.
The President of Oberlin, an infamously liberal college, recently rebuffed a list of demands from left-wing activists on campus, the University of Missouri has been uncompromising in its decision to fire radical assistant professor Melissa Click over her attempted physical intimidation of a student reporter, and a growing number of professors are now speaking out against the culture of safe spaces and censorship on campus.
Of course, these efforts feel a little like Pandora trying to close her box — campus faculties trying to contain campus crazies they themselves helped create.
The campus crazies are still winning some victories, like Princeton and Harvard’s removal of the academic title “Master” over complaints that it conjured memories of slavery. But the flames of resistance are quickly flickering to life. Allies of the regressive left grow harder to find, while new opponents appear every day. After all, the regressive types manufacture a new enemy everytime they decide that an ally or a sympathiser isn’t ideologically pure enough for them.
The regressive left played into the hands of its opponents with hysterical responses to recent visits to U.S campuses from Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos and Professor Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute.
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