Groupthink on Campus, by Bruce Bawer.
Four of the group-oriented “studies” that [have] become established parts of today’s academic curricula [are] Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Chicano Studies. … Relatively new and on the rise: Cultural Studies, Disability Studies, Fat Studies, Men’s Studies, Whiteness Studies. …
None of this nonsense had anything to do with actual education. It was all about encouraging students to identify not as individuals who were at college to prepare themselves for a successful life but as members of one or more oppressed groups (the more, by the way, the better) and to see themselves, on that account, as victims of deep-seated prejudice on the part of a system that was determined to keep them down and prevent their success. And if you weren’t a member of any of those groups – if, in other words, you were a healthy heterosexual white male – the goal of all these pseudo-studies was to teach you that you were in possession of an undeserved privilege for which you were obliged to spend your life apologizing and making amends. Never mind if you’d grown up dirt-poor and had worked your toches off to get into college.
Your skin color, your sex, your sexual orientation: at many a university, these attributes now matter at least as much as anything intrinsic about you as an individual. …
How bad have things gotten? So bad that even the New York Times has decided to allow the truth about this subject into its sacrosanct pages: in a long, passionately argued November 18 article for that paper, Mark Lilla … actually argued that a pathological preoccupation with group identity has impaired higher education, the media, the Democratic Party, and liberalism generally. …
The whole point of a university used to be to develop students’ ability to think critically – to subject ideas, all ideas, to objective analysis and rigorous evaluation. Today, the vapid dogmas of group identity and “diversity” are considered to be above such criticism.
We’ve certainly come a long way, baby, from Martin Luther King’s line about the content of one’s character. And how old-fashioned that whole “colorblind” business now seems. And forget about those quaint concepts “the life of the mind” and “the cultivation of the intellect.” What sane, self-respecting individual with a shred of personal integrity would willingly submit to the increasingly totalitarian strictures of the contemporary university, with its profoundly illiberal, anti-intellectual creed? How can a system that has given itself over to such obscenities as the “diversity statement” end up producing anything but mealymouthed mediocrities?
What will life be like when this generation at university reach positions of power in their fifties (the 2050s)?
