This article by Adam Hoffman ran in the NY Times and it is basically the same boilerplate moral panic article that has been written hundreds of times now.
The story of this transformation, according to the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, starts around 2014, when Gen Z arrived on campus. The new progressive students were less tolerant of heterodox ideas and individuals. Demands to rescind invitations to speakers seemed to spike. The terms “microaggression” and “trigger warning” made it into everyday campus parlance
No, it didn’t start in 2014. I can trace it back to 1951. And this makes me wonder if Adam Hoffman or Jonathan Haidt have ever heard of William F. Buckley. Way back in 1951 William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a book called God and Man at Yale.
Buckley, then aged 25, criticized Yale for forcing collectivist, Keynesian, and secularist ideology on students, criticizing several professors by name, arguing that they tried to break down students’ religious beliefs through their hostility to religion and that Yale was denying its students any sense of individualism by making them embrace the ideas of liberalism.
Conservatives have been complaining about universities being biased against them for three quarters of a century. It may have started with Buckley but it most certainly didn’t end there. This is from the 1990s PC moral panic.
There are dozens of articles from 1990 to 1995 and any one of them could have been written last week about the current “woke” moral panic. Much of what Mr. Hoffman is saying was said before in the 1990s. In the New York Times no less.
From Hoffman’s article:
These changes were felt on my campus, too. “Princeton has become a much more politicized place over the last 10 years,” said Thomas Kelly, a philosophy professor. It’s also become more progressive. Diversity training sessions blatantly endorse progressive ideas: Espousing a colorblind ideal, for example, is deemed a “microinvalidation.” Bureaucrats police conduct and speech. Many programs cater to left-wing causes.
And from the 1990 NY Times article by By Richard Bernstein
Professor Gribben, who opposed the curriculum change at the University of Texas, has been denounced in the campus newspaper as a right-winger; a rally was held on campus to harangue him. “I just wanted to question a few features and my world fell apart,” he said.
What’s amazing about all those articles from the Clinton era, the Obama era and today is that they totally omit William F. Buckley. Nearly no one is willing to point out that the modern conservative movement is built on a foundation of campus grievance peddling. And there has been precious little difference between the grievance peddling of 1950s Buckley and the modern campus grievance peddling of TPUSA. All of them imagine this golden age of campus free speech without any mention of campus life being 99% male, 99% white, 99% christian and 99% native born.
I’m the first to admit things have changed. You used to be able to mock people of color by wearing blackface. Women were afraid of reporting harassment due to the consequences on them for reporting it. A white dude could use all kinds of slurs against the LGBT community for cheap laughs. It was totally ok to have an old boys club and hire your fellow white male friends. And all that was all viewed as totally normal. Because campus life was 99% male, 99% white, 99% christian and 99% native born.
It is important to realize that freedom is not being taken away from white men-dignity is no longer being withheld from women, from people of color and from the LGBT community. Freedom was not taken because white men never had any right to harass, belittle and exclude. Those transgressions simply went unpunished. And this is the change that conservatives are calling “woke”
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