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No Safe Spaces

Paul Bond reports at the Hollywood Reporter,

Comedian Adam Carolla and radio host Dennis Prager are touring the nation’s universities while making their documentary film, No Safe Spaces, and their first stop, scheduled at CSUN, was canceled, according to lawyers, because the content of a talk they were to give was deemed politically incorrect.

The presentation was supposed to consist of Carolla interviewing Prager at the Campus Theater on Dec. 1. The topic was rather vague, but it invariably was to focus on the duo’s assertion that the political left has a stranglehold on most colleges, and it was to be filmed so that some portions would have presumably ended up in No Safe Spaces.

...No Safe Spaces is filming with Carolla and Prager primarily over the fall and is a feature-length documentary about political correctness at universities. It derives its name from the so-called “safe spaces” that were created at some universities during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Safe spaces usually consist of coloring books, stuffed animals, bubble-blowing toys and the like, and were built for students who find it disturbing to hear opinions they don’t agree with.

Read more here.

Times have changed

Looking for courage and strength

Eliot A. Cohen writes at The American Interest,

Harvard and Yale are the products of Old New England.

...In 1692 a witch craze swept Salem, Massachusetts, triggered in part by hysterical children, fed by stern divines who sincerely believed in witchcraft, and permitted by a community too terrorized to stand up for due process, let alone prevent hangings and, in one case, the crushing of an innocent man to death by heavy stones because he refused to confess to an absurd, imaginary crime. There is something not entirely different going on today. Appoint assistant deans to take charge of witch hunting, and they will uncover horrifying stories of naked women flying on brooms at midnight and performing obscene acts with the goat devil Baphomet. Thought police will always find thoughts that require policing, and report dolefully that the problem of malign cogitation is even more pervasive than they had suspected. When one rewards, or merely fails to oppose, a culture of reckless incrimination and denunciation, the craze, and the persecution, will persist.

...That insolent teenagers behave the way they do is unfortunate. What is menacing is when they become a mob. If their teachers can get them to understand that they are in fact acting as a mob; that by calling for the persecution of those who do not conform they are the heirs not of Martin Luther King, Jr. but of Joe McCarthy, it may be the start of their awakening. The students might even, with assistance, discover the respect that liberal thought once accorded to the lonely individual who stands up for what he or she knows is right — someone like the principled doctor in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People or the retiring sheriff in High Noon.

The pervasiveness of social media makes the act of standing alone, of being one’s own man or woman, much harder than before. We all wish to be “liked” and we know that the best way to be “followed” is to “follow” others. Retweet and you shall be retweeted.

...The shrill petulance of today’s college protestors depresses observers because these talented young people see themselves as weak, vulnerable, psychologically frail, desperately in need of coddling. In another age these students’ demands to be cushioned against every one of life’s psychic blows would, properly, be seen as contemptible, and their willingness to bully anyone who gets in their way as a threat.

In my time as an assistant dean I saw some serious hardship cases: students who were the only effective individuals in dysfunctional families, desperately ill themselves, or facing the trauma of real tragedy among friends and relatives, including death. I do not remember one of them insisting that they be shielded from unkind words or ambiguous gestures, let alone potentially distressing Halloween costumes, as was the case at Yale. They had much to teach their fellows about the courage to bear life’s numerous injustices with fortitude. The adults nominally in charge of universities should take the example of today’s young people who have shown such courage — wounded veterans, for example—to heart, and use them to teach those who have suffered little yet feel deeply aggrieved the value of imperturbability in the face of adversity and the virtues of Emersonian self-reliance. Who knows? In such an exercise the faculty just might awaken a little courage in themselves as well.

Read more here.

The fine art of cultivating grievances

Jonah Goldberg writes,

Outside of the actual headquarters of the Democratic party itself, no major institution in America today is more thoroughly run and controlled by the Left than academia.

For several years now, whenever I’ve visited a college campus, I’ve tried to make the following point. It basically goes like this:

You kids think it is somehow rebellious to be liberal. So let me see if I get this right. The administrators at this school are liberal. The professors are liberal. Your high-school teachers were probably liberal. Your textbooks are, for the most part, liberal. Hollywood is liberal. The music industry is liberal. The fashion industry is liberal. Publishing is liberal. The mainstream media are liberal. Silicon Valley is liberal. Believe it or not, most corporations and the overwhelming majority of charitable foundations are liberal.

And yet, you think you’re sticking it to the man by agreeing with them?

...You see, there is precious little bigotry and prejudice on college campuses. But the bulk of what does exist is aimed almost entirely at the guys and gals chilling at the tailgate party. Pro-life Christians, Israel-supporting Jews, libertarian professors, conservative scholars, climate-change skeptics, traditionalists of every stripe including classical liberals, and, of course, people who can take a joke: These make up the bulk of the victims of campus bigotry and prejudice. I can’t tell you how many professors I’ve met who have to keep their conservatism secret, at least until tenure, if not forever. I’ve never met or heard of a faculty member who had to keep her Marxism on the down-low.

...If you can leave aside the threat to Western Civilization these little totalitarians pose, it’s a fascinating and glorious comeuppance these university staff are getting.

...Just as the “free speech movement” was never actually for free speech, the safe spacers aren’t really for spaces that are safe. They are for little moving zones of political absolutism, where their worldview and, yes, their privilege, are unquestioned and celebrated.

...By my rough count*, Yale offers 26 courses on African-American studies, 64 courses on “Ethnicity, Race and Migration,” and 41 courses under the heading of “Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.” I am probably low-balling the real numbers (they don’t include independent study) and the extent of the indoctrination, since you can be sure that many seemingly conventional courses are chock-a-block with left-wing treacle. How many courses are there on the Constitution? Well, from what I can tell: two (though one is actually taught by a conservative visiting professor, Steven Calabrisi). The History department offers three courses on the era of the Founding, all by a single professor.

...As for safe spaces, there is already an Afro-American Cultural Center, a Native American Cultural Center, an Asian American Cultural Center, La Casa Latino Cultural Center, and the Office of LGBTQ Resources. Included among the 80 or so official student organizations:

- A Learning and Interactive Vietnamese Experience
-Asian American Students Alliance
-Asian American Studies Task Force
-Association of Native Americans at Yale, Undergraduate Organization
-India at Yale
-IvyQ (as in “Queer”)
-Japanese Undergraduate Students at Yale
-Latina Women at Yale
-Liberal Party
-Reproductive Rights Action League at Yale
-Sex and Sexuality Week Planning Board
-Undergraduate First Generation Low Income Partnership
-Women in Physics
-Women’s Leadership Initiative at Yale
-Yale Queer+Asian
-Yale Urban Collective
-The Black Solidarity Conference at Yale
-The Yale Women’s Center
-Yale Southeast Asian Movement
-Q (again, as in Queer) Magazine
-Alliance for Southeast Asian Students
-Arab Students Association
-Association of Salvadoreñas at Yale Undergraduate
-Black Student Alliance at Yale
-Brazil Club
-Canadian Students’ Association at Yale [Talk about safe spaces!]
-Chinese American Students’ Association
-Chinese Undergraduate Students at Yale
-Club Colombia
-Club of Argentine Students at Yale
-Club of Romanian Students at Yale
-Cuban-American Undergraduate Students’ Association
-Despierta Boricua, the Puerto Rican Student Organization at Yale
-DisOrient
-Eritrean and Ethiopian Student Association at Yale
-In the Q[as in Queer]loset
-Japanese American Students Union
-Kasama: The Filipino Club at Yale
-Korean American Students at Yale
-La Revolucion
-La Societe Francaise
-Lo Stivale
-Malaysian and Singaporean Association
-Organization for Racial and Ethnic Openness
-Russian Cultural Club
-Sisters of All Nations
-South Asian Society
-Southeastern European Society
-Student Association of Thais at Yale
-Students of Nigeria
-Swiss Students and Affiliates at Yale
-Taiwanese American Society
-The German Society of Undergraduates at Yale University
-The Polish Students’ Society of Yale College
-Vietnamese Student Association
-Yale African Students Association
-Yale Black Women’s Coalition
-Yale British Undergraduates
-Yale Caribbean Students’ Organization
-Yale College Black Men’s Students Union
-Yale College Student Czech and Slovak Society
-Yale Dominican Student Association
-Yale European Undergraduates
-Yale Friends of Turkey
-Yale Hawaii Institute
-Yale Kala
-Yale LGBTQ Cooperative
-Yale Mexican Student Organization
-Yale Scandinavian Society
-Yale Undergraduate Portuguese Association
-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer+ Activism Collective
-Margin: Student Perspectives from the Left
-Middle Eastern Resolution through Education, Action & Dialogue
-Party of the Left
-Students for Justice in Palestine
-Yale NAACP

And the response from the activists? A loaded-diaper tantrum about how Yale is a hotbed of bigotry against people of color and women. And what will placate the mob? Why more institutions, courses, and faculty trained in the fine art of cultivating grievances.

Read more here.