Remember When Universities Were For Smart People?
Universities throughout Australia, The United Kingdom, The United States, and Canada are profoundly left-wing institutions.
Universities throughout Australia, The United Kingdom, The United States, and Canada are profoundly left-wing institutions. In Canada, the best-researched estimate is that 95% of academia is left-wing. The United States it’s around 90%.
Civil discourse and freedom of speech have been eroded. There are more displays of aggression, intimidation, and shutting down of other views. Those other views are always anything even slightly right of centre.
Academics are encouraging students to be heavy social justice warriors and can often be seen in attendance with their students shutting speeches down.
There is an alarming amount of unhinged animosity of right-of-centre views. Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Michael Knowles have all had violent outbursts, threats, and violence directed towards them or their supporters at speaking events on campuses. The left do not debate them with facts or counter-arguments. Much better to shut them down or deplatform them.
I think we can all agree we do not want neo-Nazis (an extreme fringe) inciting violence, but the mainstream right of centre conservatives being shut down is not that. But to the hard left anyone not in cohorts with them or marching to their drum is called a Nazi. In case they did not know there have been no Nazis since 1945. They are only a very small fringe and have never been close to influencing any policies.
There is certainly a radical shift in the environment of university campuses. Safe spaces and trigger warnings are a feature of university life and even segregation based on ethnicity, sex or gender. A life of ease within the campuses is the rule and not hearing views that challenge the left postmodernist outlook.
The nasty exchanges and outbursts are almost entirely by the social justice warriors. Calling yourself a conservative on campus now takes a lot of courage. I would say it is harder to call yourself a conservative on campus than telling others you dress like a little boy on weekends and wear diapers. That is where we are folks.
What the social justice warriors visualise and crave is enforcing the heavy hand of the state to compel you to say things you find objectionable. Making your views seem like a pathological disorder or making them abhorrent to the masses is their aim.
If you hold conservative views such as limited government, you are a Christian, believe in capitalism, free markets, personal responsibility, freedom of conscience and religion, parental rights over children, having a gun, abortion is murder, Marxism is bad and so on, you are ostracised and ridiculed or seen to be against social justice or equality.
Your feelings and freedom from not feeling upset are now even enshrined in law such as in Canada with 16C legislation. To be seen as right of centre the left define you as against equality. If you frame someone as being against fairness, an even playing field or common decency you can be easily pushed aside and shut out from society. This is how they play the game. Make others look nasty and vindictive.
If you are against the self-identification movement for example, often you will be called a hater or transphobic. If someone absurdly believes that having white skin is superior to black skin and whites are superior to blacks no one has to agree with that view. Just as someone who wants to identify as one of the dozens of chosen genders, I do not have to go along with it. But in Canada you do. It is even considered hate speech.
In Canada, the government is in the business of legislating against personal feelings or ridicule. Many even define it as hate speech if I do not wish to call you your chosen gender.
If I want to talk of the extraordinary number of people who have been lifted from poverty in the developing world from markets and business I will be called an oppressor or bigot. Even though over 2 billion have been lifted from poverty since 1990, that view is not accepted. Ben Shapiro tried on a university campus to say exactly that but was called a bigot and a fascist!!!
Unfortunately universities are breeding the next generation of pathetic whining radicals. They are not educating them, they are in the business of indoctrination. The education faculties want kids to be social justice warriors and only to see humanity and the world around them from the lens of progressivism postmodernist thinking. We have children as young as 4 in Australia being taught the gender bender view.
History, art, literature, religion and culture are seen through the critical theory view. Division between ethnicity, sex, gender, oppressed and oppressor, group identity, and expression. It is breeding chaos and social disorder. Victimology is a growing epidemic and once you make identity politics your prime motivation in life you look for perpetrators. Then you play blame games. It pits one group versus another group.
Radical leftism we do not want to see manifesting extreme reactionary groups like white supremacy. Radical identity politics is a dangerous game. The radical left may produce a radical response which no one wants to see.
Universities are becoming primarily about two things: an export market and more bums on seats. Foreign students are cash cows ready to be milked and any local bum on a seat is a good one. Of course medicine, health studies, nutrition, dentistry, engineering and science are necessary.
However, what many call toxic are the arts. Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Feminism, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Literature and the Faculty of Education are nearly always on the front lines of the all-out assault on the West through postmodernism and Marxist critical theory. Those faculties make up the vast majority of the intolerance within universities and groups like Antifa or the Socialist Alliance.
You can read my analysis on the failures of the Australian education system due to left-wing infiltration here, as well as part 2 of my series ‘The State of the Culture Wars’ here.
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