Stream: Professors Say Lack of Ideological Diversity is a Feature, not a Bug
You know who the real champions of open debate on our beleaguered college campuses are? Social justice warriors.
Obvious, right?
It was obvious to tenured professor of classics and ancient history Matthew Sears at the University of New Brunswick.
He wrote “Why ‘social justice warriors’ are the true defenders of free speech and open debate” for the Washington Post. And they printed it. So it must be true.
Sears is one a growing rank of academics who see the enforced progressive monoculture at American universities not as a bug but as a feature.
He wrote “the social justice approach — which emphasizes the dynamics of power and oppression — that many fear has taken over the humanities and social sciences at its best is actually an improvement over the ‘disinterested pursuit of truth’.”
Reality is Judgmental
It sure is an improvement! Why use disinterested truth when we can speak our Oprah-blessed self truths by using the dynamics of power and oppression? Just like those SJWs at Evergreen State College did when they stalked through campus with bats daring people to disagree them.
And remember: Disinterested truth can be awfully harsh. You’re a man who wants to be a woman? That’s your truth. But the disinterested truth insists you’re still a man. Ouch.
Sears says “In fact, rather than constituting an attack on knowledge, the social justice lens reflects new ideas generated by academic disciplines and experts within them, and generally encourages expanding our knowledge and opening up subjects to new perspectives, much like Socrates advocated.”
Know What You Don’t Know
It’s not clear what Socrates Sears meant. Maybe the chef at The Pita Pit located in downtown Saint John. (Or perhaps Karl Popper’s cat?)
He can’t have meant Socrates the philosopher. Socrates the philosopher was all for the disinterested pursuit of truth. While in jail awaiting execution, Socrates congratulated his friend Crito on being well placed to consider a certain argument because Crito was “disinterested and not liable to be deceived by the circumstances in which [he was] placed.”
At that same time Socrates said that he would follow the path of reason “even if the power of the multitude could inflict many more imprisonments, confiscations, deaths, frightening us like children with hobgoblin terrors.”
We are therefore right to doubt that Socrates would have supported the path of Social Justice. Like that followed by SJWs at Middlebury College, who you might remember used the dynamics of power and oppression to shut down a speech by Charles Murray. SJWs hounded Murray of campus and tried to yank the head off of a professor accompanying Murray. Giving your debating opponent a concussion is not what is classically meant by the Socratic method.
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If you are not on a campus that has blocked this (it’s happened before!), click here to read the rest.
Shut them all down. Colleges no longer any useful civilizational purpose. Starve the beast.
For at least two decades, the USA has annually produced more lawyers than the rest of the world combined. Japan graduates more engineers every year than the US does.
Set up trade schools for engineering and medicine. ¡Science! has been too thoroughly corrupted to save. We need to start fresh there.
Part of the problem is that SJW’s get a disproportionate amount of air time. There is a growing number of openly right-thinking students in universities. Partly due to people like Ben Shapiro who can calmly and succinctly rebut leftist claims. Shutting down universities isn’t the answer.
Eventually, the degrees in Diversity and the like will be seen as non-productive. The answer is to let economics win but it will take time.
He wrote “Why ‘social justice warriors’ are the true defenders of free speech and open debate” for the Washington Post. And they printed it. So it must be true.
Evergreen … Laurier …
’nuff said