In 2007, Keith John Sampson, a middle-aged student working his way through Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as a janitor, was declared guilty of racial harassment. Without granting Sampson a hearing, the university administration — acting as prosecutor, judge and jury — convicted him of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”Read the rest here
“Openly.” “Related to.” Good grief.
The book, “Notre Dame vs. the Klan,” celebrated the 1924 defeat of the Ku Klux Klan in a fight with Notre Dame students. But some of Sampson’s co-workers disliked the book’s cover, which featured a black-and-white photograph of a Klan rally. Someone was offended, therefore someone else must be guilty of harassment.
This non sequitur reflects the right never to be annoyed, a new campus entitlement. Legions of administrators, who now outnumber full-time faculty, are kept busy making students mind their manners, with good manners understood as conformity to liberal politics.
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5 comments:
Political correctness is going to kill this country. And the sad thing is that people who are supposed to be educating young adults are instead teaching them to think "correctly" rather than to deliberate, which is the dumbest thing I can think of.
The dumbest people I run across are those who refuse to consider another viewpoint. Some are liberal, some are conservative, some atheist, some Christian, some unaffiliated with any of these categories. The common denominator is the assumption that they are right and the refusal to consider any other viewpoint.
This cover, apparently - http://www.amazon.com/Notre-Dame-Vs-Klan-Fighting/dp/0829417710
The Klan rally isn't even the prominent part of the cover photo.
The Liberal Campaign Against Freedom of Liberal Speech on College Campuses.
I don't think political correctness is the problem, per se, if we mean having the usual 'liberal' opinions about things as political correct ness. As the article give evidence (Greg Lukianoff)one can hold opinions labeled politically correct and reject bureaucratic actions such as these. I suspect most of this poor fellow's support in getting administrative and legal retribution is going to come from liberal sources, as appears to be the case now from the facts given. I think the problem has more to do with a cultural shift, most notable in the academy but certainly not isolated to it, in which making another person uncomfortable is deemed tantamount to abuse. I think movement conservatives have their own hyper prudish equivalents of the paranoia we see here. You go further to the left than liberal or further to the right than movement conservative and you find a lower % of folks who are so fragile.
Hey John, I hear you with this post. Check this one out:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/10/31/free-speech-at-canadian-universities-abysmal-report-says/
My university is particularly awful.
Pax Christi,
Jason @ Ascending Mount Carmel
Och, yepper. We extremists are too scrappy to worry about fragility, except as a retributive tactic. I remember that I was required once to attend a diversity discussion during which I wondered aloud why anyone thought that Tiger Woods' adultery was blameworthy. The discomfort of the happily-married woman who was leading the discussion was precious. Best of all, I wasn't invited to the sequel.
Political correctness, ideas such as equality of human inputs yields equality of human outcomes, is a denial of reality. All such systems must inevitably resort to totalitarian methods to maintain the delusion.
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