Our higher education system fails leftist students, Mike Munger argues:
What happens when a leftist student confronts arguments he or she disagrees with? After all, they sometimes hear views that contradict their own. The problem is that they have always been rewarded for facile rejoinders, the equivalent of one-move chess games.
There is a ceremony that goes with this, something one of my colleagues calls “The Women’s Studies Nod.” When someone makes a ridiculously extreme, empirically unfounded but ideologically correct argument, everyone else must nod vigorously.
Not just a, “Yes, that’s correct,” nod, but “Yes, you are correct, you are one of us, we are one spirit and one great collective shared mind” nod.
What if someone withholds the Nod?
Since the children of the left have never actually had to play a full chess game of argument, they need a response. Their responses are two: “You are an idiot; no one important believes that,” or “You are evil; no good person could possibly believe that.”
At this point, leftist faculty teach the left students several different moves. Let’s consider a few.
Suppose I claim that rent control is a primary reason why there is such a shortage of affordable housing in New York and San Francisco. Here are the responses I have gotten from students:
- Micro-aggression!
- Check your privilege! (If they had a mic, they’d drop it, because this is supposed to be so devastating).
- You must take money from the Koch Foundation.
- Economists don’t understand the real world.
- Prices don’t measure values. Values are about people. You don’t care about people.
Not one of those responses actually responds to, or even tries to understand, the argument that rent controls harm the populations that politicians claim they want to help.
The point is that if you cared about poor people, actually cared about consequences for poor people, you would oppose rent controls. But that’s not how the logic of the left works. Instead of caring about the poor, they want to be seen as caring about the poor.
This doesn’t fail left students. It helps dumb leftists. And smart leftists have an opportunity to check their IQ privilege.