I do not intend to say that

Wednesday, February 17th, 2016

I got a chuckle out of Jonathan Haidt’s response here:

Jonathan Haidt: Anthro is completely lost. I mean, it’s really militant activists. They’ve taken the first step towards censoring Israel. They’re not going to have anything to do with Israeli scholars any more. So it’s now — it’s the seventh victim group. For many years now, there have been six sacred groups. You know, the big three are African-Americans, women and LGBT. That’s where most of the action is. Then there are three other groups: Latinos, Native Americans….

John Leo: You have to say Latinx now.

Jonathan Haidt: I do not intend to say that. Latinos, Native Americans, and people with disabilities. So those are the six that have been there for a while. But now we have a seventh — Muslims. Something like 70 or 75 percent of America is now in a protected group. This is a disaster for social science because social science is really hard to begin with. And now you have to try to explain social problems without saying anything that casts any blame on any member of a protected group. And not just moral blame, but causal blame. None of these groups can have done anything that led to their victimization or marginalization.

Comments

  1. Wilbur Hassenfus says:

    I wonder if this whole Maoist mess isn’t the administrators using the students as a weapon to intimidate the faculty. Admins spew anodyne bullshit for a living. There’s nothing in persecution of dissent that cramps their style; they’re happy to spew whatever anodyne bullshit is in fashion. The narrower the scope of permitted expression, and the more explicitly defined the list of mandatory pieties, the easier it is to prepare your remarks.

    But a competent academic is a funny old dinosaur who actually cares about the content of what he says. I suspect most administrators wonder if there’s any legitimate place for that sort of thing in the modern academy.

  2. Lucklucky says:

    It is Marxism. Administrators? No. This is the educational result.

  3. MD says:

    “I do not intend to say that” leaves the door open for “but I might be forced to at some point.”

Leave a Reply