RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yet an even more intolerant brand of campus activism is taking shape. This rising political philosophy isn’t merely allergic to dissenting ideas but is opposed even to ideas about dissenting ideas. It’s a bit like the concept of metacognition in reverse: These activists, gripped by zealotry and inflexible dogmatism, are taking pains to avoid even thinking about thoughts with which they disagree.

Consider a recent controversy at Washington College in Maryland. Students there successfully lobbied to shut down a campus production of a play just one day before it was set to open.

The aggrieved students were upset that the play, Larry Shue’s “The Foreigner,” depicts the evil antics of the Ku Klux Klan. But the play doesn’t show Klan members in a sympathetic light—on the contrary, they’re the villains of the piece, and they get their comeuppance in the end. Yet students were deeply upset by the Klan costumes the actors would wear, so the play had to go. (The theater department was “unable to find a satisfactory compromise” with the student activists, a campus official dryly noted.)

Several professors have also landed in hot water recently simply for speaking an offensive word while students were around. At Emory University, law professor Paul Zwier is facing major sanctions from his school because, in a few instances, he said the N-word. Mr. Zwier didn’t direct the word at anyone or anything; he merely mentioned it, first as part of a discussion of case law and then to illustrate a larger point during a private conversation. Students claimed Mr. Zwier threatened their “safety and emotional well-being.” Another student who heard Mr. Zwier use the word was reportedly “visibly shaken” after the experience, as if he had suffered a near-death experience. Faculty wanted Mr. Zwier barred from school events, lest they be forced to sit near him and risk their own reputations.

An employee at the University of North Texas lost her job after referring to the N-word as an example of constitutionally protected speech. Students demanded her firing, claiming that her use of the word proved she was racist. At Augsburg University in Minneapolis, a professor uttered the word while discussing a James Baldwin text that itself used the word. That professor was suspended after a student outcry. A professor at the University of Kansas got booted off the tenure track after referring to the word during a class session.

More evidence of ideological intransigence can be found in the “bias response teams” that are now regular features at many universities. One Michigan State student had a bias report filed against him for watching a Ben Shapiro video in a dorm. A faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was reported for having a Trump sticker in his office window. Another professor was hit with a bias report after discussing the infamous Janet Jackson “nipplegate” controversy. The offended student said the professor had not couched the discussion with enough moral qualifiers.

These incidents don’t represent the normal campus hysterics to which we’ve become accustomed. A growing and strident sect of campus activism is coming to oppose not merely differing opinions but even talking about differing opinions. This is a new and far more uncompromising brand of progressive politics, where even an unsympathetic and progressive depiction of the Ku Klux Klan is too much to handle. CONTINUE AT SITE