RUTHFULLY YOURS

Student thuggery against non-leftist viewpoints is in the news again. Agitators at Claremont McKenna College, Middlebury College, and the University of California’s Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses have used threats, brute force and sometimes criminal violence over the past two months in efforts to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and me from speaking. As commencement season approaches, expect “traumatized” students to try to disinvite any remotely conservative speaker, an effort already under way at Notre Dame with regard to Vice President Mike Pence.

This soft totalitarianism is routinely misdiagnosed as primarily a psychological disorder. Young “snowflakes,” the thinking goes, have been overprotected by helicopter parents, and now are unprepared for the trivial conflicts of ordinary life.

“The Coddling of the American Mind,” a 2015 article in the Atlantic, was the most influential treatment of the psychological explanation. The movement to penalize certain ideas is “largely about emotional well-being,” argued Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Jonathan Haidt of New York University. The authors took activists’ claims of psychological injury at face value and proposed that freshmen orientations teach students cognitive behavioral therapy so as to preserve their mental health in the face of differing opinions.

But if risk-averse child-rearing is the source of the problem, why aren’t heterosexual white male students demanding “safe spaces”? They had the same kind of parents as the outraged young women who claim to be under lethal assault from the patriarchy. And they are the targets of a pervasive discourse that portrays them as the root of all evil. Unlike any other group on a college campus, they are stigmatized with impunity, blamed for everything from “rape culture” to racial oppression.

Campus intolerance is at root not a psychological phenomenon but an ideological one. At its center is a worldview that sees Western culture as endemically racist and sexist. The overriding goal of the educational establishment is to teach young people within the ever-growing list of official victim classifications to view themselves as existentially oppressed. One outcome of that teaching is the forceful silencing of contrarian speech.

At UC Berkeley, the Division of Equity and Inclusion has hung banners throughout campus reminding students of their place within the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood. One depicts a black woman and a Hispanic man urging fellow students to “create an environment where people other than yourself can exist.” That’s not meant as hyperbole. Students have been led to believe they are at personal risk from circumambient bigotry. After the February riots at Berkeley against Mr. Yiannopoulos, a columnist in the student newspaper justified his participation in the anarchy: “I can only fight tooth and nail for the right to exist.” Another opined that physical attacks against supporters of Mr. Yiannopoulos and President Trump were “not acts of violence. They were acts of self-defense.”

We spent the second half of the last century in a long war with a bunch of leftists who wore funny clothes and shouted a jargon of incomprehensible slogans.

These days you can only find them in North Korea and on your local college campus.

As free speech disappears from campuses faster than beer during Hell Week, here’s your guide to understanding what the people taking away your free speech are saying while they pepper spray you.

Free speech is actually not at all endangered on campus, according to the Wellesley News which defines free speech as any speech that protects the underprivileged. The only free speech is left-wing speech. Any other speech is a form of oppression against the underprivileged who have the privilege of calling it out by harassing anyone who engages in it to protect their existence from your existence.

That includes lying down in the middle of freeway traffic so as to impede white supremacy by preventing teachers from getting to work, kids from getting to schools and ambulances from transporting dying patients to the hospital. This calls attention to the plight of angry African Studies majors who almost read “Between the World and Me” and named their gerbils after wanted terrorist Assata Shakur.

All non-social justice forms of speech are hate speech. These include supporting Trump, quoting the Bill of Rights or refusing to check your privilege. Checking your privilege determines how much free speech you really have. The privileged have the least free speech because of their burden of privilege and the underprivileged are privileged with the widest latitude of free speech.

This includes bursting into the library and shouting racial slurs while everyone is studying for their finals.

Objecting to racial slurs, death threats, fake hate crimes, machete attacks, pepper spray and/or arson is “tone policing”. Policing the tone of angry left-wing minority hooligans who have Tumblr pages full of clips from The Boondocks is deeply wrong and you need to check your privilege. They are already performing enormous amounts of “unpaid emotional labor” by just existing in white spaces and then trying to educate you about your privilege and their agony by yelling racial slurs in your face.

It doesn’t help when you refuse to be educated about your privilege and instead whitesplain, mansplain, hetsplain or cisplain to them about the challenges you have overcome. If you aren’t enduring daily “microaggressions” when people fail to use the correct personal pronoun that reflects your agender identity (Zer or Ler are both acceptable) then you have no idea how privileged you are.

Existence is resistance. The mere existence of an agender Muslim Eskimo Lesbian who is differently abled on account of Zer’s learning disability is an act of resistance against a system of white supremacy filled with unthinking privileged cis and het normative people like you.

Every time that Zer encounters anything from a bathroom sign to a wedding cake that normalizes heterosexual and cisgender people who are racist enough to love the opposite sex and believe that they’re still men and women, it is triggered and must defend its existence. This requires it to perform enormous amounts of unpaid emotional labor from which it must retreat into self-care mode where it binge watches a season of Orange is the New Black while shoveling pints of Ben & Jerry’s into its maw and then demands class credit and a grant for all that unpaid emotional labor.

Failure to accede to its demands is also a microaggression.

Unpaid emotional labor is any emotional friction resulting from Zer fighting back against being marginalized, triggered and bloated. Social justice crybullies will often demand to be paid for their emotional labor. The emotional labor they demand to be paid for includes yelling at people on Twitter, posting social justice cartoons on Tumblr and reporting people for offensive Halloween costumes.

New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo rolled out a plan last week to give free tuition to middle-class students attending the state’s public colleges. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were quick to praise Mr. Cuomo’s political ploy, whose true target isn’t New Yorkers but Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The governor presents himself as a champion of the middle class, but it has been fleeing the state in droves due to the lack of jobs and high cost of living. More than 191,000 New Yorkers decamped last year for other states, 43,000 of them to Florida alone. About three-quarters of the state’s counties have lost population since 2010, when Mr. Cuomo was elected. The New York City area continues to grow thanks largely to an influx of foreign immigrants.

Alas, the plan for tuition-free college merely redistributes income while giving the middle class little actual help. In fact, many of the scheme’s putative beneficiaries may be harmed.

Consider the terms and conditions for the state scholarship. To qualify, students must come from families earning less than $100,000 ($125,000 by 2019)—and they must attend school full-time and graduate on time. The State University of New York estimates that about a fifth of its undergraduates would be eligible. A mere 2% of students at the City University of New York would qualify—in part because of low graduation rates, just 5% for full-time students at CUNY’s York College.

There are also claw-back provisions. At the end of each year, scholarship recipients who don’t complete 30 credits—a full course load for two semesters—could lose their grant award for that second semester and get stuck taking out loans to pay back the state.

Students also have to commit to living and working in New York after they graduate for as many years as they receive the scholarship. If they leave the state, the grant turns into a loan. This kind of indentured servitude could keep young graduates from pursuing higher-paying employment elsewhere.

Scholarship recipients also won’t save as much money as they might think. Annual tuition for in-state students at SUNY community colleges is roughly $4,370. The figure for the state’s public four-year schools is about $6,470. Low-income students can get federal Pell grants of up to $5,920 a year. New York’s Tuition Assistance Program, which covers students whose families earn less than $80,000, can further reduce tuition by $500 to $5,000 each year.

In other words, many middle-class students already are paying little to nothing for tuition. Students who receive Gov. Cuomo’s scholarships, however, would still have to pay for room and board, which SUNY estimates will run between $10,000 and $13,000 a year.

Mr. Cuomo says the plan will cost state taxpayers a mere $163 million by 2019. Yet hundreds of millions more in federal student aid may flow to public colleges because of increased enrollment, which may be one of the governor’s unstated goals. Since 2010, enrollment at SUNY community colleges has fallen on average by about 12%. Between 2011 and 2015, enrollment dropped by 8% at SUNY Buffalo State and 18% at Erie Community College.

Promising free tuition could steer more students to public schools from private ones. The Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities in New York estimates Gov. Cuomo’s plan would boost enrollment at public colleges by 116,000 while reducing the head count at nonprofit schools by 11%. The declines would be particularly acute at small, less selective colleges. For-profit schools would be pinched, too.

According to the commission’s analysis, the plan would shift $1.4 billion away from nonprofit colleges, resulting in 45,000 job losses. Compensating jobs would be created at public schools, but dislocations would invariably occur. “Once this is out there and implemented, possibly some of the more precarious institutions will go under,” Gary Olson, president of Daemen College, told Inside Higher Ed. “And what that will do is cause millions of dollars of lost economic impact on the local community where the college is located.” CONTINUE AT SITE

A Letter From An Ivy League Admissions Dean – WSJ By James Freeman

Brown University in Providence, R.I. houses one of the country’s most selective undergraduate colleges. The Brown Daily Herald, a student-run newspaper, cites Dean of Admission Logan Powell in reporting that the school received a record-high 32,724 applications this year, and admitted just 8.3% of applicants.

Among those lucky few is the daughter of a Journal reader who is still trying to make sense of a letter the family received this week from Mr. Powell. Our reader’s bright daughter had already received news of her acceptance when a letter arrived that was addressed to her “Parent/Guardian.”

Oddly, the note referred to the accepted student not as “she” but as “they.” Dean Powell’s letter also stated that our reader’s daughter had no doubt worked hard and made positive contributions to “their” school and community. Our reader reports that his perplexed family initially thought that Brown had made a word-processing error. That was before they listened to a voice mail message from the school congratulating his daughter and referring to her as “them.”

We’ve read about the literacy crisis in the U.S. but would not have guessed that the problem extends to Ivy League administrators. An item on Brown’s website announcing Mr. Powell’s 2016 hiring reported that he had previously served at Bowdoin, Harvard and Princeton—and also noted that he would be overseeing a staff of 38 people at Brown. One would think that at least some of them are familiar with pronouns.

It turns out that the errors were intentional. Brown spokesman Brian Clark writes in an email that “our admission office typically refers to applicants either by first name or by using ‘they/their’ pronouns. While the grammatical construction may read as unfamiliar to some, it has been adopted by many newsrooms and other organizations as a gender-inclusive option.” Our reader figured as much. “Mind you, our daughter has always been clear what her biological gender and identity is — she’s a woman,” he reports. He believes the school “wants to make it clear that only left wing extremists are welcome at Brown. Fine with us — good riddance.”

The letter from Dean Powell included a total of four short paragraphs, including this one: “And now, as we invite you to join the Brown family, we encourage you to allow [daughter’s name] to chart their own course. Just as you have always been there, now we will provide support, challenge and opportunities for growth.”

Nearly a complete stranger, Mr. Powell is writing a short, error-filled letter to parents claiming that his organization is fit to replace them. No doubt the “Brown family” with all its “thems” and “theys” can offer a wealth of valuable educational opportunities. But anyone who buys the line that competent parenting is part of the package has probably never set foot on campus.