Will Professors Viscusi and Chopra permit disagreement, or will disagreement constitute a lack of collegiality, a claim recently made at Brooklyn College? The e-mail does not indicate whether the democratic ideologies of Stalin and Mao will be used to illustrate Robin’s and Chopra’ commitment to freedom and democracy.

Will LGBT status or socio-economic status become the next mania among college admissions people intent on making their campuses “balanced” and “mirroring diversity”?

All that “critical thinking” stuff they’re learning at UW put to use!

Zuckerberg stated:

“I don’t want Facebook to be an American company [God forbid!],” he said. “I don’t want it to be this company that just spreads American values all across the world. …For example, we have this [culturally constructed American] notion of free speech that we really love and support at Facebook, and that’s one of the main things that we’re trying to push with openness. But different countries have their different standards around that. …My view on this is that you want to be really culturally sensitive….”

This is the moral and cultural nihilism that bristles at “American values” and must be “culturally sensitive” and protect the “right not to be offended” lest you face a “hostile environment” charge–or worse. My students spew this because it starts K-12 and many of my colleagues are fond of the “free speech for me but not for thee” quote (Stanley Fish). And, of course, we must “understand The Other” (non-Americans). Or, as Zuckerberg put it: “understand the way that people actually think.”

Now, there is nothing wrong with “understanding the way the people actually think” but there is something wrong when you privilege these “other ways of thinking” at the expense of what you profess to “really love and support at Facebook” (that odd notion of openness and American values).

God help Mr. Zuckerberg, et al. as Iran goes ahead with its foolish autarkic plans to build a new operating system to impose the Islamic ethical code on all computer users in Iran. If or when Zuckerberg sells his out in Iran (and China), he will move one step closer to losing his soul and costing the lives of Others in foreign lands who had hoped that U.S. companies and Americans (of all types) might stand with them as they embrace dissident “American values” (as if they were peculiar to America).

“What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?

Mark 8:36

Kushner’s views on Israel, far from being a strike against him in garnering honorary degrees, appear to have worked mostly as a condiment. Honoring him at commencement is a kind of PC trifecta: a prominent gay playwright; a writer who embodies a general disdain for traditional American values; and someone who reviles Israel—or who at least appears to, since Kushner now says he is “proudly identified as a Jew” and maintains “a passionate support for the continuous existence of the State of Israel.”

Now, the “progressive” Left has replaced the Puritanical Right as the great policer of speech. “Progressives” have always policed speech (“you are politically incorrect, comrade!”) so this is really nothing new. Both Left and Right have a long history of searching out words they feel are too sensitive to the ears of minors or thin-skinned individuals. (Apologies in advance for those who suffer from blue noses or thin skin).

Latest example: the Canadian “Standards Council” has banned the Dire Straits song for using the word “faggot” in the classic 1980s tune “Money for Nothing.” I learned this after listening to the song on the Dire Straits’ album “Brothers in Arms.” The song brought back memories of my youth so I searched out the video which was as good as I recalled (classic MTV video of the 1980s). Alas, the video has also been excised so that it is “good for all countries.” Now Canada can join the Religious Right in America and the Muslim bloc (in the United Nations) in bullying or outlawing “hate speech.” Perhaps the result will be some Universalist Code of Speech.

What makes this even more chilling is that they are attacking not only present speech but scouring the past for things that might offend someone if ever read or heard now. Shades of Fahrenheit 451.

The new rule of thumb: don’t say anything that might offend any one one hundred years from now. Looking at the evolving history of speech, good luck guessing what might be on the “hit list” in the year 2111!

Coda: the secondary definitions for “bluenosed: “Canadian.” Kind of appropriate, eh?

There is a pervasive attitude that `the kids can’t do it.’ Bullshit. Teachers won’t let them because it’s `easier’ to just read it all aloud in class (since it takes up more time) or just read some of it.  In a meeting today . . . two of my colleagues brought up dropping [Fahrenheit 451] since their students `couldn’t handle it.’  An AP teacher shared an assignment for Of Mice and Men. She passed around journal books where the students summarize each chapter on the left side of the page and then draw a picture on the right to represent a ‘theme’ of the chapter.”

This is what passes for reading and for writing, and it’s not just in high school.  Electronica’s erosion of reading ability means that reading books is no longerexpected at any level.  In a presentation last year, the Columbia University Core Curriculum directors sheepishly admitted that even their celebrated and historic program now finds it must resort to having students read excerpts rather than entire books.

Impoverished reading begets impoverished writing.  I also heard from Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review who struggles to preserve the meaningfully-researched high school history essay, a Herculean task when the previously mentioned AP teacher also “doesn’t assign an essay anymore because they are `too painful’ for her to read.”

So if teachers don’t have students read and don’t have students write, what do they do?  In The Intercollegiate Review (print only), R. V. Young writes about the decay of Freshman Comp., using as his example Jonathan Alexander’s composition class at U.C. Irvine devoted to developing “sexual literacy.”  According to his U.C.I. listing, Dr. Alexander “works at the intersection of the fields of writing studies and sexuality studies, where he explores what discursive theories of sexuality have to teach us about literacy and literate practice in pluralistic democracies.”  Dr. Young understandably despairs of reforming what he finds to be not an educational system at all but “a curious and uneven amalgam of job training, indoctrination, and custodial care.”

Amen, brother.

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