by Alon Goldberg
For many on the new Left, the devil is the mere debate of issues.
A
lineup of prominent professors has recently spoken out against the
growing clout of the radical Left in Western academia. They are worried
that subjects and research have been taken over by a wave of fashionable
trends such as anti-nationalist identity politics.
Historian Niall Ferguson recently said that
this radicalization will soon lead to the purging of anyone who does
not conform. When this happens, students will no longer learn the truth
about the crimes of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, or about the
factual, non-conspiratorial version of the 9/11 attacks.
The renowned jurist Alan Dershowitz has
echoed this, saying that that the radical Left "poses a far greater
danger to the American future than the hard Right. ... When I used to
teach 150 students in my first year of criminal law, I'd look around and
I'd say, 'Future president. Future chief justice. Future editorial
director of the New York Times. Future managing partner of Goldman
Sachs. They're our future. And that's why we have to worry much more
about what's going on on university campuses than in Charlottesville
[where a white supremacist ran over a crowd of left-wing protesters]."
Dershowitz says the left-wing radicals
"blackball" professors or students who dare to deviate from the
orthodoxy of identity politics.
Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist and
professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of
Business, founded an organization aimed at countering the Left's
orthodoxy and has marshaled a coalition of professors who espouse free
speech and pluralism.
He believes the radical professors in
academia have long abandoned the idea of teaching students tolerance and
acceptance as a means of engaging in an educated and civil debate. They
believe in teaching their students about delegitimization and
dehumanization, because these are the best ways to besmirch and destroy
the reputations of people marked as the enemies of the new revolution.
Today's radicals used to be student
activists during the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. Some are the product of
social justice movements from that era, and they believe in neo-Marxist
identity politics as articulated by philosopher Herbert Marcuse, one of
the ideological forefathers of radical Left.
Haidt says that for many on the new Left,
the devil is the mere debate of issues. Debate is the core of
scholarship and science and the foundation of any academic institution
that hones intellectual skills. Thus, with the help of those professors,
students are deprived of those skills and become a human herd that is
easily manipulated and maneuvered.
A recent study conducted by Political
Science Professor April Kelly-Woessner showed a worrying trend: College
graduates are much less tolerant of opposing viewpoints that they were
upon entering college.
She says this trend is a product of years
spent in college classrooms where the students were rarely exposed to
views different from their own and spent much of their time doing
everything possible to avoid listening to anyone outside their echo
chamber of radical ideas.
Kelly-Woessner says hearing differing views
is critical: The more we listen to ideas that challenge our views on
identity, on morality and on anything sacred or important, the more we
develop critical thought and become accepting of pluralism.
This does not mean we have to
accept everything, but we do have to accept the legitimacy of multiple
viewpoints and the notion that this only makes people stronger, smarter,
and ultimately more convincing.
Alon Goldberg manages "The Classic Liberal" page on Facebook.
Alon Goldberg
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/fight-the-lefts-hold-on-academia/
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