I teach at a public university in a highly selective program, and even my most politically engaged students are unfailingly polite and respectful, eager to learn, and share their opinions in thoughtful ways. I don’t shy away from challenging them, nor am I simply some font of leftist pieties; I teach the work of people who would’ve doubtlessly hated me personally—for instance, Immanuel Kant or St. Augustine.
I suppose I’m a sample size of one, but then not a single one of my colleagues has ever reported anything similar. No member of my committees, no fellow grad students, no tenured professor I’ve ever worked for or sat down for coffee with. And that’s just at my campus. None of my colleagues elsewhere report anything even remotely like the Revenge of the Snowflakes narrative that seems so popular in mass media these days.
I’d humbly propose that writers of a certain age would benefit from actually reconnecting with the campuses they left behind so long ago, instead of getting all their information about them through whining op-eds in legacy news outlets that exaggerate half-truths and rumors about what’s really happening on campus.this such a problem to begin with? Social media has a way of distorting us into an imago of our worst, most extravagantly emotional selves.
Instagram is everyone’s favorite culprit here, a platform whose very norms condition you into making yourself look more glamorous and successful than any person can reasonably claim to be. But this is only the most obvious form of the problem. On Twitter you have to be your snarkiest self. Sincerity is a crime—or at least an invitation to get trolled by the savvy and suitably ironic. TikTok, despite its more youthful sheen and video-heavy culture, is very similar.
interesting. a rippling game of Ripley's believe it or not.
'...that scene 'understood the vocabulary but not the grammar' of how young activists talk about issues...' This would (have if true) put it way the hell ahead of the way this shit has been spewed since Michael Bérubé diagnosed the problem back in 1991.