The problem of cowering to and enabling SJW's

Post Reply New Topic

Samuel Abrams is among our best commentators on higher education. Readers may remember Abrams as a conservative professor at a very liberal college. After he wrote an op-ed that led off with a “politically lopsided” event at his own Sarah Lawrence College, Abrams saw his office vandalized and heard calls for his tenure to be reexamined with a view to revoking it. Rather than stepping in to affirm that the uproar over Abrams’s data-driven argument was completely out-of-step with the norms that ought to govern an educational community, the president of the college reportedly told him that he was creating a “hostile work environment.”

Yet Abrams refuses the conclusion that our campuses are irredeemable. This refusal has much to do with his students at Sarah Lawrence who, far from being the groupthink zombies of our campus nightmares come “ready to engage, question, and debate topics and questions across the ideological spectrum.” Unfortunately, they find themselves in a campus culture over which small numbers of activists, backed by “social justice-minded administrators,” have disproportionate influence. So, they may be subjected to bullying even for taking an Abrams class.

Abrams doesn’t deny that there is a major viewpoint diversity problem on his campus and others. But how we diagnose it matters. If the problem is caused by small numbers of people, and there is a large audience for the kind of teaching Abrams does, simple courage can go far toward bettering campus cultures. If the problem is instead that the present generation of students, Generation Z, is hostile to the free exchange of ideas, then our situation, while not hopeless, is harder.

Abrams looks at the best survey we have, the Freshman Survey offered by the Higher Education Research Institute. HERI has been polling college freshmen across many campuses for over five decades. Its researchers recently released the findings of its 2019 survey. The data, Abrams explains, show that “51% of college students believe that colleges have the right to ban extreme speakers from campus, proving that a large number of students simply reject this notion.” Moreover, “our nation’s colleges and universities are not overwhelmingly liberal and there is no leftist student monoculture our campuses.” In fact, a plurality of students, 43.6%, identify as “middle of the road,” and only 4.5% consider themselves “far left.”

Students are certainly more liberal than non-students. But campuses in which the “middle of the road” and “conservative” contingents constitute better than 60 percent of the student body become monocultures only if one lets them.

Some caveats. First, there has been a big change over the years in how students respond to the proposition. From 1967, the first year of the survey, to 1986, the highest percentage of students agreeing that colleges have a right to ban extreme speakers broke 30 percent only twice. HERI’s researchers did not ask the question between 1987 and 2003, but when they began to ask again, that percentage spiked into the 40s. It remained in that range until this year, when it broke 50 percent for the first time ever. On the narrower question of whether colleges should ban racist and sexist speech, last asked in 2018, we are also at an apex—74.6 percent in agreement. When the question was first asked, in 2000, that number was 61.8 percent. Finally, while the percentage of students on the far-left is quite small, it is also high by historical standards—4.5 percent is, again, a peak. In the 1990s, a period of high alarm about political correctness on campus, the number was never higher than two percent.

Abrams is absolutely right. Among students, and even faculty, colleges and universities have drifted leftward, but it is not as drastic as media coverage of our campuses makes it seem. Abrams writes that “media, a core group of activist students, and social justice-minded administrators are leading” whatever cultural warfare we see on campus. But student opinion has been trending in favor of this small band of activists. This trend, our toxic political environment, and the growing power of “student-facing” administrators, whom Abrams’s research finds “the most left-leaning group on campus” by far, indicates that opponents of the politicized campus are in for a bumpy school year.

Why would anybody even think of putting that sort of ad out there?

Leftists, Socialists, Commies, Demonrats, Woke libs, PC, SJWs, Antifas, Anti Racists... oh my! oh my!

I am happy that you are not cowering and enabling these scary baddies for their inclusivity! Fight the good fight man! It is not like there are more pressing issues facing the world these days.

I find it interesting what triggers some people...

Get back on out there chaps and own some libs!

Get back on out there chaps and own some libs!

Leftists, Socialists, Commies, Demonrats, Woke libs, PC, SJWs, Antifas, Anti Racists... oh my! oh my!

I am happy that you are not cowering and enabling these scary baddies for their inclusivity! Fight the good fight man! It is not like there are more pressing issues facing the world these days.

I find it interesting what triggers some people...

Get back on out there chaps and own some libs!

While I think the SJW boogeyman is not nearly as scary or monolithic as it is portrayed as, I also don’t think this is a fair characterisation of ASPartofMe’s position and it certainly isn’t a fair characterisation of him and his motivations. He is a moderate and kind-hearted individual who is worried that our society is too quick to judge, has limited capacity for forgiveness, and does not appreciate nuance. He has no interest in “owning the libs”, he isn’t scared of communists, and although he doesn’t talk about partisan issues much, I get the impression he usually votes Democrat and certainly will in November.

It’s not a toomah — but it is apparently canceled, at least from one Portland drive-in screening series.

Kindergarten Cop, the quotable 1990 hit comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a detective who poses as a teacher to apprehend a dangerous drug dealer, has been removed from its opening night slot at Portland's Northwest Film Center's Cinema Unbound Drive-in Theater after criticisms that it plays a “school-to-prion pipeline” for laughs and “romanticizes over-policing in the U.S.”

The charge was led by local author Lois Leveen, who took to Twitter Saturday to call out the film ahead of its planned screening, which was scheduled to kick off the film series on Thursday.

“What’s so funny about School-to-Prison pipeline?” Leveen wrote in a tweet shared via screen caps by The Daily Mail (Leveen’s account has since been made private). “Kindergarten Cop-Out: Tell @nwfilmcenter there’s nothing fun in traumatizing kids. National reckoning on overpolicing is a weird time to revive Kindergarten Cop. IRL, we are trying to end school-to-prison pipeline.”

In a separate tweet, Leveen compared Kindergarten Cop to the much older controversial films The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939).

“We recognize these films like those are not ‘good family fun.’ They are relics on how pop culture feeds racist assumptions. Kindergarten Cop romanticizes over-policing in the U.S.”

The film’s cancellation has — predictably — come under fire, with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz lamenting that “angry leftists hate Hollywood. Anyone who disagrees will be censored. Hollywood, afraid of the mob, will keep funding those trying to erase any speech/movies that don’t conform.”

Folks of all political stripes, however, questioned Leveen’s head-scratching comparison of the PG-13 comedy to D.W. Griffith’s infamous film The Birth of a Nation, an explicitly racist film that painted the Ku Klux Klan as valiant heroes. Beyond its multicultural cast of kindergarteners, there are scant — if any — racial implications in Cop.

“Kindergarten Cop and Birth of a Nation are both problematic movies in the same sense that my kids are Vincent Van Gogh are ‘both painters,’ responded Alex F. Baldwin on Twitter.

There’s also the argument to be made for Kindergarten Cop’s pro-teacher and pro-education messages. One of the film’s central themes is that teaching is just as — if not more difficult — than police work. And by the end of the film (spoiler alert), the initially bad-tempered LAPD Det. John Kimble (Schwarzenegger) actually decides to quit his job at the police department to become a teacher.

The festival’s decision to nix Kindergarten Cop also comes on the heels of other recent cancellations of law enforcement-related programming, most notably the reality shows Cops and Live PD, which were criticized for glorifying police force. Contrary to social media rumors and a statement by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, the Nickelodeon animated dog-cop series Paw Patrol has not been canceled.

In place of Kindergarten Cop, the event’s organizers will instead screen John Lewis: Good Trouble, Dawn Porter’s insightful documentary about the late civil rights icon

Do you think that it romanticizes over policing?

Do you see how it might be a saw spot for a city that just had a lot controversy over the topic, including federal police using technicality of being within 100 miles of a border entry because they were within 100 miles of the coast, and saying that they are protecting federal buildings, to terrorize protestors such as kidnapping people into unmarked vans?

Prior to the arrival of the federal officers, had the federal buildings been attacked\damaged\broken into?

How many "protesters" were "kidnapped" into unmarked vans (I will say that it is surprising that police have never, to your apparent knowledge based on your statement, ever used an unmarked vehicle before)?

Of these "kidnapped" protesters, how many were taken before a judge and either remanded in custody\released on bail after being charged and how many were ACTUALLY kidnapped and so have not seen a judge?

Of these, how many were arrested in relation to damage to the federal building\assaulting the federal officers protecting it, and how many for another, unrelated reason?

Do you think that it romanticizes over policing?

Do you see how it might be a saw spot for a city that just had a lot controversy over the topic, including federal police using technicality of being within 100 miles of a border entry because they were within 100 miles of the coast, and saying that they are protecting federal buildings, to terrorize protestors such as kidnapping people into unmarked vans?

It romanticized nothing, it was a juvenile comedy. It was nothing remotely like Birth of A Nation or Gone With The Wind films designed to promote the lost cause mythology. There may or may not be reasons to cancel Kindergarten Cop but the last person people should be listening to is a person who makes comparisons between Kindergarten Cop and
Birth of A Nation. The type of person who makes such comparisons is the type of person the pejorative Social Justice Warrior describes.

There did not seems to be a massive outcry from the citizens of Portland about this screening it was this one activist. IMHO the people that were going screen the film were not worried about mass offense being taken, they were worried physical violence being done to their facility and protesters at their homes. There is a recent history of that in Portland.

Somehow the troops actually fighting in wars were not particularly bothered by Bob Hope making comedy about their situations. They understood it was comedy.