When I started a student magazine of conservative opinion during my junior year at Colorado College, it was met with immediate backlash. Just days after the release of the first issue, student activists ran an anonymous campaign to confiscate and destroy hundreds of copies around campus, arguing that the publication’s presence posed a danger to the safety of the student body. The students engaging in the coordinated effort to remove the magazine from campus claimed “a right, as members of the community, to reject such discourse in our spaces,” as a spokesperson for the group wrote.
That language — “a right to reject such discourse in our spaces” — might have struck a previous generation as odd. But it wasn’t particularly unusual at colleges like mine. The introduction of a new semantic flexibility — wherein pronouns no longer necessarily correspond to biological sex, our truth has replaced any notion of the truth, and words like “rights” are devalued to nothing — was intended to emancipate us from oppressive structures supposedly encoded into the English language. But instead, the untethering of words from their commonly understood definitions has damaged our ability to communicate with one another at all: Students say more but convey less. In the classroom and beyond, today’s elites-in-waiting are rewarded for their mastery of academic jargon rather than for saying anything worthwhile or true.
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