Every so often, you come across one of those old-fashioned leftists who doesn’t go along with the toxic strands of modern “progressive” thinking, such as identity and diversity.
There aren’t many of them, but among them is Robert Boyers. In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Joseph Knippenberg contemplates his new book The Tyranny of Virtue. Knippenberg focuses his review on what Boyers has to say about the obsessions with identity and diversity.
He writes, “Reflecting both on his own journey from a working-class Jewish boyhood in Brooklyn and on his experience as a teacher, he emphasizes the active role we ourselves play as we move from ‘our families and communities of origin’ to a community of more or less like-minded friends and colleagues that we foster for ourselves. We do not, in his view, totally abandon our old family ties, but we become something more than just a person who only bears the family name and all the burdens and limitations that attend it. Thus he is troubled—as am I—by students who think they can only be what they were when they arrived on campus, as a young woman described in an article who says that she is ‘going home, back to the ‘hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.’”
In sum, academic leftism seeks to saddle people with identities (usually freighted with a host of historical grievances) that get in the way of individuality and intellectual growth. Boyers dislikes “the smug attachment to easy ideas,” so characteristic of so many academic leftists today.
Both Boyers and Knippenberg would like to see the university again become a place where people are free to explore ideas and discuss them with civility. Alas, the intolerant leftists who now dominate (think, for example, of the law students who refuse to allow Ilya Shapiro to speak because they are offended by a tweet of his) are not inclined to allow that to happen.