In his wistful piece on the rise of campus censorship, Jonah notes that our universities are not really teaching students about mutual respect:

Instead, we are teaching young people that being offended is an ideological priority. Indeed, the coin of the campus realm today is victimhood, grievance, and offense.

The sad fact is that our universities are teaching students how to use “victimhood, grievance, and offense” as a tool of control. Students are being taught socially acceptable ways of tyrannizing each other, of controlling each other’s speech, of suppressing beliefs they don’t agree with.

Curiously, we face the same problem nowadays in dealing with lots of Islamic advocacy groups. Recall what Danish editor Flemming Rose told Bob Simon (R.I.P.) after the Danish cartoon controversy:

It’s problematic if some Muslims requires of me that I, in the public space, in the public domain, have to submit myselves [sic] to their taboos. In that case, I don’t think they are asking for my respect, I think they are asking for my submission.

It’s exactly the same on campus. The Inclusive Language Campaign at the University of Michigan is promoted as a way of fostering respect and toleration. But such a campaign would only seek to raise awareness about terms that are, or should be, considered obscenities, things you would only say if your purpose is to offend people, things that should be considered outside the bounds of civilized discourse. But once I am encouraged to take offense at your opinions, whether you intended to offend me or not, the incentive is for me to take offense as much as possible, on my behalf and everyone else’s, so I can control you as much as possible. That is why we now have the concept of “microaggression”: The very concept is nothing more than a clever way to expand the machinery of tyranny.

These campaigns are not designed to foster mutual respect, and that is not what students use them for. Rather than appealing to the most humane aspects of our nature, they appeal to the very worst. Rather than make our society a more nurturing place, they make it a much more intolerant and dangerous one, as Jonah’s piece shows.