Many of our college students these days are so certain of their moral rectitude that they protest campus speakers before having heard what the individual has to say. It’s emblematic of the tribal mentality that the left engineers in its adherents — if you aren’t on our side, you are bad and should not be allowed to speak (or even live, in some instances).
In this AEI article, Professor Samuel Abrams writes about a recent case at NYU, where students protested against Prof. Jonathan Haidt as commencement speaker. Haidt’s thought crime: to criticize some aspects of “progressivism,” starting quite a few years ago when he noticed that whereas students on the right had pretty accurate ideas about the arguments of leftists, students on the left merely had mental caricatures of the arguments on the right. Haidt also is no fan of the diversity obsession. He’s a wrong-thinker. So, obviously, he was unfit to address the students.
Abrams writes, “On May 14, Haidt walked to a podium at Yankee Stadium and was booed before he had said a word. Roughly three dozen graduates walked out during his remarks. The Atlantic published the full text the same week with an unusual editor’s note: They were reproducing it ‘so that readers may judge it for themselves.’ A commencement address now requires a chain of custody.”
Abram’s analysis of this obvious failure of our education system is right on target: “Ironically, read against the protest, the speech is not a rebuttal. It is a description of the machinery that produced the protest. A pre-emptive condemnation of a speaker the authors had not heard, circulated for amplification on platforms designed to reward exactly that kind of circulation, is the attention economy doing what it was built to do. The grievance generates engagement; the engagement confirms the grievance; the speech itself becomes the least relevant artifact in its own controversy.”
Read the whole thing.