Welcome To The Most Sense You've Seen Coming Out Of A University In Eons
At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf chronicles some quotes from Columbia prof John McWhorter from a conversation with Frank Bruni at the Aspen Ideas Festival. An excerpt:

I think anybody in their more sober moments understands that even though racism exists and microaggressions are real, college campuses are perhaps the least racist spots on earth. And the idea that any student is undergoing a constant litany of constant racist abuse is theater, it's theatrical--you hate to say that to somebody 19 years old, but it's not true.

To say that we need a safe space and then to physicalize it, you're expecting people to allow you a place to be shielded from all of this abuse that you claim is happening; that's the kind of performance that I think students are being supported in because--and this is a good thing--we live in a society in which, in contrast to the way it was two generations ago, it's considered extremely incorrect or even immoral to be a racist or a sexist, among a certain educated segment of the public, which is not tiny.

That's not all of America. But it's at the point where to be a racist, for example, is almost equivalent to being a pedophile. That's good in many ways.

And this new movement takes the idea that you're supposed to show you're not a racist or be sniffing out incidents of racism to give yourself a sense of legitimacy in society, into a place where language is being abused. And then when a speaker gets to campus, the idea is not that you protest the speaker, which was the idea when I was in college in the 80s, but that the speaker is not allowed to pollute the space with their words. Again, that is interesting, but it is theater. It's almost like Brecht when people are doing things like this. This is not the way usual socio-politics happens.

And it needs to be called out, I think. And that's tough! Because we're talking about the behavior of people who are under 22. But it serves no purpose, as I think we've been able to see.

It starts with sense.

The idea that words are not always mere words comes to the fore in the mid-80s with radical feminist arguments from people like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. And there was value in the argument that we need to check the sorts of things that we say to each other, and that might go beyond a single short checklist of epithets. But you can take it too far if words are violence simply because you don't agree with them or find them slightly noxious. That's where free speech winds up being choked...

On talking to the other side:

When I was in college in the eighties Republicans were thought of as ridiculous. I remember living in a hall at one point and there were Republicans down at the end. And you were supposed to think of them as some sort of vermin. Nobody questioned this. It was during the Reagan era. And I couldn't help noticing that they were also some of the nicest people on the hallway. Over the years I learned that I was not a Republican, but I could see how you could be one and have a coherent worldview.

And it happened from listening to them and eating lunch with them. And now they're in my swimming pools! That is an experience that I don't think students are having as much these days. That means education is failing them. They're thinking life is much simpler than it is. They're not learning how to think ...

On the Original Sin of "white privilege":

The idea is you are to learn that you're a privileged white person; you are to learn it over and over; really what you're supposed to learn is to feel guilty about it; and to express that on a regular basis, understanding that at no point in your lifetime will you ever be a morally legitimate person, because you have this privilege. It becomes a kind of Christian teaching, and it seems to serve a certain purpose--I have to say this, I hope it doesn't hurt anybody's feelings. For white people, it is a great way to show that you understand racism is real. For black people and Latino people, it is a great way to assuage how bad a self-image a race can have after hundreds of years of torture. I can't speak for Latinos there, but certainly for black Americans. It ends up being a kind of a security blanket.

I don't think that either one of those things takes students anywhere. To be a black student who learns that their purpose, that something special about them, is that they can make a loud noise and make white people guilty, I don't think that's an education. And quite honestly, if a white person is constantly attesting to their privilege, constantly attesting that they still have things to learn, and not ever specifying what more it is that they have to learn, the idea that is somehow constructive, I suggest that be reexamined.