Here’s a great letter that came in last night. Boldface emphases mine:

You’re probably beyond tired of Mizzou-related emails from weary, concerned academics, but what the heck: here’s one more. I’m a professor at a small Catholic college in KC, and I can confirm that the mood on campuses is not as bad as you think it is — it’s far, far worse.

I was born and raised in Columbia, and was briefly a law student at Mizzou (until I dropped out and retreated to doctoral work in the humanities). My father taught there for many years. The racial history of Columbia, and of Mizzou, is of course checkered. Anytime you create an intellectual center in the middle of a rural area, you get tension. Same thing in Lawrence, Madison, Iowa City, Lincoln, Stillwater, Norman, Austin, Ann Arbor, and, though I’ve never been there, probably Baton Rouge. I can remember casual racism at football tailgates, and hearing comments when we Columbia high-schoolers spent time on the Mizzou campus (playing frisbee and trying to convince girls we were college students).

What the SJWs don’t understand is that there’s a difference between casual racism — which you can find everywhere in the country — and a concerted effort to oppress black students. One can only imagine what their ancestors, who braved police dogs and fire hoses and brutal beatings, would make of their wilting every time they hear a comment they don’t like. Clearly they have no sense of history. (Modern man wakes each day as if there were no yesterday, said Allen Tate.) They would not understand if you explained the obvious parallels to the French Revolution (forced confessions and loyalty pledges), internecine Communist battles, and McCarthyism (blacklisting, etc.). Their lack of a sense of history prevents them from seeing their efforts in any kind of larger narrative. There is only the present, the subjective, the personal, and the therapeutic.

There are two things that I think have been overlooked in the conversation. One is the role of economic theory and the advent of neoliberalism in the 1970s. When we define our society by our economy, and our economy is made up only of individual consumers who act in a market, then it becomes difficult to think of anything beyond your personal choice. I know you’ve talked about Matthew Crawford’s new book on the blog before. He argues that we take economic choice to be the incarnation and fulfillment of nothing more than personal desire and self-actualization. So if we are all actors in a marketplace (because that’s all society is, according to neoliberalism), and our choices reflect who we are, then no one action or choice or purchase can be said to be better or worse than any other action, and thus no way of living or social choice can be said to be better or worse. When we have economic nihilism, and when we define our society in market terms, then eventually we get the social nihilism we see today: we are beholden to no force more powerful than our own sense of self, and the good life as we define it personally, removed from any sense of society, community, or history. Consider also the economic mantra of our time: disrupt. Take all the ways we’ve done things before, and kill them. Pretending that concept stays in the economic realm is foolish.

This leads to the second thing that has been overlooked: the belief that technique can save us. All the protesters’ demands at Mizzou were technical in nature (and here I’m talking about techne, or technical thinking, versus phronesis, or practical thinking. MacIntyre covers this in the managerialism section of After Virtue.): increase minority hiring, establish a certain oversight position, and so on. Technical fixes all. But the problems are cultural. Real change in racial attitudes takes decades, even centuries. Their lack of a sense of history means they cannot understand larger forces or institutions. Can you imagine the civil rights movement cohering today? The labor movement? None of these SJWs could possibly possess the patience or understanding required to understand things beyond the self. Who has the energy to take on the centralization of capital when all that matters is the personal and the subjective? Why not just instead mandate gender-neutral bathrooms? Liberalism’s death at the hands of liberalism is the great philosophical story of our time.

I have several colleagues from both stages of grad school who teach at Mizzou, and I’ve been in touch with them. They are terrified. One cancelled classes last week to participate in the “teach-in” because, as he put it, “I want to keep my job.” Another has no doubt she will soon be asked by students to sign a loyalty pledge, which she says she will sign because she knows that if she doesn’t, she will be branded a racist and fired. And can you blame her? If a few malcontents can take down the president and the chancellor, what chance do individual professors have? What’s really incredible is that the SJW tactics and the Tea party tactics are exactly the same: give us everything we want, or we will blow up the system. All that matters is flattering our sense of self.

What I wish is that all these Mizzou students — and I can tell you as a native that most students there come from the wealthy suburbs of KC and St. Louis — could come spend a week in the lives of my students. My college has a student population that is 90% minority. Most are first-generation American or are undocumented. The rest are immigrants themselves (mostly Kenyan, Ethiopian, Bhutanese, and Nepalese). Nearly all work full time and live in extreme poverty. Our school is smack in the middle of urban blight; shootings in our neighborhood are common. Now these students see the results of injustice. These students suffer actual racism. And you know what they do? They suck it up and work to improve their lives. The idea that these precious snowflakes at Mizzou are collapsing in personal catastrophe when they see a picture of an offensive Halloween costume, while my students are literally struggling to afford food, is infuriating.

Anyway. Just some thoughts from one more exhausted member of academia.

Thank you, professor. I especially appreciate your pointing out the role neoliberal economics of the sort endorsed by both the Right and the Center Left in the US have played in conditioning us for nihilistic, will to power politics.

This letter came in, titled “Scared to Educate”:

I am a school principal in a small school. We are small so that we can attend to character development more effectively than a larger school.

I often feel like I am one incident away from losing my job due to a racial discipline issue or something about gender or homosexuality. What do you do when a lesbian student tries to kiss a girl and slaps her when she is refused?

There are some black families that seem to count it as a right to ignore facts by simply proclaiming their version of truth. Unfortunately, some of these same families are so poorly educated that they can hardly speak clearly for themselves when they most need to.

I have some students I treat differently to avoid being called a racist. There is not really any way to win once that term is thrown out.

I feel as if I am always one step away from drifting through some strange universe where logic does not work are never heard. That is a scary place to be–kind of like one of those dreams where you scream for help but no sound comes out.

I just recently had my judgment questioned due to my whiteness.

Last year we narrowed the achievement gap for all of our minority sub-populations.

I am looking for another place to work.