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Captive Minds At Ketman U.

Brave liberal undergraduate at University of Virginia denounces her college for its oppressive woke culture
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In Christian terminology, a “confessor” is someone who has suffered for publicly defending the faith (as distinct from a “martyr,” who gives her life for the faith). I don’t know if Emma Camp has any religious beliefs, but the University of Virginia senior has certainly been a brave witness for free speech. A self-described liberal, Camp published a powerful op-ed in The New York Times denouncing the militant conformity and fear on her campus. Excerpts:

I went to college to learn from my professors and peers. I welcomed an environment that champions intellectual diversity and rigorous disagreement. Instead, my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity. Students of all political persuasions hold back — in class discussions, in friendly conversations, on social media — from saying what we really think. Even as a liberal who has attended abortion rights protests and written about standing up to racism, I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind.

In the classroom, backlash for unpopular opinions is so commonplace that many students have stopped voicing them, sometimes fearing lower grades if they don’t censor themselves. According to a 2021 survey administered by College Pulse of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges, 80 percent of students self-censor at least some of the time. Forty-eight percent of undergraduate students described themselves as “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with expressing their views on a controversial topic during classroom discussions. At U.Va., 57 percent of those surveyed feel that way.

More:

Being criticized — even strongly — during a difficult discussion does not trouble me. We need more classrooms full of energetic debate, not fewer. But when criticism transforms into a public shaming, it stifles learning.

Professors have noticed a shift in their classrooms. Brad Wilcox, a U.Va. sociology professor, told me that he believes that two factors have caused self-censorship’s pervasiveness. “First, students are afraid of being called out on social media by their peers,” he said. “Second, the dominant messages students hear from faculty, administrators and staff are progressive ones. So they feel an implicit pressure to conform to those messages in classroom and campus conversations and debates.”

The consequences for saying something outside the norm can be steep. I met Stephen Wiecek at our debate club. He’s an outgoing, formidable first-year debater who often stays after meetings to help clean up. He’s also conservative. At U.Va., where only 9 percent of students surveyed described themselves as a “strong Republican” or “weak Republican,” that puts him in the minority.

He told me that he has often “straight-up lied” about his beliefs to avoid conflict. Sometimes it’s at a party, sometimes it’s at an a cappella rehearsal, and sometimes it’s in the classroom. When politics comes up, “I just kind of go into survival mode,” he said. “I tense up a lot more, because I’ve got to think very carefully about how I word things. It’s very anxiety inducing.”

Camp says it’s not just conservative students. Progressive ones who diverge, or think they might diverge, from whatever the “correct” opinion is also clam up. She adds that it’s not enough to encourage undergraduates to be brave and take risks to speak out. She’s tried that, but without institutional support from the university, it does no good:

I protested a university policy about the size of signs allowed on dorm room doors by mounting a large sign of the First Amendment. It was removed by the university. In response, I worked with administrators to create a less restrictive policy. As a columnist for the university paper, I implored students to embrace free expression. In response, I lost friends and faced a Twitter pile-on. I have been brave. And yet, without support, the activism of a few students like me changes little.

Our universities cannot change our social interactions. But they can foster appreciation for ideological diversity in academic environments. Universities must do more than make public statements supporting free expression. We need a campus culture that prioritizes ideological diversity and strong policies that protect expression in the classroom.

Read it all. Seriously, it’s really very good. And notice some of the responses from the Left. Jesse Singal calls out the deranged Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley — about whom I have written in the past — for saying … well, look:

I think he probably does. He is a tenured lunatic consumed by hatred and paranoia.

Reading Emma Camp’s op-ed makes me sad for all the young people today who are being cheated of the education they deserve. The chief villain is the gutless college administrators and professors who have allowed their colleges to turn into woke madrassas. But all these kids who come to college out of a culture of bullying, where their first reaction is to try to silence by shunning anyone who thinks different, that’s on them and the adults (high school teachers and others) who allowed them to get away with it.

What kind of country are we going to have over the coming decades, when young adults who have been acculturated to this norm start running things? I think we know. It is going to be an even more oppressive, mindless, conformist culture than we have now. The backlash, if one ever emerges, is going to be severe. Nobody wants to hear it when people like me talk about wokeness as a national security issue, but it’s true. Who wants to risk their lives fighting for a country and a social order where they have been bullied into silence? If, say, the State of Virginia were to be governed by radical right-wing legislators who wanted to tear the University of Virginia down to punish these commissars, how many Virginians will say, “Good, UVA deserves it”?

Why are the people of Virginia paying taxes to support a university where young people are being educated primarily in fearful conformity? Why do no politicians, Republican or otherwise, ever question this? It’s a massively important question for the future of American society. It would be a wonderful thing if Live Not By Lies were not relevant to the present and the future of America, because we were a country and a culture that valued open debate, intellectual diversity, and tolerance. But we aren’t, and people like Emma Camp are going to find the rest of their lives are filled with walking on eggshells.

Ask the people who lived through Communism what it’s like to have to live constantly with the fear that some innocent thing you said will suddenly get you in serious trouble, and cost you everything. When I was in Moscow three years ago, I visited an elderly man whose father, a prominent Georgian orchestra conductor, was tortured to death by Stalin’s thugs in the 1930s. After we left, my translator pointed out that the old man had the large window in his living room covered with a thick black blanket. The translator said that in Soviet times, people covered their windows with those blankets to keep neighbors from staring in, drawing negative conclusions, and reporting them to the KGB. Nearly three decades after the fall of the USSR, this old man still lived like that. The fear never left him. To be sure, the fear college students in contemporary America have about expressing their opinion is not the same thing as a citizen of Soviet Russia would have. There are no gulags in America. Yet the intellectual and spiritual contortions that one learns to do to avoid trouble — those deformities stay with you.

Here’s a passage from Live Not By Lies about what the Polish exiled poet Czeslaw Milosz, in his great 1950s book The Captive Mind, taught about intellectual life under Communism:

In his writing about communism’s insidiousness, Miłosz referenced a 1932 novel, Insatiability. In it, Polish writer Stanisław Witkiewicz wrote of a near-future dystopia in which the people were culturally exhausted and had fallen into decadence. A Mongol army from the East threatened to overrun them.

As part of the plan to take over the nation, people began turning up in the streets selling “the pill of Murti-Bing,” named after a Mongolian philosopher who found a way to embody his “don’t worry, be happy” philosophy in a tablet. Those who took the Pill of Murti-Bing quit worrying about life, even though things were falling apart around them. When the Eastern army arrived, it surrendered happily, its soldiers relieved to have found deliverance from their internal tension and struggles.

Only the peace didn’t last. “But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities,” writes Miłosz, “they became schizophrenics.”

What do you do when the Pill of Murti-Bing stops working and you find yourself living under a dictatorship of official lies in which anyone who contradicts the party line goes to jail?

You become an actor, says Miłosz. You learn the practice of ketman. This is the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting. Ketman was the strategy everyone who wasn’t a true believer in communism had to adopt to stay out of trouble. It is a form of mental self-defense.

What is the difference between ketman and plain old hypocrisy? As Miłosz explains, having to be “on” all the time inevitably changes a person. An actor who inhabits his role around the clock eventually becomes the character he plays. Ketman is worse than hypocrisy, because living by it all the time corrupts your character and ultimately everything in society.

Miłosz identified eight different types of ketman under communism. For example, “professional ketman” is when you convince yourself that it’s okay to live a lie in the workplace, because that’s what you have to do to have the freedom to do good work. “Metaphysical ketman” is the deepest form of the strategy, a defense against “total degradation.” It consists of convincing yourself that it really is possible for you to be a loyal opponent of the new regime while working with it. Christians who collaborated with communist regimes were guilty of metaphysical ketman. In fact, says Miłosz, it represents the ultimate victory of the Big Lie over the individual’s soul.

Under the emerging tyranny of wokeness, conservatives, including conservative Christians, learn to practice one or more forms of ketman. The ones who are most deeply deceived are those who convince themselves that they can live honestly within woke systems by outwardly conforming and learning how to adapt their convictions to the new order. Miłosz had their number: “They swindle the devil who thinks he is swindling them. But the devil knows what they think and is satisfied.”

The University of Virginia is teaching its undergraduates how to practice ketman. It is surely not the only one. This is going to cost us more than we can imagine.

I’m going to a provincial small city in Hungary tomorrow to talk to undergraduates. The last time I did this, I had a classroom with students who were liberals, students who were conservatives, students who were religious, and students who were secular. Every single one of them found it bizarre to hear my tales of what wokeness has done to campus culture, to friendships, and to the idea of education and free speech. I told them — as I will tell the students at the university tomorrow — that they have no idea how fortunate they are to have a campus culture that welcomes this kind of discussion. They will not keep it if they aren’t prepared to fight for it. What an irony: an American journalist appearing on college campuses in a former Communist country to warn students not to allow their universities to fall captive to the mind-killing habits of American universities.

It’s shameful. But that’s what the American left has done to us. That’s what the unwillingness of the American right to fight to protect our vital institutions from political capture has done to us.

Take a look at this short video in which Emma Camp talks about what the First Amendment means to her. What an inspiring young woman! If a campus had just fifty young people like her, they could save it, I bet, from woke bullies like Prof. Jason Stanley.

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