Last spring, three professors at the University of North Carolina surveyed undergraduates to get a sense of the campus climate. Rather than focus on discrete controversies, such as the time in 2015 when UNC student protesters seized control of a room where a journalist was speaking, or the time in 2019 when a UNC student assaulted a sign-carrying anti-abortion activist, they sought to understand day-to-day undergraduate experiences. The results of the survey, distilled from more than 1,000 responses to email questionnaires, can’t be applied to every college in America, but the findings do illuminate what’s happening at a highly selective public institution in a swing state, where more than 20,000 undergraduates are enrolled.
Culture war
Fearing The Left In Power
Visiting a childhood friend who has become a social justice extremist frightened reader about the future
Here’s an update to yesterday’s “People Are Getting Sick Of It” post.
A friend, N., writes to say she recently paid a visit to a lifelong friend in another state. Her friend, a white woman, has become “a far-left liberal,” which doesn’t surprise N., given some of the thing the woman has had to deal with. N., who is gentle, sweet-natured, and fun-loving, goes on:
I had to listen to unmitigated left-progressive ranting for the whole time I visited and didn’t DARE disagree because of what you say here:I would never discuss things like this with liberals, not because I don’t want to hear what they have to say, but because their self-righteousness and indignation is unbearable. Not every liberal, of course, but you never really know when you’re going to find yourself in a discussion with someone on the Left who will decide that you are not just wrong, but evil, and who will take it upon themselves to campaign against you, both personally and professionally.She probably would have kicked me out and ended our friendship if she knew my husband voted for Trump. She really and truly believes that all human beings who do not agree with her are EVIL, and harbor deep motivation to keep the poor and the brown down.She honestly, truly, madly, deeply believes that white men are intentionally and willfully and consciously planning ways to suppress the poor, the brown, the non-binary.To listen to her is to see the paradigm of the far left which is that all of our current cultural and political system is true evil and true morality in an epic fight. I’m not kidding. These leftist people really do think that the “other” is 100% evil incarnate and that they must, MUST destroy the evil.It is truly the Inquisition. If they got real POLITICAL power they would not see killing white men named Bob who voted for Trump as wrong but HOLY.
My friend gave me permission to use this on the blog, but only if I scrubbed any identity markers. On the off chance the progressive extremist pal from childhood read this, says my friend, she would cut my friend off.
I received another e-mail yesterday in response to this blog — this one from an emigre from a communist country, a guy I interviewed for my book. He writes to say that in one of our interviews, I asked him when he first started to sense that things were not right in America, and that they were starting to remind him of the Soviet-bloc life he fled. This morning, he said he didn’t have an answer for me at the time, but he now remembers:
The very first time I started to have an unarticulated feeling that something was seriously wrong was when discussing conservative views with my friends. They would lower their voices and look over their own shoulder. When I spoke — and I will not lower my voice let alone care who’s listening — they would grow fidgety, constantly scanning the environment. It started about ten years ago. It was a cognitive dissonance. I grew up like this but it was not supposed to be happening here.The leftists, on the other hand, have no filter whatsoever. Just yesterday, sitting in my [local] coffee joint, I had to listen for hours to four fine, insufferable specimens of the Left. They were not lowering their voices. They were professing unquestionable truth and wanted everybody to know that. They might as well have been an SA soldatesque shouting in a Munich beerhall. All they needed was uniforms. Honestly, I had to work hard to suppress the urge to stand up and punch the ringleader in his smug face.
Finally, the libertarian writer Conor Friedersdorf writes about evidence that conservative students really do censor themselves. Excerpts:
The good news: In classes where politics comes up, large majorities of self-identified liberal and conservative students say that instructors encourage participation from both sides and want to learn from different perspectives, suggesting that concerns about faculty-indoctrination efforts are unfounded. Indeed, students reported that they worry less about censure from faculty than from peers.That brings us to the bad news:
- While majorities favor more viewpoint diversity and free-speech norms, an intolerant faction of roughly a quarter of students believe it is okay to silence or suppress some widely held views that they deem wrong.
- Students across political perspectives engage in classroom self-censorship.
- Students harbor divisive stereotypes about classmates with different beliefs, and a substantial minority are not open to engaging socially with classmates who don’t share their views.
- Disparaging comments about political conservatives are common.
The study found that the source of the problem is unmistakably the campus left. More:
Also troubling were the undergraduates who reported having kept an opinion to themselves in the classroom, even though the opinion was related to the class, because they were worried about the potential consequences of expressing it. Almost 68 percent of conservatives censored themselves in this way, along with roughly 49 percent of moderates and 24 percent of liberals.
Added: Expressing unpopular views “can reveal critical blind spots in prevailing thought patterns,” the authors of the report note, and even when a view is wrong, its refutation allows both parties “to better apprehend why the correct view must be true.” But “a substantial proportion of respondents fear social sanction, or even outright grading penalties, for sharing their views.” What’s more, almost a quarter of conservative students reported being more than slightly concerned that peers would file a complaint against them for speech related to a class they are in together.
And this:
Out conservatives may face social isolation. Roughly 92 percent of conservatives said they would be friends with a liberal, and just 3 percent said that they would not have a liberal friend. Among liberals, however, almost a quarter said they would not have a conservative friend. Would UNC be a better place without conservatives? About 22 percent of liberals said yes. Would it be a better place without liberals? Almost 15 percent of conservatives thought so.
This is NOT a “both sides do it” situation. This is overwhelmingly a problem of the Left. And within academia, the media, and (I believe, but can’t prove) within management ranks at corporations, the cultural Left totally dominates.
Read all of Friedersdorf’s piece. He says that the authors of the study warn that it’s not simply a left-right thing at UNC. The censorious liberals, they say, are still a minority, even among liberals. That might be true, but these silenced liberals have the power to stand up to the radicals from the left, but don’t do it. If alt-right students were intimidating campus progressives and liberals, and conservatives didn’t stand up to them from the right, I would consider those conservatives to be particularly complicit in creating the culture of oppression on campus.
I also believe that university administrations are complicit in creating these environments on campus, by hosting events like the “Tunnel Of Oppression” exhibits (UNC held one in 2017), and frogmarching students through what amounts to ideological indoctrination. When campus institutions promote critical theory and “social justice” perspectives, is there any surprise that the kind of people who are demonized under those ideological frameworks feel intimidated into silence?
My question is: what are state lawmakers going to do about it? In North Carolina, both houses of the legislature are controlled by Republicans, though the governor is a Democrat. If Democrats were in charge, do you really think they would sit back and do nothing if documented evidence emerged that significant numbers of liberals and racial minorities were silencing themselves on campus out of fear of the Right? If such large numbers of self-identified conservatives on campus said that they wouldn’t have a black friend, or a liberal friend, would Democratic lawmakers believe that there wasn’t a serious problem on the campus of a state university, and just sit back?
What needs to happen is defunding the campus diversity office, and redirecting that money to programs to teach students how to respect free speech and intellectual diversity, and to institute those norms.
The fact is, media and academia are not neutral about any of this. They are teaching people to hate anyone who dissents from the progressive narrative, to think that they are illegitimate and harmful. They are going to make democratic self-government in this country more difficult. My concern about the Right is that they are not engaged in meaningful opposition to this insanity. Deep down, I think most Republican elected officials are free riders on the frustration and anger of ordinary people in the face of this stuff. People will vote GOP because they know that the GOP does not endorse it, and can be counted on not to push it. But that’s not the same thing as actively pushing back. It’s hard to believe that people in North Carolina, for example, would be satisfied to pay taxes to support a state university that is so indifferent to the presence of so many students on campus who harbor such spiteful intolerance for those not like themselves.
This morning I heard from a Bernie Sanders supporter with whom I’m friends. He’s a Christian college student, and is backing Sanders 100 percent for Sanders’s economics, and because he despises Trump. He tells me that he is concerned that the Democratic Party is so sold out to wokeness on social issues that it is going to blow its chance to do structural economic reform. I suggested that he read political scientist Eric Kaufmann’s piece on why the Right can be flexible on economics, while the Left is paralyzed into supporting maximal social justice positions.
