Tag: PREACH

Critics assert that modern students are losing their powers of critical thinking, but what we are actually seeing is that power in action: students are using their critical faculties to uncover structures of power in their own academic and social environments. They are clearly recognising that discourse and ideas can be powerful, and that is precisely why they struggle to reshape the discursive terrain, to change the conversation in ways that further their political and moral commitments. Humanities professors should be proud.

This is what’s so odd about the language of coddling and hypersensitivity. If students are really so fragile, if they’re really hiding from scary ideas in a thoughtless cocoon of political correctness, why are they so often to be found out on the campus, demonstrating, protesting, petitioning and organising? That’s not what hiding looks like. It’s not what coddling looks like. In fact, the people showing greatest signs of coddling are those professors for whom the classroom has been a safe space for way too long. Now they’re apparently afraid that their “small or accidental slights”, as Lukianoff and Haidt put it, are going to get pounced on. They’d much rather students “question their own emotional reactions” than question the assumptions coming from the front of the classroom.