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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTrump has gained much support by blasting politically correct speech. He's not all wrong
It pains me to say that, but the politically correct speech movement all too often enters dangerous absurdity and that's part of the reason he's gained such purchase
THE BATTLE AGAINST HATE SPEECH ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES GIVES RISE TO A GENERATION THAT HATES SPEECH
During his 18 years as president of Lebanon Valley College during the middle of the past century, Clyde Lynch led the tiny Pennsylvania liberal arts institution through the tribulations of the Great Depression and World War II, then raised $550,000 to build a new gymnasium before he died in 1950. In gratitude, college trustees named that new building after him.
Neither Lynch nor those trustees could have predicted there would come a day when students would demand that his name be stripped from the Lynch Memorial Hall because the word lynch has racial overtones. But that day did come.
When playwright Eve Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues, which premiered in 1996 and has been performed thousands of times by actors, celebrities and college students, she probably did not foresee a day when a performance of her feminist agitprop would be canceled because it was offensive to women without vaginas. And yet that day did comeat Mount Holyoke, one of the nations premier womens colleges.
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Their degrees look the same as ever, but in recent years the programs of study behind them have been altered to reflect the new sensitivities. Books now come with trigger warningsa concept that originated on the internet to warn people with post-traumatic stress disorder (veterans, child abuse survivors) of content that might trigger a past trauma. Columbias English majors were opting out of reading Ovid (trigger: sexual assault), and some of their counterparts at Rutgers declined an assignment to study Virginia Woolf (trigger: suicidal ideation). Political science graduates from Modesto Junior College might have shied away from touching a copy of the U.S. Constitution in public, since a security guard stopped one of them from handing it out because he was not inside a 25-square-foot piece of concrete 30 yards away from the nearest walkway designated as the free speech zonea space that needed to be booked 30 days in advance. Graduates of California public universities found it hard to discuss affirmative action policies, as administrators recently added such talk to a list of microaggressionssubtle but offensive comments or actions directed at a minority or other nondominant group that unintentionally reinforce a stereotype.
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http://www.newsweek.com/2016/06/03/college-campus-free-speech-thought-police-463536.html
SickOfTheOnePct
(7,290 posts)Political correctness has gone beyond the pale, and that only helps demagogues like Trump.
**edited to add: You can expect to be excoriated by some here at DU for daring to acknowledge that a) Trump is right about something and b) too many college students are whiny, entitled brats who should be told to grow up and suck it up or leave.
TampaAnimusVortex
(785 posts)There isn't much anyone can say anymore about him that would change anyone's mind. Call him a racist, and people yawn. Say he's anti-woman, and they yawn. The overly zealous PC types have diluted all the various terms into uselessness now and they are shocked when screaming them that many people just tune them out.
SickOfTheOnePct
(7,290 posts)"The overly zealous PC types have diluted all the various terms into uselessness now "
lunatica
(53,410 posts)and far worse than pc ever could be.