The coddling of the conservative mind

from Salon:


The coddling of the conservative mind
Why baiting "politically correct" college students won’t save honorable conservatism or America. And what might

JIM SLEEPER


Look who’s complaining

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising — undirected by students, professors or deans but scripted, funded and promoted by people off-campus — that blames liberals for trying to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Speech codes. Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. We’ve all read and heard disturbing accounts of such measures’ ubiquity and oppressiveness on campus after campus, their students depicted as demanding them en masse and administrators as rushing to establish them.

I don’t expect these alarms to stop being sounded, or students to stop demonstrating, once the new semester is underway. But this is the time to consider what’s really driving not only the students, but the strong and largely successful campaign to condemn them.

“Our colleges and universities, though lavishly funded and granted every perquisite which a dynamic capitalist economy can offer, have become factories for the manufacture of intellectual and moral conformity,” thundered Roger Kimball, the veteran conservative polemicist, strategist and chairman of the board of the William F. Buckley Program at Yale, introducing the columnist George Will last April at a black-tie “Disinvitation Dinner” sponsored by the program to dramatize Scripps College’s cancellation of its invitation to Will to be one of several conservative speakers it has been bringing to a lecture series.

....(snip)....

Look who’s been coddled

That counter-revolution was announced in 1951, early in the Cold War, when Buckley’s own “God and Man at Yale” urged Yale’s presumptively Christian-gentleman alumni to rescue their college, their faith and free enterprise from their professors’ incipiently totalitarian socialism. But Ivy alumni weren’t quite the splendid, steely gentlemen Buckley was conjuring up as his foil to leftist oppressors. John P. Marquand’s 1941 novel “H.M. Pulham, Esquire,” presented the vapid, all-too-representative meditations of a Harvard grad struggling to summarize his life thus far for the 25th reunion of his equally coddled, clueless, conformist classmates, all striding through life in a feignedly hearty but tightly correct lockstep.

Conservative business and social elites had been manufacturing moral and intellectual conformity for nearly a century before Marquand’s novel was published. “A thought would destroy most persons whom we know. Bring a thought into a chamber full of company, it would extinguish most of them. They are exposed as counterfeits and charlatans, as rats and mice, they who strutted, a moment ago, as the princes of the world,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, himself a Harvard graduate, in 1858. ...................(more)

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/13/the_coddling_of_the_conservative_mind/