Princeton University has posted “Some Thoughts and Advice for Our Students and All Students” signed by 15 members of prominent Ivy League faculty.
We are scholars and teachers at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale who have some thoughts to share and advice to offer students who are headed off to colleges around the country. Our advice can be distilled to three words:
Think for yourself.
Now, that might sound easy. But you will find—as you may have discovered already in high school—that thinking for yourself can be a challenge. It always demands self-discipline and these days can require courage.
In today’s climate, it’s all-too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion on your campus or in the broader academic culture. The danger any student—or faculty member—faces today is falling into the vice of conformism, yielding to groupthink.
At many colleges and universities what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of public opinion” does more than merely discourage students from dissenting from prevailing views on moral, political, and other types of questions. It leads them to suppose that dominant views are so obviously correct that only a bigot or a crank could question them.
Since no one wants to be, or be thought of as, a bigot or a crank, the easy, lazy way to proceed is simply by falling into line with campus orthodoxies.
Don’t do that. Think for yourself.
It’s pissing in the wind, boys.
It’s way too late for this. You let the genie out of the bottle (with the Frankfurt School, deconstructionism, neo-Marxism, and other variations of postmodernism) and now you can’t get it back in.
I do hope SJWs and Antifa types force each and every one of these 15 faculty out of their jobs, so as to more quickly get us to the point where all this is heading.
And it’s gonna happen, because for every 15 of these faculty, there are hundreds more like this:
More than 100 Dartmouth College faculty members rushed to support a controversial fellow professor who repeatedly justified Antifa’s violent tactics — despite the Dartmouth president’s condemnation of the professor’s support for the so-called anti-fascist group.
Mark Bray, the author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook” and visiting professor at the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth, appeared in dozens of television interviews after the Antifa movement gained national traction following deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Va. earlier in August. Bray supported Antifa’s violence, dubbing it “self-defense” and a “legitimate response” to what he termed white supremacist and neo-Nazi violence.
As long as conservatives and race realists are categorized as ‘white supremacists’ or ‘neo-Nazis’, then, per their timeworm ‘the ends justifies the means’ logic, it’s anything goes for the Left.
