In all of human history, perhaps no other person has ever been as privileged, coddled and appeased as the modern American university student. And yet from coast to coast, campus to campus, paroxysms of rage and hysteria, culminating in violence, are now the new normal.
It wasn’t always like this.
“The hysteria level is rising, that’s not my imagination,” marveled Tucker Carlson on his Fox News Channel show. “I went to college at one point; it wasn’t like this. What’s changed?”
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According to Scott Greer, deputy editor at the Daily Caller and author of “No Campus For White Men,” it’s because a whole new form of morality has been installed on campus.
“Identity politics and victimhood culture have taken over higher education,” Greer said in a recent appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” “Identity politics stresses that all a person should care about is their own narrow group interests and the identity they ascribe to themselves. [For example,] if I’m an African-American man, that’s the sum total of my politics and I only care about the interests of my specific group, African-Americans. And that’s become dominant on campus because they encourage it through affirmative-action and other procedures that encourage people to gravitate towards specific identities for more benefits.
“Secondly, and more important in some ways, is victimhood culture. Everybody kind of competes to be the biggest victim. A lot of people ask: ‘Why are all these young people trying to pretend to be victims? Nobody wants to be a victim.’ Well, the reason why they do that is because we assign moral status, in the college moral culture that’s being created, to who is the bigger victim, who’s more oppressed. Who is more oppressed gets more status in that moral hierarchy that’s created. And if you’re ‘privileged,’ then that’s the worst thing you can be. That’s the worst thing that can happen.”
In an older version of morality, the two poles of morality are “good” and “evil.” But on campus, the new standards of righteousness and sin are “oppressed” and “privileged.”
“If you are ‘privileged,’ that’s the worst thing you can be and being a victim is the best thing you can be,” Greer said. “But victimhood isn’t assigned by socioeconomic status. You can be the son of a poor coal miner from West Virginia and you’re ‘privileged.’ You can be the son of a wealthy multi-millionaire, but African-American, and you’re ‘oppressed.’ And that’s how the system works.”
Carlson noted the many ironies of the system.
“Everyone in college is ‘privileged’ by definition,” he said. “They’re not working for a living. They’re learning, which was considered a privilege for like, a thousand years. And the second point is that colleges were designed to be places where people studied universal truths and values rather than narrow and sectarian ones. Why the change? What brought this about? How did it get here?”
Greer argues identity politics, once established as the primary force of campus culture, spreads its tentacles throughout the entire university apparatus.
“So when you have an English course, the fact that Shakespeare and John Milton are the primary writers that are studied in that course becomes a problem, because they are white males,” Greer said sadly. “We suddenly need to have more diversity there because of identity politics. People say, ‘I feel left out because I’m reading Shakespeare or John Milton, even though they forget the universal message in those works and the great writing. Instead, they say, ‘We need to have somebody that reflects this current campus culture we have.’ So that’s why they push these types of things on college campuses.”
Carlson noted that whatever justification is offered for the current hysteria on campus, it’s not solving any problems but is simply producing students who are angry, unstable and deeply unhappy. He referred to a case at Yale University in 2015 in which a manufactured controversy over Halloween costumes on campus led to two professors resigning their posts and millions of dollars being spent on new diversity and affirmative action programs.
A video of professor Nicholas Christakis calmly speaking with student protesters and being screamed at in return riveted the nation.
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“The professor who was defending himself, who was surrounded and undergoing an inquisition, his wife wrote a simple column saying you shouldn’t get all bent out of shape about ‘culturally appropriating’ Halloween costumes,” said Greer, explaining the incident.
As the author pointed out, even to consider such a minuscule incident an example of “oppression” requires the “victim” to already possess a vast amount of privilege. In a normal society, it would be laughed off. But at Yale, Greer noted, “it was the worst thing that ever happened on this campus.”
Students responded by subjecting a professor, himself a liberal, to a “ritual humiliation.”
The incident inspired Greer to write “No Campus For White Men,” which is now the No. 1 bestselling book in “Cultural Policy” at Amazon.com and was in the top 150 of all books sold at the retail site after Greer’s appearance.
In an interview with WND, Greer said he hopes conservatives wake up to the “enormous” consequences of the battle developing on campus.
“As we saw with the ritualistic manner in which student activists attacked that professor at Yale, campus leftism is becoming a kind of cult,” he said. “It has its own inflexible moral code, its own heroes and villains and its own ways of inflicting punishment on those who leave the fold. Conservatives shouldn’t just snicker at ‘crazy college students’ or ignore this. This is what is shaping tomorrow’s elite. And what happens on the campus today sets the tone for what happens in the entire country tomorrow.”