Why the left in the Universities?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UVUnUnWfHI

Source: N. Zuercher Zeitung, Zurich, article by René Scheu and Stanford, 20.3.2019

We offer some words from Niall Ferguson about culture in universities: “As a right-wing extremist you are a potential Nazi. Communists, on the other hand, are morally clean social democrats.

What’s going on?

He is one of the most important historians of the present. In a major interview, Niall Ferguson settles accounts with the thinking of many colleagues: he reveals how the left has taken over Anglo-Saxon universities. And how those who constantly speak of inclusion systematically exclude those who think differently.

This is not an intellectual problem, but a moral one: the hypersensitivity of students or the fear that ideas can hurt makes young people no longer want to deal with unpleasant ideas. Students have become snowflakes who need to be protected from dangerous (right-wing) thinking – and this in universities, which ultimately exist for the sole purpose of allowing a free exchange of ideas.

The change in mood that has taken place over the past thirty years is profound. I have to put it simply and directly: the left has taken over power and control. And they, who in theory defend inclusion, in practice have systematically excluded all those who think differently.

Valuing the Old Elite

This elite was not so good. Conservative and liberal academics are chaotic contemporaries and quite lousy at planning academic follow-up. They are busy with their studies, write books, and barely care about the politics of power.

The so-called progressives are different – they are often true careerists, and their writings are simply a means to an end. That’s why they often present really bad essays and books. But that doesn’t matter, because what you see is the right origin. Today, when a professor of modern German history retires from an American college, he is replaced by a young professor specializing in the history of Native American peoples. And it’s not that I’m mounting my theory on the subject – I’ve spent thirty years observing very closely what was going on. The concept of diversity has essentially changed, becoming its opposite.

The professor as an activist is the role model, who has imposed himself. The left lost the struggle in the Economy in the 1980s – which became more evident after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But what remained hidden for a long time was the fact that even then, the left was very successful in its cultural struggle against the Establishment. In this it found support in the Frankfurt School, in Michel Foucault and in French theory – and at some point social studies of wailing and grieving were invented as a discipline with a scientific air about it.

Infiltration of the Left into the State

It was not, therefore, a revolution from below, but from above. It was a revolution of the representatives of minorities and of those who, out of conviction or cowardice, chose to support it. And what has happened in academia over the last thirty years is now happening in state administrations and, increasingly, in publicly traded companies.

It is indeed a question of intellectual integrity. Most prefer to support in silence, and some do so publicly, for example, at the ˇ Intellectual dark web’. But those who dare to speak out are clearly a minority.

 The logic is like this: those who are against politically correct orthodoxy are racists. And anyone who supports a racist or does not clearly distance himself from him is a racist himself. It takes some courage to confront this logic of slander by putting one’s reputation at stake.

In this regard, a particularly amusing case comes to mind: Peter Boghossian, professor of philosophy at Portland State University, along with two colleagues, published a score of false articles in humanities journals, in order to condemn them as ideologically opposed to science. Instead of criticizing the magazine editors, Boghossian himself was attacked, even by his own university. For the rest, Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, myself, and a few other intrepid people wrote a letter to the University of Portland to save Boghossian’s honor.

Additional comments from Peter Kopa

The essential identification of the socio-political left is in its materialistic atheism, as an ideology at least as bad as Nazism, which nevertheless exerts a certain seduction on weak spirits, because it gives them the apparent freedom to think that there are no moral imperatives nore laws that could limit their behaviour.