In Defense of My Students
The idea of the campus as a stronghold of leftwing extremism and authoritarian censoriousness stands in stark contrast to what’s happening inside the classroom.
A thread, based on my new piece:
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-my-students
🧵 1/
What was supposed to be just a short note turned into a long, personal reflection on how the “free speech crisis/campus extremism” narrative that the mainstream media is constantly pushing distorts the reality of what is still the everyday normal at American universities. 2/
I do not recognize the place where I work or the students with whom I interact in that ugly picture that outlets like the New York Times and The Atlantic are relentlessly painting. What can I do to push back against this pervasive narrative of the campus as an extremism incubator? 3/
Countless op-eds and guest essays on how bad leftwing censoriousness has gotten, how terribly oppressive the atmosphere in the classroom is. How many pieces from students talking about how they liked their courses and learned a lot have you read? From professors after an uneventful lecture 4/
Last week, I taught a class on the ongoing struggle over how the Holocaust should be remembered and taught in Germany today. We had a calm, nuanced, and deeply serious discussion. It’s the college campus reality the “free speech crisis/campus extremism” discourse deliberately obscures. 5/
The current Holocaust debate in Germany, the so-called “Catechism Debate,” started in 2021 and quickly morphed into a frenzied fight over the claim that what presents itself as anti-racist social justice activism is actually just anti-white, antisemitic, “postcolonial” extremism. 6/
According to the prevailing campus discourse, this class should have provoked exactly the kind of extremism on which mainstream outlets are laser-focused - and yet, 2.5 hours of free-flowing discussion generated nothing but thoughtful and careful engagement with a difficult topic. 7/
Is intellectually implausible, politically extreme, and morally abhorrent stuff being said on college campuses? Of course! We are talking about millions of people, an extremely diverse environment.
But that does not mean that campuses are dominated by dangerous extremism. 8/
The “free speech crisis/college extremism” frenzy relies on presenting the most extreme cases as that which defines the whole - and never asks if something is just wrong/offensive/annoying or actually indicative of powerful forces that constitute an acute threat to society. 9/
It also completely ignores – even inverts – the actual power relations: student activists are presented as all-powerful, while university administration and leadership, which certainly aren’t bastions of “woke” leftism, are assumed to be cowering before them. 10/
It is remarkable how closely the mainstream “campus crisis” discourse resembles the narrative reactionary crusaders want to advance about America’s institutions. On October 13, Christopher Rufo, who is once again so proud of himself, blurted out the rightwing strategy: 11/
Woof, Rufo is a real piece of shit. And also a point against the existence of cancel culture, as he's said some truly vile things in public and has so far experienced zero consequences. He actually just got a ton of PR mileage out of a new book he wrote, quotes all over the media (WaPo, NYT) and even got a couple of columns out of it.
@Dseitz @tzimmer_history the best thing about these "establishment" outlets is that they are behind a paywall
