Diversity Thursday

Nice article worth your time by our friend Professor Bruce Fleming at The Washington Free Beacon; Trigger Warnings in Annapolis Review: Joanna Williams, ‘Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity’.

The immediate subject of Joanna Williams’s depressing but compellingly written chronicle of the threats to Anglo-American academia over the last several decades is the concerted attack, first by the professors themselves and now by students, against the academic freedom of the title. Academic freedom is the ability of the professorate to express, explore, and teach even those ideas that don’t happen to be cut to this decade’s fashions.

Thus academic freedom and its enemies may seem initially to be a narrow issue, of interest to few outside the now dwindling number of tenured professors who thought they were free to follow truth, and who discover instead that they can be shouted down by colleagues or students who feel that what the professor is saying “supports oppression.” Even worse, in Williams’s view, are those who self-censor to get their writing published and gain advancement while avoiding disapproval.

However, the issues Williams addresses are of far wider importance than the professional interests of academics. First of all, most of the people reading a review like this will have been students at such institutions, and now may well have children going to them or hoping to do so. Indeed many readers may themselves be associated with such institutions—so central to our national economic health that President Obama suggests that virtually all young people should, for their own benefit and that of the country, go to college. Universities matter to the nation.

Williams suggests that these vital institutions have rejected reasoned discourse and become free-for-alls where individuals don’t take turns at the microphone but instead grab it, or shout down those they disagree with. In Williams’s hair-raising account, those who shout the loudest and are the most destructive are most likely to get what they want.

I've only touched on about 10% of what is going on at Annapolis with the slow but steady advance by the diversity bullies and SJW, but know this: the "trigger warning" and "micro-aggression" people are already in place, pushing their agenda, and infecting the seed corn of our future officer corps.

Most MIDN think it is a joke from what some of them tell me (and I agree), but enough of the motivated and easily convinced do not and are embracing the People's Committee mentality;

At Annapolis, certainly neither students nor faculty enjoy the freedom to pursue truth. Students (and as I have learned, faculty) at Annapolis have to parrot what the brass hand down from on high. What they hand down changes from year to year, decade to decade. In the old days, the party line was anti-gay and misogynistic. Now the winds have shifted and (voila!) we are per diktat just as enthusiastically for the inclusion of out gays and soon, clearly, transgendered individuals, as we were against it before. What civilian schools call “hate speech” (jokes about women, say) is punished at Annapolis with the full force of the military “justice” system. Being able to pursue a radical left-wing agenda with radical right-wing power is a dream of progressive politicians, and at Annapolis it has become a reality. The left wing says it wants to liberate you, but actually it wants to tell you what to do just the way the right wing does.

This is very true. For years I have been in correspondence with MIDN, and they act like they are taking huge risks even emailing me. Once they get over that hump and are comfortable to share more, I learn that they just wanted to let me know that they are disgusted as we are, but they cannot speak out. They cannot write. 

The most upset of my correspondents at the 3rd Wave Leftist cant coming out of Annapolis have been the female MIDN. Based upon what they have told me about the ideology of some of the female officers appointed over them - I don't blame them.