For years I've been grumbling about the rise of the imagined right not to be offended.
It's not going away. If anything, feelings of entitlement not to be offended are growing, especially in academia. The University of California is considering enshrining a right to be free of "expressions of intolerance," defined as meretriciously as you'd expect. Chancellors of great universities announce that free speech requires feeling safe. Too many students seek not just to disagree with ideas but to prevent ideas they don't like from being uttered in their safe spaces at all.
Plenty of folks and institutions — the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, for example — are devoted to pushing back against this attitude.
But what if they're taking the wrong approach? What if the market is the right way to deal with the imagined right not to be offended?
Snowflake U.
Imagine a world in which the market lets people decide whether to be special snowflakes — people wtih an actual protected right not to be upset or offended.
As the University of California's proposal shows, the legions of school administrators are perfectly capable of creating Snowflake Schools, where the administration vigorously defends students' rights to be free of offense. What if we let them?
Take, let's say, Brown University. They're already on FIRE's red light policy list, and frankly I enjoy making fun of them. Brown could decide to take on the mantle of a Snowflake School. It could openly declare that its students have a right not to be offended. It could enact policies accordingly, and discipline students and faculty who cause any offense through their speech and actions. Brown could display the snowflake symbol on their letterhead and web page. They could even vigorously rebrand themselves to attract students who don't want to be offended — I don't know, they could rename their teams The Blizzards or something.
Students, staff, and academics could then vote with their feet. Do I want to go to an acknowledged Snowflake School? Maybe I do, and will wear the snowflake badge proudly. Maybe I don't — either because I don't want to get expelled for offending someone, or because I'm embarrassed to go someplace that marks me as a snowflake.
Other people could vote, too. Do I want to hire someone who chose to go to a Snowflake School? You might, but I wouldn't. Do I want to date a Snowflake? Do I want a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant who wears a Snowflake U. sweatshirt?
The Department of Snowflake Studies
But wait! Isn't the snowflake/non-snowflake decision too binary, you ask? Won't schools that make a choice always be riven by snowflake vs. non-snowflake conflict, with some schools lurching back and forth?
Perhaps. That's why we can implement market forces within schools as well.
Imagine: "Snowflake Choice" schools have a Snowflake Registry. Students, staff, and academics can choose to sign up for that registry, or refuse to. Only folks on the registry can assert a right not to be offended, and pursue offense-related grievances. If you're on the Snowflake Registry, you are subject to full punishment for causing offense. If you're not on the Snowflake Registry, you're subject to punishment only with respect to self-selected Snowflake Classes and Snowflake Activities and Snowflake Departments. You might get kicked out of Professor Feels' classes but not Professor Grownup's classes.
Once again, this lets market forces take hold. Do I want to take history from a professor on the Snowflake Registry, knowing I can get kicked out of her class if I offend someone? Or do I want to sign up for a class taught by a professor not on the registry? Do I want to major in a Snowflake Subject, or a non-Snowflake subject?
Transcripts, naturally, would reflect status. I'd be able to see if a job applicant only took classes from Snowflakes, and act accordingly. I'd be able to see if an applicant's major was in a Snowflake Department. I'd be able to notice if a student got all As from non-Snowflake teachers but Cs from Snowflake-teachers, and draw appropriate conclusions.
Every Snowflake Is Unique
A few caveats are important. First of all, non-Snowflake status would not be a defense to accusations of genuine misconduct. A physical assault is not mere offense, nor is a true threat.
Second, Reverse-Snowflakes would find no solace. A Reverse-Snowflake is someone who thinks they have a protected right not to be told they're offensive, someone who thinks that they have a right not to be called an ass when they act like an ass. That's whingy and unprincipled nonsense. Such people should sign up for a Snowflake School, since that's what they fundamentally are.
Let A Thousand Snowflakes Melt
The virtue of this approach is choice. The struggle between Snowflakes and Non-Snowflakes would remain, but rather than a struggle to control institutions to impose their viewpoints, it becomes an individual struggle.
Non-Snowflakes may worry that the market would operate in a way they don't like — that the market would favor Snowflake Schools and Snowflake Majors and huge drifts of graduating Snowflakes. Maybe. But if that's the case, do we deserve any better?
Last 5 posts by Ken White
- Willful Paranoia: The Classic Excuse for Willful Paranoia #IStandWithAhmed - September 16th, 2015
- Lawsplainer: What's Going On With That Troll Joshua Goldberg, Anyway? - September 15th, 2015
- A Market Solution To Academic Snowflakes - September 14th, 2015
- It's Not Politically Correct To Say, But People Who Say "It's Not Politically Correct To Say, But . . ." Are Generally Assholes - September 10th, 2015
- OMG! Broad, Flexible, Plaintiff-Friendly Law Used In Unanticipated Manner! - September 9th, 2015
Sign me up!
With respect to my above comment, I apologize for having offended anyone by failing to recognize that some people cannot sign documents, but must simply make their mark.
I accept my expulsion.
Do you want to build a snow…person? Is that snowflake enough?
While Delaware is unfortunately becoming more and more a snowflake school, it was not yet one while I was there. The underpinnings of snowflake-ness certainly were present, but for those of us who decided we wanted to be grownups, you didn't have to deal with it. Then again, it might have just been because I was an engineering major, and didn't have any time to waste being aware of such things…
Well, besides Brown, looks like Oberlin should certainly be on the list.
I so wish this would work on a market level. (Even known Ken is being a level of tongue in cheek) I'd love to see the collapse of several snowflake schools.
Sadly though government's weighty hand of grants and scholarships would keep many prestigious institutions in business and people would still clamor to go to them.
As an employer are you more likely to hire someone that has spent years perfecting not pissing people off our the person who made sure they went somewhere they could practice being an asshole?
How can they even have teams, at least in anything competitive? Isn't a drive to defeat another team going to be divisive and non-inclusive by definition? We can't allow snowflakes to trample on each other in this way.
Is it reasonable to assume that snowflake schools will, in addition to being intolerant of intolerance, also be pony free? [And by that I mean free from ponies.] Is there a market-based solution to freedom from ponies?
It'd be a damned shame for someone to be in the last weeks of spring senior semester, nearly ready to graduate with a degree in sociology, wrapping up that senior thesis titled "Cultural Reagan-ism: the beginning of the slide toward totalitarianism or a means to an end?" only to be savaged by a pony savauge looking for prey one night on the old quad.
I would really rather not know what a Brown Blizzard looks like. It sounds… unwholesome.
@Sledge:
I have to admit that as a member of CorpWorld, we would really prefer the former in our office. I've had too many HR issues over the latter.
I know I'm missing the joke, even if I'm not precisely sure what it is. Like, obviously this wouldn't work because the Snowflakes aren't going to want to stand for the non-Snowflakes offending, so letting people opt in isn't going to resolve the conflict. Hell, if Snowflakes were satisfied with making this stuff opt in, the problem, such as it is, wouldn't exist at all.
This is a great idea. When I was in college, I took a class on religion. One of the students said it should be illegal to criticize any religion because it might "hurt someone's feelings." I'd love special non-snowflake classes just to not only avoid punishment for perceived transgressions, but also to avoid classmates who say things like that.
Great read, as always. Beautiful satire in the tradition of "A Modest Proposal"!
Blizzards are much too aggressive. Allow me to submit The Flurry.
"As an employer are you more likely to hire someone that has spent years perfecting not pissing people off our the person who made sure they went somewhere they could practice being an asshole?"
I would not want someone who avoids controversial subjects because it might piss someone off. And I wouldn't want someone who avoids discussing potential improvements because someone might be offended. And I certainly wouldn't want someone who writes people off with viewpoints that they disagree with as assholes.
This seems similar to "When I Grow up, I want to be a Grownup" from a few years ago (one of my favorite posts, actually): http://popehat.com/2009/05/28/when-i-grow-up-i-want-to-be-a-grownup/
Brilliant! A 2-track uni system, one for getting an education, another for those seeking an ego massage.
Adam Steinbaugh, that sort of apology will never protect you from the microvictims (I figure if "microagressions" are the name of the transgression, "microvictims" must be the valid name for the plaintiffs). Instead, I would recommend something along the lines of what the actor Chris Pratt published on Facebook this past May in prep for an upcoming promo tour for "Jurassic World":
I want to make a heartfelt apology for whatever it is I end up accidentally saying during the forthcoming #JurassicWorld press tour. I hope you understand it was never my intention to offend anyone and I am truly sorry. I swear. I'm the nicest guy in the world. And I fully regret what I (accidentally will have) said in (the upcoming foreign and domestic) interview(s).
I am not in the business of making excuses. I am just dumb. Plain and simple. I try. I REALLY try! When I do (potentially) commit the offensive act for which I am now (pre) apologizing you must understand I (will likely have been) tired and exhausted when I (potentially) said that thing I (will have had) said that (will have had) crossed the line. Those rooms can get stuffy and the hardworking crews putting these junkets together need some entertainment! (Likely) that is who I was trying to crack up when I (will have had) made that tasteless and unprofessional comment. Trust me. I know you can't say that anymore. In fact in my opinion it was never right to say the thing I definitely don't want to but probably will have said. To those I (will have) offended please understand how truly sorry I already am. I am fully aware that the subject matter of my imminent forthcoming mistake, a blunder (possibly to be) dubbed "JurassicGate" is (most likely) in no way a laughing matter. To those I (will likely have had) offended rest assured I will do everything in my power to make sure this doesn't happen (again).
The polar opposite of "snowflake" is "Trump."
And though we don't like to admit it, Bobby Jindal is a Brown graduate.
If I were hiring, I'd rather hire someone who can deal with the full give-and-take of adults arguing, rather than someone who needs to be protected against that.
I've heard some amazing knock-down drag-out arguments among co-workers over issues so abstruse and technical (and job-related) that it would take me pages to explain to an expert exactly what the argument was about and what the sides were. (What made it even more fun was that one person grew up in New Jersey and believed that if you weren't jumping up and down and screaming you didn't care, and the other was born in China and believed that if you showed any emotion you lost face. But both of them were adults and understood that the other was just speaking his native (body) language.)
Last week the president of SUNY Canton wrote, "In other words, the best response to the offensive speech wasn’t censorship—it was more speech from reasonable and responsible people in the campus community…" I wonder whether Dr. Szafran reads Popehat.
The link to his post is: https://zszafranblog.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/september-3-2015/ Scroll down to "Freedom of Speech (Part 1)."
Unfortunately this whole concept is undermined by the discovery some years ago that snowflakes are not unique, but rather can be identical.
Josh M. says September 14, 2015 at 8:22 am:
STEM majors can't be snowflakes. They have to deal with all those sexist-looking vector diagrams, and homomorphisms, and heterotic strings, and homogeneity and heterogeneity, not even to mention black body radiation and other racist subjects.
Stop subsidising half-wits studying hobbies, and the problem would end within a decade.
One key principle of economics, is that you get more of what you subsidise: people were gulled into believing that going to university would, in and of itself, make them more employable/productive… irrespective of whether they studied medicine or "gender studies".
What is being subsidised, is not education: it is advanced child-care.
What actually gets subsidised, is devolving in the same way as high schools devolved when the years of compulsory attendance were ratcheted up: forcing kids who don't want to be there, to be there, is a recipe for a really fucking hard time for high school teachers – so eventually nobody with any alternative paid use for their time becomes a high school teacher. That's been the case in 'higher education' (outside the professoriat) for a generation.
Universities have been going that way for 20 years (conservatively): even when I was an undergraduate (in the 90s), there were people who could get into Honours programs before any real test worthy of the name… people who had spent three years writing hand-waving essays then discovered that they could no longer avoid 'modern' macroeconomics, and the howls were heard around the department (at the time, to no avail – which is as it should be).
The notion that 'more years of education are better' is not true, and never has been: the historical reasons why those who went to university (historically, 5-10% of teenagers – more in the US where universities have been child-care centres for longer) were explained by Becker in "Human Capital" (and before that, in "Education and the Distribution of Earnings" in the AER in 1966).
I was fortunate to have been lured out of the academic world just as the blight was really taking hold – at the turn of the false millennium (e.g., at the start of 2000 – which was declared the beginning of the millennium because six generations of public schooling resulted in people who can't count properly). I was also fortunate to have taught 'elective' subjects in a highly specific discipline (econometrics, and quantitative analysis of economic policy), so was spared most of the whining from entitled little shits.
Five years prior, the writing was on the wall – it had been daubed in monkey-shit, with the creation of a 'Women's Officer' within the (compulsory) student union… a position that paid almost as much as a full PhD scholarship. When we decided that we would run a male candidate for the office (with some stumping among the Engineering students, so they would vote en masse thus ensuring the male candidate's win), the harridan classes declared that possession of a vagina was a condition of the (student funded) job. They didn't declare that openly, of course. (A university in Tasmania had exactly the same problem this year: a man ran, and won, and stepped down when the harridan classes – all studying things that render them less employable than if they had left school at 12 – arced up).
And of course the 'grey matter' (the administrators) are as skeevy a bunch of assholes as ever drew breath – like all rent-seeking sociopaths whose livelihoods depend on taxes (don't kid yourself that it's different at 'private' universities, either).
I agree with what Seth said, because this isn't the correct dichotomy that results from creating self-selected Snowflake Universities.
A Self-selected Snowflake MAY be practiced in the art of not pissing people off, but they have no practice in being offended, either, nor in dealing with being offended by others. The dichotomy between Snowflakes and non-Snowflakes is not "Non-pissers-offers" and "Assholes", but "Sheltered" and "Adult". Or, "Never offended in their life" and "Can handle being offended once in a while".
I heartily endorse this product or event.
@Jim did you read the follow-up to that atlantic piece? Very good read:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/why-critics-of-the-microaggressions-framework-are-skeptical/405106/
What a load of malarkey, "let the market decide". What about all those students that are in the middle of their degrees and have substantial time and monetary resources invested already and suddenly a university decides it wants to go "intolerance free" (which is a contradiction in terms anyway). The student (or staff member) is suddenly in a position where they can be punished for speaking their minds and exercising otherwise legal free speech rights under the First Amendment. This is an untenable situation and should not have become a problem in the first place. The First Amendment grants absolutely no security against being offended by another person's speech, but it does grant the right of speaking one's mind in a way that may or may not cause offense to others. That's the ENTIRE REASON behind the concepts the First Amendment enshrines. So yes, sue the pants off the University or College that treads on that right and hold the administrators that instituted the brain dead policies to begin with personally responsible for doing so.
For the record, what we're just about always talking about here is the right of coddled liberals to not have to be exposed to conservative or libertarian ideas and ideals.
"As an employer are you more likely to hire someone that has spent years perfecting not pissing people off our the person who made sure they went somewhere they could practice being an asshole?"
As one of the (usually, self-identified) assholes who had grown up faced with a host of opinions, and had learned the (less respected than I believed it worthy) fine art of taking opinions out back and shooting them (even my own) when necessary, I heartily support my last employer's choice of what to do with me. They hid me in a deep dark closet of the organization where my general asshole-ness would not offend the special snowflakes who made up the majority of the company, and brought me openly into the light of corporate day when facts and outcome was more important than some department manager's assumptions and ego.
My manager was very honest with me about my role, which I greatly appreciated. Sadly, when he left the company, it took me several years to recognize the writing on the wall before I too retired.
(I should add that I spent the very vast majority of my time in that deep dark closet of corporate backwater. It is not a place for people who need to feel appreciated by others.)
It's not politically correct to say, but people who worry about "Snowflake U"- while whinging about other people's frustrations with political correctness- are generally asshalves.
It would take two of them to make a decent asshole.
Huge fan of Ken's work- clearly not smart enough to recognize the line Ken is drawing in his two recent posts. I get thinking the guy in the former post is a tool- but the thread title and general discussion in that post seems to suggest the content of this post is bogus.
Wish I was smart like Ken:(
I'm pretty sure you're actually smart enough to recognize the difference between private criticism and university discipline.
My theory is that the universities ARE responding to pseudo-market forces. Alumni donations to the elite schools that drive this nonsense seem to increase every year. I doubt enrollments for the whole University of California system rarely ever decline. Administrators and faculty set the policy and Trustees accept it.
There is no indication that "right to not be offended" has hurt any school's market position. They are giving their customers (students) what they want and other stakeholders (alumni, faculty, administrators, donors, future employers) seem to be fine with it, too.
We seem to be creating the kind of society we want.
Certainly I can see that distinction. I agree with this post- and largely agree with the PC post.
I guess my confusion is with someone who thinks the right to be offended is horseshit- which seems like a fair characterization of this post- and someone who also thinks that having no interest in the acceptable PC terms makes one an asshole.
Isn't- as that thread's comments indicated- using "PC terms" a way of making sure not to offend? Therefore, someone who says "I will be not be PC" is- to a large degree- saying "I don't give a f*** if you're offended by my words, you have no right not to be offended." As such, I would think the author of this post- even if he does think using PC terms is generally the best way to comport oneself- would at least have some understanding for why someone would say, "I will ignore the PC terms and offend if I choose."
Obviously, university behavior can be a much bigger deal and I' m not saying one's position on the two issues has to be the same. It's simply that someone who says your right to be offended is nonsense would seem to have some sympathy for one who has no patience for PC.
PS- I don't really think you're an asshole (or an asshalf.) I just saw an opportunity to call someone an asshole… and still be somewhat witty. That's the internet equivalent of scoring two chicks at the same time- I had to go for it.
I think the key is the difference between individual action and institutional/official action.
I think "I recognize this will offend and I don't care" arguably makes someone a dick. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect institutions to protect us from dickery. We do that ourselves, by shunning dicks.
@Pablo:
The Brown Flurry. Hmm. I'm borrowing DES' description on this one. Sounds unwholesome. Also too close to slurry.
Hilarious … until I think of just how great the possibility is of neoliberal big-biz academia making something like this true.
It's bad for chem majors – they learn TRUE threats. Mix acids and bases and you end up with assault. Unless you are organic and end up with Esther.
I spent a week at my alma mater in Providence last June — Commencement, 50th anniversary of the Computer Science program (I was in the first class), retirement of my advisor Leon Cooper. I heard CS majors and professors talking about encryption, geologists talking about earthquakes, global warming, and Mars, economists talking about inflation and Janet Yellen '67, mathematicians talking about John Nash, med students talking about prosthetics and icky stuff, and physicists talking about pentaquarks.
Nobody was talking about political correctness or offensive speech, or apparently giving them any thought.
Some people seem to have very strange ideas about what goes on day-to-day at an Ivy League school.
An alternate , less disparaging, name for such an institution would be "progressive seminary."Unlike "colleges" and "universities," seminaries make no implicit promise of open minds and free inquiry.
Peter B says September 14, 2015 at 8:59 pm:
EE majors may be making progress on national origin discrimination, but some of it is real and some is imaginary. When they use an integration line around simple Poles, their results are imaginary. But at least most of them don't call Poles zeros.
It's not a dichotomy; it's a trichotomy.
Team America: World Police explained it very well.
Ken is sounding a lot like Clark, or maybe via angus (contemplating a snow storm) in this post (oops, I hope that doesn't offend either of you). Really, characterizing your opponents with a derogatory (for your constituency) term, ignoring real problems with debates on campuses and online, and then heaping on all these imagined bad things that are going to happen, what are you afraid of? One of your supporting links was about Oxford, so I wasn't really sure what the point was for US law and/or culture.
I also love how all the tough-talking free speech advocates are ready to sign up for the classes and jobs that don't have anyone who tells them to shut up already. Because that's what I see mostly, blowhard types who like to spread discord and strife by bringing up controversial and off-topic polarizing issues who don't want their rhetorical bombs taken away from them by people who insist on respecting the people you're arguing with.
So are the regents of the university of California proposing something anti-constitutional, or is it just that you don't like the new cultural experiments where they ask/require students to be civil toward one another. Because I suppose if the experiment was a success, it could spread to other parts of society, and then someone might actually suggest that there be an actual right to not being offended. The question would then be, would this comment be in breach of it?
The largest problem I see with this is that safe spaces aren't seen as a product. They aren't something students want and universities look to provide.
They are a moral imperative. It is moral to provide safe spaces and immoral to let the opposite exist. Sure I can opt into a safe space under your system, but others (gasp) might not have a safe space!
I can't speak for the amorphous-solids, but my own experience is that the Special Snowflake policies aren't primarily objectionable because they seek to prevent all offense. That would collapse into unworkability basically instantly. They're objectionable because they specifically shrine certain offenses to certain groups, by members of other groups, as forbidden.
It's not about offensiveness, or adulthood, or maturity. It's formalizing power relations, under the paradigm of victimhood. Hell, that Unruh post from a few days ago shows how a lot of people react when equality ends up in the hands of those who they don't think deserve it.
Re: The specific addendums in UCal's proposed code: The first doesn't sound bad, since it's specifically referring to vandalism and graffiti. The ambiguity of 'culturally-recognized symbols' does make me wonder how spray-painting 'die cis scum' would go over.
The second: No objections here.
The third? Um. Should we be objecting to "Mexicans are all lazy!" because it's forbidden to say, or because it's factually wrong? Also, I note that "Women are stupid and lazy. Not any individual woman at this college, of course, who all earned their positions fairly and honestly. Just all women, as a whole." is 100% tolerance-approved, because these policies need to cut really finely to include just the right offenses, and not auto-expel anyone who pointed out that most people who commit violent crimes are men.
And the last? What? If you are disabled, then you by definition lack a capacity expected in the mean population, from a sense to a form of locomotion to a mental capacity. This doesn't make you any less of a human being, obviously, and obviously you shouldn't treat disabled people as fragile eggshells or morons. But according to the bare text of this policy, depicting blind students as requiring accommodation for their studies and exams is in violation, because it articulates the view that they are incapable of sight.
There seems to be a self-contradictory risk to the situation, and I fear that you risk the creation of some sort of hyperemotional critical mass, depending on the size of the university. Just imagine the mushroom cloud resulting from thousands of self-avowed Snowflakes when they realize that the term 'Snowflake' is derogatory, and, thus, offensive. This would be a chain reaction, too, as the epiphany hits the first few, and then the idea spreads.
The solution is to grandfather all currently-admitted students. (I apologize for my ageist terminology, as well as any suggestion that older people are unable to adapt to changing conditions.) (I also apologize for the inherent sexism of the term "grandfather"; certainly, a grandmother would be equally capable of studying at a snowflake university.)
@Ken,
Brilliant idea! Snowflake U will be top-heavy with management and fully bureaucratized, and so will soft-pedal the 'right not to be offended' rule. It'll be buried in the TOS, and pop up to getcha, with lawsuits, public humiliation, etc.
I blame Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers solely for this trend. Therefore, it should be required to rename at least two streets on campus after the original instigators.
Great comments from everyone (except 205guy. "new cultural experiments"? No, it's good ol' Fascism 101. Why not simplify things and tear up the Constitution. The danger would be that the University Bureaucrats won't realize any of their dreams; they'll be moving in lockstep with the politicians and their paymasters. So who's gonna be the Thought Police?).
RE: G Joubert
"For the record, what we're just about always talking about here is the right of coddled liberals to not have to be exposed to conservative or libertarian ideas and ideals."
Yeah, because conservatives never get upset when they're exposed to ideas espoused by their opposition. *cough* gay marriage *cough* right to privacy *cough* drug decriminalization *cough* paying down the national debt *cough* separation of church and state *cough*
It's sad when people throw a temper tantrum because they get offended at just about everything, and it's equally sad when people pretend like it's only the other side that throws temper tantrums because they get offended at just about everything.
You're right that when we're talking about college it's mostly liberals that throw those tantrums, but outside of the university experience conservatives throw just as many tantrums (and probably in a much more spectacular fashion, when was the last time you heard about a liberal bombing a mean asshole in the same way that conservatives bomb abortion clinics?)
How about the team name 'The Flakes'?
That probably depends on whether you stick anarchists and animal rights folks on the extreme right or left wing of the spectrum.
If you're proposing a market based solution and you need to start by describing all the registries, lists, legalistic rules for conduct, and other bureaucracy that are required to make it work, that's your hint that what you're proposing is less free-market based than you think.
Frankly we have a market based solution already. People already choose to spend their tuition money where at the school that will take them and has the best services for the cost. It's just that, relatively, no one gives two wet shits about Brown's commitment to absolute free speech and that many people give many many shits about the brand value of an Ivy League school.
I would rather put my child in Thick Skin U and pay extra tuition to have unemployed comedians insult him between classes. Iron clad snowflakes!
the problem with allowing market forces to make decisions on policy is that they don't always make choices that are good for society (or constitutional, at least if we're talking state schools). this article reads as if the understood choice is that teachers and students will shun snowflake schools and that there will be market pressure on the snowflake schools to allow more speech… but what if what happens is that all the money ends up at snowflake schools, because the parents and sundry with money all send their kids to the snowflake schools, and the non-snowflake schools are decimated, if not eradicated due to lack of funds, if not also enrollment?
if we always allowed market forces to make the decisions, then we'd still have slavery.
it's always hard not to stray into paternalism when making these kinds of evaluations of what's "good", but i think the point is that because it's so hard, the more permissive approach to personal behavior is generally the way to go. and, that idea is enshrined in the constitution. schools, whether public or private, have always felt enough less than voluntary (college is too intertwined with one's future pursuit of happiness) that it's reasonable for the state to force them all to be reasonably permissive with respect to personal behavior, and particularly speech. i see the pressure there, but i don't ascribe to schools and businesses being more deserving of personal freedom than their students/employees.
i don't mean to miss any sarcasm in the original post, but a lot of the comments seem to be taking the post at its face value, so i will too, at least for this post.
This is huge! Why, just think, you could be responsible for whole new areas of Academic wanker-hood. The Department of Grievance Studies, Whiner of the Year awards, it's endless!
I've come to realize that a lot of commenters here have an alternate definition for "politically correct." They apparently define it as:
Coming from an academic, Ivy League background, I've always seen the definition as: