Then you grow up

From Can We Start Taking Political Correctness Seriously Now? by Jonathan Chait. Nice to see a mainstream liberal stand up so clearly for freedom of speech and against the Heckler's Veto that so many university students of the postmodernist ilk seem to wish to exercise.

The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)

American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state. The continuous stream of small-scale outrages it generates is a testament to an illiberalism that runs deep down to its core (a character I tried to explain in my January essay).

The scene in Columbia and the recent scene in New Haven share a similar structure: jeering student mobs expressing incredulity at the idea of political democracy. As far as the students are concerned, they represent the cause of anti-racism, a fact that renders the need for debate irrelevant. Defenses of p.c. tactics simply sweep aside objections to the tactics as self-interested whining.

Just about across the spectrum we are seeing solid condemnation of the authoritarian tactics in evidence at Yale and Missouri State University. Consequently there is more accord in the comments sections than is normally the case. While there are plenty Mr. Wilson commentators (of Dennis the Menace fame; "get off my lawn") there is actually some useful observations as well, including

mohammed.noori
William Perry used to write about this stuff in the 1970s (he was a student counselor at Harvard). What's happening at Yale is a natural part of the learning process in higher education. This relates to students' conceptions of knowledge and how these conceptions develop and deepen as people successfully move through various stages of human development.

Perry suggests that students move through three stages:

1) a dualistic view of knowledge as right and wrong which is the responsibility of an authority to arbitrate.
2) as open view of knowledge as a multiplicity of positions of equal value;
3) a relativisitic view of knowledge as contextualized, requiring a personal commitment to align it with ones personal values.

Following Perry's framework, the altercation between the student and the resident "house parents" looks like the students are still at the dualistic phase while the residents, as one would expect, have a relativistic view. These views are incommensurate, hence the conflict.

William Perry passed away in 1998. Here is his obituary. Sounds like an estimable man. The book from which Mohammed summarizes is Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years by William G. Perry.
The True Believer loves dualism and sees everything through that lens. Life is so much simpler when you can cram everyone into two simplistic boxes, Good and Bad. Then you grow up.