Ep. 32: Attack of the PC College Kids!

We’ve heard this scare story a million times: A theater group at Wesleyan won’t perform The Vagina Monologues because it’s offensive to trans women! Oberlin is banning classes featuring white authorsI Rich, sheltered college students, increasingly indoctrinated by radical Marxist professors, are asking for safe spaces!

But how much merit is there to the popular trope that college kids are hypersensitive and coddled? Is there really a free speech crisis America’s campuses? What are the origins of this evergreen complaint? Who does the constant harping on the threat of “political correctness” and anti-free speech undergrads actually hurt? And more importantly, whom does it benefit?

Today's guest is David Palumbo-Liu, professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University.

Guest

David Palumbo-Liu is a professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age and Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, founding editor of the e-journal, Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, and a Contributing Editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books. His writing can also be found in The Nation, The Guardian, Truthout and Salon.

Why Berkeley’s Battle Against White Supremacy Is Not About Free Speech - Meleiza Figueroa and David Palumbo-Liu, The Nation (September 6, 2017)

I'm a Stanford professor accused of being a terrorist. McCarthyism is back - David Palumbo-Liu, The Guardian (February 8, 2018)

The Adam Johnson Files

NYT’s Campus Free Speech Coverage Focuses 7-to-1 on Plight of Right - FAIR, Nov. 2017

Centrist Pundits Prepared Way for Trump Smear of ‘Alt-Left’ -  FAIR , October 2017

Centrist Pundits Paved Way for Trump’s ‘Alt-Left’ False Equivalence -  FAIR , August 2017

WaPo’s Laziest Columnist Calls Protesters ‘Fascists,’ Equates Them to Manchester Bomber -  FAIR , May 2017

Campuses Don’t Need Affirmative Action for Trumpism -  FAIR , Dec. 2016

Lashing Out at ‘Identity Politics,’ Pundits Blame Trump on Those Most Vulnerable to Trump -  FAIR , Nov. 2016

The Chait Crusade

Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say - New York Magazine, January 27, 2015

Barack Obama Versus Political Correctness - New York Magazine, September 15, 2015

Can We Start Taking Political Correctness Seriously Now? - New York Magazine, November 10, 2015

The Right Is Worse Than the Left on Free Speech. So What? - New York Magazine, March 20, 2018

References

The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct 

Richard Bernstein | October 28, 1990 | The New York Times

Are You Politically Correct?

John Taylor | January 21, 1991 | New York Magazine

Ricky Gervais:  Humanity Needs an Empathy Lesson

Matt Zoller Seitz | March 13, 2018 | Vulture

Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy

Moira Weigel | November 30, 2016 | The Guardian

The Phony Debate About Political Correctness

Erica Hellerstein and Judd Legum | January 14, 2016 | ThinkProgress

Show Notes

The ‘campus free speech crisis’ is a myth. Here are the facts.

Jeffrey Adam Sachs | March 16, 2018 | The Washington Post

The Real Threat To Campuses Isn’t ‘PC Culture.’ It’s Racism.

Tressie McMillan Cottom | February 19, 2018 | The Huffington Post

The ‘Free Speech’ Hypocrisy of Right-Wing Media

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor | August 14, 2017 | The New York Times

Your Political Correctness Is Showing, Conservatives

Maximillian Alvarez | December 29, 2016 | The Baffler

How ‘Political Correctness’ Went From Punch Line to Panic

Amanda Hess | July 19, 2016 | The New York Times

What Research Says About The Consequences Of PC Culture

Gene Demby | January 30, 2015 | NPR

Who’s afraid of free speech in the United States?

Justin Murphy | March 12, 2018 | jmrphy.net

Everything we think about the political correctness debate is wrong

Matt Yglesias | March 12, 2018 | Vox

Is Antifa Counterproductive? White Nationalist Richard Spencer Would Beg to Differ.

Natasha Lennard | March 17, 2018 | The Intercept

Jewish Fraternity Boss Teams Up With Controversial Right-Wing Campus Group

Josh Nathan-Kazis | March 13, 2018 | Forward

The Bari Weiss problem

Leah Finnegan | February 14, 2018 | The Outline

NYT's Bari Weiss Falsely Denies Her Years of Attacks

Glenn Greenwald | March 8, 2018 | The Intercept

The Big Uneasy - What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus?

Nathan Heller | May 30, 2016 | The New Yorker

What’s Wrong (and Right) in Jonathan Chait’s Anti-P.C. Screed

J. Bryan Lowder | January 28, 2015 | Slate

Transcript

The full transcript for this episode can be found here.

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