Heather MacDonald: The Snowflakes Have A Chilling Effect Even Beyond The Campus

Hear, hear.
   I've been saying this for a long time. Also, it's true. Pretending that this is limited to campuses is part of what I have been calling PC denialism. Somebody explain to me why it is so difficult to understand that ideas matter? Even if these bad ideas were limited to universities, that wouldn't mean that they're not a problem. Universities matter. Nobody's ever think of saying "oh, fascism is extremely fashionable at universities...but it's isolated to campuses...so no reason to worry." If the content of PC ideas doesn't bother you, that's one thing. But the isolated to universities argument is bogus. By how on earth could anyone believe that they are isolated to universities? Universities are a place where people learn important ideas--ideas that influence them for the rest of their lives. Universities are largely for learning ideas. Are there any ideas that are limited to universities?
   Anyway, MacDonald writes:

Many observers dismiss such ignorant tantrums as a phase that will end once the “snowflakes” encounter the real world. But the graduates of the academic victimology complex are remaking the world in their image. The assumption of inevitable discrimination against women and minorities plagues every nonacademic institution today, resulting in hiring and promotion based on sex and race at the expense of merit.
Seemingly effete academic concepts enter the mainstream at an ever-quickening pace. A December 2016 report on policing from the federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services includes a section on “intersectionality”—the campus-spawned notion that individuals who can check off multiple victim boxes experience exponentially higher and more complex levels of life-threatening oppression than lower-status single-category victims.
Faculty and campus administrators must start defending the Enlightenment legacy of reason and civil debate. But even if dissenting thought were welcome on college campuses, the ideology of victimhood would still wreak havoc on American society and civil harmony. The silencing of speech is a massive problem, but it is a symptom of an even more profound distortion of reality.

   And just one more example: the DoJ argued that sex is, at least in part, determined by "gender identity." That is to say: purely biological kinds are at least partially determined by beliefs. The Department of Justice seriously argued that a bogus concept dreamed up in the women's and gender studies department is partially constitutive of biological kinds. 

   To think that bad ideas somehow, magically, cannot cross some kind of doxastic town-gown force field is simply absurd.