On Aug. 24, Campus Reform reported that Baylor University will be rolling out a new “cultural humility” program focused on educating student leaders on social identity. Their emphasis? “Microaggressions.”
If you haven’t kept up with the latest in left-wing campus craziness, the academics behind microaggression training believe that small statements like “Where are you from?” and “America is a melting pot” are actually forms of everyday racism that apparently target minority students. In their training, Baylor even referred to students guilty of these supposed speech crimes as “attackers.”
This sensitivity training program at Baylor is far from the only of its kind. Colleges across the country are taking steps to combat these microaggressions, ranging from private schools like Baylor and Harvard, to public schools like the University of Wisconsin and the University of Massachusetts.
It’s easy to laugh off these programs as both insignificant and absurd, but they actually present a real cause for concern. Once university administrators and student activists start policing speech, any degree of serious learning, controversial debate, or academic freedom is immediately put into jeopardy.
After all, such hypersensitive attitudes could quickly shut down classroom conversations. Colleges offer diverse courses that cover politics, race relations, gender studies, human sexuality, and more. But if we allow the politically correct ideology behind “microaggressions” to fully infect the academic atmosphere, all of these classrooms will become even emptier echo chambers than they already are. How can you have a meaningful conversation about gender while it’s considered an act of aggression to argue that “men and women have equal opportunities for achievement?” How could one possibly discuss racial issues with any substance when the statement “America is the land of opportunity” has been deemed insulting to minority students?
Social science and liberal arts departments are already bastions of left-wing ideology, where liberal faculty outnumber their conservative counterparts by at least a ratio of five to one. If we allow blatant speech policing to spread to classrooms already dominated by one side of the political spectrum, any hope for actual academic debate is lost.
Additionally, interacting with peers from different backgrounds is supposed to be an important part of a college education. Giving young students exposure to viewpoints and life experiences they’ve never encountered is vital to a well-rounded outlook on the world. Yet identity politics has taken a foothold in the culture of hypersensitivity that is established by initiatives like microaggression training, and shuts down cross-cultural connections. In the end, students are simply encouraged to stay inside their comfort zones. After all, if a small social faux pas can get a student branded a racist or an “attacker,” that surely incentivizes them to not reach across racial or cultural lines in the first place.
It’s startling to see some professors and faculty embracing these microaggression-based programs, as they so obviously pose a threat to academic freedom as well. Once we start letting political correctness determine the acceptable bounds of campus discourse, there’s no shortage of potential for abuse.
In 2017, seven classes at Harvard University were subject to administrative investigation after students reported that they felt “microagressed” by lecture content. In a more recent example, a Brown University study on transgenderism was just retracted after a student outcry, because the results, which indicated that the prevalence of gender transition among teens may be subject to some degree of social contagion, were deemed to “discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.”
If sensitivity continues to supplant the scientific method at even our most prestigious college and universities, all hope for academic freedom is lost.
Still, it is true that sensitivity trainings and microaggression programs are likely not an actual violation of the First Amendment, especially at private universities. But if we want to live in a culture where open inquiry and freedom of expression are encouraged, we can’t teach students that minor social mishaps are bigoted attacks — unless we want to set them up for a mental breakdown the first time they face an actual act of aggression.
Brad Polumbo (@brad_polumbo) is a contributor to Red Alert Politics. He is an assistant editor for Young Voices and a student at UMass Amherst.
