Phoniness on Campus

Many people have commented on the hypocrisy and illiberality of   faculty members and officials at universities who support – directly or tacitly – those trying to suppress the presentation of dissenting viewpoints by students and invited speakers at colleges and universities.  The hypocrisy  is surely obvious enough with professors and administrators creating so-called safe spaces to pamper students they agree with and shield them from the imagined dangers of being offended about anything while allowing  or approving of vulgar insults, racial slurs, and assorted types of intimidation  sometimes including investigation by the campus cops for students with attitudes and opinions they do not like.  The illiberality is just as obvious with the fairly explicit abandonment in some places of the liberal idea of a university as a place where ideas, hypotheses, and opinions of all sorts may be presented and discussed freely, openly, and rationally without fear of punishment or censorship and with the acceptance by officials at some universities of threats,  disruptions, and even mob violence as means to prevent speakers with unpopular views from being heard.

However there is also an interesting bit of hypocrisy  in  this that has not been noticed as much. For years  defenders of affirmative action quotas or preferences at universities have used the idea of the importance of a diversity of thoughts  and viewpoints (together with specious claims that a simple wide range of skin color somehow guarantees that) as the main argument  and justification for their policies and actions.  Lately some professors and administrators have  awkwardly revealed just how sincere that argument was.