Dec 28, 2016 06:57 PM
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Campus-...UjBUVDJYWQ
EXCERPT: The day after the presidential election, Mark Lilla had to get something off his chest. "I wrote in a fever," he says. The article that resulted, which appeared in The New York Times, argues that "American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force."
Mr. Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, pinned the blame, in part, on academe and its fixation on identity politics. "How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose … gender pronouns?" he asked. "How not to laugh along with those voters at the story of a University of Michigan prankster who wrote in ‘His Majesty’?"
The article has provoked an avalanche of response and rebuttal. "Stop blaming our society’s political and social crises on campus-based demands for color- and gender- coded justice that reflect the crises far more than they cause them," wrote Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale University, in the Times. "It is unconscionable, this know-better recrimination, directed at the very people who just put the most work and energy into defeating Trumpism, coming from those who will be made least vulnerable by Trump’s ascension," wrote Rebecca Traister in New York magazine.
A Columbia colleague accused Mr. Lilla of aiding and abetting white supremacy. The article also struck a chord in Europe, where it was republished on the front page of Le Monde and debated in newspapers across the continent. Mr. Lilla has been interviewed nonstop for a month and is considering writing a book on identity politics.
After checking the NFL schedule, he found time to talk with The Chronicle last weekend about political correctness, being likened to David Duke, and why academics need to watch more Fox News.
Are colleges too obsessed with diversity?
They’re too obsessed with identity. There’s a subtle distinction. Diversity as a social goal and aim of social reform is an excellent thing. But identity politics today isn’t about group belonging; it’s about personal identity. From the ’70s into the ’90s, there was a shift in focus from group identity to the self as the intersection of different kinds of identities. Identity became more narcissistic and less connected to larger political themes. For many students, their political interest and engagement end at the border of how they’ve defined themselves.
It’s extraordinary how much time and thinking they devote to exactly what they are as the subtotal of other identities, rather than seeing their time at the university as an opportunity to leave those things behind, or overcome them, or become something that’s actually themselves and autonomous in some way.....
EXCERPT: The day after the presidential election, Mark Lilla had to get something off his chest. "I wrote in a fever," he says. The article that resulted, which appeared in The New York Times, argues that "American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force."
Mr. Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, pinned the blame, in part, on academe and its fixation on identity politics. "How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose … gender pronouns?" he asked. "How not to laugh along with those voters at the story of a University of Michigan prankster who wrote in ‘His Majesty’?"
The article has provoked an avalanche of response and rebuttal. "Stop blaming our society’s political and social crises on campus-based demands for color- and gender- coded justice that reflect the crises far more than they cause them," wrote Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale University, in the Times. "It is unconscionable, this know-better recrimination, directed at the very people who just put the most work and energy into defeating Trumpism, coming from those who will be made least vulnerable by Trump’s ascension," wrote Rebecca Traister in New York magazine.
A Columbia colleague accused Mr. Lilla of aiding and abetting white supremacy. The article also struck a chord in Europe, where it was republished on the front page of Le Monde and debated in newspapers across the continent. Mr. Lilla has been interviewed nonstop for a month and is considering writing a book on identity politics.
After checking the NFL schedule, he found time to talk with The Chronicle last weekend about political correctness, being likened to David Duke, and why academics need to watch more Fox News.
Are colleges too obsessed with diversity?
They’re too obsessed with identity. There’s a subtle distinction. Diversity as a social goal and aim of social reform is an excellent thing. But identity politics today isn’t about group belonging; it’s about personal identity. From the ’70s into the ’90s, there was a shift in focus from group identity to the self as the intersection of different kinds of identities. Identity became more narcissistic and less connected to larger political themes. For many students, their political interest and engagement end at the border of how they’ve defined themselves.
It’s extraordinary how much time and thinking they devote to exactly what they are as the subtotal of other identities, rather than seeing their time at the university as an opportunity to leave those things behind, or overcome them, or become something that’s actually themselves and autonomous in some way.....
