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by hurbledr
3393 days ago
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I fail to see how political correctness is both a nebulous concept and a dogmatic belief system at the same time. Along the same lines, the idea that their is some sort of over-arching "liberal elite" belief system that colleges slavishly adhere to is laughable, or it would be, if folks like the author of this piece didn't take it serious. While professors in any given discipline often share a number of "beliefs", colloquially known as "facts", if you get a few of them together in a casual setting, they'll more often than not take to arguing about the finer points of their field. In fact, this sort of behavior is often encouraged, in both casual and professional settings. That's why grad students write and defend a thesis. I also think that accusing professors and students of using political correctness as a tool to further their own aims and to preserve their entrenched power is assuming quite a lot about the actions and motivations of a huge swath of people. |
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I didn't say political correctness was a nebulous concept, I said it was a nebulous term. The issue isn't vague concepts; the issue is that it's hard to tell what concept we are talking about. Lots of words have to be defined. If you're reading something about art you better hope there's a definition for the term "art" toward the front. The same is true for terms like "political correctness", "liberal", "conservative", and "culture". Defining vague terms before using them is very common. This should not be so hard to understand. For an extreme case, look at Guy Steele's speech, "Growing a Language".[0] He defines every word longer than a certain length.
Along the same lines, the idea that their is some sort of over-arching "liberal elite" belief system that colleges slavishly adhere to is laughable, or it would be, if folks like the author of this piece didn't take it serious. While professors in any given discipline often share a number of "beliefs", colloquially known as "facts", if you get a few of them together in a casual setting, they'll more often than not take to arguing about the finer points of their field. In fact, this sort of behavior is often encouraged, in both casual and professional settings. That's why grad students write and defend a thesis. I also think that accusing professors and students of using political correctness as a tool to further their own aims and to preserve their entrenched power is assuming quite a lot about the actions and motivations of a huge swath of people.
Rather than argue with my summary of someone else's writings and your own second hand perception of him, why don't you read his work and argue against his own points? Did it occur to you that evidence and responses to your very replies might be inside the text or do you just not care to find them?
Actually, don't even bother. I've been telling you to read the article since my first post and you obviously still haven't. There is no worth while discussion happening here. Turn off the computer. Read a book. Practice listening to someone else for a few hundred pages. Then maybe you can handle ten.
[0] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf