Saturday, December 31, 2016

Free Speech returns?

Stepford Students No More?

Writing for The Spectator (October 8, 2016), Brendan O'Neill informs us that "Students are fighting back against the PC creed" . . . in Britain, anyway:
Something dramatic is happening on campuses. Two years ago, in this magazine, I wrote about the rise of the Stepford Students. These are the student leaders who might look and sound rad - all dyed hair and blather about 'intersectionality' — but who are really just officious meddlers in the lives of others. Whether they're banning sombreros because they're offensive to Latinos or No Platforming right wingers and off message feminists, these student officials strangle debate, and have tried to turn campuses from hotbeds of social and intellectual interaction into starched 'safe spaces' . . . . Now, however, a counter Stepford rebellion is stirring. Students are sick of being patronised, so they are shooting down this PC creed. They aren't hurling Molotov cocktails or staging sit ins, as students of old did - they're setting up free speech societies, boycotting patronising lifestyle lectures . . .
Good! May this trend continue - and spread to the States! Incidentally, the expression "Stepford Students" comes as a wordplay on "Stepford Wives," the title of Ira Levin's 1972 satirical thriller about rule-bound, conformist, robotic wives in an 'idyllic' neighborhood.

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4 Comments:

At 5:44 AM, Blogger Carter Kaplan said...

What is "intersectionality"?

 
At 9:12 AM, Blogger Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

The point at which two movements on the political left cross each other, thereby binding the two movements as necessary for a leftist to support even if the two are otherwise contradictory, e.g., Feminism and Islamism.

Jeffery Hodges

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At 12:35 PM, Blogger Carter Kaplan said...

That sounds like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel.

 
At 1:34 PM, Blogger Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

A plot for a story, at the least!

Jeffery Hodges

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