#92 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Sunday July 18)
Good morning,
I have a friend who has given up on teaching a college class because he is tired of the game of “gotcha” with his students. This person has all the bona fides of a liberal, feminist, sensitive, humanistic person. And yet his students lay in wait, ready to pounce on any perceived slip of the tongue—anything that might confirm that he is nothing more than an uninformed, insensitive representative of the historic toxic male patriarchy. Teaching classes is no longer worth being on the firing line.
Then there is the case of Amy Chua (aka, the “Tiger Mom”), excoriated for relationships with certain students and not others and for statements she may have made that might have offended.
Chimamanda Adichie, international bestselling and awarded author, sympathizes. This paragraph is brilliant, instructive, and frightening, summing up much of what is happening in academia, on college campuses and in intellectual discourse—and worth every word:
“In certain young people today…I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.”
Adichie says she finds it obscene. I do too.
Troubling times,
Glenn
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