10 minutes into the @yourewrongabout episode on politics correctness and it already feels like a look at the intellectual history that led to that moral panic-y NYT story about Smith College a few months ago. https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/political-correctness/id1380008439?i=1000517758102

One thing that’s important context for fights over “culture” and “free speech” on campuses is that they are primary sites of conflict re: historical and ongoing segregation.

1) These are PWIs established *for* white students and white academics that are still reckoning with the reality that “integration” is more complicated than simply beginning to admit people who ain’t white. (Or straight or able-bodied or...)

2) Pervasive segregation in housing and schools means that (PWI) college campuses will be the first (and maybe last) time many USians share a social space for an extended period of time with critical masses of people of another race.

Like, one reason these fights over campus culture have been going on since the 1990s moral panic over political correctness to today’s moral panic about campus wokeness is every freshman cohort has to go through the shock of this experience for the first time.

You can look back to the fights that resulted in the first Black Student Unions and ethnic studies departments in the 1960s/1970s and find students making the *same sets of demands as students today. It’s really wild.

These are (generally) 18 year olds experiencing their first tastes of adult agency trying to deal with somewhat heterogeneous social spaces for the first time. And they’re doing this on campuses that were *never built* to be heterogeneous.

Of *course* this shit is rancorous.

That NYT story focused on an elite college’s response to one racial controversy — checking off the moral panic boxes from the @yourewrongabout ep.

But does the median experience of Black students at PWIs look like administrators mobilizing to ensure they’re not antagonized?

I mean, damn... does the median college experience for anyone look like Smith College?

(That story was such concern-troll bullshit.)

More later.