The Washington Post reports on a student teacher at Stanford who was targeted by political correctness police of unusual viciousness. Her thought crime? Nothing more than briefly dissenting from the political implications of the program’s mandatory “commitment to diversity”. Until overruled by higher-up university administrators acting at the behest of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the administrators of the teaching program within which Michele Kerr was enrolled undertook Orwellian efforts to harass and intimidate her, including demands that she give them access to her private, password-protected blog, secret meetings to find ways to retroactively disenroll her from the program, and efforts to sabotage her job hunting efforts.
This is the kind of people who are too often empowered on university campuses these days. And even when they fail, as they did here, to enforce their orthodoxy in particular cases, the lack of sanctions against them leaves them free to try again and again and again. Not every victim will have the resources and will to stand up to them. And when the ideological thought policing takes place in the secret environment of admissions committees, hiring committees, and tenure reviews, there are few outlets for accountability to creep in.
But not to worry. I’m told repeatedly that it is only Republicans that are the party of intolerance.
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