Academic freedom is terminal

The report is from Britain but it is quite as valid here: Academic freedom is dying because profs are too scared of the repercussions to use it.

The book, edited by commentator and academic Joanna Williams, says that a culture of self-censorship in the academic community is so far advanced that there is no need for formal curbs on freed speech, since they exist in practice anyway.

Williams said: “The tendency for academics to police themselves and each other means that formal restrictions on academic freedom, although problematic, are actually rarely needed. One danger is that self-censorship becomes a routine part of academic life.

“New lecturers quickly learn how to avoid upsetting the student-customers who pay their wages and how to please the peer-reviewers who will green-light their work for publication and them for promotion. They learn how to comply with all manner of speech codes, safe-space and anti-harassment policies.

“Routine self-censorship not only does away with the need for too many overt restrictions on academic freedom it also reinforces an intolerance of dissent.”

The primary power tactic of the Left in America today is first, to define the terms of public debate and second, to dictate what may not be uttered without invoking furious retribution. That both of these tenets are pure power plays and nothing more seems hardly worth explaining. Speech control is joined at the hip to the Marxist categories of Oppressor-Oppressed, and these are defined by the speech controllers according to sex, class, race, disability, gender-identity and numerous other ways that are impossible to track because the speech controllers keep changing them. Witness the fury unleashed by the Left on Matt Lauer for his moderation of Sept. 7's "Commander in Chief Forum."

Lauer is getting raked over the coals by the Left, who contend that he wasn’t as tough on Trump as he should have been. The Washington Post said Lauer “was tougher on Ryan Lochte than on Donald Trump” ...

The New York Times had two separate articles on Lauer’s performance, one titled “Matt Lauer Fields Storm of Criticism over Clinton-Trump Forum.” The other headline called his performance “pathetic.” The Times’ Nicholas Kristof called Lauer “an embarrassment to journalism.” 

No wonder that college campuses have become the main place "where victimhood is the way you assert your will to power."

... our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment. Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make anyone other than the “privileged” feel uncomfortable, challenged, or otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or concepts.

Professors who wander off the narrow, approved path become class enemies. who are anyone who does not toe the line of "revolutionary truth." This is the result of postmodern deconstructionism, which I explained here:

One of the basic tenets of postmodernist linguistic deconstructionism (which I learned how to do in my postgraduate studies at Vanderbilt) is that all text is tainted by bias and that objective points of view are impossible. Hence, the objective of expression is to exercise power. Formerly the type of expression so designated has been confined, mostly, to those of history, literature and politics. But now even mathematics may be considered biased and subjective.

Hence, there is no such as thing as objective truth and statements are never more than propositional in nature. A statement's truth content is never more than opinion, and opinions are nothing but expressions of power. Therefore, in a basic sense, all speech is power directed.

This is a fundamental world view of the Left and is derived directly from Marxism, as reworked by Leninism. Since Marx held that his communist theory was literally scientific, his economic-historical forecasts were not simply likely, they were certain. To understand and partner with this inevitability was to be "on the right side of history" (which is where that overused cliche comes from). As formulated by Lenin et. al., truth is therefore not statements of objective facts, but assertions that move the communist revolution and its fulfillment closer to reality. "Truth" is therefore pliable and impermanent, the concept of truth being only practical. In practice, all of language became subservient to the dominance of the party, a fact recognized by George Orwell in his novel 1984 and its concept of Newspeak. 

The appetite of tyrannical ideology is never sated. When the commissars run out of one group of class enemies they always invent another.

American college campuses are starting to resemble George Orwell’s Oceania with its Thought Police, or East Germany under the Stasi. College newspapers have been muzzled and trashed, and students are disciplined or suspended for “hate speech,” while exponentially more are being shamed and silenced on social media by their peers. Professors quake at the possibility of accidentally offending any student and are rethinking syllabi and restricting class discussions to only the most anodyne topics. A Brandeis professor endured a secret administrative investigation for racial harassment after using the word wetback in class while explaining its use as a pejorative. [boldface added]

Inevitably, Leftists always devour their own.

Sarah Hoyt:

LISTEN CAREFULLY FOR THOSE YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO MOCK.  THOSE ARE THE ONES WHO OWN YOU: North Korean Citizens Warned Against ‘Hostile’ Speech.

As Glenn Reynolds has described it, "you can’t speak here, this is a university!"