The Hypocrisy of Political Correctness
by John Grimaldi, Contributor at the Association of Mature American Citizens [AMAC]
A professor at NYU was shunned by his colleagues because of "the content and structure of his thinking." That's right, the "thought police" were after him. They didn't like the fact that he was using social media to expose the hypocrisy of political correctness on campus.
Because he exercised his right to free speech, Professor Michael Rectenwald claims he was the target of defamation and harassment by his colleagues. And so, Rectenwald recently filed suit in Manhattan Supreme Court. The New York Post reported that "the politically incorrect NYU professor accused of 'incivility' by liberal colleagues and put on leave is now suing the college and four fellow profs for calling him everything from a drug addict to Satan."
The suit sheds light on what is going on in college and university classrooms these days. Is it a movement by the left to create a generation of voters who could eventually have the numbers and ideological resolve to turn the United States of America into the Soviet Socialist Republic of America?
The irony here is that Rectenwald describes himself as "a communist." Yet he says he is an ardent advocate of free speech on campus. As he put it in an interview last year: "Every time a speaker is booed off campus or shooed off campus because they might say something that bothers someone, that just feeds the notion that the left is totalitarian, and they have a point."
I don't think Rectenwald is switching teams anytime soon. Left is left and right is right and never the twain shall meet, the exception being those with a left of center political preference.
Whatever his bent, the Professor seems to believe that schools are places that should be encouraging discourse and a diversity of ideas, not "mindless indoctrination." And, he believes that if there is a sinister motive behind the PC movement, it will not succeed. I believe that, too, because our kids are smarter than that, for the most part. They were brought up in a free society and it will take more than leftist propaganda to make them give it up.
In the old Soviet Union, the communist culture was built on systematic indoctrination that brainwashed the citizenry into believing that the leftist elites and their apparatchiks who ran the "Evil Empire" had their best interests at heart. The American Revolution, on the other hand, sought to allow the people to become individuals with a collective lust for freedom and justice.
And, what fuels that lust is knowledge, the kind of knowledge only available in an institution of learning that fairly exposes its students to all sides of any argument, whether it be scientific or political.
