Social justice

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. America’s colleges and universities are in crisis. According to the latest data released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, enrollment is down 1.7 percent compared with 2018, following a drop of 1.8 percent the previous year. If you contrast 2019 with 2017, that’s more than half a million fewer students. The brunt of this decline is being felt in New England, the center of America’s higher-education sector. In eastern Massachusetts, eight colleges have either closed or merged in the past four years, while in Vermont three colleges have gone to the wall in 2019 alone. Most experts think things will get a good deal worse.

Anyone who follows left-wing Twitter, or reads the more exotic NYT columns, might have noticed the rise of an increasingly fashionable new political language: therapy-speak. Just look at the weird self-helpy terms which now seem everywhere in political debate – phrases like ‘validate’, ‘call out’, ‘tone-policing’, ‘trivializing’ or ‘macroaggression’. Others are more specific – like ‘gaslighting’, an obscure psychological term which, as Megan McArdle notes, has become an obsession for the woke left.

You have to admire the inexhaustible capacity of the social justice left for taking offense. This week, the straight white male in the stocks is Jay Fielden, the editor-in-chief of Esquire. His sin? To put a white teenager called Ryan Morgan on the front of the March issue, accompanied by the line: ‘What it’s like to grow up white, middle class and male in the era of social media, school shootings, toxic masculinity and a divided country.’ Turns out, it’s a lot harder if you appear on the cover of Esquire. https://twitter.com/eiffeltyler/status/1095321466357403648 ‘Really @esquire?’ tweeted Karamo Brown, a television presenter in Los Angeles. ‘“What’s it like growing up white, middle class and male…” How idiotic!

Is there anything better than the sound of a bustling kitchen, the scent of turkey roasting in the air and children laughing, free from the burdens of gender identity? At least that what I tell my sister-in-law, as I urge her to let my nephew, Cody, watch Dora the Explorer instead of giving into the gender stereotypes permeating Go Diego Go. It seems obvious she should use the show as a tool for teaching Cody about the ‘explorers’ bravely making their way from South America in the migrant caravan — the people our racist president wants to kill. Many Americans watch football on this national holiday, but with the culturally insensitive Redskins not on yet, my opportunities to bring some social justice perspective on the toxically masculine game are limited.