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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have been teaching at the college level for 20 years, so I have some perspective on how things have changed over time.  We are currently in a very difficult moment for the exchange of ideas and many, many students feel that they cannot express very legitimate ideas and perspectives in academic settings right now. That is true for both white students and students of color who deviate from a very specific ideological orientation. It is absolutely not a healthy moment for intellectual rigor or nuanced ideas. However, it won’t last forever.  When power structures change, there is often on overcorrection.  The pendulum will swing back towards move open, flexible debate in time. Such swings towards strident viewpoints has happened before in academia. This swing is a bit more troubling because the terminology has escaped from academia and is being wielded by people who are applying it in a variety of non-academic settings that it was not designed to adequately explain.  [/quote]

This is an interesting and hopeful post, but at what point do you see the pendulum swinging back towards more open, flexible debate?  The thirst for power and status, once acquired, is hard to quench.  You basically have very wide swaths of academia and increasingly government that embrace race-based approaches to every issue and employing an entire vocabulary intended to reallocate power from whites (and, in some cases, Asians) to other minority groups.  If you are a young adult caught up in the crossfire, you are just treated as collateral damage.  [/quote]

I have been in academia for 30 years (with my grad school years) and know the experiences of older colleagues.  These ideological movements have about a 10 year shelf life.  Most of my mentors came of age during the years when Marxist theory dominated. I entered grad school at the height of deconstructionism. By the time I graduated, it was largely passé.  Next came post-colonialism, which sat atop the field for about 10 years and pushed its way into everything so that every group was somehow reclassified as post-colonial.  That faded to the fields of identity politics (feminism, queer theory, critical race theory).  The latter is right now outpacing it’s compatriots, but we are already half a decade in.  It’s about hitting it’s peak, which is when each theory becomes so attenuated from lived experience and common sense that a backlash starts.  I have a few suspects as to what will replace it based on new ideas that are percolating out there in the journals, but only time will tell.  The only surety is that this to shall pass.  [/quote]

What are some of your guesses? [/quote]

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