This is a good piece with examples of attacks by the ideologically militant multitude against what is unfortunately these days the free thinking minority.
If these attacks succeed, education is on its way to moral bankruptcy.
Nowadays (if there's ever been a time in history) it's not easy to voice opinions that diverge from the crowd.
With stuff like Instagram it's the norm that people mime meaningless things, just mindlessly repeating unexamined ideas (blackout is a great example).
It's gobsmacking to me when I see how many educated (liberal arts educated friends, no less) people passing around these conversation guide infographics...as though they can't express original ideas, hold a conversation, etc.
It's critical that people are brave enough to recognize the obvious illiberal attitudes circulating and criticize them for the nonsense they are.
"Free thinking minority" is so often meaningless that it's hard to find the actual message behind it. 99% of the time it basically means "we share an ideology and are surely very intelligent."
Free thinking means to create your own fact based opinion without ideological bias.
Now, we should be afraid to think freely on thorny topics lest we end up offending someone's feelings. It could also come at the cost of careers and livelihoods.
Not sure about you, but universities as institutions that historically had only places for upper class men with no room or tolerance for anyone who didn't look like them isn't exactly the pinnacle of morality. One might even consider that a morally bankrupt starting point...
Universities weren't historically jobs training programs, as they've now been reduced to, and so weren't even a consideration for the vast majority of people for whom even basic literacy wasn't requisite for their day-to-day job.
Not founding all things for everyone does not imply moral bankruptcy.
It may have started that way, but then progress was made based on the principle of meritocracy.
Now it is regressing due to vague "social justice" principles.
I graduated from a meritocratic institution 20 years ago. Got there on a scholarship, studied unhindered by the politics of the day for 5 years, and it made me who I am today.
Unfortunately the same institution is today spending too much time and energy on various socio-political abstractions, hence it is not being able to offer the same opportunities for scientific exploration I enjoyed during my time there to the new generation.
From my experience, the pinnacle of education was around the end of the cold war here in the West, then it started going downhill once we lacked a properly defined adversary and started to look for enemies and oppressors in our own midst.
If these attacks succeed, education is on its way to moral bankruptcy.