In 2000 Francine Prose wrote a hilarious and sometimes sad novel called Blue Angel (http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Angel-Novel-Francine-Prose/dp/006...), which is worth reading both for its own sake and because its story and themes are compatible with Kipnis's. Decades of academic satires seem to have had near zero effect on campus politics.
(I taught as a grad student at the University of Arizona and have been teaching as an adjunct at Marymount Manhattan College.)
This stuff really isn't liberal at all. Our culture is Protestant, Christian, Puritan. Always present beneath it is a deep subsurface ocean of sexual paranoia, prudery, and holier than thou moral crusading. Overt religious forms of this are out of vogue, so it creates a sort of pressure that must be released. Campus PC ideology forms an easy framework for a good old fashioned Protestant moral crusade.
That's how I start to view the SJW movement. Our parents and grandparents were outraged by people violating morality as described by religion. Our generation gets outraged by people violating whatever random moral sensitivities are popular nowadays (often opposite to the religious ones). Nothing has changed, people are people.
I think you're mostly right here, although as the downvotes indicate, this possibility is unsettling to many. When judgmental people are prevented by prevailing mores from fully exercising their judgmentalism, their efforts will be concentrated on the unfortunate few who remain acceptable targets. Many judgmental people don't like young women to be sexually active (this seems to have been the case for all of recorded history). One can't complain directly about that nowadays, however, so one must complain about whoever vile tempters can be blamed, however tenuously, for the sexual activity of young women.
A similar phenomenon exists with respect to abortion and infanticide. Once upon a time, we would have been fairly merciful toward young mothers troubled enough to kill their own children. Now, however, our harridan-in-chief Nancy Grace leads the popular crusade to crucify the poor mothers. The reason is that many people feel very uncomfortable about abortion, but have no other acceptable outlet for that discomfort.
I read that first article about the liberal professor and his "liberal" students. The only student who seems to have threatened anything to get course material changed was a far-right student demanding that the course thoroughly cover the hypothesis that black people getting housing loans caused the Global Financial Crisis.
I'd really like to see some statistical evidence that the academic thought-police are louder, more prominent, or more powerful than in previous times before I start panicking over it.
Why research when there's already an existing narrative about the liberal university turning our spoiled children into oversensitive, overconcerned, disrespectful, judgemental revolutionaries that lack sufficient respect for their parent's pragmatic decisionmaking?
If there's any increase in oversensitiveness in universities, for me it would make sense as an indicator that the universities are becoming increasingly out of reach for people who haven't had a life privileged enough to sustain the idea that one might be able to go through life without feeling bad or sad without the person who made you feel that way being expelled from the community.
Basically, they expect proper customer service, and they're used to it from the people that serve them from behind retail counters and fast food cash registers every day. With the prices they're paying, I'm not sure that they don't deserve it. If you're a tutor to royalty, there's no academic freedom; if you can't figure out that the customer is always right, you lose your head.
Anyway, aren't most people who teach at universities making less than minimum wage with no health insurance? Do we really want their 'truth' to endanger the incomes of the administrators? If it looks like a temp, swims like a temp, and quacks like a temp, you can fire it like a temp.
There's no doubt that there's been an increase of immediately firing anyone who generates any controversy anywhere, unless they're the ones bringing in the revenue.
In 2000 Francine Prose wrote a hilarious and sometimes sad novel called Blue Angel (http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Angel-Novel-Francine-Prose/dp/006...), which is worth reading both for its own sake and because its story and themes are compatible with Kipnis's. Decades of academic satires seem to have had near zero effect on campus politics.
(I taught as a grad student at the University of Arizona and have been teaching as an adjunct at Marymount Manhattan College.)