I Middelalderen grundlagdes universiteterne, som Quora skriver

These new centres of learning took the scholarly framework of the old cathedral schools’ curriculum based on the “seven liberal arts” but combined it with the structure of craft and merchant guilds (which is where the name universitas came from as well).  As in the guilds, students had to choose to work under the guidance of a “Master” and serve a long, structured and scrutinised apprenticeship and then pass a series of tests and oral examinations before being judged a “Master” himself and finally going on to become a “Doctor” or teacher.  This structure, hierarchy and rigorous testing made the Medieval university very different to similar-seeming schools in the Islamic world or the academies of ancient Greece.

The other radical and crucial novelty in the university system was the way advancement and prominence in this system was not gained merely by mastering material from key texts, but by disputation and debate using set rules of formal logic.  Masters and doctors maintained their positions and their reputations (and therefore their incomes from students) by their ability to win debates, often throwing open the floor to all comers.  And brilliant students could rise quickly in reputation and renown by taking on these masters and beating them.  At least twice a year a university would hold a quodlibeta - a multi-day tournament of rigorous logical disputation where anyone could propose and defend any position on any subject at all.  Often highly radical, controversial, paradoxical or even heretical idea were presented and participants had to defend or attack them using logic and reason alone. The idea of a rational free-for-all where the finest minds of the time used reason alone to bat around ideas like “God is in fact evil” or “the universe had no beginning in time” certainly does not fit most people’s ideas of the Middle Ages, yet this was a regular event in Medieval universities.

I det miljø ‘opfandt’ Benediktinermunken Roger Bacon den moderne videnskab og Guillaume de Conches hypotiserede darwinistisk at alt levende opstod fra ursuppen og udviklede sig over til det det er i dag - på Guds initiativ. Det er lang tid siden at man beflittede sig med rationalisme på universiterne og de fleste andre læreanstalter. Atlantic beskriver den sørgelige sag, da et akademiker-ægtepar sagtmodigt frasagde sig at rådgive de studerende om Halloween-kostymer og blev mødt med krav om bortvisning for deres manglende forebyggelse af potentiel krænkelse. Daily Caller ridser det sørgelige optrin op, hvis man ikke har hjerte til at se den lille video nedenunder

The conversation is at first tense but calm, but it escalates rapidly after a student accuses Christakis of creating an “unsafe space” at Yale.

“I did not-,” Christakis attempts to reply, but a student aggressively interjects.

“Be quiet!,” she screams. Then, voice quavering with emotion, she continues. “[In] your position as headmaster, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman.”

Christakis attempts to dissent, saying “No, I don’t agree with that,” unleashing a torrent of shrieks from the student.

“Then why the fuck did you accept the position? Who the fuck hired you?,” she cries, drowning out any attempt by Christakis to explain himself (Christakis never raises his voice, except to be heard by the crowd).

“You should step down! If that is what you think of being headmaster, you should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not!”

Another student, a male, joins in, shouting “You’re supposed to be our advocate!”

The student continues the attack, saying that students will transfer out of Yale because of its failure to be a “safe space” for them. As she continues, one passing student yells out “Retweet!,” apparently to endorse her attacks.

“You should not sleep at night!,” she says to finish the verbal assault. “You’re disgusting!”

Som man kan se er konflikter nogle gange sort/hvide. Den unge dames hysteri udgør et studie i sig selv. Selvretfærdigheden, berettigelsen, selvoptagetheden, aggressionen, den manglende empati for andre mennesker, manglende selvrefleksion og den grundløse foragt for andre meninger. Og ingen sans for værdighed. Som et udtryk for venstrefløjen er der kun emotioner, et mentalt barn forkælet til den rene narcissisme. Men det får vente, for her er endnu et eksempel på venstrefløjs ideologiske emotioner fra Missouri State universitetet, hvor nogen demonstrerer imod noget strukturelt undertrykkende noget

After desperately trying to gin up media coverage of student protests at the University of Missouri, one of the school’s media professors is now furiously trying to “muscle” the press off campus to prevent them from covering student protests that rapidly spiraled out of control Monday.

Mizzou president Timothy Wolfe announced his resignation on Monday after members of the school’s 4-5 football team announced they would boycott team activities unless the school acceded to certain demands surrounding racial equality. Unsurprisingly, Wolfe’s resignation did little to quell the mob.

On Monday afternoon, activists who had demanded Wolfe’s resignation abruptly demanded that media stop covering their activities on the public campus of the taxpayer-funded university. At the center of those demands was Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media within Mizzou’s communications department.

In the video below, you can see Click ask for “muscle” to help her bully a Mizzou student into not covering the ongoing mob protests:

Det kræver en beundringsværdig mangel på ironis sans at holde en demonstration inden i et ’safe space’. En god ven spåede at professor Clicks bemærkning “I need some muscle over here!” kan blive en ikonisk kommentar; “Al safe/inclusive/cis/gyn/LGBT/postmodernisme-BS er hermed udstillet og demaskeret”. Det er sandt for dyden en stjerneparade i eksempler på venstrefløjens selvforståelse. Journalistens argument om de grundlovssikrede rettigheder, der beskytter ikke blot ham men også demonstranterne, hvorfor de ikke kan tvinge ham væk,, som han ikke kan tvinge dem, verfes af med “Forget a law. How about for humanity?”. Eller sætningen “Sir, I’m sorry, these are people too. You need to back off!”, som virkeligt kræver en indforstået præmis om moralsk overrettighed for at give mening. Og så er der unødvendige journalister, som der er unødvendige mennesker…

Breitbart ridser tendensen på amerikanske universiteter, der også mærkes i resten af den vestlige verden, op, for som venstrefløjens børn tydeligvis ikke kan rumme den virkelighed, som venstrefløjen har beredt dem, så kan venstrefløjen heller ikke rumme sine egne børn

Similar incidents have happened before, on other campuses. Oberlin College was recently the scene of astonishing protests at the visit of former philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers, who was deemed to be too “triggering” for some students. But it is deeply worrying to see this happen at Yale, where undergraduates typically go on to become business leaders, senators and even Presidents.

The footage was published by Greg Lukianoff, the President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), one of the organisations that monitors and seeks to address the disturbing rise of intolerance on U.S. campuses. Lukianoff recently co-authored an influential essay, The Coddling of the American Mind, which describes the disturbing rise of campus zealots like the ones in this video.

Students of history will notice an alarming similarity in the video above to the “struggle sessions” of Maoist China, a form of public shaming in which perceived enemies of the Party would be surrounded in a public place by Red Guards, Mao’s most zealous supporters. The Red Guards would hurl abuse at their target until they confessed to their crimes.

Uninformed critics might argue that the Red Guards were a weapon of the Communist state, and not a genuine grassroots movement, but they’d be wrong: the Red Guards started out as a student movement, on Chinese campuses. Afraid yet?

College staff finally are. Earlier this year, Vox published an essay from a liberal professor who confessed that the zealotry of his own students frightened him. Earlier this month, Salon published an article from a black feminist film studies lecturer, describing her “disastrous” attempt to accommodate her students’ strangely aggressive emotional fragility. It seems the left, and especially the academic left, has finally woken up to the Frankenstein’s monster that they’ve constructed.

Daniel Greenfield ser også parallelen til rødgardisterne, men trøster sig med at i de frie lande har flertallet stadig noget at skulle have sagt og unge mennesker er generelt ikke så rædselsfulde

These aren’t an entire generation. They’re trained radical left-wing activists who have been encouraged to emote, to act out and throw tantrums as activism. It’s not unique.

(…)

What is happening now is a perfect storm with several causes, one of the biggest of these is the Obama era in which major social transformation and the craziest campus stuff have backing from the White House.

There are assorted generalizations about millennials in the workplace. But your typical campus screamer won’t be working a real job. They’ll be in academia, diversity consulting or something even dumber and more useless. Millennials serve in the military and members of that generation have won the Medal of Honor.

Washington Posts Wendy Kaminer går nogle årtier tilbage

You can credit — or blame — progressives for this enthusiastic embrace of censorship. It reflects, in part, the influence of three popular movements dating back decades: the feminist anti-porn crusades, the pop-psychology recovery movement and the emergence of multiculturalism on college campuses.

In the 1980s, law professor Catharine MacKinnon and writer Andrea Dworkin showed the way, popularizing a view of free speech as a barrier to equality. These two impassioned feminists framed pornography — its production, distribution and consumption — as an assault on women. They devised a novel definition of pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights, and championed a model anti-porn ordinance that would authorize civil actions by any woman “aggrieved” by pornography. In 1984, the city of Indianapolis adopted the measure, defining pornography as a “discriminatory practice,” but it was quickly struck down in federal court as unconstitutional. “Indianapolis justifies the ordinance on the ground that pornography affects thoughts,” the court noted. “This is thought control.”

So MacKinnnon and Dworkin lost that battle, but their successors are winning the war. Their view of allegedly offensive or demeaning speech as a civil rights violation, and their conflation of words and actions, have helped shape campus speech and harassment codes and nurtured progressive hostility toward free speech.

The recovery movement, which flourished in the late ’80s and early ’90s, adopted a similarly dire view of unwelcome speech. Words wound, anti-porn feminists and recovering co-dependents agreed. Self-appointed recovery experts, such as the best-selling author John Bradshaw, promoted the belief that most of us are victims of abuse, in one form or another. They broadened the definition of abuse to include a range of common, normal childhood experiences, including being chastised or ignored by your parents on occasion. From this perspective, we are all fragile and easily damaged by presumptively hurtful speech, and censorship looks like a moral necessity.

These ideas were readily absorbed on college campuses embarking on a commendable drive for diversity. Multiculturalists sought to protect historically disadvantaged students from speech considered racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise discriminatory. Like abuse, oppression was defined broadly. I remember the first time, in the early ’90s, that I heard a Harvard student describe herself as oppressed, as a woman of color. She hadn’t been systematically deprived of fundamental rights and liberties. After all, she’d been admitted to Harvard. But she had been offended and unsettled by certain attitudes and remarks. Did she have good reason to take offense? That was an irrelevant question. Popular therapeutic culture defined verbal “assaults” and other forms of discrimination by the subjective, emotional responses of self-proclaimed victims.

This reliance on subjectivity, in the interest of equality, is a recipe for arbitrary, discriminatory enforcement practices, with far-reaching effects on individual liberty. The tendency to take subjective allegations of victimization at face value — instrumental in contemporary censorship campaigns — also leads to the presumption of guilt and disregard for due process in the progressive approach to alleged sexual assaults on campus.

Universiteterne var måske en religiøs opfindelse, til at begribe Gud og forstå hans skaberværk. Måske fordi Gud er ubegribelig, kunne et studievære en søgen, mens uden Ham, kan vi kun prøve at begribe os selv og vores selvretfærdighed? Hvem ved, denne ateist er ikke mindre rådvild, når teisme ligner det bedste værn mod religiøs dogmatik.