Viewpoints: Letters / Opinions
The hypocrisy of political correctness
By John Grimaldi
January 22, 2018
Monday PM
A professor at NYU was shunned by his colleagues because of "the content and structure of his thinking." That's right, the "thought police" were after him. They didn't like the fact that he was using social media to expose the hypocrisy of political correctness on campus.
Because he exercised his right to free speech, Professor Michael Rectenwald claims he was the target of defamation and harassment by his colleagues. And so, Rectenwald recently filed suit in Manhattan Supreme Court. The New York Post reported that "the politically incorrect NYU professor accused of 'incivility' by liberal colleagues and put on leave is now suing the college and four fellow profs for calling him everything from a drug addict to Satan."
The suit sheds light on what is going on in college and university classrooms these days. Is it a movement by the left to create a generation of voters who could eventually have the numbers and ideological resolve to turn the United States of America into the Soviet Socialist Republic of America?
The irony here is that Rectenwald describes himself as "a communist." Yet he says he is an ardent advocate of free speech on campus. As he put it in an interview last year: "Every time a speaker is booed off campus or shooed off campus because they might say something that bothers someone, that just feeds the notion that the left is totalitarian, and they have a point."
I don't think Rectenwald is switching teams anytime soon. Left is left and right is right and never the twain shall meet, the exception being those with a left of center political preference.
Whatever his bent, the Professor seems to believe that schools are places that should be encouraging discourse and a diversity of ideas, not "mindless indoctrination." And, he believes that if there is a sinister motive behind the PC movement, it will not succeed. I believe that, too, because our kids are smarter than that, for the most part. They were brought up in a free society and it will take more than leftist propaganda to make them give it up.
In the old Soviet Union, the communist culture was built on systematic indoctrination that brainwashed the citizenry into believing that the leftist elites and their apparatchiks who ran the "Evil Empire" had their best interests at heart. The American Revolution, on the other hand, sought to allow the people to become individuals with a collective lust for freedom and justice.
And, what fuels that lust is knowledge, the kind of knowledge only available in an institution of learning that fairly exposes its students to all sides of any argument, whether it be scientific or political.
John Grimaldi
Washington, D.C.
About: Contributor at the Association of Mature American Citizens [AMAC]. Grimaldi began his career as a reporter for the Associated Press and subsequently joined the pioneering public relations firm of Carl Byoir & Associates in New York where he was a group vice president. He served for a period as part of the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly [he was Press Secretary to the Speaker for Membership Affairs]. Subsequently, Mr. Grimaldi became a member of the Board and Executive Vice President of the Braun & Company, a leading international business and public relations consultancy.
John Grimaldi is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. and he has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.
Editor's Note:
The text of this letter was NOT edited by the SitNews Editor.
Received January 19, 2017
- Published January 22, 2018
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