Object Lessons | Lay off Right, we of the Left can intimidate each other just fine

Carolyn Bradley Columnist

What’s the matter with the Vassar left? By now, it has become almost a rite of passage for pundits of The Miscellany News to pen a hand-wringing article about the mistreatment of conservative students on campus by liberals. From these Opinion pages alone, you’d think all of the political energy on the left at Vassar gets targeted at right-wing students here. What you wouldn’t know about is the intense backbiting and intimidation that flourishes among the left itself, in which most of this political energy gets squandered. The truth is, I often find myself wondering if right-wingers really have any place to complain about academia being so hostile to conservatives: God knows it’s no bed of roses for liberals, either.

Unfortunately, discussions about intimidation in academia have become confused with debates about “political correctness:” that is, the right-wing’s grab-bag term for most all efforts to make academia more sympathetic to the needs and desires of that tiny— insignificant!—majority of people who don’t identify as “straight white men.” As the anti-PC campaigners would have it, academia has transformed into a parody of itself, replacing traditional knowledge with a tyrannical obsession with language and symbols. Efforts to redress power imbalances on campus, to re-think how we talk about divisions of gender, race, and sexuality, are derided as being fatuous and trivial—and yet, somehow they are also so divisive that they have managed to create a storm of anti-academic sentiment in America in the last 20 years. To point out that this doesn’t make any sense is to overestimate the analytical capabilities of the anti-PC faction. In any case, it should be enough for us to know that symbols are never just symbols; and in much the same way that school uniforms have proven to conjure better behavior from students, the very presence of African American writers on a Vassar English course syllabus improves the way our society thinks about—and ultimately treats—African Americans.

That said, if charges of intimidation via “political correctness” are mostly a right-wing ploy, it is certainly true that there is a specific breed of mean-spirited faux-leftist activism that seems to creep up a lot around campus, which I would argue hinders both the emotional well-being of many students here and, yes, their ability to participate in leftist activism. How many classes have I sat through over the years watching one leftist student lash out against another, for only the faintest of reasons! The frustrating thing is that, nine times out of ten, the quieter person (the person being intimidated) was a committed leftist herself, but she lacked the “killer instinct” required to defend herself when caught unexpectedly in the line of fire: a good thing, in my book! It is troubling that we’ve come so far in academia, and yet, still, “might trumps right” more often than not in the classroom setting. And while I may not like it, I understand why teachers so rarely interfere in these shows of bravado: I have to think they are a little frightened themselves.

Outside of the classroom, things are not always much better. It seems like I have seen a lot of jealousy and rivalry be disguised as political disagreement, often to the exclusion of consensus-building and true activism. More problematic, I’ve seen shame being used as a tool to undermine others’ political struggles: people insisting on creating a hierarchy of oppression, not only to point out that certain marginalized groups are more victimized than others (a point which is undoubtedly true), but to guilt people whom they consider to hold a lower place on the hierarchy than themselves into feeling selfish for asserting their own political grievances. The result of all this negativity is—surprise!—people get disillusioned with the leftist scene here, or more likely (as this is Vassar), they get severely depressed.

So you’ll forgive me for not thinking that this is the kind of environment in which a healthy leftist movement might be born.

Naturally, the irony of all this in-fighting, this shaming, at Vassar is that no one stands to lose from it, except the left. Karl Marx once said, “Shame is a revolutionary sentiment,” but how could he think so when its consequences are paralysis and despair? A healthy leftist movement at Vassar will spring not from power plays of shame and intimidation, but from a recognition of just how much we all need one another in the fight toward freedom and equality, and that for all the gratification one might derive from hurting a fellow leftist, it is a poor substitute for real change.