At 72 years-old, renowned scholar Camille Paglia, who also serves as professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, is still fighting back against a new age culture of ultra-sensitivity brought on by hordes of leftist student activists.
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Camille Paglia is distraught over the current behaviors exhibited by undergraduates. Last semester, a group of leftist student protesters argued that Paglia she should be fired for her unorthodox views on hot-button issues such as the #MeToo movement and transgenderism.
“Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color,” a petition circulated by students read. “If, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.”
Paglia ultimately won that battle but her war against “safe space” culture rages on.
Paglia, who rose to national prominence with the publication of her book, Sexual Personae, is a lifelong leftist. She supported Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election and Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the 2016 election. Despite this, Paglia has never been afraid to fray from party lines. In fact, Paglia laid the groundwork for modern discourse on “social justice” sensitivities when she published an essay entitled “The Nursery School Campus” in 1992, which highlighted the beginning of a trend towards safe spaces and trigger warnings on campus.
This year, Paglia came face to face with an extreme version of the problem she first diagnosed in 1992. Last week, she told the Wall Street Journal that she is concerned about the impacts that these new trends will have on young Americans.
As a teacher of undergraduates, Ms. Paglia despairs at how “bad it is for young people, filled with fears, to be raised in this kind of a climate where personal responsibility isn’t spoken of.” Since her own youth, she says, college students have devolved from rebels into skittish supplicants, petitioning people in authority to protect them from real life. Young adults are encouraged to look for “substitute parent figures on campus, which is what my generation rebelled against in college. We threw that whole ‘in loco parentis’ thing out.”
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