quote:

An NYU professor crusading against political correctness and student coddling was booted from the classroom last week after his colleagues complained about his “incivility,” The Post has learned.

Liberal studies prof Michael Rectenwald, 57, said he was forced Wednesday to go on paid leave for the rest of the semester.

“They are actually pushing me out the door for having a different perspective,” the academic told The Post.

Rectenwald launched an undercover Twitter account called Deplorable NYU Prof on Sept. 12 to argue against campus trends like “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings” policing Halloween costumes and other aspects of academia’s growing PC culture.

He chose to be anonymous, he explained in one of his first tweets, because he was afraid “the PC Gestapo would ruin me” if he put his name _behind his conservative ideas on the famously liberal campus.

“I remember once on my Facebook I posted a story about a kid who changed his pronoun to ‘His Majesty’ because I thought it was funny,” he told The Post. “Then I got viciously attacked by 400 people. This whole milieu is nauseating. I grew tired of it, so I made the account.”

On Oct. 11, Rectenwald used his _internet alter ego to criticize “safe spaces” — the recent campus trend of “protecting” students from uncomfortable speech — as “at once a hall of mirrors and a rubber room.”

Two weeks ago he posted on his “anti-PC” feed a photo of a flyer put out by NYU resident advisers telling students how to avoid wearing potentially offensive Halloween costumes.

His caption read: “The scariest thing about Halloween today is . . . the liberal totalitarian costume surveillance. NYU RAs gone mad,” he wrote.

“It’s an alarming curtailment of free expression to the point where you can’t even pretend to be something without authorities coming down on you in the universities,” Rectenwald told The Post.

But the Twitter feed soon sparked a “witch hunt” by the growing army of “social justice warriors,” he said.

In an interview published Monday in the Washington Square News, NYU’s Independent Student Newspaper, the eight-year instructor admitted he was the Deplorable NYU Prof.

“My contention is that trigger warning, safe spaces and bias hot-line reporting is not politically correct. It is insane,” he told the student paper. “The crazier and crazier that this left gets . . . the more the alt-right is going to be laughing their asses off [and] getting more pissed.”, he was quoted as saying.

The divorced father of three came forward because “I thought there was nothing objectionable about what I had said.”

But Rectenwald says he began getting “dirty looks” in his department and on Wednesday figured out why: A 12-person committee calling itself the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group, including two deans, published a letter to the editor in the same paper.

“As long as he airs his views with so little appeal to evidence and civility, we must find him guilty of illogic and incivility in a community that predicates its work in great part on rational thought and the civil exchange of ideas,” they wrote of the untenured assistant professor.

“We seek to create a dynamic community that values full participation. Such efforts are not the ‘destruction of academic integrity’ Professor Rectenwald suggests, but rather what make possible our program’s approach to global studies,” they argued. Rectenwald likened the attack to “a Salem witch trial. They took my views personally. I never even mentioned them and I never even said NYU liberal studies program. I was talking about academia at large,” said the professor, a popular instructor who was graded 4.4 out of 5 on ratemyprofessors.com.

The same day the letter was published, Rectenwald was summoned to a meeting with his department dean and an HR representative, he says.

“They claimed they were worried about me and a couple people had expressed concern about my mental health. They suggested my voicing these opinions was a cry for help,” Rectenwald told The Post. “Then they said I should leave and get help.”

He said, “They had no reason to believe that my mental health was in question, unless to have a different opinion makes one insane.”

Students told him that professors openly discussed with students how he may be fired.

The leave has “absolutely zero to do with his Twitter account or his opinions on issues of the day,” said NYU spokesman Matt Nagel.

But Rectenwald is disheartened.

“I’m afraid my academic career is over,” he said Rectenwald. “Academic freedom: It’s great, as long as you don’t use it.”

quote: (post)

Originally posted by Astner
I wonder if the public image of Americans as fat, loud and obnoxious is going to degrade into an image of coddled man-children.

quote: (post)

Originally posted by Surtur
These students are just pussies.

quote: (post)

Originally posted by meep-meep
I disagree with almost everything you post, but I agree. A lot of thes students are going to have a tough time adjusting to the workforce.

quote: (post)

Originally posted by Astner
When I first heard of shit like safe spaces and trigger warnings on colleges in the United States I thought it was limited third-rate art schools and whatnot. Then I found out it affected your top universities like Yale, Princeton and University of Chicago.

The funny thing is that this epidemic seems to be limited to the United States. In Europe it's not even debated, it's universally considered to curtail free speech.

quote: (post)

Originally posted by krisblaze
I think this reaffirms the assertion that these SJWs are not triggered by things related to trauma, but rather ideas that conflict with their worldview.

quote: (post)

Originally posted by Emperordmb
The purpose of PC is misguided. We should honestly morally not attack each other and not be dicks, offer constructive criticism instead of destructive criticism, act in each other's best interests instead of trying to put each other down, move beyond arrogance and act out of love etc.

This isn't something that can be forced however, and it's only something that can come from open communication. PC goes against this open communication through censorship, tries to completely shut out the sometimes painful experiences we need to grow, tries to exert an unfair power over the thoughts and actions of other people, and promoting emotional weakness that can only lead to self-loathing and therefore arrogance and therefore hurtful behavior towards others. When you victimize yourself, when you demonize the people who disagree with you, when you think you have the moral authority to apply censorship, when you close yourself off completely to ideas you disagree with, when you intentionally build walls like that between you and other people... that isn't acting out of love, that isn't acting with the best interests of everyone, of true progress, in mind, it's an exercise in arrogance.

quote: (post)

Originally posted by Surtur
I can agree with someone saying people should not be dicks, but I think what people don't realize is that what is PC has changed. Here is an example of the normal non-shitty political correctness. Illegal immigrants. Some want you to call them undocumented workers. Which okay, whatever, that is fine.

It becomes something else though when people use it to flee from ideas. That is what an alarming number of students do. At Brown University they were triggered into hate speech not by foul language or anything like that, but by ideas lol. Specifically the ideas of a feminist who doesn't subscribe to silly fairytales like rape culture, wage gaps, a war on women in America, etc.

I guarantee you if someone like Lena Dunham was showing up they wouldn't need safe spaces.

Here is where stuff gets even weirder: there is some sort of paradox going on. People want triggers and safe spaces because, in their views, they don't want to be victims of something. Yet at the same time victimhood status is something coveted by these people. It's why we've had black students lying about white people attacking them(when in reality they did the attacking) it's why we have Jewish girls drawing swastika's outside their dorms and then saying other people are doing it.

quote: (post)

Originally posted by Surtur
I don't want to endorse being dicks to these people either, but on the other hand a majority of them seem to consistently show they don't respond well to someone calmly giving them facts. It tends to get ignored or they try to make excuses for it in some way. Look at a person like Milo Younnoupolous who comes not only with facts, but with a dickish attitude.

The problem is there are certain aspects of the PC culture that have the potential to do harm, like when people say we live in a rape culture and they tell young girls that 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted, and they make college campuses seem like rape central.

In general I want people to stop trying to control language though. As you said, the fact someone shouldn't do something doesn't always mean they can't do it. I'd rather react to someone's words as opposed to telling them not to say anything at all.