Joanne Jacobs (welcome back!) calls our attention to an amusingly revealing opening convocation speech at Brown.
The speaker, Carolyn Dean, a Brown history professor, had been criticized for demanding “critical thinking” without defining it. Apparently, as Joanne wryly notes and quotes, such thinking has to do with your identity:
If to think critically means to be highly self-conscious about how we must all negotiate our identities in complicated ways whoever we are . . .
Well, that explains it. I’m as confused by this as Joanne, but I was also struck by another political correct-ism over which the good professor did not pause. Referring to the criticism of her failure to define critical thinking, Prof. Dean begins her remarks:
So in the spirit of what I failed to convey to that student and which he or she had absolutely every right to ask and expect….
Never mind that she never got around to defining critical thinking. What struck me is this: what I failed to convey to that student and which he or she….
What kind of person was “that student”? Surely Prof. Dean remembers whether he was a he or she was a she. (Of course, there’s the possibility of a he/she transsexual.) Has political correctness now become so mindlessly pervasive on campus that we must say “he or she” (or more progressively, “she or he”) even when we refer to one specific known person?
Or maybe, this being Brown, that student was simply “diverse” in the manner of the student at the University of Central Florida referred to here.
