As Robby Soave of Reason Magazine reports, Ohio State University student Abdul Razak Ali Artan, who terrorized the campus by stabbing numerous people before he was shot dead by a campus security officer, was enrolled in a class in which he worked on a group project dealing with “microaggressions.”
That assignment, worth 15 percent of Artan’s grade, involved discovering a dozen examples of microaggressions on social media, then demonstrate which identity groups were the victims.
The syllabus for the class states that the purpose of the class was to promote “intercultural leadership” and transform students into “actively engaged, socially just global citizen/leaders.”
Soave writes:
I was able to confirm that the microaggressions assignment is indeed a component of the “Crossing Identity Boundaries” class. The course’s instructor didn’t respond to a request for comment, either. According to the syllabus, the point of the microaggressions project is to make students “recognize the role of social diversity” and “demonstrate an appreciation for other points of view and cultures.”
As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt wrote in The Atlantic in an article titled “The Coddling of the American Mind”:
… it’s not hard to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past. This hostility, and the self-righteousness fueled by strong partisan emotions, can be expected to add force to any moral crusade … Even joking about microaggressions can be seen as an aggression, warranting punishment … the increased focus on microaggressions coupled with the endorsement of emotional reasoning is a formula for a constant state of outrage …
As Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro has stated of the way leftists think, microaggressions “aren’t ‘micro-offensive statements.” Or “micro-insults. They’re tiny aggressions, almost physical in nature. Such aggressions, as with all aggressions, call for punishment.” He added, “’Microaggression,’ in short, is an excuse to arrest, jail, or hurt you.”