Just when you thought the social justice left couldn’t get any more stupid, it finds a way to outdo itself, giving our rational faculties the routine beating they so richly deserve. This time the cult of idiocy reared its ugly head at perhaps the most prestigious academic institution in the world, Oxford University.
“The university’s Equality and Diversity Unit has advised students that ‘not speaking directly to people’ could be deemed a ‘racial microaggression’ which can lead to ‘mental ill-health,’ ” reports The Telegraph. “Other examples of ‘everyday racism’ include asking someone where they are ‘originally’ from, students were told.”
This is real life. Not satire. Not parody.
The Telegraph continues, explaining the sheer depth of Oxford’s plunge into the pits of leftist delusion:
Oxford University’s Equality and Diversity Unit explains in its Trinity term newsletter that “some people who do these things may be entirely well-meaning, and would be mortified to realise that they had caused offence.
But this is of little consequence if a possible effect of their words or actions is to suggest to people that they may fulfil a negative stereotype, or do not belong.
Fortunately, sanity prevails at England’s rival schools.
Oxford’s guidance is “completely ridiculous” and will make students “hyper-sensitive,” Dr. Joanna Williams, a lecturer at the University of Kent, told The Telegraph. “Essentially people are being accused of a thought crime. They are being accused of thinking incorrect thoughts based on an assumption of where they may or may not be looking.”
It’s a sad day when the same university that helped lay the philosophical foundation for Western civilization and liberal democracy, the institution that once employed the likes of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, and other empirically-minded Enlightenment sages, as professors, succumbs so pitifully to the zeitgeist of “micoaggressions,” “safe spaces,” and other ideological contrivances that serve no other purpose than to lay waste to mankind’s (rather humankind … our apologies for the rhetorical gender violence) critical thinking skills.