It is a famous piece and I am very familiar with it. It is totally counter to my experience. What I've seen, among friends and family, includes
* climate science faculty getting death threats after having their work called out on fox news, and having members of the trump white house interfere with their grant funding
* transgender faculty being specifically targeted by organized harassment campaigns from tpusa, though trained students who know precisely where they can write hate speech without faculty members being able to share that material
* history faculty being told administrators to focus more on the history of the colonies in a history course focused on native americans.
And in the wider news
* grad students being publicly called out for their non-standard appearance by full professors on twitter after publishing work critical of heterodox views on Covid
* grad students being shit for being early-career on twitter by full professors after publishing work critical of heterodox views on Covid
* grad students receiving rape and other violent threats for calling out sexual assault committed by high-status faculty and the failure of universities to take action and then continuing to do so through the hatred
My experience is that undergraduates and grad students are actually either far more open to exploring ideas and engaging in difficult work that can even involve threats on their own lives than administrators or political leaders think they are, or they are already ideologically frozen and only take courses so they can attack the faculty members.
* climate science faculty getting death threats after having their work called out on fox news, and having members of the trump white house interfere with their grant funding
* transgender faculty being specifically targeted by organized harassment campaigns from tpusa, though trained students who know precisely where they can write hate speech without faculty members being able to share that material
* history faculty being told administrators to focus more on the history of the colonies in a history course focused on native americans.
And in the wider news
* grad students being publicly called out for their non-standard appearance by full professors on twitter after publishing work critical of heterodox views on Covid
* grad students being shit for being early-career on twitter by full professors after publishing work critical of heterodox views on Covid
* grad students receiving rape and other violent threats for calling out sexual assault committed by high-status faculty and the failure of universities to take action and then continuing to do so through the hatred
My experience is that undergraduates and grad students are actually either far more open to exploring ideas and engaging in difficult work that can even involve threats on their own lives than administrators or political leaders think they are, or they are already ideologically frozen and only take courses so they can attack the faculty members.