EDIT: In the past a progressive candidate wouldn't have even stood a chance, now one of them almost won.
First, I want to note that this has been a conservative talking point for a long time. It's flared up again since 2014 or so, but "PC culture" has been the go-to jab against coastal intellectualism since the early 1990s. That isn't to say that valid criticisms of (coastal, collegiate) intellectualism can't be made, just that the motives for the term "PC culture" are part of a broader and somewhat aged conservative campaign against the perceived liberal elite.
> Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past?
I can indeed say this with some certainty. I'm in college right now, in a department (philosophy) that conservatives frequently associate with rampant leftism and its intellectual mainstays (pomo, critical theory, &c). This has not reflected my experience at all - many of my professors are philosophical libertarians, and the diversity of ideas is actually broader than I expected going into the major.
I have also had progressive professors, but they have bent over backwards to make conservative students comfortable (even in environments where nobody was on the attack).
Of note: The most overt political actions I've seen recently on my campus have been plasterings of white supremacist posters [1] and the murder of a visiting black student by a white student [2].
[1]: http://www.dbknews.com/2017/03/28/umd-white-supremacist-post...
[2]: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/21/sean-urbansk...
Edit: Added "recently" to the final sentence. There were some campus sexual assault protests in my freshman and sophomore years that might be characterized as political (even if I wouldn't).
It was addressing the exact ideology and behavior that is coming into fruition now, and we should have listened. In the early 90s people watched as the fringe slowly leaked out into the mainstream, and now it's fully into the mainstream. Example: the only acceptable feminist in public discourse is now the radfem (google the term if you think I'm using an epithet)--if you deny patriarchy as an omnipresent and nearly omnipotent, incorporeal force, you don't have a seat at the table. Another example: privilege theory, the "invisible knapsack" is a concept invented in the 90's, and while it has an academic basis, and functions as a motte-and-bailey argument in almost every use.
The ratio of college campus hate hoaxes to actual hate has got to be sky high. Yes some are real, but they almost never pan out, and the university silently drops agitating about it.
I don't see how you can even say this stuff. This is like the opposite of people who believe in bigfoot and UFOs. We all have cellphones with cameras on them. And so Youtube is filled with insane campus protests, assaults, bizarre seminars and speeches, and yet people deny they exist or have any power.
I can say it because it's my lived experience. I think you should read my comment again - I have seen hate on my campus, and it is not a hoax. Richard Collin's death is a testament to that.
> And so Youtube is filled with insane campus protests, assaults, bizarre seminars and speeches, and yet people deny they exist or have any power.
In other words, we have the most potent tool for confirmation bias and alienation ever conceived by man. Lenses only capture moments, not sympathetic humans.
You shouldn't make a claim and then ask someone else to disprove it. What numbers are you basing this belief off of? How do you define extreme left? Do you consider beliefs like evolution and global warming to be extreme left view points?
According to [0] it seems that the number of professors who consider themselves liberal has increased by about 10% in the last 60 years. But the definition of liberal has become much more inclusive over the last 60 years as well, so I am not sure how meaningful this is.
[0] Gross, Neil. Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? Most of my quick research was based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_bias_in_academia#cite_...
Personally I have no idea what the typical atmosphere is on university campuses. Of course I'm aware of the protests that make the main stream media, but it seems silly to just assume that those small numbers of protests are broadly representative.
Moreover, old people are unlikely to support revolutionary changes because revolution always causes some sort of turmoil, and you can likely only begin to reap the benefits of the new order after a long time, e.g. 10-15 years. You're less likely to support such a change if you're going to be dead by the point when its benefits start becoming apparent, or when a significant amount of your remaining time will be spent in the turmoil before that.
This question is bait though, to say something like "I don't like that I'm told to hire women over men" has many interpretations.
One is that I'm a sexist pig trying to throw women out because they're women.
Another is that I'm trying to get the best candidate based on skill not gender.
And yet another is that I am propping up the status quo by not altering my behaviour to be more inclusive.
It all depends on how _you_ feel about me saying that. And that's not a good tone for further discussion.
And then there is that background noise with shitstorms trying to get people fired over things they said (remember the nasa T-shirt guy? or brendan eich?), products boycotted over guilt by association and so on. But they make you ask yourself "could this happen to me?". Say the wrong thing and get fired because someone is OFFENDED about a joke or affiliating with the wrong people?
I have also seen github projects that I use suffer just because someone didn't like some language. This concerns me because when people push their preferences on the entire platform instead of subcommunities it becomes a cultural monoculture instead of a more compartmentalized system.
[1] The only exception I recall is the discussion about which gender inputs we should support in software forms where some suggested we should support the whole facebook madness.
Like a shit storm being kicked up over the use of master-slave terminology in code or hardware.