Citations Needed, Episode 32: Attack of the PC College Kids!

Students at Middlebury College disrupt speaker Charles Murray.

The horror stories are ubiquitous: a theater group at Wesleyan won’t perform The Vagina Monologues because it’s offensive to trans women! Oberlin is banning classes featuring white authors! Rich, sheltered college students, increasingly indoctrinated by radical Marxist professors, are asking for safe spaces!

But how much merit is there to the popular trope that college kids are hypersensitive and coddled? Is there really a free speech crisis America's campuses? What are the origins of this evergreen complaint? Who does the constant harping on the threat of "political correctness" and anti-free speech undergrads actually hurt? And more importantly, whom does it benefit?

Today's guest is David Palumbo-Liu, professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University.

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The Show

Episode transcript available here.

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The Guest

David Palumbo-Liu is a professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age and Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, founding editor of the e-journal, Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, and a Contributing Editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books. His writing can also be found in The Nation, The Guardian, Truthout and Salon.

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Want More?

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Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. Our Production Consultant is Josh Kross. Our research assistant is Sophia Steinert-Evoy. The theme is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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