There are three grave problems here. First, you can’t learn much if you are unwilling to listen to ideas that challenge your self-righteous orthodoxy, nor can you even understand exactly what your orthodoxy means until you have had to think hard enough about it to defend it vigorously. All that “critical thinking” that college students were supposed to have learned before they arrived on campus and refined once they got there seems to involve nothing more than indoctrination in contempt for the politically incorrect ideas of the supposedly unenlightened. True, the humanities departments, where the race, class, and gender orthodoxy is central to the subject, are losing enrollment, but science, engineering, and business students also marinate in the all-pervasive atmosphere of such ideas, shaping their political and social assumptions, which become badges of enlightenment and superiority.

Second, the constant social pressure of having to monitor everything you say, lest some unguarded politically incorrect utterance loses you friends, dates, status, or even employment makes for (pardon the fifties’ expression) boring conformists, apparatchiks afraid to think for themselves—quite the opposite of the sturdily independent, resourceful, thoughtful, plainspoken, and creative character that used to be the American ideal. Take the case of Smith College president Kathleen McCartney, who joined her students’ “shared fury,” she said, as “we raise our voices in protest” against the grand jury decisions in Ferguson and Staten Island. Trouble is, she raised her voice in the wrong slogan, declaring that “All lives matter,” when the approved chant was “Black lives matter.” How could she be so disgracefully discriminatory in her nondiscrimination? her scandalized undergraduates exploded. A modern college president may be the very definition of an apparatchik, but there is something humiliating to human nature in the cringingly self-abasing apology that McCartney fairly sobbed out, without even having to be carted off in a dunce cap to a reeducation camp, as if she were her own Maoist cultural-revolutionary commissar. What would it take to make characters like this pull the lever at Treblinka?