March 8, a University of Vermont (UVM) professor joined the growing chorus of brave souls willing to risk their careers and public scorn to stand for what is right. Professor Aaron Kindsvatter, a self-declared liberal, claims that the university is embracing dubious ideological racial policies. The intolerant backlash against this professor was fast and fierce, but so too have been the expressions of support.
Americans once regarded themselves as sharing agreement on most goals, just differing in desired means. But "social justice ideology" does not broach dissent: it negates traditional liberalism and free speech protections. Thus, "liberal" professors will be silenced as readily as conservative speakers such as those at Middlebury College. "Social justice" ideology behaves much like an institutionalized cult.
Professor Kindsvatter titled his latest video "Racism and the Secular Religion at the University of Vermont" as an allusion to that religiosity, warning that this ideology will seed future hate and division:
[W]hiteness falls under the umbrella, in the derogatory meaning of the word, of critical social justice. And whiteness, the thinking that informs it is so crude, and so lacking in falsifiability, and it speaks so eloquently to our tribal impulses that the same logic that informs what's currently being called whiteness right now can easily find its way to desperate persons who need a group to hate and who will adopt the suppositions that inform whiteness towards their own ends.
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