Andrew Hofer

“The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“As I spoke with academics and university students, I lost count of the number who echoed Tuvel’s worry. In journalism and law and certain other sectors of the reality-based community, coercive conformity had made inroads, but in universities it was reconfiguring the whole intellectual landscape, for students and professors alike. As a professor told me, “There is no bigger filter bubble than any selective university in the United States. It is definitely the case that at these institutions, which are supposed to be founded on the idea of a marketplace of ideas, there are all kinds of expressions you can’t say now. Anything that relates to race or gender, you had best keep your mouth shut if you have a point of view that deviates from the predominant woke one. You’re going to get your ass in trouble.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“In practice, deconstructive approaches to language therefore look very much like nitpicking at words in order to deliberately miss the point.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“universities need to make defending pluralism a top institutional priority, not an afterthought. If they do not, politicians—the world’s worst judges of scientific integrity—will try to do it for them.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth