Training for the Contemplative Life

In the 1990s the academic left wanted to avoid the “chilling effect” of prohibiting someone like Angela Davis from speaking, but it did not yet want to interfere with professional speech in the interests of upholding political dogma. It is only in the last decade that the speech being chilled became speech that departed from left-political orthodoxy. And it is only since 2020 that university administrators have taken heterodox speech out of the refrigerator and put it into the freezer. Now, failure to agree with the opinions voiced by Angela Davis a half-century ago can get you fired, and an insufficiently vocal adherence to these ideas will bar you from even being interviewed on many campuses.