New York Times Opinion editor Bari Weiss warns that college campuses are becoming more focused on manufacturing internet activists instead of sticking to its original goal of promoting higher learning.
“Students are being coddled and professors are taking on the role of babysitters. University used to be, and are in a democracy, a sacred place in the pursuit of truth,” she said during an interview on “Morning Joe” Thursday. “They’re in the truth pursuit business, and increasingly it seems, they’re in the business of turning out social justice warriors.”
Social Justice Warrior or SJW has become a popular term of disparagement toward far-left political correctness advocates — often found on Tumblr.
Weiss went on “Morning Joe” to defend her most recent column, “We’re All Fascists Now.” The piece, which warned of the growing danger to free speech on college campuses and elsewhere, was swiftly denounced on Twitter.
The criticism largely was focused on Weiss mistakenly linking to a fake Antifa Twitter account in the article. The matter was quickly corrected by the Times, and Weiss apologized on “Morning Joe” for the mix-up.
“I made a mistake and I corrected it, which is what we do in the newspaper business and I apologized immediately as soon as I saw it,” she said. “It’s very hard, as we’ve learned from the last election, sometimes you fall for troll accounts. That’s what I did.”
Also appearing was New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters, who seemed to agree with Weiss’ position, blasting college students obsessed with microaggressions as “wusses.”
“Just think about the way people on college campuses talk about speech, as a form of aggression,” he said. “That term microaggression, that you are actually wounding someone. It’s just — it’s totally changed the way that we interact with one another and really I think made wusses out of our college kids.”
Watch above.