NYU prof attacks ‘viral identity politics of academia’

A New York University professor has started an undercover Twitter account to attack SJW culture from within, explaining that the hypersensitivity of the left has produced the alt-right “by virtue of its insanity.”

NYU professor Michael Rectenwald recently revealed in an interview with Washington Square News that he is the man behind an anonymous Twitter account known as “Deplorable NYU Prof,” which claims to expose “the viral identity politics of academia and its destruction of academic integrity.”

Indeed, Rectenwald noted that he is not necessarily “anti-PC,” but rather opposes the safe-space mentality of the left because it has reached the point of literal insanity.

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“My contention is that trigger warnings, safe spaces, and bias hotline reporting is not politically correct. It is insane,” he explained. “This stuff is producing a culture of hypervigilance, self-surveillance, and panopticism.”

Now, in an interview with Campus Reform, Rectenwald has expanded on his motivation to take on the “SJW left,” noting that his own experience in the classroom has shown him that colleges have “become a minefield or a field of eggshells.”

“We can’t ask students where they are from. We are supposed to put the information for a ‘bias reporting line’ on our syllabi, so that the classroom becomes a site where every move is surveilled upon a possible transgression. Everyone is turned into a sentinel of surveillance,” he contended.

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He then explained that he finally got “tired of withholding [his] criticism for fear of being mobbed by the SJW twitterati,” later characterizing such groups again as possessing a “mob culture” that is “very dangerous” and “totalitarian.”

Rectenwald went on to draw an analogy between college campuses and hospitals, both of which, he explained, create atmospheres of “isolation and protection” where “everyone is treated as someone afflicted with something to some degree or another” and all “must be protected, isolated, even quarantined by safe spaces and trigger warnings.”

[RELATED: Northwestern prez: only ‘idiots,’ ‘lunatics’ oppose safe spaces]

“The university is a site where damaged people must be buffered from realities that the infirmed cannot sanction,” he added, suggesting that such behavior “curtails academic freedom and freedom of expression because it caters to this supposedly beleaguered population.”

Follow the authors of this article on Twitter: @AGockowski and @amber_athey