[HotAir] An interesting piece from the NY Times about how the woke ideology of the American college campus is going over in France. The simple answer is not as well as you might imagine. In fact, there’s a lot of resistance to the import of American identity politics and woke ideology, at least among an older generation of French academics.
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. "There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.
Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture...
The publication this month of a book critical of racial studies by two veteran social scientists, Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel, fueled criticism from younger scholars — and has received extensive news coverage. Mr. Noiriel has said that race had become a "bulldozer’’ crushing other subjects, adding, in an email, that its academic research in France was questionable because race is not recognized by the government and merely "subjective data.’’
The statement by Macron’s education minister would be widely denounced if it were uttered here, especially on campus. But in France, a group of 100 intellectuals wrote a letter supporting those comments. The letter specifically mentions the need to be honest about the threat of political Islam.
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