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gjm comments on Open thread, Dec. 21 - Dec. 27, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Note that the person on your last link, despite professing to be terrified of his students, seems to have been happy enough to publish that article with his real name on it. Note also that he links to a number of other pieces by other academics expressing similar opinions, all also apparently not so terrified as to avoid publishing such opinions with their names attached.
So far as I know, no academic has in fact got into any sort of trouble for expressing opinions like those, or like the (milder) ones expressed in James's article.
People died in the Cultural Revolution. This is not in any useful sense "basically the Cultural Revolution". Nor does it bear anything like the same resemblance to the Cultural Revolution as Louis Napoleon's assumption of power did to his uncle's. Calling someone courageous for daring to say openly that the idea of "safe spaces" may have gone too far is like calling someone courageous for daring to say "Merry Christmas". Can we get a bit of perspective here?
Vox:
Edward Schlosser is a college professor, writing under a pseudonym.Ha. I actually checked for that, but obviously not carefully enough. My apologies.
[EDITED to add:] OK, so I went back and searched the page, and it doesn't say that anywhere. (Though buried in the middle of the article is a statement along the lines of "all controversial things I write, like this article, are anonymous or pseudonymous", so I still should have known.) Perhaps it's because I'm reading on a mobile device?
You get that line if you click on the author's name.
The article starts by saying:
I'm a professor at a midsize state school.If you read between the lines that's a decision against revealing the name of the school and thus a decision to protect anonymity.In general the media likes to use pseudonyms when it can't use the real name, so the fact that you have a name on the top is no good evidence that the article isn't written anonymously or under a pseudonym.
That's why I looked for a statement at the start or end that the name was pseudo. I think not finding such a thing genuinely was evidence of non-pseudonymity, though clearly not enough evidence was it turned out. I didn't think of clicking on the name because I'm an idiot.
Let me enhance your knowledge.
"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." -- Karl Marx
You link to three stories, but so far as I can see only the first of them is actually anything like an example of what we were talking about. Still, that's one more than I knew of, so thank you.
The way many students at Yale responded to Christakis is shocking, for sure. But, again, this is a long long long way from the Cultural Revolution. She didn't lose her life or even her job. And this is an unusually extreme case.
I knew where the quotation comes from, and what it refers to, and what it means, as you could have worked out: