I think an important reason why people like the ones you mention care more about Oberlin students who think bad sushi is a microagression than Texas A&M firing people for criticizing the state government is that the former affects them more, in the following sense. If you work outside academia but in culture industries or other areas driven primarily by people with elite educations, then (a) you already work at-will, don't have tenure or anything like it, and have to negotiate your relationship with your bosses in ways familiar to most American workers, but (b) the culture around how you talk to your colleagues, what kinds of positions are acceptable or out of bounds, etc really can change and is influenced by new hires from prestigious colleges.
I'm going to put it a bit more bluntly: some of the vocal public intellectuals inside academia who voice more concern about student activism than government action never expect right-wing states to target them but they do think students might--they're mostly center-right or centrist liberal intellectuals, mostly men, mostly white, and they're just not afraid of being targeted by conservative political power.
There are definitely people who think that as long as they're exposed to at-will termination, everybody should be, but I think even those folks might object to the idea that government leaders might call up their employer and tell them to fire that guy who is a Democrat Party worker when he's not on the job or might ask their boss to fire them because they said something critical about the governor while in a staff meeting.
And yes, there are some people who resent elite-educated young workers coming in and woke-ing up the workplace; that's at least some of what DeSantis, Abbott and Youngkin have been feeding off of. I don't think that's mostly the people who are yammering about college kids these days in the Atlantic and all that, but it might be part of their appreciative readership.
I guess I see journalists/think tankers/general non-academics as being the primary authors of these articles too. Eg Conor Friesdorf or Jonathan Chait or Bari Weiss or Emily Yoffe, who have all written a lot in the "excesses of college students" beat from various perspectives. The other category is often "enormously famous older male academic" like Pinker or Haidt, for whom I think tenure is also not as valuable as it is for you or me.
Yes--Pinker, Haidt, even Christakis etc. see themselves, I think accurately, being in a tier of untouchables in terms of academic employment, and thus not really needing or caring about tenure as such, but they do imagine that student activists could be a serious nuisance that would mess with their prerogatives.
I think an important reason why people like the ones you mention care more about Oberlin students who think bad sushi is a microagression than Texas A&M firing people for criticizing the state government is that the former affects them more, in the following sense. If you work outside academia but in culture industries or other areas driven primarily by people with elite educations, then (a) you already work at-will, don't have tenure or anything like it, and have to negotiate your relationship with your bosses in ways familiar to most American workers, but (b) the culture around how you talk to your colleagues, what kinds of positions are acceptable or out of bounds, etc really can change and is influenced by new hires from prestigious colleges.
I'm going to put it a bit more bluntly: some of the vocal public intellectuals inside academia who voice more concern about student activism than government action never expect right-wing states to target them but they do think students might--they're mostly center-right or centrist liberal intellectuals, mostly men, mostly white, and they're just not afraid of being targeted by conservative political power.
There are definitely people who think that as long as they're exposed to at-will termination, everybody should be, but I think even those folks might object to the idea that government leaders might call up their employer and tell them to fire that guy who is a Democrat Party worker when he's not on the job or might ask their boss to fire them because they said something critical about the governor while in a staff meeting.
And yes, there are some people who resent elite-educated young workers coming in and woke-ing up the workplace; that's at least some of what DeSantis, Abbott and Youngkin have been feeding off of. I don't think that's mostly the people who are yammering about college kids these days in the Atlantic and all that, but it might be part of their appreciative readership.
I guess I see journalists/think tankers/general non-academics as being the primary authors of these articles too. Eg Conor Friesdorf or Jonathan Chait or Bari Weiss or Emily Yoffe, who have all written a lot in the "excesses of college students" beat from various perspectives. The other category is often "enormously famous older male academic" like Pinker or Haidt, for whom I think tenure is also not as valuable as it is for you or me.
Yes--Pinker, Haidt, even Christakis etc. see themselves, I think accurately, being in a tier of untouchables in terms of academic employment, and thus not really needing or caring about tenure as such, but they do imagine that student activists could be a serious nuisance that would mess with their prerogatives.