I contemplate a bird. In fact it is a photo of a bird, many times larger than life, hanging on the wall of a café. I’ve never had a chance to scrutinize a bird so carefully before. After I finish admiring its beauty, I turn my attention to its claws, which are pointed and hard, its beak, which is open in a cry, its eyes, which are empty of pity or warmth. I think: this creature is intensely alien to me. It is not a cute little bird, a sweet little bird, look at the pretty little bird. It is not a bird in a children’s book. And it comes to me that I have never understood an animal this way before. That whether in a zoo, on a farm, in my yard — still more with a photo or video clip of the kind that are forever being passed around online — my response to animals has always been to anthropomorphize them, to project my subjectivity onto them, to slobber over them with my emotions, with my needs. To place them in relation to myself. And it comes to me as well that to refrain from doing so, to let the bird, the goat, the possum be exactly what it is, in itself and for itself, without reference to me, to accept it in its otherness, would be to treat it with profound respect. I am talking with a former professor of mine. She is telling me that she believes that part of our job as teachers of undergraduates is to help our students, as she puts it, “instrumentalize” the things they learn from us — instrumentalize them, she means, for the sake of social change. I’m skeptical. What do academics know about instrumentalizing anything? More to the point, what business do we have telling students what they ought to do with what we teach them? “Fine,” I say at last (this is some years ago), “as long as you would be okay with one of your students instrumentalizing what they learn from you to try to overturn Roe v. Wade.” She is stunned. The possibility has clearly never crossed her mind — the possibility, that is, that students might have goals that conflict with hers. That they possess an otherness that we as educators must respect. A few years later, I come across an essay by this same professor in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the principal organ of news and opinion about the academy. Titled “In Praise of the Academic Cliché,” it champions buzzwords such as “performativity,” “intersectionality,” and “heteronormativity” as agents of transformative social potential, especially once “they quietly wriggle through discourse, swimming from theory to classrooms” and thence, beyond the college walls, to essays, podcasts, Twitter, “mainstream journalism and popular entertainment.” The student’s function in the process is to carry them, the way that a deer might carry a tick. “Not all of our students will be original thinkers,” she writes, “nor should they all be. A world of original thinkers, all thinking wholly inimitable thoughts, could never get anything done. For that, we need unoriginal thinkers, hordes of them, cloning ideas by the score and broadcasting them to every corner of our virtual world. What better device for idea-cloning than the cliché?” Instead of teaching undergraduates to avoid clichés, as generations of instructors have done, “we should instead strive to send our students forth — and ourselves too — armed with clichés for political change.” My professor had progressed from wanting to teach her students to instrumentalize ideas to wanting to instrumentalize her students: to recruit, enlist, train, mobilize, and deploy them — “armed,” in “hordes” — for the purpose (her purpose) of “getting things done.” Or rather, she had shown me that the second impulse was implicit in the first. Forget teaching people to think; forget uniqueness, individuality, the soul. The ideas are cloned, and so are the students. Nor is she alone in her desire, as anyone familiar with contemporary academia will know. Quite the opposite, in fact. Some years ago, to take one data point, I spent a couple of weeks at a moderately selective Catholic university: not an elite institution, not one you would think of as a redoubt of progressive ideology. Across the board, across the disciplines, the dean informed me, younger faculty believe their job to be indoctrination. Which means they think their mission is to serve the cause, not the students. The students are tools. This is the antithesis of what I am calling respect, be it for a creature or a student: the recognition of another as other and the willingness to let them be such. Call this antithesis projection, intolerance, the will to power, it is surely a persistent part of being human, and it is also surely getting worse. Academics are not the only professionals who have decided that their mission is to save the world and that their clients must be proselytized and propagandized, their personhood be damned, in order to do so. So have teachers, librarians, and social workers. So, perhaps worst of all, have counselors and psychotherapists, who practice the one line of work in which it is even more important than in education to treat one’s charges as individuals, people with their own particular histories, qualities, needs. All around us we are witnessing the loss of this thing that I’m calling respect. 
The problem is bipartisan. The left speaks constantly of “difference,” but it cannot abide it. This is, again, an old phenomenon freshly intensified. “Deviation” from the party line was a cardinal sin in twentieth-century communism. Leftist groups, accordingly, were notoriously fissiparous, splintering into ever-smaller factions of doctrinally pristine believers. As class politics became self-expressive lifestyleism, the purism seamlessly transferred. A friend from redneck small-town southwest Georgia lived for many years on a commune in central Virginia largely populated by Northeast liberals. They were, she told me, the most intolerant people she’d ever met: accepting and open to
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence