There are many ways to parse this essay, but it is emotionally challenging to give feedback, lest the charge of being conventional minded is levied against you. However, I doubt that is pg's intention. This comment is my good faith attempt at a measured response.
pg mentions universities multiple times, with the implicit and explicit statement that they were centers of revolution and non-conformist thought. While that is partly true, it's not the whole truth. History remembers a different, more complicated reality.
Lise Meitner was the second woman in the world to gain a doctorate in physics. When she started, women weren't allowed to go to college, one of humanity's greatest minds spent her youth as a teacher. It was the only career available to her. When she tried to start doing research, she was refused,
> The only difficulty was that Hahn told me in the course of our conversation that he had been given a place in the institute directed by Emil Fischer, and that Emil Fischer did not allow any women students into his lectures or into his institute. So Hahn had to ask Fischer whether he would agree to our starting work together. And after Hahn had spoken to Fischer, I went to him to hear his decision and he told me his reluctance to accept women students stemmed from an unfortunate experience he had had with a Russian student because he had always been worried lest her rather exotic hairstyle result in her hair catching alight on the Bunsen burner.
- https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...
Fischer relented with pressure from Hahn, but in some cases, it took nearly half a decade for people to allow her to work with them. She lost years banging her head against the wall. What else could she have discovered had she gotten the right resources from the start?
She prevailed against these barriers, but she was never recognized as an equal. Recognition eluded her. Lise and Otto discovered fission together, Hahn got the Nobel, she didn't.
Decades afterwards, the first Pulsar was detected by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She helped build the array that made the discovery. She spent her nights looking at the data. She noticed the anomaly. She championed it when her supervisor dismissed it as a glitch. Her persistence paid off, and her supervisor got the Nobel.
Women have never been accepted as equal. Even at universities. How radical and non-conformist could they be when they repeated the same mistakes as the societies around them? They excluded people for being Jewish, for being born with the wrong sex organs, for having the wrong skin color, for being the wrong person. They were radical along some axes, but conformist along others.
Things are better today, but women continue to be overlooked broadly and in academia. Women are discriminated against for "reasonable concerns" when it comes to pregnancies, leaves, healthcare needs... Systemic reviews have shown that doctors take reports of pain from women less seriously than they do from men. By a factor that gets multiplied if you're black or queer. Some people still have to work twice as hard to get half as much. They were just dealt with a shitty card.
It is happening now, against someone as we speak. At prestigious teaching and research hospitals across the country, prejudice and the status quo are dealing out a crap hand to someone not counted as lucky few. Someone who will have to live with this moment for the rest of their life. My favorite anecdote is relayed by a woman who went in after a knitting accident; she was worried about losing dexterity and told her doctor that. The doctor assured her nothing would go wrong and started to patch her up. By happenstance, one of the woman's students happened to wander by and greeted her with the words, "Professor". And the doctor stopped. He asked her if she was a professor at the prestigious local university. She said yes. And before she could ask why she was wheeled into surgery to ensure she wouldn't lose dexterity. What cards would an ordinary black woman would have been dealt had she presented with the same problems?
Young people on campuses see these shitty cards. Why is it a surprise that they seek to rebel? Universities have always been the hallmark of radicals, and these are the new radicals. It is simple to 'both sides' this, but their anger - magnified and disproportionate it may be - comes from a legitimate place. It comes from the rebukes of the past and present. The big and small injustices that make the world. And it is their clumsy attempt to create a better world.
With all due respect to pg, the problem with the essay and this scale is that it is not well calibrated. Conformist along which directions? Aggressive in what ways? To what ends? To what degree? To what measure?
At times it seems pg puts the (admittedly foolish) yale undergrads going on about cultural appropriation in the same bucket as the Kim Davis, anti-women's rights and 'religious rights' crowd. The former is an overreaction by the young and hot-headed. The latter is an enormous, organized effort to take rights away from others and to force everyone else to conform to their rules of society. The former a miasma in civil discourse. The latter an organized attempt to strip women of their right to determine what's right for their bodies.
On what scale are we equating the two? By what means of calibration are these in the same quadrant and to the same degree?
The idea in this essay is valuable. The insight is valid. And I believe that it is a good faith attempt to understand the world. However, it fails to resonate for me. It fails to track as it appears to be made for a world I am not a part of. No one invited me to the party.