What we have in this NYT story is an outraged conservative being peeved after finding out that there was going to be a University of Chicago anthropology course on “The Problem of Whiteness”. The student put information about the course, including publicly available information on the instructor’s photo and email address, on social media. It of course went viral among a certain set of The Easily Offended that does not include me.
Naturally, the instructor was harassed big time. She complained to the University about it—twice. While one dean characterized the social-media onslaught as “cyberbullying,” eventually the University dismissed the instructor’s complaints. She postponed the course one quarter (she not on tenure-track here, but a teaching instructor and a new Ph.D. looking for a job). Then, with University’s security and support, she taught the course twice.
The student who “doxxed” the instructor was not punished or sanctioned in any way. The University took this affair as a pure matter of freedom of speech, with no First Amendment violations committed by anyone. Of course we’re a private university and don’t have to abide by the First Amendment, but our well known Principles of Freedom of Expression (adopted by about 80 other universities) ensure that we do.
Click below, or find the article archived here.
A few details:
Rebecca Journey, a lecturer at the University of Chicago, thought little of calling her new undergraduate seminar “The Problem of Whiteness.” Though provocatively titled, the anthropology course covered familiar academic territory: how the racial category “white” has changed over time.
She was surprised, then, when her inbox exploded in November with vitriolic messages from dozens of strangers. One wrote that she was “deeply evil.” Another: “Blow your head clean off.”
The instigator was Daniel Schmidt, a sophomore and conservative activist with tens of thousands of social media followers. He tweeted, “Anti-white hatred is now mainstream academic inquiry,” along with the course description and Dr. Journey’s photo and university email address.
Spooked, Dr. Journey, a newly minted Ph.D. preparing to hit the academic job market, postponed her class to the spring. Then she filed complaints with the university, accusing Mr. Schmidt of doxxing and harassing her.
Mr. Schmidt, 19, denied encouraging anyone to harass her. And university officials dismissed her claims. As far as they knew, they said, Mr. Schmidt did not personally send her any abusive emails. And under the university’s longstanding, much-hailed commitment to academic freedom, speech was restricted only when it “constitutes a genuine threat or harassment.”
Schmidt sounds like a bad piece of work, but Journey’s photo and email address are freely available on the Internet, so he didn’t do anything but disseminate publicly available information. Not that I think the course is great, but if the University approved it, we can’t really beef. Nor can we say that Schmidt violated our principles of free expression.
Mr. Schmidt has found himself in adversarial roles before.
Over the last year or so, he actively supported Kanye West, the artist now known as Ye, for president — work that he promoted with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier. Mr. Schmidt declined to comment on his political activism or his dealings with Mr. Fuentes.
In his first year at the university, Mr. Schmidt was fired from The Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper, after his editors said that he had repeatedly antagonized another columnist on Instagram, and encouraged others to spam her. Mr. Schmidt said he was simply “calling out a public figure.”
After he was also fired from a conservative campus publication, Mr. Schmidt turned to his own website, College Dissident, which featured articles like “Time to Fight Anti-White Hatred on Campus.”
His activism has helped fuel an industry dedicated to accusing universities of liberal orthodoxy. Websites like Campus Reform and The College Fix have for years trained students to report on campus controversies, hoping that conservative news outlets like Fox News, Breitbart and The Daily Caller will whip out their own stories.
All three publications ended up writing about Dr. Journey’s class.
And after the course catalog said the class was canceled for the winter, Mr. Schmidt celebrated. “This is a huge victory,” he tweeted.”
What we seem to have is a professional kvetcher who comes down on liberals, but again—he didn’t do anything that violated the law or accepted university principles of free speech.
And here’s the support that Dr. Journey got from the University, which is important, and something that (as Greg notes below) the NYT didn’t make a big deal about. But that is the important part of the story since so many colleges refuse to defend their instructors attacked on social media (remember Hamline University and the Muhammad paintings?):
Administrators had already amped up security. They had moved Dr. Journey’s class to a building that required key-card access and did not publicly list the location. Dr. Journey said the university beefed up security patrols.
Officials also took key steps that supporters of academic freedom say many colleges fail to do: They affirmed Dr. Journey’s right to teach the class and did not distance the institution from her.
I sure as hell wouldn’t do what what Schmidt did, though in the past I have occasionally put up contact information for what I see as egregious circumstances. But a course doesn’t fit that description; it’s a course, and even if it be woke, I can write about it; but it’s rude and bad form to sic a bunch of angry conservatives on a new Ph.D. looking for a job.
I think that Geof Stone of the Law School, one of our big free-speech advocates, has the right take on this situation:
Professor Stone, who wrote the Chicago statement [of Free Expression], agreed that the student’s actions could have a “chilling effect” on speech. But, he asked, who determines the difference between, say, a newspaper reporting on an individual and Mr. Schmidt’s actions? Both can result in hate mail and threats, he said.
The university, as a private institution, could change its policies to say that students, staff and faculty cannot post material that is intended to be intimidating, Professor Stone said.
But such a move — which he does not recommend — would run afoul of the First Amendment if the university were public, and would bring its own complications, he said.
“It’s very hard for either law or institutions to monitor those sorts of things,” he said. “Your administrators may be biased in terms of who they go after, and who they don’t go after.”
And while a strong case could be made that Mr. Schmidt’s intent was to intimidate, Professor Stone said, “Do you really want to get into the business of trying to figure out what the purpose was?”
Finally, here’s Greg Mayer’s take on the whole business, quoted with permission.
Complaining about the class is fine, including identifying the instructor. If Schmidt did tweet out her email address, that’s unkind and uncalled for, and someone should talk to him about etiquette. It would also clearly NOT fall under one of the exceptions to the First Amendment, though: as Jerry noted to me, there was no call for imminent lawless action. Schmidt probably, though, hoped to generate a Twitter mob, which I guess he did.
Political ads that call for people to harass a politician are standard these days. (“Joe Biden wants to take away your Medicare. Call Joe Biden now and tell him to keep the government out of Medicare! Call xxx-xxx-xxxx now!”)
The University could have rules that are more restrictive than the First Amendment. But fashioning them could be difficult– what would cross the University’s (as opposed to the First Amendment’s) line? Name-calling? Incivility? But how to define these?
The U of C did stand by the instructor, which I think is the key here: the institution resisted the Twitter mob. Policing individuals is tough, in part because of the problem of defining where the “line” is; and there are so many individual miscreants one could go after. But having those in charge stand up for the academic freedom of the instructor is a rarity these days, and is the real story, which the Times barely mentions.
The course sounds like a real stinker– an exercise in the cultural typological essentialism which is sort of the guiding principle of neo-racism. But, as Voltaire didn’t say, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
As you imply, the verb “doxxing / to doxx” is normally used to indicate the release of private information into the public domain. Which this “conservative activist” does not seem to have done.
But considering his audience and this being America. he’s probably hoping that one of his followers will “put a cap in her ass”. And would be morally if not legally responsible for that.
What’s the current count of America’s mass-shooting epidemic? Has it reached or exceeded 2/day this year? Yet? There was one that made enough news to be heard across the Atlantic during the weekend. I’m not sure of details like the city though – details like that get mentioned any more.
America’s shootings don’t work that way, not even mass shootings, most of which just mean the gang-banger had a big gun and a better than average aim.. Political assassination is almost unknown. Not zero. But unpopular college professors are not being shot by Twitter mobs.
Mr. Schmidt would not be at all responsible if someone did shoot her. That is patently ridiculous. You wouldn’t even think that, much less say it, if it was a leftist troll attacking a right-wing professor (not that there are any now.)
Did you actually read the NYT piece? The very policy which is protecting this student was written to prevent liberal activists on campus from shutting down/preventing guest appearances from conservative speakers they don’t agree with.
With respect to your comment about leftist trolls attacking right-wing profs (and there are some), the article at least touches on that. But do you really think the risks of leftist violence against conservative scholars are on par with rightwing violence against scholars on the left? According to everything I’ve seen, rightwing groups that embrace and engage in violence far outnumber similar leftwing groups. And I’m not talking about demonstrators here (though the same pattern may be true there as well). I mean organized activist groups. Antifa is often invoked by conservative media who can’t even identify any of the leaders or members – probably because they’re really more of an idea than a real entity.
I’ll let Leslie answer for herself, but just look at the FIRE history of deplatforming. In the last decade or so, the opposition to and censoring of speakers has come from the Left far more from the RIGHT. I’m talking about censorship rather than violence, but if you want to change the subject (this post was NOT about violence), then say you’re changing the subject and give some data.
I didn’t read the NYT piece initially. I have never been led astray by Jerry’s précis of these columns and normally only read them (if not paywalled) if I have a professional interest in the original content, particularly where I suspect the original author got it wrong. Any mistake or misinterpretation I might make in commenting would be entirely on me, of course, and not on Jerry, so in the name of due diligence, since you ask, I have now read the article. It doesn’t cause me to recant anything I said.
The U of Chicago policy, which I support fully, does indeed protect Mr. Schmidt as a student as much as it protects professors. That’s the whole point of the story. The article says the professor was trying to get special protection not contained in the policy (I.e., punishment of the student), which, because it was written before the Internet, should be revisited. The Times was more sympathetic to her than I am. I don’t think it should be revisited and, far more important, neither does the University.
You raise points that I didn’t actually make. Gravel-inspector was trying to conflate gang-land violence which had made the news in a foreign country with actual risk of lethal violence targeted at the professor. Whether right-wing extremist groups are more or less dangerous to the social fabric than left wing groups in general is not the issue here. The idea that someone of the ultra-violent right might care enough about a professor to shoot her is Gravel-inspector’s imagination. As Jerry says below, the issue for academic freedom is the de-platforming of heterodox speakers by the censorious totalitarians identified with the left. I certainly agree with that view but it wasn’t the point I was making here yesterday.
I thought the university made creditable efforts to consider her safety but striking back at her tormentor who stays within legal grounds is not an option. I could ask her, “What did you think would happen when you gave your course the title, ‘The Problem with Whiteness’, even if it is just a clickbait title?”
Merriam-Webster defines “to dox(x)” as “to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge.” Cannot spotlighting publicly accessible information about someone as well be used as a form of punishment or revenge? For example, when someone’s publicly accessible address on their personal website is posted on Islamist websites with the message “This wo/man has insulted Allah!”, I consider this impermissible, because the intention behind it is to threaten and intimidate that person: “If you want to hurt or kill that blasphemer, you now know where to find her/him!”.
Schmidt didn’t do more than any number of leftist students haven’t done. That seems to be the idiom these days. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t all putzes. When I was in school, I just dropped a class if I thought the professor was more political than academic. If Journey thought that her course wouldn’t cause a controversy, than she was naive. That all said, I don’t see an issue on either side. I think the University shouldn’t have treated the incident the way it did, and hide the course’s location. It should have defended academic freedom, and backed up the Journey if there were demonstrations.
If an instructor decided that “blackness” was a “problem”, and so ran a course called “the problem of blackness” (let’s say it “covered familiar academic territory: how the racial category “black” has changed over time”), would they have the university’s support, and how many milliseconds would it be until they were sacked?
Absolutely true. But the part I dislike the most is the divisiveness of it all. It seems designed to inflame, much like Mr. Orange does.
Coel’s comment suggests that “whiteness studies” is one of the contemporary made-up scholarly fields, lacking serious scholarly credentials. It’s easy to dismiss if you don’t look and see what a serious syllabus would involve, and Journey herself has written about how she would explain what she takes to be the central issues the course would cover. I would particularly note the interest of topics like how the Jews and the Irish came to count as white (which they didn’t originally count as). I would also note the importance of James Baldwin as a writer about whiteness and about immigrants to the US “becoming white”. These are among the substantial issues.
I think the U of Chicago would have allowed the course if it met academic standards and would not have dreamed of sacking the instructor. The hate would have been worse, though.
It seems to me, that the problem is the title of the course. It gave an opening for a jackass instigator to take advantage of.
If any other course was named “The Problem with Blackness, Jewishness, Asians”, etc., would it have been allowed?
The unsavory title wrongly implied racist course content. It was misleading, and was written to spark controversy or interest. Most of us don’t want racist course content, so why title a course something that implies that? Was it to be “cute”? Was it a joke? Was it to point out that racism is based on nothing but delusion? If so, that is a good point.
It’s unfortunate that the world isn’t safe for a controversial linguistic joke. It gave Schmidt an opportunity to get some narcissistic attention, and in our current reality, sparked fears of violence. It was a costly joke. Preventing it would also have damaged our freedom of speech values.
I’d like to tentatively defend Dr. Journey’s course (as opposed to her right to teach it). I think that, while the title was unfortunately (and probably purposely) provocative, there is nothing inherently inappropriate in a course on “whiteness” in an anthropology department. Cultural constructs like “whiteness”, “blackness”, “masculinity”, etc. are very much within the subject matter universe of modern cultural anthropology. If there is to be a course on “whiteness,” it probably should be taught by an anthropologist.
That said, the course could be great, or could be terrible. I know nothing of the course details. A course on “whiteness” taught through the lens of modern Critical Theory dogma would almost certainly be just what one would expect.
My only comment is that while you may be right, I would never in a million years have taken a course like this as part of my liberal-arts education. It’s too narrow: I’d rather have taken “ethics” or “fine arts 101” or even “Greek tragedies.” This is an au courant course, tied to what’s going on politically right now, and the broader courses that I took in college (and believe me, I took as many as I was allowed). If you were allowed to take one anthropology course in college, would it be on “whiteness”? There’s so much more in anthropology to learn about!
I actually escaped semi-intact from a PhD program in anthropology back in the pleistocene, so I have some understanding and sympathy for the philosophical validity, at least, of Dr. Journey’s premise (i.e. that “whiteness” is a cultural construct and can be discussed). The reality of course, given the political moment we’re in, is that it’s probably pretty bad. The great anthropologists of U of C’s golden years- and there were many: Sapir, Redfield, Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz, etc.- would probably not have given a course on “whiteness.” But time- and tastes- march on. I don’t want to pre-judge Journey before I know the details.
It would be great if the course attracted a wide range of participants who were open to challenging each other’s ideas. I suspect that this course wasn’t designed to do that – but I am happy to accept that I could be wrong.
But “whiteness” is not a neutral term, it’s a woke/CRT term. E.g. (wiki): “Whiteness theory is an offshoot of critical race theory …”. And the “problem of whiteness” is definitely not neutral.
This course will be pure, undiluted, CRT ideology. It is part of the U Chicago “Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) program” and the course description begins: “This seminar examines the problem of whiteness through an anthropological lens, drawing from classic and contemporary works of critical race theory …”.
Coel’s claim is misleading. While the term “whiteness” is significant in Critical Race Theory, it is also a perfectly respectable subject for historians of a great variety of persuasions. Nell Irvin Painter (for example) has an outstanding work of scholarship, The History of White People. Whiteness can be studied within anthropology, history, sociology and literary studies. Toni Morrison has a deeply interesting book on whiteness and the literary imagination. It is a subject that can be seen from many different angles, and white people can be challenged by exploring how whiteness has been seen by people who aren’t white. “Whiteness” is a capacious term. How well Journey will deal with the topic in her course is another matter. But there is nothing automatically woke-ish about studying whiteness.
What the instructor works on:
BTW, we’re not turning this thread into a two-person back and forth.
But isn’t the choice to lump literally countless billions of people from both the present and past into a single category of “white” a rather radical and frankly biased choice in the first place?
What, exactly, do all the “white” people from time immemorial possess to link them together, other than pigmentation?
I seriously believe that this kind of mile-wide-brush painting is not only useless, but manifestly ridiculous.
It’s very American.
Agree, “whiteness” is a capacious term, and a good anthropologist could, theoretically, orient an enlightening course around it. Critical Theory, on the other hand, would change the course from social science, or independent criticism, into a doctrinaire group-think exercise. Critical Theory turns everything to shit, basically.
Agree with Coel. The professor worded this course in a very thorny way that was sure to blow up with controversy. As the NYT suggests: “Dr. Journey’s syllabus included readings like, “How Did Jews Become White Folks?” by Karen Brodkin and “The Souls of White Folk,” a lesser-known essay by W.E.B. Du Bois.”
Even those are OK (and historical) but while Professor Journey’s speech is protected, surely she can’t play naive here. The test is word swapping: substitute “black” or “people of color” for white and all hell breaks loose on campus or if white was meant to convey ethnicity as in ‘the problem with being caucasian,’ the problem with being asian, latino, Jew, etc. is no better.
I do have a problem with students cyberbullying professors and using online mobs to go after them personally (not their ideas or teaching) and harrass them with spam to waste their time. I think repeat offenders of professors and staff (it appears to be a trend) should be disciplined with suspension. Students can be kicked out of class at the prof’s discretion and out of the university at their discretion. Yes, the story here is cowardly administrations that don’t usually defend their staff from harrassment by entitled, petulant little gradeschoolers who can’t behave properly in college like an adult.
Interesting concept, except he did nothing illegal, suspending or expelling him would open up the university to a tort action of breach of contract. I believe there is a university in Washington that lost a similar suit.
Legally you’re correct but there can be on-campus rules and behavioral conduct standards that have punishments even though they technically violate the law or have legal carveout exceptions (right to bear arms, uttering racist/sexist slurs even though there is free speech, unlawful search and seizure, etc.). Perhaps these ‘codes of conduct’ could have useful deterrent value even though they might not ultimately hold up in court.
Consider this: why couldn’t a college professor reciprocate online and retaliate against a falsely accusatory student who is trying to incite a Twitter mob against them or the classes they teach if say both are legal adults?
Schmidt is obviously a jerk who did hope to get Dr Journey harassed, but I have to agree with Prof Stone—the university can’t be in the business of deciding motives, which is both impossible in many instances and a perfect way to let an administrator’s bias discriminate. I do think UC could set some basic common sense rules for how they’ll assess such social media situations. Giving Journey’s email wasn’t doxxing maybe because it was easily publicly available, but maybe UC could count this as a potential reason to assess a post as cyber bullying?
The thing with the NYT article is it fails to even get the easily available stats from FIRE showing that the vast majority of cases like this are left students going after heterodox or conservative professors. Plus, NYT doesn’t even bother to mention the mirror image instance this past year at UC in which Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) tried to organize a boycott of if I recall three courses the group claimed were Zionist, including one on terrorism and anti-terrorism (as I recall) taught by a former IDF general. UC rightly didn’t interfere with SJP’s on-campus and social media campaign around that either.
Upon what information does Mayer conclude that the course sounds like a “real stinker?” It may be a thorough and illuminating analysis of some important contemporary issues. Sometimes it’s difficult to characterize a 16-week course sussinctly.
It could be illuminating, I suppose, but to use a current buzzword like “whiteness”, which is invariably a pejorative as used nowadays (see, for example, the now deleted Smithsonian graphic on the characteristics of “whiteness”), and which seems to be rooted in a very typological view of cultural attributes, does not seem very promising. Biologists who study geographic variation– which is what race is about– long ago, and with considerable effort, abandoned the idea that groups have essences that express an underlying reality. To return to such stereotypical thinking is an enormous intellectual regression.
Perhaps the course would, in fact, “interrogate” “whiteness” to expose the essentialist basis of such concepts– I’ve been surprised at times to find that a poor title gives little indication of the good that follows. But I wouldn’t want to bet a course-quarter worth of time on it. (Chicago courses are quarters– 10 week, not 16 week.)
But, to re-emphasize what to me is the important point, the University absolutely did the right thing to defend her academic freedom, and insure that she was able to teach the course in the manner she saw fit.
GCM
Just for an example, take the famous “separate but equal” case of Plessy v. Ferguson:
“Louisiana enacted the Separate Car Act, which required separate railway cars for blacks and whites. In 1892, Homer Plessy – who was seven-eighths Caucasian – agreed to participate in a test to challenge the Act. He was solicited by the Comite des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens), a group of New Orleans residents who sought to repeal the Act. They asked Plessy, who was technically black under Louisiana law, to sit in a “whites only” car of a Louisiana train.”
Think about that for a moment – “technically black under Louisiana law”, the “whites only” car. What does it mean? What’s the cultural assumptions leading to such a law and practice?
The whole topic can always be dismissed by saying they shouldn’t do that, they were wrong, stupid, bad, etc. But they did do that, and there was a complex societal structure behind it. This seems to me a reasonable topic of academic study.
This is usually part of American legal history. As I see you’re replying to me, just let me respond that I’m not dismissing the topic. My comment was that a course on “whiteness” (which by all accounts will be woke), is not something I’d want to take to get the most out of college, especially if you’re limited to one anthropology course. You can bet your bippy that this course will center on victimization and the original sin of whiteness.
But that aside, you can always cite one example of an area to show that “this makes the whole area a reasonable topic of academic study.”
I do not know how to think about this. One one hand, she ought to be able to teach whatever she can get enough interest in to fill the seats. Also, the student does seem like a reactionary, attention seeking sort.
On the other hand, although she claims the class will not be anti-White in tone or content, I do not think that is accurate, either. When Whiteness is “interrogated through the lens” of critical race theory or intersectionality, it is always portrayed as evil. And, though Asian or even Black folks who do not hold far left views are often accused of White supremacy, Whiteness is always linked to White people, and always seen as a negative trait.
So, even though the speech principles there permit classes with racist content, approving and scheduling the class may not be the wisest thing for the department to do. They must not assume that its existence would remain forever a secret. The title itself seems deliberately provocative, as others here have pointed out.
I like the rule that if something would be offensive if you swapped out “Black” for “White”, then it should be avoided.
Probably the largest issue for me is consistency. The general tone of the articles I have read on this is rage that a tactic used constantly by the left to silence their critics was used in a very mild way against them. Doxing by the left would not have been a screenshot of the instructor’s university profile, but would have included a home address, and likely the names of close family members. Even the names of children, what schools they attend, and phone numbers of spouse’s places of work.
There would have been organized demonstrations at those homes and places of business, and blockades and disruptions of the class itself.
The left has for some time advocated that such tactics are appropriate to silence anyone they disagree with, even that not participating in such purges is itself an act of violence. It should have been obvious to them that normalizing such tactics would mean that when fashionable politics shift a bit, those same tactics would be used on them.
Just as if one advocates for DEI statements, they should not be terribly surprised when they find themselves expected to make an anti-communist pledge sometime in the future. Or worse, having to pledge to some completely unexpected future absurdity of belief.
Like it or not, crass racism is the core ideology of the American (and Boston and Harvard) elite. Don’t believe me? The New York Times hired a fanatical racist by the name Sarah Jeong for its editorial board. Of course, she was no ordinary racist. Frothing, foaming, and over the top is more like it. This decision was (predictably) defended by other racists. Quote from a typical racist (and Sarah Jeong defender) “To anyone who’s even passingly familiar with the way the social justice left talks (Sarah Jeong is just an example)”. The reality is that SJWs live in racist bubble where expressing the right kind of hate is perfectly acceptable. Think Selma, Alabama in 1910 for an accurate analogy.
For better or worse (certainly worse), universities are a bastion of intolerant, religious, anti-truth thinking these days. Consider two propositions, “sex is a spectrum” and “race has no biological basis”. Neither statement is evenly remotely true. However, 99% of university students and faculty would affirm the “truth” of these statements, at least publicly. Like it or not, universities have become deeply irrational. It is somewhat unclear if the race nonsense or the sex nonsense is more deeply held. This academic insanity is somewhat new (perhaps not, see below). From “Sex is a Spectrum” (https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/08/07/sex-is-a-spectrum/) a comment by Spencer
“Lol. I introduce students every semester to various non-overlapping or barley overlapping graphs by sex. Every year their jaws drop further. Twenty years ago barely an eyebrow was raised.”
The converse point is that universities were deeply religious and intolerant even years ago. The famous book “The Blank Slate” was written in 2003. The Summers affair (at Harvard) is from 2006. The Pinker/Spleke debate is from 2005. It was clear then (and still is) that Spelke was/is a liar. Was she ever punished for lying? Of course, not.
Of course, these problems are by no means limited to Harvard. Over at Yale, a talk was given on ‘The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind’. The speaker (Dr. Aruna Khilanani) explicitly fantasized about killing innocent white people and then was offended because Yale would not give her the recording. The following is from her speech.
“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor. (Time stamp: 7:17)”
She was actually mad that Yale didn’t give her the video of the speech.
These issues are by no means limited to elite universities. At University of Southern Maine, an instructor (Christy Hammer) dared to say that there are two sexes All but one student (21 of 22) walked out in protest. The one student later caved to the fanatics. Of course, Hammer was entirely correct.
What we seem to have is a professional kvetcher who comes down on liberals
I’m ( hesitantly) not sure that “professional” applies in this case? Either way, he’s likely someone that I wouldn’t agree with who is trying to stir up trouble – but, odious as he might be, I would defend his right to do so, within the usual legal limits.
At the university, was a 4+ year member of MEChA, I’m Irish mix. I was well taught how to identify racism. 2 Chicanos were talking about the gabacho, referring to me. I replied, entiendo un poquito they suddenly turned red with embarrassment and left. Every group has racism, it’s the “not like me” ethos. The title to that class is blatantly racist and offensive.
following
(If that is working again…)
I think the professor’s op-ed in the Maroon is instructive https://chicagomaroon.com/37473/viewpoints/op-ed/the-problem-of-white-grievance-a-defense-of-critical-inquiry/
Jesse Singal wrote about this incident, and the article, at his substack:
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/most-solutions-to-most-forms-of-internet