Category: authoritarian leftists

The Unitarian Universalists go big-time woke

January 2, 2024 • 11:30 am

If I felt the need to go to a church, or belong to a Western religion, I suppose it would be a Unitarian Universalist church. Years ago I visited one in the South (I can’t remember if I spoke there), and was impressed that there was no cross on the wall, no fixed set of beliefs (many members are pretty much atheists); and I was impressed by their commitment to real social justice. UUs, as they’re called, have been tremendously active in fighting racism, raising awareness of LGBTQ+ activities, and helping immigrants.  As far as I can see, the church exists not to foster any beliefs or creeds, and does no proselytizing, but aim—or, rather, aimed—to create a sense of community among their liberal and largely well-off members.  (I don’t feel a need for that kind of community, but of all American churches, UU is probably the one that does the most net good, since up to recently it’s caused little harm.)

But it’s the “progressive” nature of the church, and the privilege of its members, that in recent years has propelled it from the realm of social justice to that of Social Justice, with the capital letters denoting wokeness. In the article below, published at the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) Substack site, Kate Rohde describes the creeping and destructive wokeness of the church, something  I’ve heard about several times before.  She’s now a defrocked (?) UU minister suing the UUs for defamation and for denying her her job; and she describes in detail how the church is crumbling. The cause, as you might expect, is accusations of racism, or rather accusations of white supremacy,  Part of the controversy is described in the Wikipedia article on the church:

Racism:

Internal controversy over the hiring of the UUA’s Southern Region Lead (a white man from outside the region was hired rather than a Latina woman who resided within the region) led to resignations and apologies in 2017. UUA President Peter Morales, the denomination’s first Latino president, resigned amid criticism of his failure to address the diversity controversies. The three co-presidents who took over commissioned a “racism audit” to address white supremacy within the denomination. In April 2018, The Washington Post reported that the UUA “in the past year has been asked to help resolve 15 congregational conflicts involving religious professionals of color”.

Rhode has all the ideological qualifications to be a UU minister, but they booted her out anyway:

Dr. Rohde is a graduate of Reed College, University of Chicago, and Meadville Lombard Theological School. From 1980 to 2014, she served as a UU Minister. She was active in women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, and the sanctuary movement.

Click below to read about how a decent church is going bad:

Rohde became a UU minister in 1980, and had a good 17-year run before things started to fall apart. It involved accusations of racism—in a church famous for being antiracist. I quote Rohde, and have bolded one part to show how woke the UUs have become: they’re policing language in a ridiculous way:

Things began to change dramatically six years ago, when a latina Sunday school director complained of discrimination after a white minister was chosen for a job that she wanted. The Unitarian Universalists’ first latino president resigned in the midst of an internet storm and accusations of racism against his administration. No concrete proof was offered for any of the accusations. In a closed-door meeting, the national Board of Trustees declared that Unitarian Universalism harbored “structures and patterns that foster racism, oppression, and white supremacy.” No evidence was given for this assertion. This was a surprising self-evaluation for a group with a strong civil rights record, including the highest percentage of clergy to participate in the Selma Civil Rights March.

A program of instruction in postmodern anti-racism was directed at ministers and laity. It allowed no modification or questioning of its precepts. Enlightenment values like reason, free speech, and diversity of opinion were characterized as part of the white supremacy culture. Any attempt to challenge someone else’s ideas is now frequently met not with evidence or reasoned defense, but by labeling the challenge (and often the challenger) as racist, ableist, transphobic, and the like. For example, at a national meeting of clergy in 2020 I argued in favor of allowing ministers to keep the right to legal representation in disciplinary matters, but my position was attacked as racist by a minister who more recently has become the leader of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). The successful slogan “Standing on the Side of Love” was junked because a few people complained that the word “standing” was offensive to those who couldn’t stand. In discussion groups at our national assembly, people were arbitrarily removed by facilitators because some person or persons objected to their opinions.

The ideological purge ramped up in 2019 when the new leadership condemned, defamed, persecuted, and ultimately removed from the ministry the Reverend Todd Eklof after he published three essays criticizing the UU’s rejection of liberal values. I joined with others to defend him. Then they came for me too—ultimately removing me from ministry for comments I made criticizing those who were enforcing ideological uniformity in UU spaces. They accused me of “gaslighting,” and making people feel “unsafe” with my words.Ironically, one of the accusations they made against me was that I had complained about “retaliation” and “persecution” within the church. They also came after me for my political opinions—claiming, for example, that because I had the audacity to question whether individuals with male genitalia could be lesbians, I had “caused UU spaces to actually be unsafe” for “trans congregants.”

Clearly, the freedom of speech and thought that was deeply embedded in the UU church is now gone: the authoritarian Left has taken over and has, in effect, now forced a creed on the church: the creed of woke antiracism. One more point:

Now, church officials regularly and without compunction defame someone and destroy their life’s work over ideological or political disagreements. When queried by lawyers about the UU’s violation of their own bylaws promising freedom of conscience and their lack of normal due process, the UUA replied that as a religious organization, they are legally entitled to contravene their own rules if they choose to do so.

Rohde was fired (and lost her pension) for opposing the creeping wokeness of the Church. For one thing, she criticized junking the “standing on the side of love” slogan on the grounds that it’s ableist. I wish her luck in her lawsuit. But as for the church itself, I’m afraid you can kiss it goodbye. Maybe it will fragment into several moieties, at least one of which will embrace the UU’s original principles. But as for me, if forced to pick a faith I’d now take Buddhism over Unitarian Universalism.

You can read more about her lawsuit at the New York Post, where this photo of Rohde appears:

Photo courtesy of Kate Rohde from the NY Post

Publishers’ and authors’ manifesto: We won’t publish books by people who were in the Trump administration

January 19, 2021 • 9:00 am

Regardless of what you think about canceling book deals with those Republicans who urged an audit of the election—as Simon and Schuster did with Josh Hawley’s book (now picked up by Regnery)— surely most readers can’t agree with the letter below, which says that no publisher should put out books by anyone considered part of the Trump administration. (That also holds for those who stormed the capitol, whether or not they were arrested.)

At least that’s the way I interpret the letter, which is genuine and appeared on the website of Barry Lyga, an author of books for young adults(click on screenshot). Lyga, who did not sign the letter, titled his post “No book deals for traitors“, and I presume is opposed to the letter. But it’s already been signed by more than 500 authors, agents, and people who work in publishing; and miscreants are still signing on here. (Click on screenshot to enlarge.)

As I’ve said repeatedly, while publishers have the right to publish whatever books they want, and can reject books based on not just their content but their authors, this is completely unwarranted censorship of authors based on their politics. It means, of course, that not only do the signers oppose publishes accepting Trump’s memoirs, but books by anyone who was part of his administration, including Robert Mueller, Nikki Haley, Anthony Fauci (who did not “scoff at science”), Ben Carson, James Mattis, and so on.And not just books about Trump—books about anything.  (Don’t forget that Obama’s administration also “caged children” as well as killing civilians with drones.)

And it assumes that anybody who worked for the Trump administration agreed with all its policies, which is simply a lie.

This is an attempt to censor works by people who have political opinions different from yours. It is an attempt to silence those who disagree with you and to suppress their views. Beside that, it’s an attempt to punish people for being on the “wrong” side politically. Yet think of all the people who worked in the Trump administration and weren’t big fans of his. Some of these people, or even the “criminals” more closely aligned with Trump, may have worthwhile things to say and to hear.

The 500+ signers of the letter don’t want to hear them, though—indeed, they don’t want anybody to hear them!

This is an example of Woke Fascism: the worst behavior of the Authoritarian Left. They call anyone associated with the Trump administration a criminal, for those who were part of the administration are accused of “enabling, promulgating, and covering up crimes.” Talk about hyperbole!

I won’t reproduce the list of signers (I don’t recognize any of them), but here are some of the houses with Pecksniffian editors and employees. I’ll stop at the J’s:

Jessica Awad (Media Assistant Editor, W. W. Norton & Company)
Kat Bennett (Senior Cartographer, Hachette Book Group)
Rachel Blaifeder (Editor, Cambridge University Press)
Sam Brody (Editorial Assistant at Hachette Book Group)
Megan Carr (Senior Sales Support Associate, HarperCollins Publishers)
Henna Cho (Digital Sales Associate (SImon & Schuster))
Angelica Chong (Editorial Assistant, Macmillan
Mia Council (Assistant editor, Penguin Random House)—MY PUBLISHER!
Michella Domenici (Springer Nature)Rachel Dugan (Publicity Assistant, Penguin Random House)  ANOTHER!
Carl Engle-Laird (Editor, Macmillan)
Leah Gordon (Senior editor, Avalon Travel, an imprint of Hachette Book Group)
Sarah Grill (Associate Editor, Macmillan)
Stephanie Guerdan (Assistant Editor, HarperCollins)
Sarah Homer (Assistant Editor, HarperCollins Publishers)
Madeline Houpt (Editorial Assistant, Macmillan)

I’ll stop now, but have to add that these people do not deserve their jobs in publishing—not when they decide to reject in advance books by anyone who was in the Trump administration. This bodes ill for the future of publishing, for these are reputable houses, and they control a lot of books who go to the public. It’s a metastasis of the cancer of Wokeism.

And if you respond, “Tough. These editors and authors did the right thing in trying to silence Republicans,” then I have no use for you. And I have only marginally more use for those who say, “Nobody’s entitled to a book deal; publishers are doing the right thing by ruling out a priori books by any of these people.” That is an extraordinarily punitive and close-minded point of view.

h/t: cesar

Oxford student union mandates that its authorities promote “jazz hands” as a substitute for applause

October 25, 2019 • 11:30 am

I don’t know why, but stuff like this depresses me and makes me wonder what the world will be like in 20 years, when students who passed this resolution are running the UK—and maybe the US. But I’ll most likely be dead then.

This event not nearly as bad as the Right supporting Trump, of course, but everybody writes about Trump while the mainstream and liberal media are reluctant to documenting the Authoritarian Left. (If you’re a reader, by the way, please don’t tell me to write more about the perfidy of Republicans. You can see that kind of discourse, whose sentiments I share, on every other site.)

So the latest occurrence is that Oxford University’s student council voted three days ago not to mandate the use of jazz hands in place of applause, but to “mandate Sabbatical Officers to encourage the use” of “jazz hands”, the British Sign Language equivalent of clapping. In other words, it’s not an absolute stricture but a strong recommendation as well as a requirement for officers.

There are three links below (click on screenshots); the indented bit here is from the Oxford Student.

The first Student Council meeting of the academic year, yesterday, passed the motion to mandate the Sabbatical Officers to encourage the use of British Sign Language (BSL) clapping, otherwise known as ‘silent jazz hands’ at Student Council meetings and other official SU events.

The motion was presented to Council last year by Ellie Macdonald (former VP Welfare and Equal Opportunities) and Ebie Edwards Cole (Chair for Oxford SU Disabilities Campaign), presented again this year by Ebie and Roisin McCallion (VP Welfare & Equal Opportunity).

BSL clapping is used by the National Union of Students since loud noises, including whooping and traditional applause, are argued to present an access issue for some disabled students who have anxiety disorders, sensory sensitivity, and/or those who use hearing impairment aids.

The proposers pointed out that alternatives to traditional clapping have been in place to aid accessibility in some organisations since 2015, when The New York Times for instance declared snapping is the new clapping.

Manchester Students Union made headlines when they led the way in passing a motion in September 2018 to use BSL clapping at their own student council.

Here’s what jazz hands look like:

And a peevish response from comedian Graham Linehan.

https://twitter.com/Glinner/status/1187686408774934528

This is from the Oxford Student:

From the Times of London:

Now I understand that the desire of the Oxford student council here was admirable: to be inclusive. But catering to what “triggers” people is not a way to deal with the issue of triggering. As far as I understand, exposure therapy is what psychologists use to eliminate triggering, and in this case exposure would mean listening to applause.

Second, “jazz hands” can easily be construed as a racist gesture, even if it is part of British Sign Language. The Atlas Obscura, for examples, describes one proposed origin for the gesture in its article “The Fabulous History of Jazz Hands!”

The exact origins of jazz hands are a bit murky, but as with most performative dance, it likely has its roots in African dance traditions. “I see one thread of it coming up through the African-American foundation of jazz dance, and that authentic jazz tradition,” says Rebecca Katz Harwood, Associate Professor of Musical Theater at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. ”In as much as vaudeville grows out of minstrelsy, that’s another step backwards on the family tree of jazz hands.”

It’s likely that the simple act of shaking your hands as part of the performance came into use when vaudeville performers began taking their cues from these traditions. As vaudeville began evolving into film, it brought jazz hands with it. Some people contend that jazz hands can be traced back to Al Jolson’s 1927 film, The Jazz Singer. . . 

. . . Some of Jolson’s moves are reminiscent of what we would call jazz hands, with arms outstretched and hands extended pleadingly to the audience, but his moves lack the signature shake. “When I think of Al Jolson, I think of the blackface and the white gloves over his hands. And of course part of what those white gloves do is draw attention to the hands,” says Katz Harwood.

Remember that The Jazz Singer features Jolson, a white man, in blackface. That, as I’ve said many times before, is reprehensible bigotry and not “cultural appropriation.” If “jazz hands” has its origin in African dance, then its use is “cultural appropriation,” and according to Woke Standards, cannot be used without simultaneous acknowledgment and apology.

Finally, while jazz hands may placate the small minority of people who get triggered by applause, it also disenfranchises the visually challenged, who wouldn’t know when people are displaying approbation for a speech or performance. How you do you weigh those off against each other?

As I said, it’s a small issue, but also a telling sign of the times. Anybody applauding at Oxford will likely be demonized.

Oxford and Cambridge are the UK’s equivalent of Harvard, and all three places are slipping inexorably to an intolerant and authoritarian Leftism. That’s better than authoritarian Rightism, but do we need this brand of authoritarian Diktat at all?  Inclusivity—which I view as conferring respect and equal opportunity on everyone, including access for the disabled and free speech for everyone—does not mean that an entire student body must always cater to what “triggers” a tiny minority. As we all know, this leads to a deadening uniformity of discourse, a uniformity that undermines the very purpose of a university.

A call for ideological uniformity?

July 22, 2019 • 9:00 am

Here we have Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, member of the “Sq**D” (I can’t bear to write it), speaking at the Netroots Nation conference on July 13, and making what I take to be a call for ideological uniformity based on race, sexuality, or religion. That uniformity, of course, must align with Pressley’s own ideology.

I may be wrong, but have a listen and tell me what you think. The transcript of the relevant part of her remarks comes from RealClear Politics:

“I don’t want to bring a chair to an old table. This is the time to shake the table. This is the time to redefine that table. Because if you’re going to come to this table, all of you who have aspirations of running for office. If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalized and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice.”

Listen:

 

You could interpret Pressley’s remarks in two ways.

1.) If you’re going to engage in political discussion, you have to discuss your identity as the paramount topic, or at least take a point of view that derives from your identity.

2.) If you’re going to engage in political discussion, you have to take the ideologically approved Leftist viewpoint considered appropriate for your race, ethnicity or religion. If you can’t do that, don’t bother to speak.

Knowing Pressley, I’m pretty sure she means #2, especially based on the last sentence. After all, if you espouse a position not approved by intersectionalist ideology, there’s no danger of you being marginalized or stereotyped. And “we need you to represent that voice” I take to mean, “We need you to represent the position appropriate to your race/sexuality/religion.”

If I’m right here, then people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali shouldn’t show up, because she’s critical of Islam, even though she’s a black woman. And Van Jones, despite being a liberal black commentator for CNN, shouldn’t show up because he made a particularly stirring and eloquent argument for free speech—for the right to offend (be sure to listen to it here; it’s a must-hear). Free speech, of course, is a non-starter for Leftists of Pressley’s stripe, because it opens up the floor to speech that doesn’t align with one’s identity.

In other words, Pressley is saying that unless people of a given identity say what she wants them to say, they should be ignored or demonized—or at the least certainly refrain from political activity. And this is my problem with both Pressley and her three colleagues, as well as with identity politics: it leaves no room for diversity of thought. If you don’t agree with the approved position down the line, you’re out of the game. This leaves no room for discussion and, especially, no room for compromise. And in Congress, compromise is the name of the game.

Santa Clara University denies recognition to conservative student group

June 13, 2019 • 1:00 pm

I remember the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) when I was in college in the late Sixties. The members were Republicans, pro-Nixon, and were largely ignored by the rest of the students. But the group served as a nucleus for conservatives, and I don’t remember anything particularly invidious about it. Reading over the Wikipedia entry on the group, I find myself opposed to everything they stand for, but hey, they’re not Nazis—they’re conservatives and libertarians. They certainly deserve a place alongside other political groups in American universities.

Well, that doesn’t hold true any longer. Conservative groups, like pro-Israel groups (e.g., WIFI at Williams College), aren’t supposed to coexist with other student groups because they supposedly make students feel “unsafe.” This is one of the ridiculous but often effective fictions promulgated by the Woke.

Now, according to the Foundation for Individuals Rights in Education (FIRE), the student government at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit school in the eponymous California town, has denied recognition twice to YAF, as reported in the article below (click on screenshot):

An excerpt:

Last week, the Santa Clara University Associated Student Government denied recognition to a campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom over the student group’s political stances. The rejection is the second time in a month that the ASG refused recognition to YAF over hostility to the group’s conservative viewpoints.

On April 25, the student government held a contentious debate on whether to grant official student group status to the YAF chapter, which would have given the club the right to request funding and schedule speakers, among other privileges and benefits. The discussion swiftly veered from YAF’s successful completion of the procedural requirements for recognition to its political advocacy and stances. One student senator questioned whether “students would feel unsafe” because of the group’s ideology, and others commented on the perceived harmfulness of YAF’s advocacy for free speech. Many student government members were sharply divided over the need for another conservative or political club on campus, and criticized YAF’s alleged ties to Turning Point USA and the Republican Party.

The student judicial court voted 4-1 to overturn the denial of YAF as a student club. Then the University’s general counsel explained to the student government that the YAF must be certified if it met the general requirements for student groups, which it did. Finally, on May 17 FIRE wrote a letter to Santa Clara’s President saying that disallowing YAF as a group constituted “viewpoint discrimination”. That letter included statements from the university’s own promises of free speech, even though it’s a private school and doesn’t have to abide by the First Amendment:

While SCU is a private university and thus not legally bound by the First Amendment, it is both morally and contractually bound to honor the explicit, repeated, and unequivocal promises of freedom of expression it has made to its students.

For example, SCU’s mission and goals statement, set forth in part in its student handbook, provides that SCU is “dedicated to” developing “a community wherein freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression enjoy the highest priorities.” Accordingly, the university pledges to “acknowledge, affirm, and defend the right of every member of the campus community t  freedom of expression [and] freedom of association. . . .”

SCU’s “Student Events, Activities, and Organizations” policy makes similar commitments, elaborating on these principles:

We are best served by an educational experience enriched by exposure to differing, and, indeed, to antithetical, opinion. Debating of “uncomfortable” ideas or points of view ought not to be shunned just because it is uncomfortable, for it may stimulate us to think and to think seriously. Thoughtful dialogue in search of truth leads to critical thinking, informed learning, and an honest exchange of facts, beliefs, and points of view. The belief system allowed to go untested is likely to be found weakest in the face of argumentative challenge.

Because as a university we remain irrevocably committed to intellectual discourse, we acknowledge, affirm, and defend the right of every member of the campus community to freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of exercise of faith in accordance with the University’s stated mission and goals.

After all this information, still no dice. As FIRE wrote,

Unfortunately, the ASG did not heed our call, or the advice of SCU counsel, as YAF was again denied recognition on May 23 after the first vote was overturned by the student judicial court on procedural grounds.

This is viewpoint discrimination, pure and simple, and cannot stand, at least without the University looking like an ideological bully. As I said, I disagree with every aspect of the YAF, but it still deserves to stand alongside more liberal organizations. Or does Santa Clara want its students to hear only one side?

You can register your dismay (or approbation, if you’re censorious) by going to the page linked to this screenshot, and filling in a brief objection form. I’ve already sent in my beef. When you click on “email,” you can send either a pre-written email or write one yourself, which is what I did.

My email:

The student government’s decision to deny status to the Young Americans for Freedom is unconscionable, and a violation of Santa Clara’s own policy to allow the promulgation of diverse viewpoints on campus. This is viewpoint discrimination, pure and simple, and the bias against conservative organizations gives one the impression that your school is a censorious bastion of ideological purity.

I am a liberal, and opposed to everything that YAF stands for. But, as they say, I will defend to the death their right to exist alongside other student groups. Will Santa Clara stand up for free speech?

Jerry Coyne
Professor Emeritus
The University of Chicago

Inclusion via exclusion: Andrew Sullivan critiques segregated housing at Williams College

May 5, 2019 • 12:00 pm

The middle bit of Andrew Sullivan’s latest “Intelligencer” column at New York Magazine calls out Williams College and similar colleges that practice or propose to practice segregated housing—now given the convenient euphemism of “affinity housing”.  I’m pleased that Andrew got the idea for this section from reading this website (see below), but even more pleased that Sullivan puts the weight of his pulpit and his intellect against segregated housing. (Let’s call it what it is.) A screenshot from Sullivan:

He adds this, all of which I’ve written about before, but not with Sullivan’s panache, which is on display here:

Segregation as the pathway to integration seems to be the argument, a point with some uncomfortable precedents dating back to before Brown v. Board of Education. The student group demanding this recently announced on its Instagram page that “the administration expressed general support for affinity housing and together we came up with a pilot program for affinity housing that was feasible given the avenues of change at the college.” If you want to see how this kind of transformation happens, check out this video of a student council meeting on April 9 discussing whether there should be funding for racially segregated events at “Previews,” when prospective students visit the campus to check it out. At around the 45-minute mark, two students enter the room, ranting and swearing as they insist that their demands for the programs be met. They were, of course.

As I’ve reported before, there are ample sociological data suggesting that people get along better when they get to know each other. Segregated housing erodes that ability. Sullivan adduces additional data, and though the results aren’t 100% uniform, the upshot is that priming students with “color blind” rather than “multicultural” (i.e., identity-politic) approaches tends to make students more aware of ethnic differences and imbue them with stronger stereotypes about different groups. Sullivan concludes this from these studies:

. . . the more focus you put on race, the more conscious people are of it as a valid and meaningful distinction between people, and the more likely they are to reify it. At today’s diversity-driven campus or corporation, often your first instinct when seeing someone is to quickly assess their identity — black, white, gay, Latino, male, trans, etc. You are required to do this all the time because you constantly need to check your privilege. And so college students — and those who hire and fire in business — are trained to judge a person instantly by where they fit into a racial and gender hierarchy, before they even engage them. Of course they’re going to end up judging people instantly by the color of their skin. Social justice has a strict hierarchy of identity, with white straight males at the bottom. It is, in fact, a mirror image of the far right’s racial hierarchy, which puts white straight men at the top.

. . .In other words, teaching people to see other races as completely different from one’s own may encourage us to define others by stereotypes.

When the deep tribal forces in the human psyche are constantly on alert for racial difference, we run the risk of exacerbating racism. So we face the prospect that anti-racism could facilitate what it is attempting to destroy. It wouldn’t be the first time that a well-intentioned experiment has backfired.

Back to Williams College. Recent demands for segregated housing at that ritzy institution came from an Authoritarian Leftist group at Williams called CARENow, which sent a list of demands to the president and trustees, one of which was for segregated housing:

3. Improve community spaces and establish affinity housing for Black, queer, and all other minoritized students.

Note that the housing is to be segregated not just by race, but by sexuality and god knows what other criteria define “minoritized” status. (Note too the use of the neologism “minoritized”, which, contrary to the word “minority”, implies that somebody is doing oppressive “othering”. But, as biology professor Luana Maroja argues, this doesn’t seem to be the case, at least at Williams.)

Now after the first year, Williams students have the right to share dorm space with other students of their choice, which leads to a form of self-segregation. I have no strong objections to that policy, though I think it may have inimical effects on “inclusion.” What I object to is a university designating living space for any group that others cannot inhabit. That is a form of segregation that, as Sullivan says, is touted as a pathway to integration. Does anybody really believe that?

On the designated date—President Maud Mandel is nothing if not compliant to the demands of protestors—the President issued a response to the demands on her official website (click on screenshot below). I’ll note in passing that Mandel, buying into the protestors’ rhetoric, uses the word “minoritized” five times.

I won’t go into her responses to the protestors’ many demands, as it’s a long document, but I do want to give her response to the demand for segregated housing. First of all, she seems to be open to it. Second, she vociferously claims that it’s not really segregated (my emphasis).

Another area of the residential life discussion that has attracted widespread attention is the idea of affinity housing. College leaders have been in constructive conversations with students leading this cause. In discussion with them, we have stressed the importance of embedding our conversations in the wider discussion around residential life that will be a central feature of the Strategic Planning process. Doing so will also enable us to collect relevant data from other schools to inform our thinking. In this spirit, the working group will consider the idea of a pilot along with other possibilities. We do want to pause and recognize that, at the time of writing, some students involved in the affinity housing and other efforts are being subjected to unduly harsh media and social media attention that misrepresents affinity housing as “segregation.”

In reality, people on campuses across America already opt to live together based on various shared interests and identities: French language students, film studies, Christian fellowship students, vegetarians, hockey players, etc. The question is not whether such an idea is valid in principle, but how to reconcile in practice the impulse toward free association with Williams’ commitment to a diverse living community. Any pilot that is considered should take these questions into account, as well as looking at the successes and struggles of comparable efforts elsewhere. But we believe such questions should not be a bar to exploring the idea in the course of strategic planning.

Note that Mandel implies that “the impulse towards free association” is at odds with “Williams’ commitment to a diverse living community,” but that’s not true. Williams is in fact committed to a community that has racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity, but not to a community in which individuals from different groups are encouraged to mingle. If ever a college is deliberately balkanized, it’s Williams.

Mandel needs to read Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” which points out how unpalatable policies can be softened simply by giving them different names.  Exactly how, President Mandel, is “affinity housing”, which separates groups of people based on their ethnicity or sexuality, different from segregated housing?

And yes, of course people on campuses across America already live with others of like minds/interests/pigmentation. That is okay. What is not okay is to mandate segregated spaces where others aren’t allowed. That idea is NOT “valid in principle.” Can you imagine a Southern segregationist making similar arguments in favor of racial segregation, either at colleges or in communities? After all, that is “white affinity housing.” (Note Mandel’s clever omission of “ethnicity”, “sexuality” and “race” from the list of “shared interests and identities.”)

Once again we see a double standard: it’s okay to segregate students by race so long as the students of color are the ones who can exclude others. It doesn’t work the other way around (and shouldn’t!). All such forms of mandated segregation are odious and, rather than being inclusive, are divisive.

For years Williams has resisted the notion of such segregated housing, and good for that. Now, however, the school is on the verge of capitulating to the demands of neo-segregationists like CARENow. Williams depends heavily on the donations of rich alumni to finance it: it has one of the largest per (student) capita endowments in America. I hope that those alumni are paying attention to how their money is being used.

h/t: cesar, Simon

A profile of Bari Weiss

April 26, 2019 • 12:00 pm

If you’ve read this site for even a short time, you’ll know about Bari Weiss, a liberal writer for the New York Times who, like me, specializes in criticizing the excesses of the Left while still believing that Republicans and the Trump administration are the most horrific aspect of American politics. (I, for one, don’t spend a lot of time criticizing Trump because others do it so much better, and far fewer people worry about Left-wing shenanigans that could help re-elect Trump in 2020.) To read some of my pieces on Weiss, whom I much admire, go here.

There’s now a new Vanity Fair piece about Weiss that has a lot of information I didn’t know, particularly about her personal and intellectual history. You can read it for free by clicking on the website below.

Given that Weiss is a liberal, self described as a pro-choice feminist, it’s odd—but understandable in today’s ideological climate—that she’s hated more by the Left than, perhaps, many Righties. This is because she calls out the excesses of the Left. Here are a few excerpts from the Vanity Fair piece:

Broadly speaking, Weiss’s work is heterodox, defying easy us/them, left/right categorization. Since getting hired at the paper in the spring of 2017, she has focused on hot-button cultural topics, such as #MeToo, the Women’s March, and campus activism, approaching each topic with a confrontational skepticism that until recently had a strong place within the liberal discourse. Her basic gist: while such movements are well-intentioned, their excesses of zeal, often imposed by the hard left, can backfire.

. . .Weiss has little patience for the new campus activism, in which she says students have been blithely tarring professors as “fascist.” In a May 2018 feature, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” Weiss profiled several popular academics and pundits, such as Bret Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, and Christina Hoff Sommers, who’ve retreated from academia and the mainstream media but have emerged on other platforms. Some thought the piece was a frank portrait of a phenomenon worthy of examination. Others believed that by giving these provocateurs the floor, Weiss was endorsing their opinions.

Weiss views outcries over cultural appropriation—Katy Perry shouldn’t wear a kimono, Marc Jacobs shouldn’t put white models in dreadlocks, and so on—as “un-American.” “If that point of view wins, it’s just a pleasureless, gray world,” she says. “Who wants to live in a world where you can only stay in the lane of your birth? Literally everything good about this culture comes from mixing.”

And here’s some Zionism mixed with disdain for Trump: the kind of mixed opinion that infuriates the Authoritarian Left:

The day after Weiss wrote “Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation,” [Glenn] Greenwald published a full-throated takedown of a range of her opinions, calling her writing “trite, shallow, cheap.” He also accused Weiss of “crusading against Arabs, Muslims, and other assorted critics of Israel.”

It’s here where Weiss’s views draw the most passionate objections. She is an ardent Zionist, and has come to believe that much of the anti-Zionist talk on the left is tantamount to anti-Semitism, a view that many American Jews find objectionable and even infuriating. But her passion for Israel has not defined her overarching belief system—the need to protect what makes America great—and in this, she believes it’s right-wing American Jews who have lost their way. After the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, where Weiss grew up, she appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and issued a warning to American Jews who aligned themselves with Trump because they like his policies: “I hope this week that American Jews have woken up to the price of that bargain. They have traded policies that they like for the values that have sustained the Jewish people and frankly this country for forever: welcoming the stranger, dignity for all human beings, equality under the law, respect for dissent, love of truth. These are the things that we’re losing under this president. And no policy is worth that price.”

Weiss is about to publish a new book on anti-Semitism:

I’ve found little to disagree with in Weiss’s columns, which puts me at odds with those on my hue of the ideological spectrum. So be it: we need her, her writing, and her worldview.

As lagniappe, here’s a video of a speech Weiss made at Chatauqua. Riffing on George Carlin’s famous bit, “The seven words you can’t say on television,” Weiss, describing incidents that many of us know, gives her own list of seven words that were once respected and are now profane. Behold: “The New Seven Dirty Words”.

imagination
humility
proportion
empathy
judgment
reason
doubt

I’ll let you hear for yourself why, she says, these are “dirty” words. Listen and enjoy (if you’re not a Weiss-hater):

More lunacy at Williams College: College paper endorses segregated housing, declares that its mission is not reporting, but social justice

April 19, 2019 • 1:35 pm

The Williams Record, the student newspaper of Williams College, is a reliable source of ludicrous Woke Culture (with a big dose of Perpetual Offense), which would be amusing if it weren’t horrifying. This week, the newspaper is dealing with student demands by a group called CARE (see here) for the kind of perks we’ve seen before: more therapists, free weekend shuttle buses to New York and Boston (this is a new one), more funding of diversity and, especially, “affinity housing,” the new euphemism for “racially segregated housing.” It’s only a matter of time before Williams students, like those at Sarah Lawrence, demand free laundry detergent and softener in the laundry rooms.

I’d be more sympathetic to student demands for better treatment of racial inequities at Williams if I were convinced that there were any. I’ve tried to find them, but all I observe is that minority students are treated not only better than any other college I know of in this country, but better than any other ethnic group. Yet they claim that they are unsafe, that they are in physical danger, that they are victims of Williams’s “institutional violence”. Yet I’ve never been able to find a single instance of “hate crimes” or of bigotry there; what we appear to have is pure Offense Culture—seemingly on the part of every “minoritized” (their term) group. And now the students are demanding “The creation of new enrollment options and teaching fellowships in Native, Trans, Disability, and Fat Studies.” Given that students also demand that this type of course be taught by a member of the stigmatized minority, one wonders if they’ll advertise for a “professor of size”.

But the most odious of the demands, or so I think, is for affinity housing, and that’s the topic of much of the paper’s reporting this week. Of course the Record favors it. Click on the screenshots below to see the articles.

But first, the front-page editorial of the paper is a paradigm of self-flagellation in journalism. The editors have decided that, over the history of the Record, they have not been supportive enough of student movements and demands. That is, they’ve been supportive, but not in the right way, as they’ve failed to support every demand and every tactic of the protestors. Apparently full, unreserved, and uncritical support is essential.

We must do better

For example:

We must face the ways we have failed students who sought, with, in their words, actions and bodies, to make this campus a better place for them and for all members of the community. We have fallen short of our obligation to consistently report on the stories relevant to marginalized members of our community, leading many to feel, justifiably, that the Record does not serve them. Too often, our editorial board has also passed judgment on the validity of campus activism from a privileged position that affirms apathy and passivity, in the process undermining positive change and upholding those in power.

How, exactly, have they failed? By not giving unreserved support to student demands and actions:

The Record in particular has a long history of upholding institutional passivity and the status quo. When students held the hunger strike that ultimately spurring the creation of a Latina/o studies program, the Record published an editorial under the headline, “Strike devalues legitimate goals” (April 27, 1993), writing, “The group is delegitimizing its worthy ideological effort by tying it so closely with unreasonable requests.” On Feb. 29, 2012, the Record published an editorial titled “Working within our means: Examining the College’s curricular priorities,” which opposed the creation of an Asian American studies program and calling into question the utility of such a concentration.

These failures apparently constitute mortal sins, but the Record is resolving to do better, and will do so not by adhering to objective reporting, but by giving complete and unreserved support to whatever minoritized students demand. This is the abnegation of journalistic responsibility in favor of Woke ideology, and it’s scary.  They might as well be penitentes scarifying their backs with barbed whips:

These gaps in reporting remind us that we cannot claim to have served all members of our community in the past, and some may find it difficult to believe that we will do so in the future. We recognize, however, that the only way for us to regain trust with those whom we have inadequately served is to expand our efforts to write, in truth and in fairness, stories that reflect the harms and issues that marginalized students, staff and faculty face at the College.

. . . As we craft editorials as well, we must be mindful not to undermine calls for change with distanced equivocation. Indeed, an endorsement of principles can be offered without any real or material commitment toward bettering campus and indeed can be accompanied by calls for restraint that actually impede progress. Passivity is not a neutral stance nor a helpful one.

No equivocation! Principles must be endorsed wholeheartedly, with no calls for restraint or rational consideration.

This kind of stuff should make any real journalist ill. But those who write for the Record are not journalists but ideologues. The campus has gotten the newspaper it deserves.

This next article, which I won’t summarize in detail, justifies why segregated housing is deemed essential. (Heretofore the Williams administration has refused to implement it, but I think the time is coming.) Apparently other schools like Amherst and Wesleyan have it, but I’m curious why such housing isn’t illegal.

I oppose affinity housing on two grounds: it’s segregation by ethnic groups (usually race), something inimical to bringing people together. Further, “mixed” housing, which most universities have (and for a reason), is a positive force for getting people from different backgrounds to learn about each other. This, at least in the eyes of most liberals, is a good thing, promoting mutual understanding.

The Record does not agree.

On the need for affinity housing

Why segregation is good:

We at the Record wholeheartedly support establishing affinity housing at the College. As a community, we must recognize that the College is a predominantly white institution in which students of color often feel tokenized, both in their residences and more broadly on campus. Establishing affinity housing will not singlehandedly solve this problem, but it will assist in making the College a more welcoming, supportive and safe community for minoritized students.

Some say affinity housing reinforces division, arguing that having minoritized students cluster in one space would be harmful to the broader campus community. We believe, however, that allowing for a space where students can express their identities without fear of tokenization or marginalization will encourage students to exist more freely in the broader campus community, rather than recede from it.

Given the propensity for many ‘minoritized’ students to take classes that attract similar minorities, classes like Africana Studies, Asian Studies, Arabic studies, Jewish studies, and so on (this hardly exhausts the list at Williams), this is not convincing. Further, I see absolutely no evidence that minority students at Williams are tokenized or marginalized. If they were, we would have tangible examples, but even asking for such examples is considered “violence” (see the Areo piece below by Darel Paul, a Williams professor, who documents the woeful lack of evidence for the kind of violence and discrimination claimed by Williams students).

Here’s yet another of the paper’s approbations of affinity housing:

Push for affinity housing builds

The statements below make me wonder if “affinity housing” is not supposed to apply just to African-American students, but to all minorities. Imagine the Balkanization that would ensue! (Emphases are mine.)

Students at the College have articulated a vision for living spaces of affinity around a common identity – including but not limited to race, culture and sexuality – as an antidote to feelings of tokenization and isolation that students say the College’s current housing options fail to address. Students say that they have began conversations on affinity housing last spring with administrators, who say that affinity housing will be a key topic of consideration as the College moves forward in the strategic planning process. A group of students met with administrators on Monday about a current attempt to create an affinity space through the housing lottery.

One of the 12 demands published by Coalition Against Racist Education Now (CARE Now) on Friday requested the establishment of “affinity housing for Black students (and all other marginalized groups).”

Will there be Asian Houses, Jewish houses, Disabled houses, Gay Houses, Fat Houses, and so on? After all, doesn’t every minoritized group deserve to have its own residence to affirm the identity of its members?

The article quotes a a previous piece by a student defending affinity housing, making clear that its goal is support and affirmation of one’s identity:

“Affinity housing would grant students who share an aspect of their identity the opportunity to live together in an intentional community with shared values and goals, allowing these students to feel supported and have their identities affirmed by those who live around them,” [Alia Richardson] wrote.

This is not a recipe for the “inclusiveness” that Williams touts, but for a separation and segregation that will intensity the identity politics already destroying the College.

In the paper’s podcast below, opinions editor Kevin Yang, at 4:15, begins the self-flagellation familiar to students of China’s Cultural Revolution, a view mirrored in the editorial that begins this article. The paper holds itself “complicit in some of these harms that have happened”, but it is wrong on two counts: there are no documented “harms,” and the paper is not complicit.

https://soundcloud.com/williamsrecord/41719-care-nows-demands-and-our-front-page-editorial

Darel Paul, professor of political science, wrote an enlightening article about this and similar madness here (or click on screenshot below). Although it deals with other liberal arts colleges similar to Williams (Wesleyan, Evergreen State, and so on), it has several enlightening links to what’s going on at his own school. Paul is clearly disaffected, and the administration should pay attention to his thoughts. More likely, though, Paul will be demonized and ignored for, after all, he’s an Old White Male:

Have a gander at the video in this article. It’s from The College Fix, a right-wing website, but it does show an amazing piece of political theater as angry black students burst into a Williams student council meeting (these things are livestreamed at Willams) and abuses the other students for not appropriating money for blacks-only events at “Previews”, the time when prospective students visit Williams and the college tries to sell itself to them. I’ve watched this video twice, and there’s nothing more telling about the climate at Williams than what happens in it. You needn’t read the article if you don’t like the site, but watch the video embedded in it; the fun begins at 30:02. [UPDATE: The students have removed the video, probably because it’s so embarrassing, but you can see the re-uploaded video here.]

Note the deep and abusive anger of the yelling student (unwarranted, in my view), as well as his denigration of free speech. It reminds me of the flack given to Nicholas Christakis at Yale during the Great Halloween Dustup.

The abuse of the student toward other Council members continues for a full 15 minutes, and the members of the council, clearly cowed, reversed their stand on race-specific Previews. They were funded.

This is exactly like the kind of stuff an abusive husband heaps on his wife, and all too often the partners buy it, assuming they’re responsible for bringing on the abuse.

Williams is this year’s Evergreen State College.