Category: authoritarian leftists

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.

Fascists on the Left explain why they called out Chelsea Clinton

March 17, 2019 • 9:00 am

UPDATE (h/t: Malgorzata): It turns out that Leen Dweik, the woman who accosted Chelsea Clinton, is, as revealed by her now-deleted tweets, a hateful bigot, a blatant anti-Semite and homophobe, and she hates the French, too. Go see for yourself.

____________

 

Yesterday I reported on how Chelsea Clinton was attacked by people at a vigil at New York University (NYU) in support of the 49 Muslims (now 50, I think) who were killed in a terrorist attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. At the vigil, Clinton was accosted by a Muslim who accused her of being responsible for the mosque shooting. Why? Because Clinton, in a single tweet, had criticized Congresswoman’s Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic comments (see below):

After that, Clinton politely agreed to meet and talk with Ilhan Omar about this issue; here’s the exchange on Twitter. I don’t know if they ever met or discussed this issue further.

At least one reader here argued that Clinton shouldn’t have been at the NYU rally because, being a prominent figure, she was making the vigil “all about her.” But that’s bogus, for Clinton is director of an interfaith program at NYU and was undoubtedly attending to show solidarity with the Muslims. As Wikipedia notes,

Starting in 2010, Clinton began serving as Assistant Vice-Provost for the Global Network University of New York University, working on international recruitment strategies.[37] She is the co-founder of the Of Many Institute for Multifaith Leadership at NYU and serves as its co-chair.[44]By 2010, she was also pursuing PhD coursework at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, but later transferred back to Oxford in 2011 to complete her dissertation.[36][45]

In 2012, Clinton received an award from the Temple of Understanding for her “work in advancing a new model of integrating interfaith and cross-cultural education into campus life,” together with Imam Khalid Latif and Rabbi Yehuda Sarna.[46]

Based on this, can you really argue that her presence at the vigil was unseemly?  You can, but you’d be irrational. At any rate, BuzzFeed (which I’ve been reading recently as part of my Leftist media homework), gave two of the NYU students an opportunity to explain in a op-ed why they confronted Clinton. (By the way, I’m not that keen on BuzzFeed News, which is a step above HuffPost, but not much.) Click on the screenshot; the authors are identified, respectively as “a senior at New York University studying International Relations and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. [Dweik] is a Muslim Palestinian whose main organizing centers on Palestine solidarity efforts; while Asaf is “a senior at New York University where she studies Comparative Politics and American Studies. She is an Israeli-American Jewish woman, and she co-founded the Jewish Voice for Peace chapter at NYU.

What we read is the usual unhinged indictment of those who dare to criticize anti-Semitic remarks, and DEMANDS that Clinton apologize.

In reality, Omar apologized on Twitter for her remarks!

Granted, this “unequivocal” apology is lame, but if Omar felt she didn’t do anything wrong, why did she apologize? To placate her fellow Representatives? If that’s the case, then she is a coward and Dweik and Asaf should have called Omar out, too. But if Omar apologized because she was sincere and recognized that her comments could be taken as anti-Semitic, then why are Dweik and Asaf going after Clinton for simply agreeing?

But on to the accusations and demands of the immature and Woke:

As a Jewish American-Israeli and a Palestinian Muslim, we understand far too well the consequences of anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and white supremacy. And as activists who are unafraid to speak the truth, we know we have a duty to call out any bigotry wherever it exists.

We did a double take when we first noticed Chelsea Clinton was at the vigil. Just weeks before this tragedy, we bore witness to a bigoted, anti-Muslim mob coming after Rep. Ilhan Omar for speaking the truth about the massive influence of the Israel lobby in this country. As people in unwavering solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for freedom and human rights, we were profoundly disappointed when Chelsea Clinton used her platform to fan those flames. We believe that Ilhan Omar did nothing wrong except challenge the status quo, but the way many people chose to criticize Omar made her vulnerable to anti-Muslim hatred and death threats.

We were shocked when Clinton arrived at the vigil, given that she had not yet apologized to Rep. Omar for the public vilification against her. We thought it was inappropriate for her to show up to a vigil for a community she had so recently stoked hatred against. We were not alone in feeling uncomfortable — many students were dismayed to see her there.

So when we saw Chelsea, we saw an opportunity to have her ear and confront her on her false charge of anti-Semitism against our only Black, Muslim, Somali, and refugee member of Congress. We took our chance to speak truth to power. Chelsea hurt our fight against white supremacy when she stood by the petty weaponizers of antisemitism, showing no regard for Rep. Omar and the hatred being directed at her.

Note that: the critics of Omar’s words are “petty weaponizers of antisemitism”. Jebus.  But wait! There’s more!

. . . To Chelsea Clinton: We hope that our intentions in confronting you are now clear. We believe that you still owe an apology: not only to Rep. Omar, but also to Palestinians for using your platform to defame their cause. As an Israeli national and a Palestinian, we want you to know that it is dangerous to label valid criticisms of Israel and its lobby as anti-semitic. We know that this is a tactic to silence us and deny us our free speech.

Note that Omar didn’t level any criticisms at Israel; she leveled one at the AIPIC lobby that does not fund candidates. And of course Omar herself took donations from Muslim lobbies.

Omar also criticized Israel earlier for “hypnotizing the world” and called out Jews for their “dual loyalty” because, after all, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.” Further, equating supposedly “valid criticisms of Israel and its lobby” as “a tactic to deny us our free speech” is palpably ridiculous. These students have free speech and used it in a widely read BuzzFeed editorial. I’m sure that if Dweik and Asaf had their way, any criticism of Omar would be banned. Make no mistake: these people are not in favor of free speech unless it’s ideologically amiable.

In short, what Dweik and Asaf are saying is this: “Any criticism of anti-Semitic statements made by Muslims is Islamophobia.”

Sorry, that’s not true—no more true than saying “any criticism of anti-Muslim statements made by Jews is anti-Semitism.”  Let us make no mistake: Omar has been trafficking in anti-Semitic statements, and they’re excused by the Left because, after all, the Jews are just white oppressors.  But those attuned to the history of bigotry are like this man below:

If this really was retweeted by Ilhan Omar, I’m mystified.

Sarah Lawrence College on the road to Evergreen State: entitled students demand to review the tenure of a conservative tenured professor, issue many other ludicrous demands

March 14, 2019 • 9:15 am

Well, two previously highly-reputed and well respected colleges are going down the drain as they cave in to unconscionable student demands. The first is Williams College in Massachusetts, where an unhinged gender-studies professor is basically determining college policy with the help of an invertebrate President. I’ll have more on that sad situation later.

The second is Sarah Lawrence College, a high-class liberal arts college in Yonkers, New York. It’s an expensive school, too, as you can see from its list of yearly costs, totaling $69,697 (lots of students get scholarships or other forms of aid).

One would think that the students at such an elite school would be entitled, regardless of their ethnicity, but you would be wrong.  They are now up in arms big time over a New York Times op-ed written by a conservative professor.

The editorial, below, is by Samuel J. Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence and a visiting fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Have a gander:

The editorial, based on a survey Abrams took, showed that school administrators were overwhelmingly on the Left, as were professors and students (the latter two groups weren’t quite as liberal)—a profound difference between academia and the American public. He was prompted to investigate after seeing the ideological indoctrination of students at his school, something we’re well familiar with as colleges change their mission from education to social engineering. Here are the words that damned Abrams:

I received a disconcerting email this year from a senior staff member in the Office of Diversity and Campus Engagement at Sarah Lawrence College, where I teach. The email was soliciting ideas from the Sarah Lawrence community for a conference, open to all of us, titled “Our Liberation Summit.” The conference would touch on such progressive topics as liberation spaces on campus, Black Lives Matter and justice for women as well as for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and allied people.

As a conservative-leaning professor who has long promoted a diversity of viewpoints among my (very liberal) faculty colleagues and in my classes, I was taken aback by the college’s sponsorship of such a politically lopsided event. The email also piqued my interest in what sorts of other nonacademic events were being organized by the school’s administrative staff members.

I soon learned that the Office of Student Affairs, which oversees a wide array of issues including student diversity and residence life, was organizing many overtly progressive events — programs with names like “Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,” “Microaggressions” and “Understanding White Privilege” — without offering any programming that offered a meaningful ideological alternative. These events were conducted outside the classroom, in the students’ social and recreational spaces.

Abrams’s survey data:

Intrigued by this phenomenon, I recently surveyed a nationally representative sample of roughly 900 “student-facing” administrators — those whose work concerns the quality and character of a student’s experience on campus. I found that liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one. Only 6 percent of campus administrators identified as conservative to some degree, while 71 percent classified themselves as liberal or very liberal. It’s no wonder so much of the nonacademic programming on college campuses is politically one-sided

The 12-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative college administrators makes them the most left-leaning group on campus. In previous research, I found that academic faculty report a six-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative professors. Incoming first-year students, by contrast, reported less than a two-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives, according to a 2016 finding by the Higher Education Research Institute. It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incrediblyliberal group of administrators.

For all of this, his conclusions were fairly mild, even if the data weren’t all that surprising:

This warped ideological distribution among college administrators should give our students and their families pause. To students who are in their first semester at school, I urge you not to accept unthinkingly what your campus administrators are telling you. Their ideological imbalance, coupled with their agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas, which is precisely what we need to protect in higher education in these politically polarized times.

In fact, I would have given students the same Hitchensian advice: think for yourselves. And colleges might rethink their mission, perhaps realizing that their job is to educate students and teach them to think, not fill them full of the professors’ and administrators’ own political ideology and act as super-indulgent helicopter parents.

But too late: the students at Sarah Lawrence went wild, demonstrating, sitting in, and issuing a multipage list of DEMANDS.

Here’s part of the demonstration (clicking on the tweet takes you to the video):

And the demands, published in the student newspaper The Phoenix (click on screenshot below), are generally risible. While some are reasonable, many are simply requests for Free Everything: food, housing, unlimited therapy sessions, and so on. Further, they are couched as demands, not requests, and all of us bridle when presented with demands that we are required to meet.

In addition, the students demand re-education of the administration, mandatory attendance at a session where they intend to hector administrators, and, worst of all, a review of Abrams’s tenure (he’s tenured)—a review conducted by members of the “Diaspora Coalition”—the student group that prepared the demands—as well as three professors of color. After all, Abrams’s editorial was VIOLENCE and hurt marginalized people, and he should be punished for that. If anything is a witch hunt, this is:

I can’t list all the demands, but, as I said, some seem reasonable (providing resources and advice to incoming and foreign students, as well as tax advice for foreign students); others debatable (send administrators to Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and so on to recruit students), and some downright ridiculous. The latter include these “demands”:

We demand a mandatory first-year orientation session about intellectual elitism and classism.

We demand all students have access to unlimited therapy sessions through Health and Wellness.

We demand indigenous land acknowledgement at all orientation and commencement ceremonies in addition to a permanent land acknowledgement page on both MySLC and the Sarah Lawrence website. These pages must also include a list of resources for local tribes.

They also demand race-segregated housing (their emphasis):

The College will designate housing with a minimum capacity for thirty students of color that is not contingent on the students expending any work or labor for the college. This housing option will be permanent and increase in space and size based on interest.

But wait! There’s more! (Emphasis is theirs.)

Diasporic Studies

  1. Students of color should not be forced to resort to racist white professors in order to have access to their own history. It is crucial that the College offer courses taught about people of color by people of color so that students may engage in and produce meaningful work that represents them authentically.

  2. We demand there be new tenured faculty of color – at least two in African diasporic studies, one in Asian-American studies, one in Latinx diasporic studies, and one in indigenous/native peoples studies.
  3. We demand there be at least three more courses offered in African diasporic studies taught by Black professors.

  4. We demand that the College offer classes that embody intersectionality, as defined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and address the racial diversity of the LGBTQ+ community instead of centering whiteness.

  5. The aforementioned classes must be taught by professors who are a part of the culture they are teaching about.

And, of course, they are going to conduct a sit-in in which they will miss class, and perhaps engage in illegal conduct or behavior that violates College rules. From this they DEMAND complete protection from prosecution:

The institution will not use the threat of expulsion, removal of positions held in student government, or any other forms of punishment in retaliation to civil disobedience.

Clearly these students don’t know what civil disobedience means. A powerful tactic of the civil rights movement, it constitutes peaceful disobeying of unjust laws, with the willingness to accept punishment for that disobedience. The Sarah Lawrence students want to have their cake and eat it too.

They demand in addition that a whole slate of administrators “attend the student-facilitated talk-back on March 13, 2019 in Miller Lecture Hall regarding this document”, and also that another list of administrators sign the demand document and agree to a meeting on April 5.

But the worst part is the DEMAND to punish Abrams for his editorial. I’ll reproduce that bit in full (their emphasis):

Sarah Lawrence must confront how the presence of Sam Abrams, an anti-queer, misogynist, and racist who actively targets queer people, women, and people of color and is an alumnus of an institute with direct ties to a neo-Confederate hate group, affects the safety and wellbeing of marginalized students. Additionally, Sarah Lawrence will forfeit donations and interactions from the Charles Koch Foundation and never hire alumni from the League of the South-aligned Institute for Human Studies in the future.

  1. Professor Samuel Abrams and Defending Progressive Education

    1. On October 16, 2018, politics professor Samuel Abrams published an op-ed entitled “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators” in The New York Times. The article revealed the anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-woman bigotry of Abrams. The article specifically targeted programs such as the Our Liberation Summit, which Abrams did not attend, facilitated by the Office of Diversity and Campus Engagement. The Sarah Lawrence community deserves an administration that strives for an inclusive education that reflects the diversity of our community. Abrams’ derision of the Black Lives Matter, queer liberation, and women’s rights movements displays not only ignorance but outright hostility towards the essential efforts to dismantle white supremacy and other systems of oppression. This threatens the safety and wellbeing of marginalized people within the Sarah Lawrence community by demonstrating that our lives and identities are viewed as “opinions” that we can have a “difference in dialogue” about, as if we haven’t been forced to debate our very existences for our entire lives. We demand that Samuel Abrams’ position at the College be put up to tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of color. In addition, the College must issue a statement condemning the harm that Abrams has caused to the college community, specifically queer, Black, and female students, whilst apologizing for its refusal to protect marginalized students wounded by his op-ed and the ignorant dialogue that followed. Abrams must issue a public apology to the broader SLC community and cease to target Black people, queer people, and women.

This is nothing other than a threat to a professor who dared differ from the ideology of the hyper-Leftist students. Note that Abrams did not evince misogyny, white supremacy, or any other form of bigotry in his editorial, yet he’s accused of nothing short of being both a Nazi and a Klansman. And his editorial is said to have “wounded” the students and targeted marginalized people. It did nothing of the sort: it took issue with the ideological indoctrination of students by Leftist administrators.

In this document we see a frightening future of American higher education: a future in which universities become not places of learning but Indoctrination Centers of the Left that cater to every student’s needs: all the way to free laundry detergent and unlimited therapy. We also see the policing of Wrongthink, in which dissenting professors are threatened with being fired. It is a place where those who dissent from “approved” opinion are afraid to speak, something now happening at Williams College in Massachusetts—a college that for 15 straight years has been rated the best of America’s liberal arts colleges. (It won’t be for long.) It is this suppression of dissenting opinion, which is pure censorship, that is frightening.

Sarah Lawrence is becoming the 1984 of college campuses, and it’s well down the road to becoming another Evergreen State College and to sharing that college’s fate: financial ruin and the refusal of parents to send their kids to a school Too Woke to Function.

I can only thank my lucky stars that The University of Chicago wasn’t like that when I was teaching there, nor is it like that now. That is thanks to the willingness of our faculty and administrators to stand up to ridiculous student demands while listening to and considering the reasonable ones. It is the failure of pusillanimous parents, administrators, teachers, and citizens to stand up to this nonsense that allows it to continue.

Twitter mobs ruin young-adult fiction again

March 9, 2019 • 11:45 am

Jennifer Senior used to be a book-review editor for the New York Times, but now she’s an op-ed editor. Her history at the paper has served her well in her new op-ed about the social media mobs who now police young-adult fiction (YAF) for ideological purity. (Click on screenshot).

What happened is that Kosoko Jackson, the author of a new book called A Place for Wolves, was forced by a Twitter mob to pull his accepted and already-printed book from the shelves.  The irony, as Senior points out, is that Jackson was not only black and gay, but had himself been one of those “sensitivity editors” who professionally vet this kind of fiction for purity.

You would have thought Jackson would learn to avoid putting himself into the shoes of characters of different ethnic or racial background, for that is the Number One Sin that gets YAF books damned by both sensitivity readers and the Outrage Police who descend en masse on works they don’t like. But when Jackson came to write his own book—a book that Senior thinks is flawed—he discovered the joys of imagination: he put himself in the shoes of people from Kosovo during the wars of the late 1990s. In particular, he made the two main characters Americans, though both are gay and one is black. The other characters are Albanians and Serbs, and one of them, an Albanian Muslim, is an evil character.

Despite the gayness and blackness, this just won’t do, because the Albanian Muslim was—horrors—not exemplary in every way. Muslims must be honored. And so the social media thugs descended. As Senior notes.

As often happens with these things, the online pile-on was mainly led by people who hadn’t read Jackson’s book. It did start with someone who had — a reader who’d written an intemperate, if highly impassioned, review of an advance copy for the community website Goodreads. But it most likely would have remained just that, a pan from a citizen critic, had the review not been noticed by that corner of Twitter that’s obsessed with Y.A. fiction. Even by Twitter standards, it’s a hothouse subculture — self-conscious, emotional, quick to injure. Not unlike teenagers themselves.

I have read Jackson’s book. Before I get to the actual contents, let’s get this out of the way: What happened to Jackson is frightening. Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power. In the Twitterverse, ideologues have far more power than moderates. They have more followers; their tweets get more traction (studies have shown that emotional tweets pretty much always have more traction); they set the terms of their neighborhood’s culture and tone.

What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for writing Y.A. literature are. In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them: “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

How did Jackson get into this mess? Because he used his imagination, which is what fiction writers are supposed to do. And here Senior gets the dilemma of ideological purity tests exactly right:

Let’s stop to contemplate this for a moment. When Jackson was left to his own devices to create and dream — rather than to simply read books for possible cultural violations — his natural, irrepressible reflex was to write about something that went beyond his own experience. Because that’s what novelists do: conjure other worlds, imagine their way into other realities, guess at the texture of other people’s consciousness. It’s part of the pleasure of inventing stuff for a living.

As I said, Senior, who read the book, didn’t like it: she found it clumsy and poorly paced. But its flaws could have been better vetted by the market than by a bunch of censorious, virtue-flaunting literary thugs. Senior ends her description and critique with these powerful words:

If the book-buying public had found “A Place for Wolves” as criminally distasteful and insensitive as Twitter did, it would have sunk the novel in slower, more deliberate ways. Librarians would have read it and taken a pass. Bookstore owners would have decided it wasn’t worth the space. Book critics would have savaged it — or worse, ignored it.

It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the chance. The mob got to it first.

This kind of social-media demonization is only getting worse over time, and I don’t know how to combat it. I do know where it comes from: from the entitlement, fragility, and purity culture infecting American college campuses, which now, as college students enter the job market, is seeping into both politics and art. And its effects are not salubrious. It’s time for all of us to stand up against it, even if it means you get called a bigot or an “alt-righter”. Kudos to Senior for having the guts to call out the call-out culture.

h/t: Greg

Is being “woke” a way to gain status?

September 23, 2018 • 1:40 pm

This new piece at the increasingly important site Quillette by two academics with the same name (brother? father and son?), is well worth reading. It’s amusing even if not 100% accurate, but it’s accurate enough to strike home, and to make you rethink what Authoritarian Leftism is all about:

The Winegards’ thesis is not entirely new. The Regressive Left, they say, is in effect a religion with a sacred narrative (victimized groups), a moral doctrine (i.e., the power hierarchy in America needs to be reversed) and a priestly caste, which, they say, comprises white intellectuals who promulgate Purity Doctrine as a way of separating themselves from the “hoi polloi” and gaining status. Since status is a zero-sum game—the more others get, the less you have—the “woke” priests spend their time signaling their purity, denigrating others who make missteps, and never engaging in actually effecting change.

We all know people who do this, but it’s interesting to see “Wokeness” characterized this way. And I think it’s largely, though not entirely, true. Here are a few quotes:

It is trivially easy (not costly) to assert that one is educated or sophisticated or committed to a doctrine; therefore, very few people pay attention to such pronouncements (except as they might indicate narcissism). On the other hand, it is not easy (is costly) to speak a jargon that is taught only in universities and that requires many hours of dedication to master. Therefore, people pay attention and often defer to those who command a rich, complicated jargon.

. . . Using arcane language and adhering to constantly changing norms about acceptable epithets are not particularly effective for attracting people from the broader population to one’s cause. In fact, they almost certainly alienate many average, and otherwise sympathetic, Americans, who understandably disdain indecipherable prose and elite superciliousness. Therefore, this signaling function of the Woke faith is actually antithetical to the stated goals of Wokeness (i.e., creating a more just social world—which requires a broad coalition of different classes of people).

Well, yes, this is Wokeness as evinced by the slaves of postmodernism. But not all of the Woke adhere to postmodernism, and we all know of cases of postmodern haters who still flaunt their virtue without using complicated jargon—though there is always some jargon, like “intersectionality” and “hate speech”.

Here are some words on the demonization of others. This rings really true, especially the second paragraph, which highlights the Serena Williams affair that I could never see as a sign of sexism on the part of the umpire:

The Woke faithful almost certainly do believe that the world is unjust, even wicked, and they almost certainly do sincerely want to ameliorate the suffering of its victims. However, they also want to signal their membership to an elite and morally righteous club, and therefore they need an out-group, a foil, a morally wicked other for contrast. And, they can’t let just any kind-hearted person into their club, because then it would lose its exclusivity. So they must develop a strenuous vetting system, one that is vigilant and suspicious and quick to detect sin.

Furthermore, accusing others of violating the faith of the Woke can serve as a signal of one’s commitment to righteousness; and, perhaps perversely, the more ridiculous the accusation, the better the signal. How, after all, can somebody who accuses the entire tennis world of racism and sexism, be racist or sexist? This can lead to a kind of concept creep, in which those vying for status among the Woke compete to call out vanishingly trivial offenses and imagined slights as intolerable manifestations of racism, sexism, and patriarchal oppression. Meanwhile, many otherwise sane people, with no interest in the excesses of The Great Awokening, nevertheless feel compelled to agree with such fantastical claims for fear that otherwise they too will be accused of bigotry.

On the laziness of the Woke:

Of course, the signaling perspective also explains why so many disciples of Wokeness expend effort writing inscrutable articles about the patriarchy or denouncing sinners on Twitter rather than going out into the world to help the victims’ groups they claim to admire: their primary motivation, whatever their conscious beliefs, is to procure status. There are, of course, many courageous and devoted people who do work quietly to make the world better for minority groups; and those people deserve our admiration. But, many of the most conspicuous activists spend more time promising punishment to heretics on Twitter than they do helping their local communities. These Twitter displays are often called virtue signals, but they are probably better understood as commitment signals, because they don’t really signal a person’s underlying moral character, but they do signal his or her allegiance to the faith of Wokeness.

The other disagreement I have with this piece is the claim that the religion of “Wokeness” functions “predominantly to distinguish white elites from the white masses.”  Well, no. In fact many of the Woke are members of minorities higher in the oppression hierarchy. You don’t have to be white to be Woke, or to shame other people for not being sufficiently Woke. Remember the Asians, for instance, who chided the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for having Kimono Wednesdays, or the black people who argue that white writers shouldn’t write about the black experience (see a particularly bizarre accusation of inappropriate blackness here).  But beyond that, the Winegards have it pretty much right.

Control-Left: EVERYBODY is “problematic”

July 16, 2018 • 10:30 am

Why do I keep returning to HuffPost like a dog returning to its vomit? It’s probably because I consider the site, as the epitome of Control-Leftist journalism (and a widely read media platform) to be a harbinger of social changes to come in the Left. Already “mainstream” venues like the New York Times and the New Yorker, as well as a vast number of American colleges and universities, are showing the C-L streak, which I detect not by their social progressivism, but by a certain hectoring tone of their discourse and by the demonization of our political opponents as somehow morally impure.

Mixed in with those elements is the overweening method that C-Ls use in their attempts to effect social change: guilt. Like the Original Sin of Christians, all of us—and I mean everyone—is supposed to feel guilty because they harbor some degree of “privilege”: that we have benefited from the oppression of others and thus must atone for it, or at least admit it. (Lots of people have equated privilege with Original Sin.)

And, one by one, groups previously seen as oppressed are now seen as privileged: the most obvious example is the pronouncement by Britain’s National Union of Students that gay white males didn’t deserve representation in the LGBT societies because they don’t face oppression. Ultimately, the end of this slide is when everybody is deemed privileged, and told to atone for it, save for members of the most oppressed class. At the same time, everybody save cis white males will eventually be convinced they are oppressed and act like it, including Asian-Americans, one of the most privileged groups in the U.S.

In the HuffPo article below (click on screenshot), the privilege belongs not to white people, or gay males, but—wait for it—to Christians. Yes, the very same Christians who themselves complain about being oppressed. The insanity of this article, in which its author, a black woman, tells Christians that they’re all privileged and must atone for it, must be read to be believed:

An excerpt (my emphasis):

Some of us buy a pair of TOMS shoes to give a pair away to a child in Africa but never want to own the Christian industrial complex that economically disenfranchises children abroad and at home. Essentially, Christians want to have their cake and eat it too. We seek to hold what is pleasant or noble about our history while rejecting the notion of our participation in oppression systems, structures and organizations by nature of our belief in itself.

The problem is that if you identify as Christian (a highly politicized social identity as much as it is a religious one in the U.S.) you must, in having the social privileges of being Christian, also carry the social weight of taking on defensive postures to seem like one of the “good ones.”

This all gets shrouded under the notion that it simply isn’t fair to lump all people into one label or category. This is is sometimes true; however, with an identity as systemically privileged as being Christian is in the U.S. and with the gravity of historical nonsense perpetuated in the name of Jesus, it is not enough to simply ascribe responsibility to individuals in the same way it wouldn’t be helpful to focus on individual white people in dismantling systemic racism.

Notice first that many Christians are black, and hence already members of an oppressed group. Further, at least half, and probably more, are women, also oppressed. To what degree does their Christian “privilege” mitigate their oppression? How guilty should they feel for being Christian?

Second, how, exactly, are Christians oppressed? What is the “Christian industrial complex” of which they are members? What kind of guilt are you supposed to feel when giving away a pair of TOMS shoes to African children but are told that you’re a member of the “Christian industrial complex” of which TOMS is supposedly a part? Is TOMS even a “Christian” company? If so, I can’t see how. And the only criticism of TOMS I’ve found in a short trawl of the Internet is that the company might drive small shoe-sellers out of business or monetize white guilt by making people feel better without doing much. Well, something is better than nothing, and the plight of a few small shoe merchants seems lesser than that of many impoverished Africans. Yet TOMS is doing something—and I suspect far more than author Brandi Miller, who hectors fellow Christians for their privilege (she’s identified as “a campus minister and justice program director from the Pacific Northwest”).

Another excerpt:

Christians must learn a posture of listening, and instead of trying to crawl out of critiques, to ask better questions that help them to own identity and, as a result, hopefully gain renewal. There is no need to be defensive and decenter a conversation on perceived individual Christian exceptionalism when it simply serves to make the conversation about that Christian’s feelings rather than a critique being made on behalf of the marginalized.

As I read Miller’s article, it seemed to come down to this: “some Christians are privileged because they participate in oppression. Thus all Christians bear that burden and must expiate it.” But I realized that, by Miller’s lights, everyone is privileged in some way—for nobody lacks privilege except those at the very bottom of the hierarchy. Ergo, everyone is “problematic” too. More important, you don’t have to be Christian, or have privilege, to help those who truly are oppressed rather than those who simply proclaim their oppression. Instilling guilt in everyone, it seems to me, is not a good way to foment progressive social change, especially when that guilt is so blatantly manufactured—as it is in this case—that it would hardly convince everyone.

There are Christians who do good things, and Christian organizations who do good things. The people involved are not motivated by guilt deriving from “Christian privilege”, but by taking seriously what they see as part of a Christian message: help the meek, the ill, and the underprivileged on this planet.

Frankly, I’m tired of the guilt-instillers, whose sole job seems to be to indict people for their moral impurity rather than actually do something. Modern Germans bear no guilt for the way their ancestors treated the Jews, though they can be cognizant of those acts, and I bear them no rancor because their ancestors killed some of my ancestors. As the grandson of immigrants from Eastern Europe who themselves were oppressed, I don’t consider myself guilty for having been part of a social-construct “race” that oppressed blacks and killed Native Americans. Yes, those latter groups are largely disenfranchised, and we should do our best to afford them equal opportunities from birth, but not out of guilt. No, we should do it because no group deserves better opportunities than others simply because of the exigencies of history.

 

Bari Weiss in the NYT: the “intellectual dark web”

May 8, 2018 • 12:30 pm

I received this link from many readers, so of course I had to read it. Plus it was a piece by Bari Weiss, a beleaguered Leftist who’s been ostracized by her fellow New York Times writers for going after the Authoritarian Left:

A few quotes from Weiss:

What is the I.D.W. and who is a member of it? It’s hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

The closest thing to a phone book for the I.D.W. is a sleek website that lists the dramatis personae of the network, including Mr. Harris; Mr. Weinstein and his brother and sister-in-law, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers. But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

. . . But they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

What she could have said is that all of these people dare to criticize the Authoritarian Left. Period. Otherwise any extreme right-winger could be considered part of the IDW. And of course Weiss is not only part of the IDW, but it’s most visible mainstream scribe. As she says:

Like many in this group, I am a classical liberal who has run afoul of the left, often for voicing my convictions and sometimes simply by accident. This has won me praise from libertarians and conservatives. And having been attacked by the left, I know I run the risk of focusing inordinately on its excesses — and providing succor to some people whom I deeply oppose.

Still, I’m not happy with her piece, largely because of her failure to explain the dissimilarities of people whom she lumps together. The list includes, for example, conservative broadcaster and writer Ben Shapiro, but I wouldn’t include him as part of the IDW because he’s a garden variety Republican, not a liberal of any stripe, though he at least has sympathy for the #MeToo movement. But why not all vocal Republicans who dare risk the chance of being deplatformed by speaking at a college?

I think where Weiss goes wrong is implying that there’s some political agreement between these “renegades” (as she calls them), and the right: between someone like Ben Shapiro and Bret Weinstein. But there isn’t: Weinstein is a classic anti-racist liberal, and Shapiro is a a young and less abrasive William F. Buckley. Michael Shermer? A libertarian Leftist and hardly someone espousing right-wing politics. And putting Steve Pinker in the group with Milo Yiannopoulos? Again, their only commonality is their criticism of Control-Leftism, but Yiannopoulos isn’t a serious thinker but a provocateur.

Most of the people mentioned by Weiss do, as I said, converge in being willing to call out the Authoritarian Left, but that’s where it ends, unless you’re one of those people who claims that Weinstein or Sam Harris or Claire Lehmann or Steve Pinker are “alt right”—accusations that are common but palpably ridiculous.

Jordan Peterson is in the IDW mix too, but I still don’t know what to make of the guy, and haven’t had much time to listen to his stuff or read his books or articles. Alex Jones? He’s a bull-goose looney, as Randle McMurphy would say.

I wasn’t too impressed by this article given that Weiss tosses into the IDW pot a whole group of people having little in common—people like Kanye West and Alex Jones. So I have a hard time taking her seriously when she concludes this:

I get the appeal of the I.D.W. I share the belief that our institutional gatekeepers need to crack the gates open much more. I don’t, however, want to live in a culture where there are no gatekeepers at all. Given how influential this group is becoming, I can’t be alone in hoping the I.D.W. finds a way to eschew the cranks, grifters and bigots and sticks to the truth-seeking.

The association of cranks like Jones or provocateurs like Yianopoulos with serious thinkers like Heather Heying, Christina Hoff Sommers, Sam Harris, and Steve Pinker isn’t the fault of the cranks; it’s the fault of those (I won’t name them) who want to tar with the label “Nazi” any Leftist deviating from Ideological Purity. We already eschew the cranks, and if Weiss thinks there’s more we can do than say what we think, she should suggest a way.

But perhaps her piece is useful in calling the public’s attention to a number of “renegade” thinkers who might have escaped their attention. Yet Weiss damages her effectiveness by an uncharacteristic lack of thoughtfulness, and a desire to lump together people who aren’t all that similar. The stuff about “gatekeepers” I don’t understand, unless she’s somehow trying to make amends with her critical colleagues at the New York Times.