RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is the first of what we hope will be a long-running series of posts on Books With Spines. Gentle reader, we invite you to suggest good books for each topic we post about—and there’s a Google form at the bottom of this post that you should click on to send us your suggestions for our first topic – good books about bad teachers (let us know by Sunday, April 10, please!). This is an experiment—if it doesn’t work out, we’ll fold our tents. But with your help, we can make this a regular feature.

The Academe blog at the Association of American University Professor’s (AAUP) website put up a post a few days ago that reproduces New York’s magazine’s listing by “28 People on the Lesbian-Culture Artifacts That Changed Their Lives.” This is an expansive list of inspirational writings, which includes some marginal members of the scene: Harriet M. Welsch from Harriet the Spy figures on the list, although Peppermint Patty failed to make the cut. More typical works include Mädchen in Uniform (1931), The Lesbian Body (1975) and Desert Hearts (1985).

It’s a narrowly identitarian list for our narrowly identitarian times, but we’re grateful to Academe for posting it since it got us thinking about making some lists of our own. These lists, after all, are the heartblood of education—the heartblood of tradition. All canons start by people saying to one another, “say, you ought to read this! It’s a really good book, and it’ll help make you the sort of person you ought to be.” New York magazine is just doing the latest variation of what we’ve been doing for a few thousand years—waving a book under somebody’s nose and saying “Give it a try!” If they can do it, so can we—by way of friendly competition, as we both do our bit to keep up the process of canon formation.

The NAS staff is going to be putting a series of book lists up on our website—but lists of a different sort. Each week we’re going to have a new list—Portraits of Bad Teachers; Important Books I Finished after Multiple Tries; Books About Imprisonment; Books Imagining the Middle Ages; Overrated Classics; and Guilty Pleasure Books. And we’re going to invite our readers—you—to make your own suggestions as well. We’ll put the combined lists together on our website, a week after we post our first suggestions. We think this will be fun, but serious fun—do-it-ourselves canon formation, you and us together, to give the AAUP and New York a run for their money as they try to form tomorrow’s canon.

There was a time when CUNY meant a quality education at an affordable price. Today, for many Jewish students who attend CUNY, the institution has become synonymous with anti-Semitism and anti-Israel vitriol. This is due almost exclusively to the malevolent presence of a pernicious student group that calls itself Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

Former CUNY board member Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld has accurately described the SJP as the “equivalent of bullying brownshirts.” This characterization may actually be an understatement. The SJP possesses all the hallmarks of a fascist student organization that operates under the larger umbrella of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamo-fascist organization that maintains a number of subgroups, each of which is tasked with furthering its cancerous ideology.

The SJP employs intimidation tactics designed to promote fear, harass and bully. Its group members have frequently disrupted pro-Israel or Jewish themed events by shouting down invited speakers and physically preventing students and others from attending. Conversely, Jewish and pro-Israel students who have attended events sponsored by the SJP have been arbitrarily removed on orders of SJP enforcers in full view of high-level CUNY officials.

Wiesenfeld also noted that SJP members are “specifically instructed and trained that disruption, shouting, harassment and the like are to be the CORE, not the periphery, of their activities.” Often, these activities manifest to overt anti-Semitism and escalate to actual physical violence against Jewish students.

America’s privileged students at elite colleges and universities continue to be traumatized by speech they find “hurtful” and “threatening.” Last November at Yale it was a faculty email suggesting that students should lighten up on policing Halloween costumes for racial insensitivity. At the University of Missouri, some students were offended by the administration’s failure to investigate and punish alleged racial slurs. A Harvard student recently told FOX News’ Meghan Kelly that displaying the American flag in a dorm room or just being in the same class with a pro-life student is hurtful and insensitive. Now students at Emory University are experiencing “pain,” “fear,” and “frustration” over messages supporting Donald Trump that were written in chalk on campus sidewalks. At Scripps College, #Trump2016 written on a dorm whiteboard was called “racist” and “intentional violence.”

There’s been no end of commentary on these incidents. Some have correctly pointed out that they are the fruit of nearly four decades of the progressive and leftist transformation of the university. Once a protected space for truth, independent thought, and free speech, now universities are training centers for left-wing cadres and commissars intolerant of political heresy and opposing points of view. Listen to the vice-president of the Missouri Students Association, responding to questions about the professor who had asked for “muscle” to scare off a journalist covering a protest. “I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here.”

Other critics blame a culture of permissive parenting and a therapeutic obsession with children’s feelings that have led to demands for “safe spaces,” speech codes, and rigorous surveillance of “microagressions.” A callow youth at Yale demonstrated this change, hysterically shouting to a professor and master of a campus residence, “It is not about creating an intellectual space! . . . It is about creating a home here!” Another Yale student in an article for the student paper wrote, “I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain!” The university’s role of being in loco parentis now means recreating the pampered indulgence of childish feelings that many affluent students have became used to at home.

These analyses are revealing, and the weird incoherence of this combination of Marx and Oprah has been neatly captured by William Voegli in an essay for the Claremont Review of Books: “The compassion commandos of 2015 are history’s first revolutionaries to mount the barricades in the name of their own emotional fragility.” Yet there are other causes of the “snowflake” phenomenon.

Start with federal law. Sexual harassment and Title IX legislation employ vague and subjective language that invites legal complaints no matter how obviously absurd. Once harassment proscribes actions or words that create an “intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment,” as sexual harassment law puts it, then the standards for defining these subjective terms will be set by the hypersensitive, the neurotic, or the Machiavellian opportunist. So too with Title IX, which says no one will “be subjected to discrimination” on the basis of sex. But who will define what constitutes “discrimination”? Students like the one quoted above, who echoes sexual harassment law with her phrase “hostile and unsafe learning environment.”

The relentless war on carbon is justified by the false assumption that global temperature is controlled by human production of two carbon-bearing “greenhouse gases.” The scary forecasts of runaway heating are based on complicated but narrowly focused carbon-centric computerized global circulation models built for the U.N. IPCC. These models omit many significant climate factors and rely heavily on dodgy temperature records and unproven assumptions about two trace natural gases in the atmosphere.

The models fail to explain Earth’s long history of changing climates and ignore the powerful role of interacting cycles in the solar system, which determine how much solar energy is absorbed and reflected by Earth’s atmosphere, clouds, and surface. Several ancient societies and some modern mavericks, without help from million-dollar computers, recognized that the Sun, Moon, and major planets produce cyclic changes in Earth’s climate.

The IPCC models also misread the positive and negative temperature feedback from water vapor (the main greenhouse gas), and their accounting for natural processes in the carbon cycle is based on very incomplete knowledge and numerous unproven assumptions.

See: Errors in the IPCC Global Circulation Models:
http://jo.nova.s3.amazonaws.com/guest/david-evans/media-release-evans-climate.pdf

http://sciencespeak.com/climate-basic.html

The dreaded “greenhouse gases” (carbon dioxide and methane) are natural gases. Man did not create them – they occur naturally in comets and planets and have been far more plentiful in previous atmospheres on Earth. They are abundant in the oceans and the atmosphere and are buried in deposits of gas, oil, coal, shale, methane clathrates, and vast beds of limestone. Land and sea plants absorb CO2, and micro-organisms absorb methane in deep oceans.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana tells us.

The philosopher’s statement poses a unique problem for many top U.S. colleges, where students and faculty have pressed for some time to ensure that they never learn about their past in the first place.

The latest example is Stanford University, where an attempt is underway to suppress the recognition of Western civilization. Students at Stanford want to reinstate the subject as a core curriculum course. Some students are fighting it. The proposal is in the form of a ballot initiative that would require the faculty senate to debate whether the study of Western civilization should be reinstated.

The school eliminated the required class in 1988, a year after the Rev. Jesse Jackson led a march in which participants – undoubtedly inspired by the works of Yeats and Tennyson – chanted: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go.”

The undergraduate student body will have the ability to vote on the ballot initiative this week.

Despite its non-binding nature, efforts to smother it and smear its supporters began soon after the petition’s launch, which should surprise no one. Many college campuses have become “safe spaces” for bullying and intimidation to silence the free speech of conservatives, a tactic to which we are not immune.

Such efforts are unfortunate. Religious freedom is a cornerstone of Western civilization and has served as an overwhelming force for good in the world.

In other parts of the globe, ISIS is destroying pre-Islamic artifacts and committing genocide against religious minorities in the Middle East. Jamat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the hardcore Islamist Pakistani Taliban, murdered 74 people and injured 362 in an Easter Sunday assault on Christians in Lahore. The name of the murderous ISIS-affiliate Boko Haram in Nigeria loosely translates to “Western education is a sin.”