RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/04/27/what-i-saw-at-middlebury-college/

“At a meeting last week at Middlebury College, students upset and angry that conservative Ryszard Legutko had been invited to speak on campus were calmed and reassured by three administrators who apologized to the students for their feelings of discomfort, agreed that they had every right to feel aggrieved, and assured them there’s steps underway to ensure controversial right-wing speakers are not easily invited to campus in the future,” reported Jennifer Kabbany of The College Fix this week. “That according to a 40-minute recording of the meeting recorded surreptitiously by a student in the room…who said the three administrators at the meeting were Sujata Moorti, the incoming dean of the faculty, as well as Dean of Students, Baishakhi Taylor, and Renee Wells, director of education for equity and inclusion.”

The “student in the room” cited in this report—that was me. But before I discuss the controversy over Legutko, let me offer a brief flashback to February 6, 2019.

At the time, I was beginning my first semester of college as what Middlebury calls a “Feb”: Along with about 80 or 90 classmates, I was beginning my college education a semester late. I moved in while most of the campus was away on break, and spent the week getting to know the other Feb freshmen. It was essentially a week full of fun activities and bonding on an idyllic private liberal-arts college campus in rural Vermont. Along with everyone else, I was encouraged to believe that this is what the whole Middlebury experience would be like. And maybe, in times of yore, it was. But not in this era, when students are encouraged to experience campus life as one long sequence of ideologically-inflicted psychic traumas.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/keynote-speaker

Christians ‘deserve to be mocked viciously and run out of the public square’To celebrate a “Decade of Dialogue” in its annual diversity conference, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences invited a straight white man to give the keynote lecture.But not just any straight white man.Tim Wise, an “anti-racism writer, educator and activist,” has denigrated Christians as “Jeezoids” and fascists and called Pope Francis evil. He has tweeted that “people who believe in a God of hell/damnation deserve to be mocked viciously and run out of the public square.”Those who base their morality on the Hebrew Scriptures “deserve to be locked up,” he said in 2015, claiming to be “sorta kidding but not by much.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/27/the-demon-in-democracy/
Earlier this month, Polish political philosopher Ryszard Legutko was supposed to deliver a lecture at Middlebury College in Vermont. A few hours before the event took place, college administrators called off the event, explaining the decision was based “based on an assessment of our ability to respond effectively to potential security and safety risks for both the lecture and the event students had planned in response.”

Legutko is a professor of philosophy at Jagellonian University in Krakow, Poland, specializing in ancient philosophy and political theory. He has served as a Polish government minister and a member of the European Parliament. He’s also an ardent anti-Communist with traditionalist views. That was enough, evidently, to make him a “threat” to the “safety” of Middlebury students.

Legutko gave a lecture anyway to a small group of students in a political science class. “All this was done in defiance of the college administration,” he later told the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher. “I was smuggled in a student’s car to the campus and entered the building through the backdoor.” Encounter Books editor and publisher Roger Kimball writes about the incident and its aftermath here.

In 2016, Encounter published Legutko’s latest book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. In it, Legutko argues that liberal democracy “tends to develop the qualities that were characteristic of Communism: pervasive politicization, ideological zeal, aggressive social engineering, vulgarity, a belief in inevitability of progress, destruction of family, the omnipresent rule of ideological correctness, and the severe restriction of intellectual inquiry.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/27/want-to-fix-the-universities-here-are-two-options/

Once upon a time, long, long ago—in May 2005, in fact—I wrote an essay for The New Criterion with the optimistic title “Retaking the University: A Battle Plan.” That was back when I believed that the educational establishment in this country could be rescued from its wasting captivity in the arid pandemonium of political correctness.

I know, I know, it all seems so naïve now when the totalitarian, politically correct ideologues ruling most of our distinguished colleges and universities have succumbed utterly, indeed proudly, to The Narrative about race and sex, the putative evils of America, and, oh, so much else, and dissenting opinions, and the persons espousing them, are strictly excluded from the desolate though expensive eyries of insanity that define what we still call, without irony, our institutions of “higher education.”

A couple of years ago, students at Middlebury College (total freight-on-board, some 74,000 of the crispest per annum) covered themselves in shame by loudly protesting the great social scientist Charles Murray, first preventing him from talking, then violently mobbing him and one of his female faculty handlers, sending her to the hospital. I wrote about that disgusting incident in these pages at the time. “What happened at Middlebury,” I wrote, “was a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy.”

Every student who can be identified in that video should be expelled and Laurie Patton [the college’s president] should resign. The former have violated the basic compact of respect upon which liberal education rests and the latter has vividly demonstrated her incompetence.

Neither happened, of course, nor did anyone follow up on my concluding suggestion that “the college should be closed and its facilities repurposed as something useful—a menagerie, perhaps, in homage to the strange, intolerant creatures that cavorted there when it pretended to be an educational institution.”