Academia’s Leftism becomes more aggressive and more stupid By Andrea Widburg
Conservatives have long been concerned about the stranglehold Leftists have had on academia in North America. Recent news from academia should give them more reason than usual to be worried about what’s happen to students trapped in these institutions.
The most recent outrage — and it is outrageous — came on Tuesday from the University of Calgary, in Canada. Professor Ted McCoy, the coordinator of the Law and Society Program in the university’s sociology department, sent out a tweet clarifying rumors about his classroom polices: “I heard it rumoured students will fail my class if they cite Jordan Peterson and I’d like to clarify that this is absolutely correct,” he tweeted.
Jordan Peterson, for those unfamiliar with his work, is a respected professor of psychology with a large body of work that has been cited thousands of times over the years. Normally, assuming the student cites a publication relevant to the student’s research, Peterson would be a rational source.
But Jordan Peterson is more than just a scholar. He rose to prominence in two ways. First, he compiled a series of essays that urged people to be responsible for their own lives. These essays in turn led to a bestselling book and worldwide tours to discuss the issues in his book.
Second, he refused to comply with the Canadian government’s Bill C-16, which adds gender expression and identity to the list of protected identities under the Canadian Human Rights Act, something that theoretically makes it a crime in Canada to “misgender” a person. Peterson rightly said the law is Orwellian in that it seeks to compel and control speech.
For his intellectual honesty, Peterson, a remarkably articulate and unflappable man, became a hero to conservatives and anathema to Leftists. For that last reason, at least one professor in Canada, namely Prof. McCoy, decided to further demonstrate just how Orwellian the Left is by not only banning mention of Peterson in his class, but promising to destroy the academic careers of those who resist that ban.
Prof. McCoy is not the only academic who went astray this week. In some ways, he can be excused because, as a sociologist, no one expects him to be anything other than a ravening Leftist. What was extremely disturbing, though, was the fact that a physicist also launched herself into the identity politics stratosphere.
University of New Hampshire professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (A.B., Harvard; M.S., U.C. Santa Cruz; Ph.D., University of Waterloo) isn’t just a core faculty member of the Department of Physics. She also has something to do with women’s studies, although it’s not entirely clear what.
Perhaps that last affiliation is why, after blacks in New York and New Jersey committed a rash of violent and sometimes fatal attacks on Jews, she assured her Twitter followers that, just as people of color cannot be racist, only white people can be anti-Semitic (although they can infect black people):
University of New Hampshire physics professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein took to Twitter on New Year’s Eve to explain why anti-Semitism is exclusively a “white” problem, and why it is inappropriate to discuss anti-Semitic acts committed by black people.
Prescod-Weinstein began her tweetstorm by explaining that it is “anti-Black” and “dangerous both to non-Jewish Black people and to Jews” to consider violent attacks against Jews by Black people “equivalent” to “white antisemitism.”
“Antisemitism in the United States, historically, is a white Christian problem, and if any Black people have developed antisemitic views it is under the influence of white gentiles,” the professor clarified.
The professor goes on to explain how “white Jews adopted whiteness as a social praxis and harmed Black people in the process,” and that “Some Black people have problematically blamed Jewishness for it.”
“There is no systemic Black on Jewish violence,” the professor clarified before insisting that “Putting more police and people with guns outside of synagogues may make white Jews feel safer but it will endanger Jews of color, especially Black Jews and Middle Eastern Jews.”
When called upon to explain her tweets, Prescod-Weinstein made her Twitter account private and refused to respond to any questions.
To round out this Leftist trio, Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard economics professor (and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund), took to the Guardian to insist that the only way to fight climate change is to transfer American money to third-world countries.
Indeed, he insisted that Americans are guilty of creating even more carbon emissions in China thanks to President Trump’s trade policies putting pressure on the Chinese economy. The article is a swirl of economic and climate gobbledygook. It’s stunning to think this kind of nonsense is now acceptable for professors from a once-reputable institution.
Rogoff’s contentions are not economics; they are socialism. His argument is entirely in line with a U.N. IPCC official’s admission, in 2010, that the whole purpose of pushing alleged anthropogenic climate change is to “redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”
Our children are not getting educated; they are getting indoctrinated, and the indoctrination carries with it a high stupidity factor.
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