RUTHFULLY YOURS

Professor Mark Bray is what passes for the intellectual wing of Antifa. You might recall that I mentioned him here:

Antifa, says Mark Bray, “have no allegiance to liberal democracy, which they believe has failed the marginalized communities they’re defending.” Professor Bray is a lecturer in history at GRID, the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth, which is the usual social engineering flimflam masquerading as a field of scholarship, but it’s Ivy League so it’ll cost you an arm and a leg (metaphorically, I mean; not literally, like, say, attending a Charles Murray speech at Middlebury). Dartmouth College is in the town of Hanover (median family income $129,000), in the state of New Hampshire (93.9 per cent white, 1.1 per cent black). So, when it comes to “marginalizing” communities, Professor Bray knows whereof he speaks. It’s so much more rewarding, don’t you find, to defend marginalized communities from a safe distance: They look a lot more marginalized when they’re on the far horizon, somewhere south of the Massachusetts line.

But then, viewed from the Gender Research Institute in leafy, pampering Hanover, everything’s on the far horizon. I see The College Fix calls Professor Bray “a foppish son of privilege”. I’m not myself foppaphobic: My old school song contained the stern injunction, “Here’s no place for fop or idler”, notwithstanding that, on a casual glance of the room, large numbers of both had managed to slip in. But the Fix’s epithet does accurately convey the sense of no-nothing trustie-fundies winging it. Yet the Bray of Privilege is ringing throughout academe. In The Chronicle of Higher Education Nell Gluckman offers a glowing paean to the man she dubs “The Button-Down Anarchist”:

Bluestockings [‘a cooperatively owned bookstore in lower Manhattan’] was Mr. Bray’s first appearance on a 35-stop tour to promote Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House), a book he’d never planned to write. He had researched turn-of-the-century Spanish radicalism as a doctoral student at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, and seemed well on his way to a life of teaching undergraduates and writing about modern European history. Then Donald Trump won the presidency, white nationalists rejoiced, and 20th-century European fascism was suddenly on everyone’s mind.

Bluestockings, eh? In my day, bluestockings used to know things. That’s what made them a turn-on. Now that last sentence is how a supposedly sophisticated “chronicle” of “higher” “education” summarizes a national election. Obviously, 20th-century European fascism wasn’t “on everyone’s mind”; for a start, it wasn’t on the minds of the half of the country that voted for Trump, who had, like them or not, reasons of their own. But never mind that – that’s just the groupthink of the American academy. What’s even more of an eye-roller for us free-speech types was the essay’s conclusion:

Mr. Scott has paid attention to the rising interest in antifa, and he has watched his friend [Professor Bray] on TV. He finds himself relying on Mr. Bray once again.

In fact, there’s a point Mr. Bray made in an interview that Mr. Scott often finds himself citing. “We don’t look back at the Weimar Republic today and celebrate them for allowing Nazis to have their free-speech rights,” he says. “We look back and say, Why didn’t they do something?”

It is a testament to the wholesale moronization of our culture that there are gazillions of apparently sane people willing to take out six figures of debt they’ll be paying off for decades for the privilege of being “taught” by the likes of Professor Bray. The reason “we don’t look back at the Weimar Republic today and celebrate them for allowing Nazis to have their free-speech rights” is because they didn’t. A decade ago, as my battles with Canada’s “human rights” commissions were beginning, I lost count of the number of bien-pensants insisting that, while in theory we could permit hatemongers like Steyn to exercise their free-speech rights, next thing you know it would be jackboots on the 401. As I said way back when:

“Hateful words” can lead to “unspeakable crimes.” The problem with this line is that it’s ahistorical twaddle, as I’ve pointed out. Yet still it comes up. It did last month, during my testimony to the House of Commons justice committee, when an opposition MP mused on whether it wouldn’t have been better to prohibit the publication of Mein Kampf.

“That analysis sounds as if it ought to be right,” I replied. “But the problem with it is that the Weimar Republic—Germany for the 12 years before the Nazi party came to power—had its own version of Section 13 and equivalent laws. It was very much a kind of proto-Canada in its hate speech laws. The Nazi party had 200 prosecutions brought against it for anti-Semitic speech. At one point the state of Bavaria issued an order banning Hitler from giving public speeches.”

As universities continue to be roiled by a debate over which speakers, and which viewpoints, can and should be heard on campuses, some concerned administrators, faculty, and students have sought ways to mitigate the increasing number of events during which heckling, intimidation, and even physical violence were used to foreclose unpopular speech.

Those who have led these protest against conservative viewpoints—progressive students, Muslim students, leftist professors, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and others—have displayed a shocking disregard for the university’s cardinal virtue of free expression, deciding themselves who may say what about whom on their respective campuses, and purging from campuses those ideas they have deemed too hateful, too unsafe, too incendiary to tolerate or to allow to be heard.

When Antifa thugs and other illiberal Berkeley students marauded through campus to shut down a scheduled speech last February by conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, for instance, the apparent lesson learned by many who assessed the unfortunate events was not that the protestors’ unwillingness to let opposing views to be heard represented a grave threat to unfettered speech and expression; instead, the takeaway seemed to be that the disruptions and rioting were the fault of the conservative students groups who invited the controversial speakers in the first place, and that those shutting down so-called “hate speech,” any view inconsistent with liberal thought, were doing so defensively to prevent toxic, hurtful, or intellectually dangerous ideas from harming the sensibilities of the many coddled special interest groups on campus.

Guest speakers, of course, are invited to campus by student groups, but in the wake of a succession of controversial appearances by conservative speakers faculty also began to suggest different ways to avoid clashes of ideology, the most obvious one—in their minds, at least—being to more carefully vet individuals in advance and counsel student groups about potentially problematic speakers, based on their prior writing, speaking, and notoriety. This process sounds innocuous enough but is actually quite pernicious when the ultimate intent is to screen the views and ideologies of prospective speakers as a way of preventing them from ever coming to campus at all—in short, violating content neutrality when assessing permitted speech and proscribing certain views in advance.

One recent instance where a professor expressed his view that faculty should be actively involved in the selection of speakers was an October op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education in which Mark Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia, suggested that faculty members, not students, should “decide who gets to speak on campus.” “Free Speech Week was sponsored by a student group,” he wrote, referring to a four-day Berkeley event to host conservative speakers, “and yet it seems to me an open question whether students should be allowed to issue such invitations.”

Professor Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto instructor who won’t use “gender neutral” pronouns, says students should know what they’re getting into when taking courses from hard-core leftist faculty. That’s not sitting well with some of Peterson’s colleagues who say identifying their politics amounts to harassment.

Peterson told the Toronto Star on Friday that he has discussed the idea of creating an “information website” that would forewarn students that a course they’ve selected has an ideological axe to grind with “radical left social justice-oriented courses.”

“I’m not happy with the fact that a huge chunk of the humanities and the social sciences have turned into an indoctrination cult. So I thought, well, the students need to be informed. Because they don’t have the information necessary to make an informed choice, and this would help them make an informed choice,” Peterson told the Star.

The professor says he’s surprised that there would be objections raised now when he hasn’t even discussed the website for over three months. What Peterson envisioned at that time was a reference of “courses and professors and disciplines that should be avoided” for students not interested in left-wing social justice teaching.

But that isn’t sitting well with the U of T facility. Faculty association president Cynthia Messenger issued a statement on Friday that explained how her group “has taken the unprecedented step of asking that the entire executive meet with the provost’s office to express our deep concern about this threat to our members and to the academic mission of the university.”

Peterson was unfazed by the “unprecedented” action, telling the Star that if “what the faculty association did today was an attempt to intimidate me into not doing it, you can be bloody sure that they’ve failed completely.”

The free speech advocate dismissed the statement as another example of university groups “bowing to pressure from a radical minority.”

Peterson asked where the “threat” is to anyone. “It isn’t obvious to me, at least, that providing students with more information about the courses that they’re going to take and their philosophical underpinnings actually constitutes a reprehensible move.”

The takeover of elite higher education is almost complete when it comes sexuality. The movement demanding normalization of sexual practices formerly forbidden by law and custom began with the Stonewall Riots (or “uprising,” as some prefer) just under half a century ago and is now indoctrinating the designated next-generation leaders of the ruling class. This is the nature of the regime the progressive left administers throughout education and the culture.

The story below was sent to me by a pal of mine who loves to torment me for my ties to Harvard.

He asks, “Where would we be without such prestigious schools like Harvard?” I have an answer that breaks my heart to think of what we have lost.

Warning: This could be upsetting and contains graphic content. “Harvard University hosts anal sex workshop.”

In a tweet that he says he now regrets, a professor stated that it’s only “rational” to believe that “the GOP and NRA must, in fact, want mass shootings” because “it serves their interests.” The tweet was initially noticed by Campus Reform, which redacted the professor’s name and university affiliation. A quick search of Twitter, however, suggested that it was Bruce Lambert, a communications professor at Northwestern University:

National Review reached out to Lambert via email, and he confirmed he was indeed the subject of Campus Reform’s article. (As of Wednesday morning, it appears that Lambert has deleted his Twitter account.)

One of Campus Reform’s correspondents, Adam Sabes, contacted Lambert to ask him to explain. In his reply, Lambert explained that the tweet had been posted “in a moment of supreme frustration and sorrow,” when he was wondering “why the GOP and NRA would not support some more aggressive efforts at gun control to stop these increasingly frequent mass shootings.”

“Upon reflection, now that my emotions have cooled somewhat, I do not actually believe the GOP or NRA wants mass shootings,” Lambert continued.

Yeah, — you think?

Honestly, the fact that Lambert actually used the word “rational” in his initial tweet just might be the most ridiculous thing about it. Yes, Lambert. It’s only “rational” to believe that the millions upon millions of Americans who call themselves Republicans and/or NRA members are actually just tricking us into thinking that they’re normal members of society — when really, they’re evil sociopaths whose every move is motivated by the desire to see mass carnage. That makes total sense! In fact, when someone says, “I am a Republican,” what they really mean is, “I want a mass shooting!” Not to mention the fact that a mass shooting certainly “serves the interests” of the NRA. After all, it always results in an angry Internet army telling all of its members that it was all of their fault, and who doesn’t think that that sounds like a party?

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio cruised to re-election Tuesday against opponents who had little money or name recognition. New Yorkers can now look forward to four more years of Mr. de Blasio’s political contributions to the United Federation of Teachers union that backs him.

One reason the UFT loves the mayor is his recent decision to ensure that unhireable teachers are also unfireable. Worse, the Department of Education is now forcing schools to fill hundreds of vacancies from its Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR), putting failed instructors back in the classroom full-time.

New York’s statistics show how awful many of these teachers are. Those in the absent teacher pool were deemed either “ineffective” or “unsatisfactory” at a rate 12 times higher than the city average. Roughly a third were yanked from the classroom because of a legal or disciplinary case. Teachers in the ATR can apply at any vacant position across New York City’s 1,700 public schools, so it’s worth wondering why 37% of ATR teachers haven’t managed to find any principal willing to give them a permanent job for four years or more.

Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña has promised that ATR teachers won’t be foisted on any of the 86 struggling K-12s in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Renewal School Program. That’s a tacit admission that these instructors pose a risk to student education. But ATR teachers can be forcibly placed at other troubled non-renewal schools, including East Fordham Academy for the Arts in the Bronx, where 98% of students lack basic math skills, and Brooklyn’s Lyon Community School, where just 8% of students achieve reading and writing proficiency.

Ms. Fariña also claims New York is “not putting people who have a record of not behaving in any school.” Then again, three years ago, she also promised that “there will be no forced placement of staff.”

Colleges have been rocked by student protests, but now they’re launching a demonstration of their own in Washington against reductions to their tax subsidies. They’re throwing a tantrum because they may, at long last, have to rationalize their spending.

The IRS code contains about a dozen individual tax subsidies for higher education, all with disparate rules that the IRS describes in a 95-page brochure that makes academic prose look lucid. Parents and students can claim three different tax credits, deduct loan interest, and receive an exemption for some discharged loans and tuition assistance.

These dispensations are layered on top of low-interest federal loans (4.45% for undergrads), grants and loan-forgiveness programs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the government will lose about 25 cents on every dollar of subsidized Stafford loans.

Colleges that have been riding this gravy train are howling that Republican House reforms repealing and consolidating their tax carveouts will raise tuition. But stripping down the subsidies might make students and parents more aware of costs and impel colleges to curb unnecessary spending.

Take the three tax credits, which the House bill proposes to combine into a partly refundable $2,500 American Opportunity Tax Credit that can be claimed for up to five years. This simplification would yield about $17.5 billion in revenue over 10 years and reduce the enticement for students to drag out their education. The Lifetime Learning Credit, which is part of the consolidation, can now be claimed indefinitely.

Despite suffering several public and humiliating reversals in various forums and venues, those pushing for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel have not dispensed with their pernicious campaign of hate. The latest outrage perpetrated by BDS activists occurred at McGill University, where a Jewish student and two non-Jewish students identified as pro-Israel were removed from their positions as directors of the Students Society of McGill University (SSMU).

At the end of his second year, Noah Lew, who is currently third year undergraduate student at McGill University, applied to serve as Director of the School’s student society. He was warned by others who had prior dealings with the SSMU, to keep his Jewish identity secret lest he sabotage his chances. This is the atmosphere that Jewish students and supporters of Israel must endure on a daily basis at McGill. The toxic environment is due almost exclusively to an active and vocal presence of BDS agitators on campus. Lew followed the advice and was elected as a board member. His “secret” was intact.

BDS provocateurs at McGill had relentlessly tried and failed to pass boycott resolutions against Israel. In fact, three attempts within an 18-month period were quashed. Finally, in June 2016, SSMU’s Judicial Board ruled that the BDS campaign and efforts to institute it at McGill ran counter to the McGill’s undergraduate student union constitution.

The Board’s ruling, which is called a “reference,” was then referred to SSMU’s directors for ratification. SSMU’s Board of Directors addressed the issue more than a year after the “reference.” Lew and other board members passionately advocated in favor of ratification and their arguments ultimately prevailed over the naysayers. The malevolent BDS campaign at McGill had belatedly come to an ignominious end; or so we thought.