RUTHFULLY YOURS

A former UCLA communications professor known for his staunch defense of free speech who was recently fired by the university offered a sobering message to a room full of conservative- and libertarian-leaning students enrolled there.

“If they can get rid of a professor like me for speaking his mind, what is stopping them from doing the same thing to all of you,” Keith Fink asked the Bruin Republicans.

“We are in the middle of another Red Scare,” said Fink, an attorney and longtime lecturer who was terminated by the university earlier this year despite his popularity among students. His classes, which focused on free speech rights, often garnered waiting lists with 200-plus students.

He made the comments during his speech Wednesday for the GOP campus club. During his talk, called “UCLA’s Dirty Tricks Against Conservatives,” Fink said of UCLA’s leadership: “They twist the rules, they distort the rules, they ignore the rules.”

As for his performance review, Fink said he was told to submit two lists to the administration for peer evaluations: one list with names of individuals he felt were biased against him and another set of individuals he felt could accurately critique his class. Ultimately, no one from Fink’s list of accurate critiquers was chosen, he said.

Greg Bryant, the communication department’s vice department chair, was asked to critique the class. Fink said he did not believe that Bryant was qualified to evaluate his class because he “is not a litigator. He teaches a class about communicating with dolphins!”

Bryant wrote a two-page evaluation of the class that attacked Fink and his teaching style, calling Fink’s class “unwelcoming.” However, Thomas Miller, a UCLA communications professor, was also sitting in the class and wrote a five-page report applauding the class, Fink told the students.

Fink also wrote a 48-page response to Bryant’s evaluation, a response he said “tore Bryant’s paper to shreds.” Bryant’s evaluation was later thrown out and not mentioned by the administration after Fink’s response, he said

Fink was fired over the summer after he did not pass a performance review, one he said was biased against him. He told students the current communications department chair, Kerri Johnson, “despised” him and wanted him gone.

He called Johnson “very far to the left,” putting her in direct contrast with Fink, who said he doesn’t believe in “safe spaces or microaggressions.”

Fink acknowledged to students that his classes did get intense from time to time. He said that the socratic dialogue was inherently confrontational, and, as someone who mocks safe spaces, being politically correct was never a goal of Fink’s. Fink said that if students didn’t want to be challenged then they should “go take the dolphin class.”

Asked if he would ever come back to UCLA, he said: “I could teach many, many places. I want to teach here.”

After Johnson took over as department chair, Fink said his classes were targeted. First, she capped enrollment into his popular classes, leaving dozens of empty seats and frustrating many students, he said.

The sheer public spectacle of near-riots has forced some college administrators to take a stand for free expression and provide massive police protection when controversial speakers like Ben Shapiro come to campus. But when Mr. Shapiro leaves, the conditions that necessitated those extraordinary measures are still there. Administrators will keep having to choose between censoring moderate-to-conservative speakers, exposing their students to the threat of violence, and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on every speaker. It’s an expensive treatment that provides only momentary relief from a symptom.

What then is the disease? We are now close to the end of a half-century process by which the campuses have been emptied of centrist and right-of-center voices. Many scholars have studied the political allegiances of the faculty during this time. There have been some differences of opinion about methodology, but the main outline is not in doubt. In 1969 the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education found that there were overall about twice as many left-of-center as right-of-center faculty. Various studies document the rise of that ratio to 5 to 1 at the century’s end, and to 8 to 1 a decade later, until in 2016 Mitchell Langbert, Dan Klein, and Tony Quain find it in the region of 10 to 1 and still rising.

Even these figures understate the matter. The overall campus figures include professional schools and science, technology, business and mathematics departments. In most humanities and social-science departments—especially those central to a liberal education, such as history, English and political science—the share of left-of-center faculty already approaches 100%.

The imbalance is not only a question of numbers. Well-balanced opposing views act as a corrective for each other: The weaker arguments of one side are pounced on and picked off by the other. Both remain consequently healthier and more intellectually viable. But intellectual dominance promotes stupidity. As one side becomes numerically stronger, its discipline weakens. The greater the imbalance between the two sides, the more incoherent and irrational the majority will become.

What we are now seeing on the campuses illustrates this general principle perfectly. The nearly complete exclusion of one side has led to complete irrationality on the other. With almost no intellectual opponents remaining, campus radicals have lost the ability to engage with arguments and resort instead to the lazy alternative of name-calling: Opponents are all “fascists,” “racists” or “white supremacists.”

In a state of balance between the two sides, leadership flows naturally to those better able to make the case for their side against the other. That takes knowledge and skill. But when one side has the field to itself, leadership flows instead to those who make the most uncompromising and therefore intellectually least defensible case, one that rouses followers to enthusiasm but can’t stand up to scrutiny. Extremism and demagoguery win out. Physical violence is the endpoint of this intellectual decay—the stage at which academic thought and indeed higher education have ceased to exist.

That is the condition that remains after Mr. Shapiro and the legions of police have left campus: More than half of the spectrum of political and social ideas has been banished from the classrooms, and what remains has degenerated as a result. The treatment of visiting speakers calls attention to that condition but is not itself the problem. No matter how much money is spent on security, no matter how many statements supporting free speech are released, the underlying disease continues to metastasize.

During the long period in which the campus radical left was cleansing the campuses of opposition, it insisted that wasn’t what it was doing. Those denials have suddenly been reversed. The exclusion of any last trace of contrary opinion is not only acknowledged but affirmed. Students and faculty even demand “safe spaces” where there is no danger that they will be exposed to any contrary beliefs. CONTINUE AT SITE

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.”