RUTHFULLY YOURS

Preparing to speak on “Students and the First Amendment” at William and Mary College, ClaireGastañaga, executive director of the ACLU’s Virginia chapter, found herself silenced by Black Lives Matter protestors.

An SJW activist herself, Gastañaga had just started her speech when the protestors marched to the stage. Holding placards, they silently lined up across the front of the auditorium.

One of the initial ironies happened as the protestors marched down the aisle. At that point, Gastañaga said, “Good, I like this. I’m going to talk to you about knowing your rights, and protests and demonstrations, which this illustrates very well. Then I’m going to respond to questions from the moderators, and then questions from the audience.”

Black Lives Matter W&M ignored her and broke into a chant of “ACLU, you protect Hitler, too.”

Repeatedly asking “whose side are you on?” the protestors kept up their chanting for nearly twenty minutes. Some of the more memorable (and ironic) chants included: “The oppressed are not impressed.” “Your free speech hides beneath white sheets.” “The revolution will not uphold the Constitution.” and “Liberalism is white supremacy.”

As the chanting ended, a young woman stepped to a microphone and delivered a speech accusing the ACLU of consistently being on the wrong side of history because they use their platform to promote white supremacy.

The planned speech eventually fizzled out as the protesters surrounded Gastañaga and prevented other students from asking questions. BLM W&M stuck around for another twenty minutes, chanting to what appeared to be an empty auditorium by the end.

Black Lives Matter W&M live streamed the event on their Facebook page and explained, ” In contrast to the ACLU, we want to reaffirm our position of zero tolerance for white supremacy no matter what form it decides to masquerade in.”

The revolution may not uphold the Constitution, but I bet they’re thankful that the Constitution stands in between them and government-led reprisals. A stunt like this one in a non-woke country would earn them a long stint in a gulag. If they spent more time in history class and less time making posters, they might have learned a little appreciation for a country that “oppresses” them by allowing them to disrupt free speech events.

William & Mary President Taylor Reveley released a statement that panders to SJWs and ignores the irony of the whole affair while refusing to name BLM as the protestors.

“William & Mary has a powerful commitment to the free play of ideas. We have a campus where respectful dialogue, especially in disagreement, is encouraged so that we can listen and learn from views that differ from our own, so that we can freely express our own views, and so that debate can occur. Unfortunately, that type of exchange was unable to take place Wednesday night when an event to discuss a very important matter – the meaning of the First Amendment — could not be held as planned.

The event, co-sponsored by William & Mary’s student-run programming organization Alma Mater Productions (AMP) and the ACLU, was entitled “Students and the First Amendment.” The anticipated conversation never occurred when protestors refused to allow Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, to be heard. The protesters then drowned out students who gathered around Ms. Gastañaga seeking to ask her questions, hear her responses and voice their own concerns. CONTINUE AT SITE

As the left exhibits paroxysms of moral outrage since the presidential election, the symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome are increasingly evident on university campuses.

One such instance of this irrationality was on display in August at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln when Katie Mullen, president of the school’s Turning Point USA chapter, was verbally harassed by leftist professors after she had set up a promotional table for the organization.

A video recording of the events shows a graduate teaching assistant and PhD student, Courtney Lawton, giving the middle finger to Mullen while carrying a sign saying, “Just say No! to Neo-Fascism!” and shouting “Neo-fascist Becky right here. Wants to destroy public schools, public universities, hates DACA kids,” “fuck Charlie Kirk [founder and executive director of Turning Point USA],” and “TPUSA Nazis,” among other repellent slurs.

Another professor, Amanda Gailey (founder of Nebraskans Against Gun Violence and a virulent critic of police and gun owners), taunted Mullen with a sign that stated, “Turning Point: please put me on your watchlist,” and others passing by aggressively accused the conservative student of being a white nationalist, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and a fascist.

Even for campuses that normally tolerate ideological excesses from its leftist faculty and students, this behavior was a bit too much for the Nebraska administration, which quickly removed Lawton from her position as a lecturer and assigned her to nonteaching duties, commenting that her behavior “did not meet the university’s expectations for civility.”

Outraged by the unceremonious firing of one of their colleagues, fellow faculty, students, and union members organized a September rally on the Nebraska-Lincoln City campus sponsored by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) — purportedly to discuss issues of academic freedom but actually a protest of what they believed was Lawton’s unjustified termination. Ignoring the fact that Lawton had not engaged in debate or dialogue at all but had actually viciously bullied Mullen, her supporters sidestepped that inconvenient detail entirely, choosing instead to make Lawton the victim.

It was not Lawton’s outrageously uncivil behavior that was the problem here, English professor Fran Kaye, one of the protesters, asserted, but retaliation for daring to question Turning Point USA, a conservative organization.

There’s an important distinction to be made in this case, however. The lecture was reassigned and relieved of her teaching duties not because of the content of her speech or the views expressed therein, but for the manner in which she expressed them; specifically, her behavior, not her ideas, is what was inappropriate and violated the norms of both the school’s policies on academic free speech and conduct by students and faculty, but also the central idea of reasoned debate and dialogue. In fact, UNL’s own policies on graduate student conduct is very clear on this matter, stating that, “Professional conduct violations… are behaviors that make the workplace hostile for colleagues, supervisors or subordinates (e.g., undergraduate students) [emphasis added].”

The headline on this story is usually a rhetorical question, perhaps posed by parents wondering why they keep paying for the daily assaults on constitutional liberty and good sense that define the modern college campus. But there may soon be a definitive answer to this question, given recent charges filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

Last Friday morning Mamdouh Abdel-Sayed, a a full-time lecturer at the City University of New York’s Medgar Evers College, was arrested and charged in Manhattan federal court with fraud, corruption, and obstruction.

According to acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim, the allegation is that Mr. Abdel-Sayed “abused his position to enrich himself by creating and selling fake certificates stating students had completed health care programs at the college.”

In a release from the U.S. Department of Justice, New York State Inspector General Catherine Leahy Scott alleges that the defendant “brazenly abused the name and resources of his college employer to operate what amounted to his own fraudulent trade school on the grounds of the City University of New York. He allegedly traded on the reputation of Medgar Evers College and pocketed all the fees students paid while undercutting legitimate schooling being performed by his colleagues across the campus.”

The New York Times reports that the biology instructor “offered classes on medical techniques, such as CPR and administering EKGs, that he was not authorized to teach, investigators said. They said he pocketed the fees and printed certificates on college letterhead from his computer. He encouraged students to use the certificates when applying for jobs — sometimes successfully — at hospitals and elsewhere, investigators said. He often held the classes at Medgar Evers on evenings or weekends when the college was less crowded, officials said.”

And the allegation gets worse, according to the Times. Quoting investigators, the paper reports that “Mr. Abdel-Sayed also engaged in ‘unsanitary and risky procedures’ in his class in drawing blood when he handed out needles and ‘suggested that students could attempt to draw blood from each other.’” This column can only guess how patients might have been affected when treated by people who have only bogus credentials rather than legitimate medical training.

But perhaps the most remarkable part of this story is New York IG Scott’s comment that the “defendant ignored repeated warnings.” When the university believes it has caught a professor defrauding both students and the university while putting lives in danger, it lets him off with a warning? “Medgar Evers officials first heard about Mr. Abdel-Sayed’s classes in 2015, and ordered him to cease and desist. But he continued teaching them,” reports the Times.CONTINUE AT SITE

In 2010, as part of my research for The Victims’ Revolution, a book about the parlous and ever-proliferating phenomenon of identity studies in universities, I attended a Queer Studies conference at Humboldt University in Berlin. One of the stars of the event was Susan Stryker, a male-to-female transsexual who was born in 1961, raised in Oklahoma, received a Ph.D. in history at Berkeley, and at the time of the Berlin event was a high-profile professor at Indiana University, to which she commuted regularly from her home in San Francisco. At her session in Berlin, the deep-voiced, broad-shouldered, square-jawed Stryker spent the first few minutes serving up a jumble of standard-issue leftist comments about various aspects of postwar America; she then settled down, for a while anyway, on a single topic: the Tea Party, which she described as fascist and racist, but nonetheless saw as promising because it at least represented a “non-elite” reaction to America’s “neo-liberal” capitalist establishment.

As I pointed out in my book, Stryker’s open contempt for liberal democracy and jejune enthusiasm for a movement she claimed to consider totalitarian came off as thoughtless and insensitive, especially given that we were in a lecture hall overlooking the Unter den Linden in what had once been a part of Communist East Berlin, and, before that, a part of the capital of Hitler’s Third Reich. When an audience member stood up and confessed that Stryker’s admiration for “right-wing populist racists” made him uneasy as a German, Stryker, obviously not grasping his point (and not really pausing, I think, to take it in), obtusely reiterated that any resistance to capitalism – even if it took the form of fascism – filled her with hope.

The other day, contemplating the recent rise of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other violent forms of anti-democratic fascism in the guise of anti-fascism, I wondered what Stryker was up to these days. First I looked at her Facebook feed, from which I could see at once that she’s still engaged in “resistance.” Indeed, you might say that “resistance” is her mantra. I perused her Facebook postings going as far back as the morning of November 9, 2016, when she described Donald Trump’s election victory the night before as a “nightmare” and a “disaster” and declared that she had always known “never to underestimate the power of white settler economic grievances, or of fragile white masculinity, when it is channeled into racism and xenophobia.” Trump’s victory, she maintained, clearly marked the start of an era of hate and oppression, and while “I fully expect some of that hate and oppression to fall on me as a white queer/trans person,” she wrote, “my heart is truly broken for my friends in this country who are Muslim and Latinx [sic: the point of the “x” is to indicate that one is including both Latinos and Latinas], who are brown and black, who are immigrants, who speak English with an accent. Already today I am hearing from friends who are afraid to go to work or even to go outside.” In the midst of this political cataclysm, Stryker found consolation in one thing and one thing alone: the act of “contemplating the possible shape of the new resistance movements.”

Resistance! “The current state of affairs,” she has since written, in reference to the Trump presidency, “calls for many forms of resistance.” On January 13, she referred to herself on Facebook as following a “’daily act of resistance regimen.” After pondering many other names for the resistance movement against Trump, she decided that the best option was “The Resistance.” In late January, she took part in the mass act of resistance that effectively shut down San Francisco International Airport to protest Trump’s temporary immigration restrictions. On January 30, she wrote: “There are so many individual battles to fight, why not just one big collective ‘no’ to the new regime? Sooner rather than later while we have momentum from the Women’s Marches and airport occupations? What if millions of people took to the streets and demanded a new government that reflects the ideals of the majority?”

Soon afterward, she promoted the idea of a nationwide general strike to be held on February 17, writing: “C’mon all you pink pussy hat ladies, airport occupiers, taxi drivers, bodega owners, and Yiannapoulos speaking-event distruptors [sic] – let’s shut this country down for a day. Gather your tribes and posses and family members and get everybody to call in sick, not go to class, and not buy stuff. Do nonviolent civil disobedience by occupying a federal building. Hold a sanctuary campus rally at your school. Use the day to make calls jamming the phone lines in elected officials offices letting them know you oppose whatever outrage the Trump regime will be perpetrating in two weeks. Make Pennsylvania Avenue impassible [sic].”

Students at the University of California, Berkeley have been getting a lot of practice at protesting lately. Apparently, some of them think they’re not getting enough practice though, so they decided to look for other reasons to demonstrate. At least that’s the only real reason I’ve come up with for their latest nonsense.

From Campus Reform:

Leftist students at the University of California, Berkeley recently attempted to shut down their own mid-term exam, demanding a take-home exam in its place.

As seen in a video posted on YouTube, four students demanded a “take-home essay with significant time to prepare” instead of the scheduled in-class exam, though Professor Harley Shaiken adamantly refused their request.

“This is a campus that is truly related throughout Latin America to the notion of free speech,” Shaiken said, followed by laughter from the protesters, who went on to claim that their “well-beings are being put on the line because of the emotional, mental, and physical stress that this university is compounding with what is already going on in [their] everyday lives.”

“Have you ever checked ‘unlisted’ or ‘undocumented immigrant’? I don’t think so!” one protester shouted at Shaiken, who wrote about and advocated for improved workers’ rights in Mexico, specializes in labor issues, and was presented in 1991 with the Outstanding Teaching Award at the University of California, San Diego.

Yet the protesters claim that he is unqualified to teach a class on labor issues in America and Mexico because he’s a white man, and went on to ask Shaiken to check his privilege.

In short, a white professor wants them to take their midterms in the same manner as practically every other professor in the nation wants, and thus he’s wrong because he’s “white.”

Frankly, Shaiken was right to refuse their demands.

If these students are taking a class on labor issues in the U.S. and Mexico, it means this probably isn’t their first college class. By now they know that midterms are the norm in many classes throughout the college. They know how this works.

Instead, they’re trying to bully him because he’s a white man teaching on a somewhat ethnic topic. They’re demanding he “check his privilege” because they expect the white man to capitulate to their insane demands, and the fact that he won’t is taken as proof of his racism. His credentials are irrelevant to the social justice jihadi. All that matters is that he’s white and therefore wrong.

And these are the same people trying to understand the rise in racism?

“Science has sometimes been used to rationalize both atrocity and inaction in its face. But conflating science with its abuse has become a favorite trope of extremists on the left. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick, and not, dare I say, very logical.Science creates space for the free exchange of ideas, for discovery, for progress. What has postmodernism done for you lately?”

Ms. Heying is a former biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

Who would have guessed that when America cleaved, the left would get the National Football League and the right would get uncontested custody of science?

The revolution on college campuses, which seeks to eradicate individuals and ideas that are considered unsavory, constitutes a hostile takeover by fringe elements on the extreme left. Last spring at the Evergreen State College, where I was a professor for 15 years, the revolution was televised—proudly and intentionally—by the radicals. Opinions not fitting with the currently accepted dogma—that all white people are racist, that questioning policy changes aimed at achieving “equity” is itself an act of white supremacy—would not be tolerated, and those who disagreed were shouted down, hunted, assaulted, even battered. Similar eruptions have happened all over the country.

What may not be obvious from outside academia is that this revolution is an attack on Enlightenment values: reason, inquiry and dissent. Extremists on the left are going after science. Why? Because science seeks truth, and truth isn’t always convenient.

The left has long pointed to deniers of climate change and evolution to demonstrate that over here, science is a core value. But increasingly, that’s patently not true.

The battle on our campuses—and ever more, in K-12 schools, in cubicles and in meetings, and on the streets—is being framed as a battle for equity, but that’s a false front. True, there are real grievances. Gaps between populations exist, for historical and modern reasons that are neither honorable nor acceptable, and they must be addressed. But what is going on at institutions across the country is—yes—a culture war between science and postmodernism. The extreme left has embraced a facile fiction.

Postmodernism, and specifically its offspring, critical race theory, have abandoned rigor and replaced it with “lived experience” as the primary source of knowledge. Little credence is given to the idea of objective reality. Science has long understood that observation can never be perfectly objective, but it also provides the ultimate tool kit with which to distinguish signal from noise—and from bias. Scientists generate complete lists of alternative hypotheses, with testable predictions, and we try to falsify our own cherished ideas.

Science is imperfect: It is slow and methodical, and it makes errors. But it does work. We have microchips, airplanes and streetlights to show for it.

In a meeting with administrators at Evergreen last May, protesters called, on camera, for college president George Bridges to target STEM faculty in particular for “antibias” training, on the theory that scientists are particularly prone to racism. That’s obvious to them because scientists persist in using terms like “genetic” and “phenotype” when discussing humans. Mr. Bridges offers: “[What] we are working towards is, bring ’em in, train ’em, and if they don’t get it, sanction them.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Shouts. Interruptions. Orchestrated chanting. The predictable convulsions of the contemporary university when a conservative comes to town. This time it was U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, speaking to students, faculty, and others gathered at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government last Thursday night. She joined former FBI director James Comey and current attorney general Jeff Sessions as the third cabinet-level official in the span of a week whose visit to a college campus was met with protests, caterwauling, and the now-rote charges of “white supremacism.”

Against this increasingly threadbare backdrop, DeVos delivered what is probably her best speech to date. It was a constructive, serious address from someone whose remarks have not always met that standard. DeVos spoke thoughtfully — at times, even eloquently — about how school choice empowers families, creates room for a healthful diversity, and is wholly consistent with the historic aims of public education.

DeVos rejected the false dichotomy that insists that the case for school choice rests on jeremiads against traditional public schools. She observed: “Education is not a binary choice. Being for equal access and opportunity — being for choice — is not being against anything.” She emphasized the stakes that can be obscured by abstraction: “It’s important for all of us to remember that we’re not just talking about abstract theory or some wild social experiment here. This is about putting people — putting parents and students — above policies and politics.”

She spoke measuredly about American educational performance: “We’re in the middle of the pack, at best, compared to other nations.” She argued that neither students nor the cause of public education are well served by squabbling over the particulars of anachronistic delivery systems. by broadening our vision of public education:

We can rethink school. And, I posit, we do that by embracing the future of education as one that fully integrates “choice” into every decision we make. Not choice translated as vouchers, or charter schools, or private schools, or any other specified delivery mechanism. No. Choice translated as giving every parent in this great land more control, more of a say in their child’s future. More choices. The future of choice lies in trusting and empowering parents — all parents, not just those who have the power, prestige, or financial wherewithal to make choices.

And she adeptly used her Harvard setting to challenge narrow, doctrinaire notions of what constitutes “public” education. As she put it:

The definition of public education should be to educate the public. That’s why we should fight less about the word that comes before “school.” I suspect all of you here at Harvard, a private school, will take your education and contribute to the public good. When you chose to attend Harvard, did anyone suggest you were against public universities? No, you and your family sat down and figured out which education environment would be the best fit for you. . . . Instead of dividing the public when it comes to education, the focus should be on the ends, not the means.

A brawl broke out in an “Empathy Tent” at the University of California, Berkeley last week, marking the official start of college riot season. Last week Attorney General Jeff Sessions braved protesters at Georgetown Law Center, where he promised to intervene in campus free-speech cases and urged students and universities to “stand up against those who would silence free expression by violence or other means.” The targets of suppression have ways to hold colleges and rioters to account using civil-rights statutes and common-law torts.
Illustration: David Gothard

Administrators often “coddle” and “encourage” censorship, Mr. Sessions observed. That’s nothing new. After the Civil War, white students at what is now Washington and Lee University in Virginia attacked blacks associated with the Freedmen’s Bureau. The college president, Robert E. Lee, offered pieties and looked the other way. In response to similar incidents, Congress safeguarded civil rights with legislation known as anti-Ku Klux Klan acts.

Public universities are subject to the full sweep of the anti-KKK laws, as well as more recent civil-rights statutes. At San Francisco State University, Jewish students have filed suit under Section 1983 of the federal civil-rights law, alleging disruption of their events violates the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The First Amendment requires public universities to treat speech neutrally, regardless of the message. Administrators may not tell police to stand down in the face of a “heckler’s veto.”

In 2013 at New York’s University at Buffalo, police let counterprotesters shut down a pro-life demonstration. This June the university settled, paying the plaintiffs’ attorney fees and promising to refrain from viewpoint discrimination in the future.

But universities are responsible only for taking reasonable precautions. A target of last semester’s antispeech riots, Bret Weinstein, was mobbed and hounded out of Evergreen State College after refusing to comply with a college-sponsored “Day of Absence” in which white people were “asked” to stay off campus. While Mr. Weinstein claimed that Evergreen State violated his right of free speech, the college could have argued that it acted reasonably because violent antispeech protests were still novel and Mr. Weinstein was physically threatened in class only once. He and his wife, also an Evergreen professor, settled their claim for $500,000 and an agreement to resign. Public universities now have notice of their duty to provide security, which UC Berkeley and the University of Utah just fulfilled for conservative writer Ben Shapiro.

Private universities have no First Amendment obligation to provide a forum for speech. But many riots purport to attack white “supremacy” or “privilege,” and if private universities act with deliberate indifference to racially motivated attacks, they may be liable to students or speakers. Colleges are subject to antidiscrimination statutes such as Section 1981, an anti-KKK act that would cover student and speaker contract rights. If they accept federal funding—and all but a handful do—they are also subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Institutions are not the only prospective defendants. Campus rioters themselves may be liable under Section 1985(3), which covers private conspiracies and targets those who, like masked Antifa attackers, go in disguise—“a common tactic also used by the detestable Ku Klux Klan,” as Mr. Sessions noted. The statute applies most clearly to racially motivated physical attacks or efforts to exclude persons. Evergreen State is a classic case: After disrupting Mr. Weinstein’s class, students detained the college president and apparently posted photos of themselves brandishing baseball bats on Facebook . Some faculty members demanded disciplinary action against Mr. Weinstein and later assembled with masked Antifa members who attacked counterprotesters. CONTINUE AT SITE