RUTHFULLY YOURS

The University of California in Berkeley was again the scene of violence recently, as protesters claimed license to silence those with whom they disagree. Their fight against “fascism” took the form of not just stopping a speech, but assaulting those who came to hear it.

For those of us at universities and colleges, these counter-demonstrators, and in particular the masked antifa protesters, are a troubling and growing presence on our campuses. They have been assaulting people and blocking speeches for years with relatively little condemnation. They flourish in an environment where any criticism is denounced as being reflective of racist or fascist sentiments.

However, as the latest violence in Berkeley vividly demonstrates, there is no distinction between these protesters and the fascists they claim to be resisting. They are all fascists in their use of fear and violence to silence others. What is particularly chilling is how some academics have given this anti-speech mob legitimacy through pseudo-philosophical rationalizations.

At Berkeley and other universities, protesters have held up signs saying “F–k Free Speech” and have threatened to beat up anyone taking their pictures, including journalists. They seem blissfully ignorant of the contradiction in using fascistic tactics as anti-fascist protesters. After all, a leading definition of fascism is “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.”

CNN recently interviewed antifa protesters who insist that violence is simply the language that their opponents understand. Leftist organizer Scott Crow endorsed illegal actions and said that antifa activists cover their faces to “avoid the ramifications of law enforcement.” Such violent logic is supported by some professors.

Last week, Clemson University Professor Bart Knijnenburg went on Facebook to call Trump supporters and Republicans “racist scum.” He added, “I admire anyone who stands up against white supremacy, violent or nonviolent. This needs to stop, by any means necessary. #PunchNazis.” He is not alone. Trinity College Professor Johnny Williams, who teaches classes on race, posted attacks on bigots and called on people to “let them f—–g die.”

These voices go beyond the troubling number of academics supporting speech codes and the curtailment of free speech. These are scholars who have embraced the antithesis of the life and values of academia. They justify violence to silence those who are deemed unworthy to be heard. Dartmouth Professor Mark Bray, the author of a book entitled “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook” is one of the chief enablers of these protesters. Bray defines antifa as “politics or an activity of social revolutionary self defense. It’s a pan-left radical politics uniting communists, socialists, anarchists and various different radical leftists together for the shared purpose of combating the far right.”

A fiery white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., has reignited calls to sanitize college campuses of anything reminiscent of the Confederacy. Many of the memorials to the Civil War-era are being targeted with vandalism or hidden away by administrators.https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/36203/

While some say the memorials should remain up as a monument to how far America has come as a nation, others say they represent a celebration of white supremacy and must come down, echoing chants such as “No Trump! No KKK! No Fascist USA!”

The controversy is especially heated on college campuses, where protests and vandalism of the monuments have plagued campuses for several years.

In recent times, the issue surfaced in 2014 when Washington and Lee University, named after the Confederate general, removed Confederate flags on display near his statue. The controversy came up again in 2015 at the University of Texas, Austin when campus leaders removed a statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis after repeated student complaints.

Later in 2016, Vanderbilt University paid more than $1 million dollars to rename a building that included the word “Confederate” in the building’s stone inscription. In November of last year, administration at the University of Louisville relocated a confederate statue on their campus to avoid offending students.

Earlier this year, Yale University reversed their stance on protecting history by renaming Calhoun College, named after the pro-slavery advocate, to Grace Mary Hopper College.

Now, galvanized by the attention brought to the memorials through the rise of white nationalists, more monuments have been vandalized or removed or come under heated scrutiny. Such recent incidents include:

Aug. 13, 2017: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Silent Sam statue covered with a black hood; a week later a massive rally unfolded against it (and it’s still ongoing)

Aug. 14, 2017: North Carolina Central University: Student takes down a nearby confederate monument by tying a rope around its neck, attaching it to a car and driving away

Aug. 19, 2017: Bowdin College: Moved a confederate monument from public view to an archived section of their library.

Aug. 19, 2017: Duke University: Removed a statue of Robert E. Lee after it was vandalized

Aug. 20, 2017: University of Texas, Austin: Removed three statues of confederate figures and relocating them to the Briscoe Center of American History

Aug. 21, 2017: University of Mississippi: Administration decides to “contextualize” their statue of confederate figure and Civil War-era Supreme Court Justice Lucius Q.C. Lamar by adding a plaque fully describing his legacy

Aug. 24, 2017: Virginia Commonwealth University: VCU President Michael Rao has directed administrators to conduct an audit of all symbols “of an exclusionary nature,” including Confederate ones

Aug. 28, 2017: The University of Maryland marching band decided it will no longer play the state song before the college’s football games because of the song’s ties to the Confederacy

Not all reactions have been supportive. Some say taking the monuments down whitewashes history. Others call the movement a politically motivated stunt that has snowballed out of control.

We are scholars and teachers at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale who have some thoughts to share and advice to offer students who are headed off to colleges around the country. Our advice can be distilled to three words:

Think for yourself.

Now, that might sound easy. But you will find—as you may have discovered already in high school—that thinking for yourself can be a challenge. It always demands self-discipline and these days can require courage.

In today’s climate, it’s all-too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion on your campus or in the broader academic culture. The danger any student—or faculty member—faces today is falling into the vice of conformism, yielding to groupthink.

At many colleges and universities what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of public opinion” does more than merely discourage students from dissenting from prevailing views on moral, political, and other types of questions. It leads them to suppose that dominant views are so obviously correct that only a bigot or a crank could question them.

Since no one wants to be, or be thought of as, a bigot or a crank, the easy, lazy way to proceed is simply by falling into line with campus orthodoxies.

Don’t do that. Think for yourself.

Thinking for yourself means questioning dominant ideas even when others insist on their being treated as unquestionable. It means deciding what one believes not by conforming to fashionable opinions, but by taking the trouble to learn and honestly consider the strongest arguments to be advanced on both or all sides of questions—including arguments for positions that others revile and want to stigmatize and against positions others seek to immunize from critical scrutiny.

The love of truth and the desire to attain it should motivate you to think for yourself. The central point of a college education is to seek truth and to learn the skills and acquire the virtues necessary to be a lifelong truth-seeker. Open-mindedness, critical thinking, and debate are essential to discovering the truth. Moreover, they are our best antidotes to bigotry.

Merriam-Webster’s first definition of the word “bigot” is a person “who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices.” The only people who need fear open-minded inquiry and robust debate are the actual bigots, including those on campuses or in the broader society who seek to protect the hegemony of their opinions by claiming that to question those opinions is itself bigotry.

So don’t be tyrannized by public opinion. Don’t get trapped in an echo chamber. Whether you in the end reject or embrace a view, make sure you decide where you stand by critically assessing the arguments for the competing positions.

Think for yourself.

Good luck to you in college!

Paul Bloom
Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology
Yale University

Nicholas Christakis
Sol Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science
Yale University

Carlos Eire
T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies
Yale University

Maria E. Garlock
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Co-Director of the Program in Architecture and Engineering
Princeton University

David Gelernter
Professor of Computer Science
Yale University

Robert P. George
McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions
Princeton University

Mary Ann Glendon
Learned Hand Professor of Law
Harvard University

Joshua Katz
Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics
Princeton University

Thomas P. Kelly
Professor of Philosophy
Princeton University

Jon Levenson
Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies
Harvard University

John B. Londregan
Professor of Politics and International Affairs
Princeton University

Michael A. Reynolds
Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies
Princeton University

Jacqueline C. Rivers
Lecturer in Sociology and African and African-American Studies
Harvard University

Noël Valis
Professor of Spanish
Yale University

Tyler VanderWeele
Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Director of the Program on Integrative Knowledge and Human Flourishing
Harvard University

Adrian Vermeule
Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law
Harvard University

Simply inaccurate’ to say he approves of political violence https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/36136/

Mark Bray says political violence is justified against certain groups.

The Dartmouth University history lecturer is not saying this privately or describing the historical use of political violence: He’s advocating it in media interviews while promoting his admittedly sympathetic new book about the left-wing terrorist movement Antifa.

But when his university president publicly criticized Bray’s expressed views, saying “the endorsement of violence in any form is contrary to Dartmouth values,” Bray’s faculty peers rushed to his defense.

More than 100 faculty have signed a statement that praises Bray as “the national expert” on fascism and anti-fascism in the 21st century, according to a Monday report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which says faculty names were not on the letter it was shown.

The statement says, bafflingly, Bray’s accurately reported words in media appearances are “simply inaccurate.”

It also raises a straw man, that Dartmouth has threatened Bray’s job by criticizing his accurately reported views: “There is nothing that Professor Bray has said that is in violation of Dartmouth’s stated free speech and academic freedom policies.”

The statement asks the university to retract President Philip Hanlon’s critical statement, apologize to Bray “for exposing him to entirely predictable possibility of physical harm,” and study how Dartmouth’s peer institutions “react when such a situation arises again—as it most certainly will.”

Here’s the somewhat typo-ridden transcript from the Aug. 20 broadcast of Meet the Press, where moderator Chuck Todd asks Bray why he’s part of “a very small minority here who is defending the idea of violence considering that somebody died in [the ‘Unite the Right’ rally and counterprotest in] Charlottesville.”

Bray replies:

I think that a lot of people recognize that, when pushed, self-defense is a legitimate response to white supremacy and neo-Nazi violence. And you know we’ve tried ignoring neo-Nazi’s in the past. We’ve seen how that turned out in 20’s and 30’s and the lesson of history is you need to take it with the utmost seriousness before it’s too late. … And the way to stop that is what people did in Boston [by physically attacking a “free speech rally”], what people did in Charlottesville. Pull the emergency break and say you can’t make this normal.

Reminded by Todd that the civil-rights movement had its own supporters of political violence who were overruled by its leaders, Bray again euphemizes political violence against words as self-defense:

Well, there’s a big difference between confronting fascism and confronting other forms of violence. So we can see that during the 30’s and 40’s, there was no public opinion to being leveraged by non-violent resistance. If you get fascist to be powerful enough in government, they’re simply not gonna listen to the kind of public opinion that non-violence can generate. … A lot of people are under attack and sometimes they need to be able to defend themselves. It’s not, you know, it’s a privileged position to be able to say that you never have to defend yourself from these kinds of monsters.

Not to be left out of the social justice chorus in the post-Charlottesville age, a coalition of 17 Princeton University student organizations have penned an op-ed blaming President Trump for the rise of the alt-right and racist incidents since the 2016 election, as well as a resurgence of white supremacy.

The groups — which include the Princeton Students for Reproductive Justice, Muslim Advocates for Social Justice and Individual Dignity, and the Princeton Hidden Minority Council — also chide their university for its complicity in the “oppression” of marginalized communities, declaring it “is not good enough to disapprove of or condemn racism, white supremacy,” etc.

The school must act, you see … and in the manner these groups demand.

Here are some of the ways in which “white- and male-serving” Princeton is “upholding structural oppression” against its students, according to their Daily Princetonian op-ed :

–Refusal to remove racist memorialization on campus (e.g. Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson Residential College, Stanhope Hall)

–Refusal to divest from private prisons and detention centers

–Failure to declare itself a sanctuary campus for undocumented students

–Lack of accommodations for non-binary students (e.g. lack of accessible gender-inclusive restrooms across campus, denial of resources, and continued harassment of queer, trans and non-binary students of color from low-income backgrounds on campus)

–Failure to provide adequate food options for low-income students

–Failure to provide students with a more diverse academic curriculum that addresses historically marginalized groups, especially within the field of ethnic studies (e.g. Latinx Studies, Native/Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies, and Pacific Islander American Studies)

–Perpetuation of double standards regarding the establishment of affinity living spaces. While the University allows for students to live together based on shared artistic (e.g. Edwards Collective ) or sustainability (e.g. Pink House) interests, it has declined to allow living spaces based on shared race or ethnicity.

In tried and true politically correct contradictory fashion, the coalition further argues that the “labor of organizing has not always been equally assumed by groups of differing privilege.”

But … how do groups of differing privilege “equally” assume responsibility? It’s obvious enough from this treatise that straight white males would assume the most responsibility; however, as I’ve previously joked regarding the creation of, a “PC hierarchy handbook” what would be the guidelines after this group?

More from the piece:

We all have an obligation to oppose those who seek to foster hatred and discord by adopting these beliefs and actions.

Over the past seven months, the current presidential administration has actively opposed carrying out this obligation. White supremacy and the oppression of marginalized peoples has always had a political platform in the United States. The Trump administration has only exacerbated the level of violence against vulnerable individuals by emboldening racists to exercise their hatred explicitly, as evident from the acts of violence against people from historically marginalized communities directly following the election to the racist marches in the present day. Donald Trump is complicit in the rise of the alt-right and the racism and white supremacy that accompanies it.

[…] we need not hold our breath for a president who will not condemn white supremacist terrorism. Instead, we must turn to one another in solidarity and commit to coalition-building and accomplice-ship between communities of differing privileges. Recognizing the value of diversity and acceptance is a start, but we can and must do more than loftily promising to stand together.

We must be in solidarity with the counter-protesters who stood inches from torch-bearing fascists at the University of Virginia. Solidarity with Takiyah Thompson, who was arrested for toppling a Confederate statue in Durham, N.C. Solidarity with all those in this country who live under and struggle against systems of oppression. …

Lastly, courtesy of this newfound alliance, here’s a new term for your “oppression” vocabulary: “transmisogynoir,” the oppression of trans women and trans feminine people of color.

A new school year is upon us, and the assault on free speech continues as Yale Law School students reject their new dean’s call for civil discourse. George Washington proclaimed in 1783 that if “the freedom of Speech may be taken away,” then, “dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.” If campuses are incubating our next generation of leaders, I hope America likes lamb chops.

While teaching at Yale, I have often witnessed students demonizing each other over their disagreements. Concerned students informed me of a school-wide e-mail argument in which one student was branded racist because of his disagreement with another student’s criticism of course offerings. The accused pointed out that he obviously could not see his interlocutor’s race over e-mail, nor guess it from her name; he simply disagreed with her idea. The ad hominem attacks only intensified from there.

Another time, a student group invited a controversial speaker to campus. Rather than speak up to expose the flaws in the speaker’s ideas, offended students announced that anyone in that group who did not publicly denounce the speaker and call for a disinvitation would be labeled sexist and ostracized. Intimidated students quietly dropped out of the group.

These private interactions are a symptom of what ails the public sphere.

Since its birth, the United States has grappled with people’s natural tendency to quash dissenting views. The founding generation rejected the British Crown’s practice of publishing its own newspaper in favor of both an independent free press and ardent support for free expression. But by 1798, a mere ten years after the Constitution’s adoption, the federal government had enacted the Sedition Act, making it illegal to publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against Congress or the president. The act was a clear violation of Americans’ First Amendment rights. The Federalist party, under President John Adams, used its control of the government to silence its critics and attack the Democratic-Republican minority.

With the nascent Supreme Court neither willing nor ready to check the other branches, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison appealed to the people to defend Americans’ rights “to think freely and to speak and write what they think.” They used the very rights under attack — the freedoms of speech and the press — to educate the populace, galvanize public support across the states, and win back control of the government. In other words, they successfully countered a bad law with rational arguments.

Today many will instinctively reject the Founders’ principles because many of them were white slaveholders. But that is part of the point: Automatically dismissing ideas based on the identity of the messenger can leave us all worse off. After all, these deeply flawed individuals nevertheless managed to enshrine in the country they founded — our country —many wonderful principles, from freedom of religion to checks and balances to free expression itself.

That latter principle is once again under siege today, and we could do worse than to dust off some of the grassroots tactics of Jefferson and Madison in its defense. We must take to the press, utilize social media, contact school administrators and professors, support leaders who practice and foster civil discourse, and speak to our friends and neighbors to help educate our communities on what freedom of speech really means.

At last there’s an encouraging message of intellectual independence—and from the Ivy League of all places. Just in time for school, a hardy band of professors has joined together to commit a flagrant micro-aggression. Scholars from various academic disciplines have signed a declaration urging college students to declare their independence. Specifically, the participating scholars warn about “the vice of conformism” and offer to each student headed off to college advice that is both simple and clear: “Think for yourself.”

Some if not all of the 15 signatories are probably a little bit amazed that their message even needs to be said at institutions supposedly dedicated to learning. But the decline of campus culture means that independent thought can now require of students tremendous effort and even a kind of courage. The professors write:

At many colleges and universities what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of public opinion” does more than merely discourage students from dissenting from prevailing views on moral, political, and other types of questions. It leads them to suppose that dominant views are so obviously correct that only a bigot or a crank could question them.

Since no one wants to be, or be thought of as, a bigot or a crank, the easy, lazy way to proceed is simply by falling into line with campus orthodoxies.

Don’t do that. Think for yourself.

Thinking for yourself means questioning dominant ideas even when others insist on their being treated as unquestionable. It means deciding what one believes not by conforming to fashionable opinions, but by taking the trouble to learn and honestly consider the strongest arguments to be advanced on both or all sides of questions—including arguments for positions that others revile and want to stigmatize and against positions others seek to immunize from critical scrutiny.

The letter, signed by professors from Harvard, Princeton and Yale, is published by Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. This seems altogether fitting, given the Princeton grad’s large role in the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution and its First Amendment protection of free speech. This is also bound to set campus radicals in search of a Madison statue to deplore. But perhaps at least a few of them will stop to ponder the nature of the freedom they enjoy to protest. They might also reflect on this week’s message from professors including Princeton’s Robert George:

The central point of a college education is to seek truth and to learn the skills and acquire the virtues necessary to be a lifelong truth-seeker. Open-mindedness, critical thinking, and debate are essential to discovering the truth. Moreover, they are our best antidotes to bigotry. CONTINUE AT SITE

Were you planning to instruct your child about the value of hard work and civility? Not so fast! According to a current uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, advocacy of such bourgeois virtues is “hate speech.” The controversy, sparked by an op-ed written by two law professors, illustrates the rapidly shrinking boundaries of acceptable thought on college campuses and the use of racial victimology to police those boundaries.

The Fuse Is Lit

On August 9, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and University of San Diego law professor Larry Alexander published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer calling for a revival of the bourgeois values that characterized mid-century American life, including child-rearing within marriage, hard work, self-discipline on and off the job, and respect for authority. The late 1960s took aim at the bourgeois ethic, they say, encouraging an “antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal [of] sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society.”

Today, the consequences of that cultural revolution are all around us: lagging education levels, the lowest male work-force participation rate since the Great Depression, opioid abuse, and high illegitimacy rates. Wax and Alexander catalogue the self-defeating behaviors that leave too many Americans idle, addicted, or in prison: “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”

Throwing caution to the winds, they challenge the core tenet of multiculturalism: “All cultures are not equal,” they write. “Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” Unless America’s elites again promote personal responsibility and other bourgeois virtues, the country’s economic and social problems will only worsen, they conclude.

The University of Pennsylvania’s student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, spotted a scandal in the making. The day after the op-ed was published, it came out with a story headlined “‘Not All Cultures Are Equal’ Says Penn Law Professor in Op-Ed.” Naturally, the paper placed Wax and Alexander’s op-ed in the context of Wax’s other affronts to left-wing dogma. It quoted a Middlebury College sociology professor who claimed that Middlebury’s “students of color were being attacked and felt attacked” by a lecture Wax gave at Middlebury College in 2013 on black-family breakdown. It noted that Penn’s Black Law Students Association had criticized her for a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2005 on black self-help.

But the centerpiece of the Daily Pennsylvanian story was its interview with Wax. Wax (whom I consider a friend) is the most courageous truth-teller on American colleges today. Initially trained as a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, she possesses fearsome intelligence and debating skills. True to form, she stuck by her thesis. “I don’t shrink from the word, ‘superior’” with regard to Anglo-Protestant cultural norms, she told the paper. “Everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify” these values. “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.” Western governments have undoubtedly committed crimes, she said, but it would be a mistake to reject what is good in those countries because of their historical flaws.

Parental rights are under fire once again, this time at a Sacramento-area charter school. A kindergarten teacher at Rocklin Academy Gateway recently staged a “transition ceremony” for a gender-dysphoric student in her class, introducing him to other students as a boy before he changed into a dress and announced his new, female name.

Students were instructed to use that new name going forward. The teacher also gave a lesson about transgenderism to the entire class, using two books not included in the school’s curriculum — I Am Jazz and Red: A Crayon’s Story, both children’s books meant to affirm the idea that transgender identities should be accepted as reality.

And it didn’t stop there — Fox News reports that a first-grader at Rocklin Academy was subsequently sent to the principal’s office for “misgendering” a different classmate, calling him by his given name because she didn’t know that he now identifies as a girl. According to Karen England of Capitol Resource Institute, the school investigated to determine whether the student had bullied her classmate.

The kindergarten teacher did not notify parents of the lesson and ceremony in advance; they found out only after their children came home and told them. Many of the students reported being “deeply emotionally bothered and traumatized,” according to Jonathan Keller of California Family Council, a group that has been counseling the families about their rights.

In response to backlash from parents, the school principal sent a letter calling the books “age appropriate” and arguing that the school’s non-discrimination policy “protects all students, including on the basis of gender, gender identity, and gender expression.”

But this isn’t a question of whether the books were “age appropriate” or whether the school should “protect” its students. The question is whether parents have the right to reserve discussion of sensitive topics about sexuality with their own children to the time and the manner they believe is best for their children and their family.

This Rocklin Academy teacher blatantly ignored those parental rights, effectively proclaiming that she knows better and that her own judgment takes precedence over that of parents. Even aside from the substance of this issue, schools should never assert their judgment over that of parents or keep parents in the dark about what their children are being taught.

Especially with regard to a topic as complicated as gender dysphoria, schools must remember that parents are the primary educators of their children and, at the very least, have the right to know about class discussions in advance so they can decide to keep their children home if they believe that’s best.