RUTHFULLY YOURS

Diversity, according to campus dogma, provides real educational benefits. Counting and mingling students and professors by race, ethnicity or gender is supposed to broaden perspectives and enhance classroom learning.

Maybe that’s true in the academic departments built on identity politics. But what critical perspective does a black academic bring to microbiology, civil engineering, or pre-1700 state formation in Ethiopia that a white scholar cannot? What distinctive viewpoint does a Hispanic professor rely on to explain French colonialism, the Afro-Asian history of banana cultivation, or Muslim slave systems that a black instructor cannot?

I taught African history for 40 years at California State University, Chico. When I criticized the overtly divisive racial preferences and gender double standards I witnessed on faculty hiring committees, I was vilified as an “enemy of diversity.” This was rich in unintended irony.

Raised in an orthodox Jewish home in west Baltimore, I graduated from the University of Richmond (founded by Southern Baptists), completed my master’s at Howard University (the country’s pre-eminent historically black college), earned my doctorate in history at UCLA, then taught at a modest liberal arts college. I was once married to a Catholic woman. Hostile to diversity?

As a Jewish American historian of Africa, I specialized in Somalia, a country that’s 99% Muslim. I visited Somalia 10 times, conducting research and teaching at the National University in Mogadishu. Somalis always welcomed me with hospitality and collegiality.

In 1984, while working on a PBS documentary called “The Parching Winds of Somalia,” I sought permission to film Muslim congregants at prayer in a Mogadishu mosque. The imam there, Sheikh Aden, insisted that I guarantee my crew would behave in a “worshipful manner” during filming. A practical scholar and revered community leader, Sheikh Aden knew I was Jewish.

After I led my crew in chanting the Muslim profession of the faith (shahada) in his office, I recall Sheikh Aden telling me: “I know who you are, Geshekter. I wish you were a Muslim of the heart. But you are just a Muslim of the mouth. That’s good enough.” Me, an enemy of diversity?

Defenders of diversity groupthink maintain that Asian or Hispanic students bring especially novel viewpoints to classrooms, making them essential for higher learning. The former president of CSU Chico once assured me that simply having a variety of students clustered by race or ethnicity contributed to a livelier mix in classes. This view is appallingly mistaken.

Earlier this month, several websites covered news of an upcoming “fat studies” course that will be taught at Oregon State by Associate Professor Patti Lou Watkins. From the way some reporters wrote about it, you might have concluded that fat studies was some brand-new bit of nonsense. In fact, I wrote about fat studies in my 2011 book The Victims’ Revolution, a critical survey of several academic “disciplines” that fall under the general category of identity studies. Even then, fat studies was a pretty established field.

To be sure, it’s nowhere near as widespread as, say, women’s studies or black studies or queer studies. But it already has its own key founding text, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight (2008), by Linda Bacon, and its own classroom anthology, The Fat Studies Reader (2009), edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. Courses in fat studies have been offered at several colleges, and it’s been accepted with surprising rapidity as a legitimate area of study.

Now, the basic premise of all of these identity-based “studies” is that the members of the groups in question are all oppressed victims. Fat studies is no exception. Fat people are victims of “sizeism,” a.k.a. “fat oppression.” If you’re fat, part of the oppression you experience is constantly being told that you should lose weight for the sake of your health. According to fat studies, when you suggest that a portly pal skip that second slice of cake, you’re not showing concern for his or her well-being; you’re committing a microaggression, expressing bigotry, causing emotional pain. Because — and this, believe it or not, is a central article of faith in fat studies — it’s possible to be healthy at any weight. Of course, as anyone who has ever watched My 600-Pound Life knows, this last claim is not only without medical basis; it’s a breathtakingly irresponsible thing to say to a corpulent person.

But then, fat studies isn’t about facts. To a large extent — and it has this in common with other identity studies, although in this regard fat studies may well outdo them all — it’s about group therapy. When I attended a fat-studies panel at the 2010 National Women’s Studies Association convention in Denver (overwhelmingly, fat studies is a female-dominated discipline), I heard professors and graduate students moan and groan about insensitive doctors who had told them that their BMI was too high; about TV ads that push sugary foods on them; about ads for diet products that make them feel bad about themselves; about the slim models in women’s magazines, who also make them feel bad about themselves; and so on.

Everything, in short, was someone else’s fault. Or capitalism’s. What it all came down to — and I’m not making this up — was a horrific phenomenon called healthism. You see, encouraging people to watch their health is (as I put it in The Victims’ Revolution) “a coercive and potentially fascist act linked to capitalism, racism, and Nazi-style eugenics.” That’s healthism.

Yes, they’re serious. If you don’t buy it, dig this, first reported at Campus Reform. In a talk given on August 3 at this year’s convention of the American Psychological Association, Joan Chrisler, who teaches psychology at Connecticut College, accused doctors of “fat shaming” when they propose that their plump patients drop a few. Such conduct by physicians, charged Chrisler, is “mentally and physically harmful.”

Timothy Vaughn dutifully cheered the University of Missouri for a decade, sitting in the stands with his swag, two hot dogs and a Diet Coke. He estimates he attended between 60 and 85 athletic events every year—football and basketball games and even tennis matches and gymnastics meets. But after the infamous protests of fall 2015, Missouri lost this die-hard fan.

“I pledge from this day forward NOT TO contribute to the [Tiger Scholarship Fund], buy any tickets to any University of Missouri athletic event, to attend any athletic event (even if free), to give away all my MU clothes (nearly my entire wardrobe) after I have removed any logos associated with the University of Missouri, and any cards/helmets/ice buckets/flags with the University of Missouri logo on it,” Mr. Vaughn told administrators in an email four semesters ago.

He was not alone. Thousands of pages of emails I obtained through the Missouri Freedom of Information Act show that many alumni and other supporters were disgusted with administrators’ feeble response to the disruptions. Like Mr. Vaughn, many promised they’d stop attending athletic events. Others vowed they’d never send their children or grandchildren to the university. It now appears many of them have made good on those promises.

The commotion began in October 2015, when student activists claiming that “racism lives here” sent administrators a lengthy list of demands. Among them: The president of the University of Missouri system should resign after delivering a handwritten apology acknowledging his “white male privilege”; the curriculum should include “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion” training; and 10% of the faculty and staff should be black.

Two weeks later, a student announced he was going on a hunger strike, and the football team refused to practice or play until the university met the demands. As protesters occupied the quad, administrators bent over backward to accommodate them, even providing a power strip so they could charge phones and a generator so they could camp in comfort. A communications instructor, Melissa Click, appeared on viral video calling for “muscle” to remove a student reporter from the quad. By Nov. 9, both the president and the chancellor of Mizzou, as the flagship Columbia campus is known, had resigned.

Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”

As classes begin this week, freshmen enrollment is down 35% since the protests, according to the latest numbers the university has publicly released. Mizzou is beginning the year with the smallest incoming class since 1999. Overall enrollment is down by more than 2,000 students, to 33,200. The campus has taken seven dormitories out of service.

The plummeting support has also cost jobs. In May, Mizzou announced it would lay off as many as 100 people and eliminate 300 more positions through retirement and attrition. Last year the university reduced its library staff and cut 50 cleaning and maintenance jobs.

Mizzou’s 2016 football season drew almost 13,000 fewer attendees than in 2015, local media reported. During basketball games, one-third of the seats in the Mizzou Arena sat empty. CONTINUE AT SITE

Duke University has cowered to political pressure and is removing the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from its chapel. The snowflake students don’t want it, so this paragon of higher learning is bowing to the will of the propagandized.

Here’s the thing. If Duke is going to be consistent (and I’m conceding leftists rarely are), they need to scurry on over to East Campus and tear down the statue of George Washington Duke because he was a Confederate soldier and, according to Robert Durden, author of The Dukes of Durham, owned a slave named Caroline whom he bought for $601. He also hired a slave from a neighbor to work on his tobacco farm.

In the 1920s, Duke’s son, Buck, gave a hefty endowment to Trinity College, and in appreciation, the school changed its name to Duke University in honor of Washington—a slave owner who fought to keep black people working in the tobacco fields under the strap of the white man’s whip.

Given this horrific history, the university must tear down all images of and all references to the Duke family, including changing the name of the university itself. If they refuse to go that far, they at least need to change their mascot to the White Devils.

Nothing else will be acceptable. How can they keep the statue and name of a slave owner who freely enlisted to serve in the Confederate army when they can’t tolerate the man who led that same army? The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Prominent anti-Israel academics launched a campus antifa group earlier this month for faculty across the United States.

Purdue University’s Bill Mullen and Stanford University’s David Palumbo-Liu created the Campus Antifascist Network (CAN) to combat “fascists” who use “‘free speech’ as a façade for attacking faculty who have stood in solidarity with [targeted] students,” as Palumbo-Liu described it on his blog.

Mullen, in an interview with Inside Higher Ed, said the mission of CAN was “to drive racists off campuses and to protect the most vulnerable from fascist attack,” and “to build large, unified demonstrations against fascists on campuses when they come.”

When Inside Higher Ed asked Palumbo-Liu about CAN’s views on the use of violence—such as the alleged assault by masked, black-clad antifa members of a conservative student earlier this week—he said the group “would advocate self-defense and defense in various forms of those who are being threatened by fascists, but not violence.”

Palumbo-Liu was more forthcoming about his opposition to the alt-right and white supremacists on campuses, saying he was primarily concerned by their “propensity to physical violence, aggressive confrontation and provocation, and violations of others’ civil rights.”

In his blog post, Palumbo-Liu wrote that CAN would support faculty who fascists “aggressively sought to smear, bully and intimidate … especially faculty of color.”

“Progressive scholars such as Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, Johnny Williams, Dana Cloud and George Ciccariello-Maher, among others, have each been threatened with violence, or firing, for strong anti-racist social justice commitments,” he claimed.

Trinity College’s Williams wrote on social media after GOP House Whip Steve Scalise was shot that white people are “inhuman a-holes” who need to “die.” Drexel University’s Ciccariello-Maher tweeted in 2016, “All I want for Christmas is white genocide,” and this year tweeted that he wanted to “vomit” when he saw someone give their first-class seat on a flight to a uniformed soldier. Both were investigated by their respective academic institutions for these comments.

Meanwhile, both Palumbo-Liu and Mullen have been leading figures in the academic campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. In 2014, Mullen issued a call on anti-Israel site Electronic Intifada to “de-Zionize our campuses.” Palumbo-Liu, in a 2016 piece titled, “9 things you need to know about the Israeli occupation of Palestine,” recommended readers look to alternative news sources for their information on the region, including several sites accused of publishing anti-Semitic content. He later updated the article to remove If Americans Knew from the list, after receiving backlash for recommending an outlet that has repeatedly published conspiracy theories about Jews. IAK has been marginalized even by virulently anti-Israel groups, such as the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation and Jewish Voice for Peace.

CAN has created an open-access “anti-fascist syllabus” that “analyzes past and present contours of fascist thought and organizing in their various forms, and provides tools for understanding and for fighting fascism today … Primarily, the syllabus articulates fascism as an historical expression of capitalism’s tendency to exploit and dominate poor, working class, and oppressed people.”

“The syllabus is … intended for students, activists, teachers, unionists, workers, and communities: Muslims, Jews, women, LGBTQI+ individuals, socialists, communists, anarchists, people of color, working-class people, and the alternatively abled, and is an act of solidarity with these communities’ struggles for self-defense,” according to the description.

The syllabus has collected dozens of articles from left-leaning sources such as the American Socialist Quarterly, Socialist Register, The Nation, Mother Jones, Jacobin magazine, and publications from the defunct communist Sojourner Truth Organization.

In the wake of the white supremacist march at Charlottesville, CAN issued an invitation for more academics to join its cause. The group has already reportedly seen a spike in membership.

Neither Palumbio-Liu nor CAN responded to inquiries about the program.

Across American campuses, there is an assault on students’ First Amendment rights. Such assaults are excused in the name of inclusion and diversity, but students who call for more diversity often fail to see the irony in demanding criminal prosecution for those spreading “hate speech.” From Title IX policies that deny the accused due process to “bias response teams” who punish those who offend, the desire of universities to achieve what they believe to be “diversity” has, actually, all but killed ideological diversity.

Take my university, Clemson. Bananas were hung on a banner located on a historical site for slaves, which mobilized a large group of students to protest and call on the administration to make changes. Clemson’s administration had already launched many oddly structured attempts at diversity and inclusion, some of which have landed it in the national spotlight, like the university’s Title IX training for incoming freshmen. As a freshman, I was asked questions about my sex life in great detail, expected to specify the type of sex, with whom, and how many times a week via an online module. Although this information would not be made public, the university would have a record of it. At the time, I had no idea what the Title IX training aimed to achieve or why it was fundamentally wrong, but it was. This training was a complete and total invasion of personal privacy, and the university has no business asking such questions. This mandatory training, which was part of freshman orientation, is a massive invasion into students’ privacy, done under the guise of bringing the school into compliance with federal guidelines.

The political correctness overreach didn’t stop there. Clemson also has a Bias Incident Response Protocol (BIRP) and an intense sexual harassment policy. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) labels schools using a red, yellow, and green light grading scale, with the green light corresponding to the best case in terms of First Amendment protections and red the worst. FIRE has labeled BIRP and the Clemson’s sexual harassment policy as yellow- and red-light policies, respectively. According to FIRE, BIRP does not clearly define parameters of harassment in line with the definition that has come down from prior court rulings, so the clause is left open to interpretation. As a result, easily offended students report others – sometimes getting them punished – via the protocol.

Student groups such as See the Stripes, a group focused on diversity and social justice, have now begun to call for radical changes that would undermine the rights of students to free expression and ideological exploration – not only infringing on their rights, but also destroying the purpose of the institution itself. These groups now demand safe spaces that exclude white people and males. Furthermore, they assert that hiring and admissions decisions should be made on the basis of race and gender, not merit.

Stanford University is slated to offer a class this fall called “White Identity Politics,” during which students will “survey the field of whiteness studies” and discuss the “possibilities of … abolishing whiteness,” according to the course description.https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/35419/

Citing pundits who say “the 2016 Presidential election marks the rise of white identity politics in the United States,” the upper-level anthropology seminar will draw “from the field of whiteness studies and from contemporary writings that push whiteness studies in new directions.”

Questions to be posed throughout the semester include: “Does white identity politics exist?” and “How is a concept like white identity to be understood in relation to white nationalism, white supremacy, white privilege, and whiteness?”

“Students will consider the perils and possibilities of different political practices,” according to the course description, “including abolishing whiteness or coming to terms with white identity.”

The course will be taught by instructor John Patrick Moran. Reached by e-mail, Moran declined to comment, instead directing The College Fix to Stanford communication’s office.

Ernest Miranda, a spokesman for Stanford, told The Fix via e-mail that “‘abolishing whiteness’ is a concept put forward in the 1990s by a number of white historians. Their belief was that if other white people would, like them, stop identifying politically as white, it would help end inequalities.”

Miranda added that “abolishing whiteness” is “among the past and current concepts that will be considered” in the “White Identity Politics” course. The Fix requested a copy of the syllabus, but Miranda declined, saying “we do not share our course materials.”

Reached by e-mail, Stanford Professor Tomás Jiménez, who told The Fix that he sponsored astudent-led class at Stanford on whiteness last semester, said via e-mail that whiteness is “the set of behaviors and outlooks associated with the racial category, white.”

“Just about any social category and subcategory has a ‘…ness’ to it. So, liberals and conservatives; men and women; Wisconsinites and New Yorkers are all social categories, and adding ‘ness’ to any of them is shorthand for the behaviors and outlooks associated with that category,” said Jiménez, an associate professor of sociology and comparative studies in race and ethnicity.

Ah, the beauty of a microaggression. If you’re not overly familiar with the term, a microaggression is when you say something that’s not outright racist or sexist but still upsets the recipient of the said comment nonetheless.

Some examples of microaggressions include asking someone’s ethnicity in any non-approved manner and mistakenly thinking someone of a given race can speak a particular non-English language because of his or her ethnic heritage.

Now, to be clear, some so-called microaggressions are understandably an issue, but not because of bigotry. Some people just say stupid stuff that comes out very differently than how it was intended.

However, as The College Fix reports, some professors are being urged to treat that poor wording just the same as a punch to the face.

Professors attending a recent academic conference were advised to treat racial microaggressions in the classroom like actual assaults, according to attendees’ tweets.

The advice was doled out at a panel workshop at the annual Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference, held in Las Vegas earlier this month.

The workshop at which the comments were made focused on ways to make theater for students of color a “safe space,” according to the conference’s program.

“A panel discussion exploring an adaption of the ‘Safe Spaces’ LQBTQ training model and applying it to faculty training for all theatre students of color,” the program states.

“Treating racism in our classrooms as we would an assault removes the burden from the victim and begins to create safe space,” one scholar in attendance, Professor Shawna Mefferd Kelty of SUNY Plattsburgh, tweeted out.

The problem, however, is that once again, the left is equating words with actual violence.

Editor’s Note: This Piece was originally published by Acculturated. It is reprinted here with permission.

Earlier this summer, I attended a two-week summer philosophy course that included many students from Ivy League universities. It didn’t take long for me to realize that although these students were brilliant, they seemed to be receiving an education that was harming them.

I learned that Ivy League schools have lost sight of what matters in education. Instead of focusing on truth, learning, and the higher things in life, our elite colleges have turned into pressure cookers designed to churn out the ideal professional. Instead of providing a challenging, rigorous education, our higher institutions of learning are content to indoctrinate their students before shipping them off to Silicon Valley or Wall Street, diploma in hand, to make their millions. That’s not what college is meant to be.

When our group of college seniors, which included students from Cornell and Stanford Universities, among other elite colleges, visited the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., this point was driven home. Viewing a particular piece of art, I made an offhand comment about Plato’s cave. The two students with me looked puzzled: “What’s Plato’s cave?”

Not everyone needs to know what Plato’s cave is, of course, but I was stunned that two elite students, hand-picked for a summer program that focused on philosophy, had never heard of one of the foundational ideas of Western civilization. My peers at Hillsdale College, a place not ranked among the nation’s elite colleges, read portions of Plato’s Republic during their freshman year, and even if they are not experts in philosophy, they can at least recognize an allusion to Plato. If “elite” students don’t understand history, philosophy, or literature, what are they learning?

Many of them are well versed in the contemporary grievance industry and can speak fluently on politically correct subjects such as “intersectionality.” Of course this is not universally true, but in the absence of real core curricula at many elite colleges, much falls through the gaping cracks.

By contrast, at many non–Ivy League liberal-arts colleges, communities of learning are intact. Students take small classes, work their way through a comprehensive core curriculum, and love learning and challenging ideas. But at the Ivies, I get the impression from my peers that accomplishments and skill and résumé-building often matter more than pursuing truth and risking failure in the process.