RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nas.org/ https://www.nas.org/articles/finding_academic_freedom

New York, NY (May 22, 2017) – The National Association of Scholars has released a chart that compares the ten most important statements on academic freedom in American history. “Charting Academic Freedom: 102 Years of Debate” starts with the World War I era “Statement of Principles” from the newly founded American Association of University Professors, and extends to recent declarations by Middlebury College professors and two Princeton professors.

The chart makes clear at a glance that “academic freedom” has changed its meaning many times in the last 102 years. During World War I, professors were worried that college trustees posed a risk to their right to speak out on controversial issues. They sought protection by claiming that their “scientific” pursuit of truth deserved a special status in society. By contrast, 107 Middlebury College professors issued a statement in March, decrying the “incivility and coarseness” of their own students, who had violently suppressed a speech by a visiting scholar.

“The NAS has published this chart to improve the quality of the national debate over academic freedom,” said Peter W. Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars. “The American public is rightly concerned that the freedom to learn in American colleges and universities has been damaged. Disinvitations to prominent speakers; riots at places such as Berkeley, Middlebury, and Claremont McKenna; and other efforts to intimidate both faculty members and fellow students have become all too common,” said Wood. “But efforts to repair the situation have been hampered by confusion over what ‘academic freedom’ really is. Our chart is meant to give all sides of the debate a roadmap of the major policy statements.”

https://www.nas.org/images/documents/NAS_freeSpeechChart_1.2.pdf

Parents, taxpayers and donors have little idea of the levels of lunacy, evil and lawlessness that have become features of many of today’s institutions of higher learning. Parents, taxpayers and donors who ignore or are too lazy to find out what goes on in the name of higher education are nearly as complicit as the professors and administrators who promote or sanction the lunacy, evil and lawlessness. As for the term “institutions of higher learning,” we might start asking: Higher than what? Let’s look at a tiny sample of academic lunacy.

During a campus debate, Purdue University professor David Sanders argued that a logical extension of pro-lifers’ belief that fetuses are human beings is that pictures of “a butt-naked body of a child” are child pornography. Clemson University’s chief diversity officer, Lee Gill, who’s paid $185,000 a year to promote inclusion, provided a lesson claiming that to expect certain people to be on time is racist.

To reduce angst among snowflakes in its student body, the University of California, Hastings College of the Law has added a “Chill Zone.” The Chill Zone, located in its library, has, just as most nursery schools have, mats for naps and beanbag chairs. Before or after a snooze, students can also use the space to do a bit of yoga or meditate. The University of Michigan Law School helped its students weather their Trump derangement syndrome — a condition resulting from Donald Trump’s election — by enlisting the services of an “embedded psychologist” in a room full of bubbles and play dough. To reduce pressure on law students, Joshua M. Silverstein, a law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, thinks that “every American law school ought to substantially eliminate C grades and set its good academic standing grade point average at the B- level.”

Today’s academic climate might be described as a mixture of infantilism, kindergarten and totalitarianism. The radicals, draft dodgers and hippies of the 1960s who are now college administrators and professors are responsible for today’s academic climate. The infantilism should not be tolerated, but more important for the future of our nation are the totalitarianism and the hate-America lessons being taught at many of the nation’s colleges. For example, led by its student government leader, the University of California, Irvine’s student body voted for a motion, which the faculty approved, directing that the American flag not be on display because it makes some students uncomfortable and creates an unsafe, hostile environment. The flag is a symbol of hate speech, according to the student government leader. He said that the U.S. flag is just as offensive as Nazi and Islamic State flags and that the U.S. is the world’s most evil nation (http://tinyurl.com/kjoax3j).

In a recent New York Times op-ed, New York University provost Ulrich Baer argued: “The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community.” That’s a vision that is increasingly being adopted on college campuses, and it’s leaking down to our primary and secondary levels of education. Baer apparently believes that the test for one’s commitment to free speech comes when he balances his views with those of others. His vision justifies the violent disruptions of speeches by Heather Mac Donald at Claremont McKenna College, Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley and Charles Murray at Middlebury College. Baer’s vision is totalitarian nonsense. The true test of one’s commitment to free speech comes when he permits people to be free to say and write those things he finds deeply offensive.

A demand for $40 million normally is the stuff of thriller movies, with British-accented villain threatening to blow up stuff or kill the governor’s daughter or some similar unspeakable horror. Supervillain territory. But the demand of the UCLA “Afrikan Student Union” for a building plus 40 mill carries no threat that I can find. Other than the implicit threat to cry racism and demonstrate, I suppose. Still, I have to credit them for chutzpah. The UCLA Daily Bruin reports:

The Afrikan Student Union called on UCLA to create a Black Resource Center and a $40 million endowment to address African-American underrepresentation on campus in a list of demands it released Thursday [May 11].

Fourth-year philosophy and African American Studies student and Afrikan Student Union Chair Alicia Frison said the group worked on the demands throughout the year and decided to release the list now in response to recent incidents affecting African-American students.

“This year will be the 51st year the Afrikan Student Union is on campus,” ASU wrote in a statement, “however, 50 years later we are struggling with many of the same issues as our ancestors and elders dealt with in 1966. This is unacceptable.”

Ms. Frison: is that a gang sign in your left hand? (Photo: Daily Bruin)

The grievances listed by the “Afrikan” students are pretty weak beer:

On April 30, a picture that showed USAC President Danny Siegel holding up a gang sign was leaked, and on the same day there was a shooting near University of California, San Diego targeting African-American individuals. ASU also cited racist stickers posted around the offices of the Academic Advancement Program as a reason for releasing its list of demands.

The poor snowflakes have no idea or concern for how many taxpayers had to skimp and go without in orer to pay their huge California tax bill. They must think that $40 million is chicken feed:

“$40 million is just a drop in the bucket for the university,” Frison said. “Berkeley already has a $30 to $40 million endowment even though they have less African American students.”

I think she means “fewer” students.

Here is thought for Ms. Frison: how about raising money for the endowment on your own? Maybe get a job and start saving.

The campaign against free speech on American campuses rolls on, steadily decreasing the domain of permissible ideas. But the case of Paul Griffiths, a professor at Duke Divinity School, is something new. The defense of liberty of thought and discussion itself has been transformed into a career-ending transgression.

The case was brought to light in late April when Rod Dreher of the American Conservative published a series of email exchanges. It started Feb. 6, when Anathea Portier-Young, another Divinity School professor, distributed a facultywide email. “On behalf of the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Standing Committee,” she wrote, “I strongly urge you to participate in the Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training planned for March 4 and 5.” Ms. Portier-Young promised colleagues that the weekend program would be “transformative, powerful, and life-changing.”

Ms. Portier-Young, an Old Testament scholar with expertise in “constructions of identity, gender, and ethnicity, and traditions of violence and nonviolence,” approvingly quoted the Racial Equity Institute’s guiding ideas: “‘Racism is a fierce, ever-present, challenging force, one which has structured the thinking, behavior, and actions of individuals and institutions since the beginning of U.S. history.’ ” She also included the institute’s call to political action: “ ‘To understand racism and effectively begin dismantling it requires an equally fierce, consistent, and committed effort.’ ”

Late in the afternoon of the same day, Mr. Griffiths replied in a facultywide email. Noting that Ms. Portier-Young had “made her ideological commitments clear,” he stated that he would “do the same, in the interests of free exchange.”

Mr. Griffiths, a professor of Catholic theology, was good to his word. “I exhort you not to attend this training,” he wrote. “There’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty,” he continued, and it would reflect “illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies” and be “definitively anti-intellectual.” He noted that “(re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history.”

He then entreated the faculty to rededicate themselves to their scholarly and pedagogical mission: “Each of us should be tense with the effort of it, thrumming like a tautly triple-woven steel thread with the work of it, consumed by the fire of it, ever eager for more of it.”

That evening, Dean Elaine Heath entered the fray. Announcing in her own facultywide email that she was “looking forward to participating in the REI training” and that she was “proud that we are hosting it at Duke Divinity School,” Ms. Heath—also a professor of missional and pastoral theology—expressed confidence that the sessions would improve the school’s “intellectual strength, spiritual vitality, and moral authority.”

Having sided firmly with Ms. Portier-Young, the dean proceeded to outline rules of acceptable discourse in facultywide email exchanges. “It is inappropriate and unprofessional to use mass emails to make disparaging statements—including arguments ad hominem—in order to humiliate or undermine individual colleagues or groups of colleagues with whom we disagree. The use of mass emails to express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution.”

Yet Mr. Griffiths’s three-paragraph, 228-word email made no disparaging statement about any individual, much less expressed bigotry of any sort. Unless—in accordance with the illiberal spirit that has taken root on our campuses—one equates unsparing criticism of ideas with attacks on a person and redefines “bigotry” to mean deviation from the progressive party line. CONTINUE AT SITE

The National Review ran a short piece, which, at first, I thought was a satirical piece by Katherine Timpf in the spirit of the Harvard Crimson, “U-Arizona is hiring-students-to tattle on others for ‘bias-incidents.’”

The University of Arizona is hiring students to be “social-justice activists,” [SJAs] and the job description demands that they “report any bias incidents or claims to appropriate Residence Life staff.”

In other words: These kids are being paid to tattle on other kids for anything they might consider to be a microaggression, and any students who gets these jobs should probably identify themselves so that other students will know to never invite them to their parties.

According to the university’s website, the official title of the position is “social-justice activist,” and it pays $10 per hour. They can expect to work about 15 hours per week, which, as the Daily Caller notes, means that they will be making roughly $600 per month to behave like self-righteous, meddling nightmares.

Before I blinked twice and realized Miss Timpf was reporting a fact, and wasn’t trying to be humorous, I wondered if the $600 a month stipend would go to reducing a student’s federal and/or state college loan, which will typically run in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars, depending on the campus.

But, no, Miss Timpf was dead serious.

The SJA would not act as an ombudsman to negotiate resolutions between triggered emotionally hurt students and steely-eyed truth tellers. Nor would he act as a blockwart, which was a Nazi rank below gauleiter. He would be, frankly, a paid, contemptible snitch. His job would be to turn in and stamp out individuals, not whole populations.

The University website, “Social Justice Advocates Recruitment Information,” informs us:

The Social Justice Advocates (SJA) Position is one that is grounded in the multicultural competency framework and allows student staff to gain the awareness, knowledge, and skills necessary to work effectively with students and residents across cultures and identities. The position calls for an understanding of social identity groups, experiences, histories, and practices as it relates to everyday life and life at the University of Arizona.

The position also aims to increase understanding of one’s own self through critical reflection of power and privilege, identity and intersectionality, systems of socialization, cultural competency and allyship as they pertain to the acknowledgement, understanding and acceptance of differences. Finally, this position intends to increase a student staff member’s ability to openly lead conversations, discuss differences and confront diversely insensitive behavior.

It’s hard not to wonder if the Butler University bookstore will have the class supplies needed for a fall course called “Trumpism & U.S. Democracy”—gas masks, Maalox to counteract chemical agents, cobblestones of a nice throwing weight?

It’s a legitimate question, considering that the School of Communication class was originally billed as planning to “discuss, and possibly engage in, strategies for resistance” to Trump’s “sexism, white supremacy, xenophobia, nativism, and imperialism,” according to the 57-word course description by Professor Ann Savage. A revised description issued after parents got wind of the course and complained moderates the language, but clearly leaves open the possibility of protest attendance and participation.
How exactly does one grade participation in a protest? Do broken civilian car windows count less than those of police cars? Does being arrested on national media count more than on local newscasts? And is there extra credit for being tased?
Some People Love the Idea

When the course came to light during Butler’s graduation week this month, response was quick on social media, today’s venue of choice for the airing of grievances.

“We have a daughter who is getting ready to graduate from Butler on Saturday,” one mother posted on the Butler Facebook page. “We used to be proud to tell people that fact…We don’t pay you THOUSANDS of dollars to teach our children to act out when things don’t go their way. Are you going to teach them to throw a temper tantrum when they don’t get the job they want?”

But as ever, other parents demonstrated their willingness to stand with disorder, another check writer posting: “Proud Bulldog mom. Proud of President (James) Danko. Proud of the community at Butler. Proud of Dr. Savage. Proud that bulldogs don’t back down in the face of criticism. Proud to send you another $57,000 for another year of education for my oldest daughter.”

It was an unusual outburst for this quiet liberal arts school of just over 4,000 undergraduates nestled among ivy-covered brick bungalows near the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The university quickly took down the initial course description, posting a much-altered version. Gone were references to Trump’s campaign boorishness and plans to take part in protests. Now the class is expected to explore “the rise of Donald Trump as a political and social phenomenon,” and “instill disciplinary diversity” by hosting guest lectures from other Butler faculty. Note that “disciplinary diversity” is not necessarily the same as actual diversity.
Same Academic Decrepitude, Different Day

University Provost Kathryn Morris said in a release that the course “falls under the auspices of academic freedom,” as would a course supporting the president. Students would never be forced to demonstrate, she wrote. But neither will they be chained to their desks. Students might visit “ongoing responses to Trump’s presidency and campaign” as “participant observers.”

This seems to leave room for some vigorous class activities, possibly qualifying for Physical Education credit. Butler is saying participation is voluntary, but wasn’t that model rejected in the case of school prayer? Something about kids feeling ostracized and marginalized. Besides, the university seems to be suggesting the real problem was how the course was described, not what the kids will be doing. The school plans to “review its practice of accepting preliminary course descriptions.”

It’s funny how the social justice jihadis never realize how outrageously racist they sound to those outside of their own bubble.

The latest example comes from the University of Hawaii, where a math professor has informed all of her white male colleagues that they should quit. All in the name of social justice, of course:

Not to alarm you, but I probably want you to quit your job, or at least take a demotion. Statistically speaking, you are probably taking up room that should go to someone else. If you are a white cis man (meaning you identify as male and you were assigned male at birth) you almost certainly should resign from your position of power. That’s right, please quit. Too difficult? Well, as a first step, at least get off your hiring committee, your curriculum committee, and make sure you’re replaced by a woman of color or trans person. Don’t have any in your department? HOW SHOCKING.

Remember that you live in a world where people don’t succeed in a vacuum; most success happens on the backs of others who did not consent. You have no idea how successful you would have been if you were still you, but with an additional marginalization (not white, or not male, or not cis gender, or with a disability, etc).

Right now, I want to talk about gender equality because the fact that women aren’t actually a demographic minority makes certain arguments easier, but please know that actual solutions require women of color and trans people. Remember having white cis women run the world is no kind of solution.

Piper Harron, an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii, is apparently only in a temporary position. This probably contributes to the Princeton graduate’s resentment at the hiring process.

In her bio on the American Mathematical Society’s blog where this screed was posted, she notes:

Piper Harron tried really hard to play by the rules of society and academia, but she failed. Not only did she fail, but she was miserable and found that playing by the rules wouldn’t even keep her safe.

It seems she chalks her failure up to being either a woman or a minority — it’s hard to keep up on which is a bigger hindrance these days. It doesn’t matter, because either way her failure simply has to be because of white men. It can’t be her fault in any way.

While she’s right by saying it’s impossible to know for sure that successful people would be just as successful if they were black or a woman, the converse is also true, but she’s absolutely sure that she would be more successful.

From a supposed mathematician, maybe her poor grasp of logic is what’s hindered her career? CONTINUE AT SITE

Earlier this week, this column noted the offensive online posts of June Chu, Dean of Yale University’s Pierson College. This morning, Pierson Head Stephen Davis sent the following email to students and faculty:

Dear Pierson community,

I am writing to let you know that Dean Chu has been placed on leave and will not be participating in Commencement activities or working with students through the end of this academic year. In the meantime, Elaine Lincoln will be coordinating with Dean Mark Schenker in the Yale College Dean’s Office to make sure that your academic needs are properly addressed.

I am very aware that when I last wrote to you on Saturday morning, it was to ask you to partner with me in envisioning a way forward—to carve out space for grace—in the aftermath of Dean Chu’s email to the college apologizing for two Yelp reviews in which she had used inappropriate and unacceptable language pertaining to matters of class and race. I did so even though I found the views she expressed to be deeply harmful to our community fabric. I did so because I was convinced that her apology was genuine, because I believed that those posts were not representative of her and of the good work I had seen Dean Chu do in her capacity as dean, and because I still had hope for the possibility of envisioning a path toward healing and reconciliation.

Today I am grieving because I no longer can envision such a way forward. When I wrote to you on Saturday morning, it was with the understanding—and under assurance from Dean Chu, an assurance given to me and to others—that she had posted only two troubling reviews on social media. On Saturday evening, I found out that she was in fact responsible for multiple reprehensible posts, enough to represent a more widespread pattern. The additional posts that surfaced compounded the harm of the initial two, and they also further damaged my trust and confidence in Dean Chu’s accountability to me and ability to lead the students of Pierson College.

Let me be clear. No one, especially those in trusted positions of educating young people, should denigrate or stereotype others, and that extends to any form of discrimination based on class, race, religion, age, disability, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Yale unequivocally values respect for all. This is simply to reaffirm what I wrote to you on Saturday: what holds us together is our collective effort to ensure that every single person in our midst is valued beyond measure. This is true not only in Pierson and across the university, but most emphatically throughout the city of New Haven and in every locale beyond.

This collective effort takes hard work. We work and strive every day to fulfill our basic social imperative: to honor and embrace those who are different from us. It also takes trust. We seek to forgive, but there are also consequences to our actions, and discerning when trust has been broken is one of the most difficult and painful kinds of labor.

And so, I write you today with a different kind of request: to join me in the equally important labor of rebuilding the trust that holds us together. Jenny and I are available to you 24/7, and we remain committed to making Pierson a place where this is possible.

Peace,

Dr. D

Now we know how far a politically correct Ivy league administrator has to go to face official discipline, and this column expects that Ms. Chu will not be returning to her position as a residential college dean at Yale. Conservatives may be tempted to celebrate, but as noted on Monday this column thinks that people on Yale’s campus and elsewhere should try to be more forgiving of comments that offend them.

And of course what campuses like Yale need more than tolerance for insulting Yelp reviews is tolerance for ideas that are hardly offensive at all but simply deviate from today’s trendy extreme of progressive leftism. It’s not clear that Ms. Chu’s leave, which is effective immediately, will make the campus any more welcoming of alternative viewpoints. There’s a joke about the limited, phony diversity sought by schools like Yale: They want people who look different but think the same.

This column recently noted cause for optimism in a campus survey showing Yale students believe in free speech. Now the grown-ups need to support those who try to exercise it. Along those lines, Yale has an opportunity to restructure the leadership of Pierson College in a way that will send an unequivocal signal that the university stands for robust and healthy intellectual discourse. Pierson Head Stephen Davis seems to be a well-meaning fellow but he might be a better fit taking over Ms. Chu’s job as dean and reporting to a new head of the residential college. Your correspondent humbly suggests that Yale should pay whatever portion of its roughly $25 billion endowment is required to persuade liberal Democrat Erika Christakis to run Pierson. Yale should also promise to support free speech as much as she does. CONTINUE AT SITE