RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘There will be more Reclamations’

University of California Santa Cruz administrators recently agreed to meet to all four demands lodged by a black student group who commandeered a campus building and would not leave until their conditions were met.

But in addition to the four initial stipulations, the group made three other demands to the university, and it has warned UC Santa Cruz that it has four months to comply with these demands or “more Reclamations” will result.

After three days of occupation by students of Kerr Hall, Chancellor George Blumenthal agreed to give all black and Caribbean-identified students a 4-year housing guarantee to live in the Rosa Parks African American Themed House; bring back the building’s lounge; paint its exterior the “Pan-Afrikan colors” of red, green and black; and force all new incoming students to go through a mandatory diversity competency training.

“The student demonstrators raised a number of issues with campus leaders, issues we fundamentally agree upon,” Blumenthal stated in a May 4 memo to the campus community announcing the concessions. “Students from historically underrepresented communities deal with real challenges on campus and in the community. These difficulties include things that many people take for granted, such as finding housing or even just a sense of community.”

Yet the African/Black Student Alliance also demanded three additional provisions from UC Santa Cruz within its initial “Reclamation Statement,” posted on the website of the Afrikan Black Coalition. The group stipulated that if by Fall Quarter 2017 the university does not provide “detailed plans” on how to fulfill its new demands, “there will be more Reclamations.”

“Reclamation” is how the student group referred to its aggressive three-day takeover of Kerr Hall.

The alliance’s three additional demands are that the university purchase a property “to serve as a low income housing cooperative for historically disadvantaged students,” that the university “allocate $100,000” for Santa Cruz’s “SOMeCA” student organization support department, and that the university create either a Black Studies department or a Black Studies Minor or Major.

The group promised that, if their demands are not met, UC Santa Cruz will “force [them] to have to take what [they] know to be in [their] best interest to Reclaim.”

The alliance’s list of demands concludes with a quote from Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Panther Party and a convicted murderer: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom; It is our duty to win; We must love each other and support each other; We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

Blumenthal, in his memo to the campus community, had denounced taking over buildings as a means of protest, saying it displaced the campus community. It is unknown how campus leaders will respond to this latest threat.

A spokesman for UC Santa Cruz did not respond to a question from The College Fix on whether there will be any disciplinary action against the students who forcibly took over Kerr Hall. He only told The Fix that “safety” is the school’s top priority.

As for the student demonstrators, they reject the term “occupation” to describe their “reclamation” actions, claiming: “We are pushing back against the language of ‘occupation’ in recognition of the largely white-centric and fairly recent ‘Occupy Movement.’ We are pushing back against the language of ‘occupation’ in recognition of the very real settler occupations that are hxstorical [sic] and ongoing, such as the European colonization and occupation of ‘The Americas,’ as well as the current context of occupation in Palestine.”https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32561/

Explain this:

We are in the midst of the Trumpian apocalypse. Actual bigoted provocateurs like Charles Murray and Ann Coulter throw flames in the academy. Hate crimes against trans people and people of color and Muslims are on the rise; women’s reproductive rights are on the line, as are just about every other aspect of bodily autonomy and gender justice. So what’s making scholars hyperventilate in outrage? A feminist academic whose body of work is clearly on the side of progressive social justice.

A young philosopher, Rebecca Tuvel, writes an article in which she considers claims to transracial and transgender identities. The result is a firestorm of condemnation — nasty emails, a petition to retract the article, and, worse, a journal that will not stand up for its own peer-reviewed articles. (That last point is complicated by an internal rift within the journal, Hypatia. The editor, Sally J. Scholz, does stand by the article. It was, she writes in a statement, the associate editorial board that disavowed Tuvel’s paper.)

There are scholars whose work needs to be not only critically engaged with but rendered moot, who, through fabricated data or improper vetting or suspicious funding, have produced work of demonstrable falsehood, with clear intent to mislead and to provide ammunition for retrogressive policy. The poster child here might be Mark Regnerus, a sociologist who argued the innate inferiority of gay and lesbian families, data be damned.

Tuvel’s paper — which I actually read — does not even remotely reach that bar. It uses the case of Rachel Dolezal as an entry point to explore questions of identity, the body, biological determinism, social constructionism, and analogies between racial and gender classification. It is a wholly legitimate, if provocative, philosophical endeavor. One can agree or disagree, or wish the author had done more of this or less of that. But the assertion that broaching the very subject produces inevitable harm is specious, to say the least. Indeed, the idea that any article in a specialized feminist journal causes harm, and even violence, as the signatories to an open letter to the journal claim, is a grave misuse of the term “harm.”

Consider the intent and background here. By any measure, Tuvel is a committed feminist philosopher who repeatedly and clearly states her absolute support of trans rights. She is not Coulter or Murray or even the predictably contrarian Camille Paglia. Surely, Tuvel should not be immune to critique — none of us are. But to organize a petition and demand retraction should be an action reserved for work that is willfully erroneous, improperly vetted, and riven with demonstrable falsehoods. If those of us on the left are unable to make distinctions between legitimate intellectual disagreements and damaging lies, we will be hoist with our own petard. Our eyes aren’t on the prize but on mutual evisceration in the name of holier-than-thou rectitude. This isn’t substantive intellectual debate. It’s schoolyard name-calling.

It’s hard to know what aspect of the affaire Tuvel is most upsetting. Is it that there is a controversy to begin with, in the midst of both real-world peril and plenty of actual right-wing scholarship available for critique? Is it that an untenured feminist philosopher has become demonized and subject to hate-filled emails and trolling? Is it that the journal that published her — and put her article through standard peer review — almost immediately threw her under the bus? Or is it that we’ve handed the right an opportunity to inveigh yet again against an elitist left that squashes free speech with its mindless groupthink?
Our eyes aren’t on the prize but on mutual evisceration in the name of holier-than-thou rectitude.

As Jesse Singal points out in New York Magazine, the major points of attack in calling for retraction do not bear up to even minor scrutiny. “It’s remarkable,” he says, “how many basic facts this letter gets wrong about Tuvel’s paper. Either the authors simply lied about the article’s contents, or they didn’t read it at all. Every single one of the hundreds of signatories on the open letter now has their name on a document that severely (and arguably maliciously) mischaracterizes the work of one of their colleagues … perhaps fueled by the dynamics of online shaming and piling­-on.”

A professor of theology at Duke University is resigning rather than facing disciplinary measures for criticizing a “Racial Equality Institute” training program.

Paul Griffiths, Warren professor of Catholic theology, responded to a faculty-wide email announcing the program by criticizing it as a waste of time and declaring that it would be “intellectually flaccid.”

The resulting firestorm of criticism led to disciplinary measures that the professor refused to accept.

Washington Times:

“I exhort you not to attend this training,” Mr. Griffiths wrote in the Feb. 6 email. “Don’t lay waste your time by doing so. It’ll be, I predict with confidence, intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, cliches, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty. When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show.”

Several colleagues replied that they were looking forward to the Racial Equity Institute training session, which was scheduled for March 4-5 from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Elaine Heath, dean of the divinity school, took a different tack.

She condemned Mr. Griffiths for using mass email “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,” she wrote in the email, also sent Feb. 6.

Mr. Griffiths sent another facultywide email months later detailing the disciplinary procedures brought against him after the initial email exchange, which was first reported by Rod Dreher of the American Conservative.

Ms. Heath tried to schedule a meeting with Mr. Griffiths but refused to let him bring a sympathetic colleague, English professor Thomas Pfau, to serve as a witness. She eventually barred him from faculty meetings and threatened to take away his access to research funds.

“It is unacceptable for you to refuse to meet with me as the Dean of the Divinity School,” Ms. Heath wrote in a March 10 memo to Mr. Griffiths. “I cannot physically force you to meet with me, but your refusal to meet with me will have consequences.”

Ms. Portier-Young filed a complaint with the Office for Institutional Equity claiming the use of “racist and/or sexist speech in such a way as to constitute a hostile workplace,” Mr. Griffiths’ email said.

Almost anyone who has been forced to sit through diversity training has probably thought, “What a complete waste of time.” No slideshow presentation is going to undermine one’s beliefs, so any real bigots taking it won’t be swayed, for one thing. For another, it takes time out of doing actual work in a pathetic attempt at indoctrination.

When Paul Griffiths, a professor of Catholic theology at Duke University, said what most of us happen to think about so-called diversity training, however, he stirred up a whole storm of social justice viciousness. The College Fix reports:

The professor of Catholic theology told his colleagues not to “lay waste your time” with the training, which he predicted would be full of “bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs”:

When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show. Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual. (Re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history; I hope you’ll keep that history in mind as you think about this instance.

Now he’s the subject of two disciplinary proceedings – one for “unprofessional conduct” and one for “harassment” – and he is reportedly resigning after the 2017-2018 academic year.

Rod Dreher at The American Conservative obtained documents related to the dispute over the weekend, reprinting a recent open letter from Griffiths to the DDS faculty and the February email chain that started his problems.

After his acerbic response, Griffiths’ dean Elaine Heath responded on the listserv that it was “inappropriate and unprofessional” for him to publicly “humiliate or undermine” his colleague who sent the invitation, Prof. Anathea Portier-Young:

The use of mass emails to express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution.

And here I thought that discussing things was what academics actually did for a living when they weren’t teaching classes. How is it “unprofessional” to voice a dissenting opinion again?

Oh, right, Griffiths assaulted the social justice shibboleth of diversity training, which can never be permitted to stand.

Students at Florida’s Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college, were not excited to have two representatives from the Trump administration at their college commencement. Omarosa Manigault, an advisor to the president, and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos addressed the crowd to discuss the legacy of the college’s founders and also to wish the graduates luck in their future endeavors. The audience booed and physically turned their backs on these speakers as an act of protest. The college president even defended the speakers, asking his students to hear their points of view. He wasn’t successful.

The New York Times interviewed five UC Berkeley Republicans on their experiences at the famously illiberal bastion of radical leftist intolerance.

“Founded in the 1960s,” the Times notes,

the Berkeley College Republicans have remained a small and tightknit club, today numbering a few dozen active members…

Berkeley’s Republicans have turned the tables on liberals at the campus, championing free speech and putting a conservative claim on one of the university’s proudest liberal legacies. Last month, the group and another conservative student organization sued administrators for what they said was discrimination against conservative speakers. They have co-opted the language of the left, portraying themselves as fighting intolerance. Not all Berkeley Republicans agree with their tactics — some describe it as unnecessarily provocative.

“We are almost like an exhibit or zoo animals,” said 20-year-old Naweed Tahmas, external vice president of the Berkeley College Republicans. “Whenever someone finds out I’m a Republican at Berkeley, they pick my brain. People are genuinely curious. Nonetheless, their image of a white, male Republican is shattered when they see me.”

“As a Republican on campus I am targeted frequently,” he continued. “I have been spit on on several occasions. I have had drinks thrown on me. I have been punched in the face… People assume we are racist, we are xenophobic. They attach labels to us that are not true.”

Eighteen-year-old Anastasia Pyrinis, a political science and economics major, said, “I think when people find out that I’m conservative there’s an underlying tone or expression I get, like: ‘How could you be? You’re supposed to be a Berkeley enlightened student. How could you dare be a conservative?’ It’s definitely something that puts distance between me and my peers, and I really don’t think it should.”

Economics and history major Patrick Boldea, 19, said, “You have a lot of professors who hold some very liberal views, and you can sometimes feel not necessarily marginalized, but like you’re being penalized when you express a more conservative view. Like in my sociology class, I wrote an essay on the good aspects of gentrification in San Francisco. I was very heavily criticized by my professor.”

He went on to say that, as a conservative on campus, “you feel like your viewpoint is not as valued. You feel somewhat uncomfortable, but it’s not unbearable or unmanageable.”

Maria Konakova, 20, linguistics and business: “I don’t agree with some of the things that Berkeley College Republicans do. Some of their moves, like having an animal-rights barbecue, where the main food that is sold is meat, that doesn’t seem to me like a rational thing to do. It seems like it was inflammatory.” Konakova also does not that the majority of liberal Berkeley students “are aggressive and intolerant.”

Therapy dogs, chocolate, Play-Doh, video games: Today’s college students are offered a variety of ways to cope with the stress of final exams.

At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, several different student groups offered various study breaks, including a Zumba class, a video game stress reliever, and a “Chocolate and Chocolate Labs” event, the Daily Pennsylvanian reports. Student organizers did not respond to The College Fix’s request seeking details.

An annual tradition at the University of Illinois offers students a “Reading Day.” “In place of classes, the university hosts a variety of non-mandatory events aimed at helping students study and de-stress,” the Daily Illini reports.

Penn State’s “De-Stress Fest” included origami folding, Wii gaming, “brain massage music” and more, according to the university’s website.

The University of Michigan offered Play-Doh and more in an event billed as a way to de-stress before final exams, according to its Facebook page. Other relaxers at the event included glitter bottles, Legos and dominoes.

At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, several different student groups offered various study breaks, including a Zumba class, a video game stress reliever, and a “Chocolate and Chocolate Labs” event, the Daily Pennsylvanian reports. Student organizers did not respond to The College Fix’s request seeking details.

An annual tradition at the University of Illinois offers students a “Reading Day.” “In place of classes, the university hosts a variety of non-mandatory events aimed at helping students study and de-stress,” the Daily Illini reports.

Penn State’s “De-Stress Fest” included origami folding, Wii gaming, “brain massage music” and more, according to the university’s website.

The University of Michigan offered Play-Doh and more in an event billed as a way to de-stress before final exams, according to its Facebook page. Other relaxers at the event included glitter bottles, Legos and dominoes.

At Temple University, its Student Activities group put together an all-inclusive “camping” event called Camp TU. Students had the chance to participate in de-stressing activities by zip-lining, scaling a rock wall, watching the movie “Anchorman,” or eating from one of seven food trucks, The Tab reports.

Christopher Carey, director of student activities at Temple University, told The College Fix via email that the offerings aided students in several ways.