RUTHFULLY YOURS

Like so many leaflets before them, these talked about the scourge of “privilege”. And whom did these pamphlets identify as the people with the most privilege?

At present, the people who preach tolerance in America and Canada are turning out to be the least tolerant.

And the people who complain of discrimination turn out to be leading practitioners of the oldest discrimination of all.

The free speech wars on North American campuses appear to have arrived at their inevitable endpoint. For years, American and Canadian students have played around with a new form of morality in education. It is based not on a traditional concept of searching for truth or investigating and analysing ideas, but rather on the concept that the veracity of an opinion can be discerned by the person uttering it.

In this way, a considerable number of people have apparently decided that a variety of “privileges” exist that make some speakers vital to listen to and others unnecessary, unless they agree to mouth a set of pre-ordained platitudes.

This concept, coupled with the idea that minorities require special protection from speech, have now finally delivered the moral breakdown that was always waiting for it. The warning signs have been there for years.

In 2010, the former editor of the left-wing magazine The New Republic, Martin Peretz, arrived to speak at Harvard University. There he was greeted by a group of around a hundred students and others who decided to shout at him as he arrived at their campus. They decided to greet him with chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, Marty Peretz has got to go.” And so, a generation of American students who can have had little, if any, knowledge of Peretz’s career or left-wing interests, chose to name him a racist and be done with him.

Being Jewish, a minority group, certainly did not offer any protection, and may indeed have harmed his cause; it already seemed that there were ordering-systems at work in the business of minority priorities.

By the time, then, that the British-born Milo Yiannopoulos was touring American campuses in 2016-17, protest movements were busily trying to work out precisely what orders of persecuted minorities should exist. As Yiannopoulos is openly gay, there was a slight queasiness about shutting him down — at first. People who are members of at least one minority group have a certain protected status, and as such a certain inevitably about ranking develops. But just as you can be marked up, you can be marked down. Yiannopoulos may be gay, but he has been rude about aspects of transsexualism. That view at least evened things out. However, his tendency to criticise Islam and Muslims moved him lower — indeed right down to the lowest level, that of white heterosexual male.

College campuses in contemporary America are rough places.

At any rate, it is of this that SJWs (“Social Justice Warriors”), i.e. “progressive” activists, have been assuring the country for quite some time.

“Racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “ageism,” “ableism,” “classism”—all of the “isms” and “phobias” that the left insists are endemic to Western civilization generally and America specifically have not only infected academia. To judge from the tireless rhetoric of both leftist student activists and their ideological ilk in the professoriate, these secular sins may be even more ensconced in colleges and universities than they are in the larger society.

“Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go!” Nearly 30 years ago, Jesse Jackson led hordes of students at Stanford University with this chant as they succeeded in pressuring the school to jettison required courses in Western civilization. The Western Civilization curriculum, so went the thinking at the time, is ridden with “European and Western male bias,” biases that privilege white men over and against historically “marginalized” groups.

This line of thinking (or unthinking) dominates academia to the present day.

To put it bluntly: Unless one is white, heterosexual, Christian, and deviates from the hegemon of Political Correctness (PC) that rules academia, the current climate on college campuses promises to be oppressive.

This is the version of reality advanced by SJWs. Reality itself, however, is quite otherwise.

In reality, it is true that college campuses have indeed become oppressive. The disinterested pursuit of truth and knowledge; the free marketplace of ideas; the cultivation of intellectual and moral virtues—these goods that have traditionally been the university’s raison d’ etre have largely given way to a new ideal: activism.

In 2012 I published a book entitled The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind. In it, I deplored the increasing fixation on group identity in the humanities and social sciences departments of American universities. That fixation, I noted, was coupled with “a preoccupation with the historical grievances of certain groups” as well as “a virulent hostility to America, which is consistently cast as the prime villain in the histories of these groups.” I devoted the book’s first chapter to tracing the theoretical origins of this lamentable phenomenon, then spent a chapter apiece outlining four of the group-oriented “studies” that had become established parts of today’s academic curricula – Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Chicano Studies. In an additional chapter, I presented a round-up of other “studies,” some of which were, at the time, relatively new and on the rise: Cultural Studies, Disability Studies, Fat Studies, Men’s Studies, Whiteness Studies.

My overall point was simple: none of this nonsense had anything to do with actual education. It was all about encouraging students to identify not as individuals who were at college to prepare themselves for a successful life but as members of one or more oppressed groups (the more, by the way, the better) and to see themselves, on that account, as victims of deep-seated prejudice on the part of a system that was determined to keep them down and prevent their success. And if you weren’t a member of any of those groups – if, in other words, you were a healthy heterosexual white male – the goal of all these pseudo-studies was to teach you that you were in possession of an undeserved privilege for which you were obliged to spend your life apologizing and making amends. Never mind if you’d grown up dirt-poor and had worked your toches off to get into college.

When The Victims’ Revolution came out, the New York Times Book Review assigned it to Andrew Delbanco, a humanities professor at Columbia University and one of the Times’s top go-to guys on education. The thrust of Delbanco’s review was that my picture of the academy today was (a) “mostly a caricature” and (b) “out of date,” because “this kind of thing is a shrinking sector of academic life.”

As to (a), well, given that my book was principally a work of reportage, all I could say in my defense was that if it read like a caricature, it was because the academy had, in fact, become a caricature. As to (b), just look around you. It’s now old news that, as a “sector of academic life,” identity studies haven’t shrunk – they’ve ballooned. The stunted mentality disseminated in these courses has spread beyond the humanities and social studies departments and taken over the campuses as a whole (not to mention the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and whole swaths of the popular culture). On American campuses, to a staggering extent, group identity has supplanted traditional morality and critical thinking.

Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, took to these pages last October to affirm that “we adhere to exceptionally strong principles of free expression.” He invoked Yale’s exemplary 1974 Woodward Report, which states that the university’s educational mission is inextricably bound up with “the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.”

A February lawsuit tells a different story. Tucked inside the amended complaint, Doe v. Yale, is the extraordinary claim that Yale punished the anonymous male plaintiff for writing a class essay in which he condemned rape.

Like dozens of lawsuits now working their way through state and federal courts, Doe v. Yale alleges that university officials grossly mishandled sexual-assault allegations. According to the complaint, a university panel found in spring 2014 that Doe had engaged in sexual intercourse with a woman without her consent. He alleges that the woman expressly consented and on that evening she harassed him. He adds that Yale’s disciplinary procedures were stacked against him and administered by biased officials who presumed his guilt.

This case is unusual in several respects. Doe advances one relatively new and one completely novel legal theory. The relatively new one revolves around Title IX, the 1972 federal law that provides that “no person” may be discriminated against based on sex in educational programs that receive federal assistance.

In April 2011, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague” letter declaring that Title IX imposed a duty on colleges and universities receiving federal funding—as virtually all do—to investigate, prosecute and adjudicate sexual-assault allegations and impose punishments where appropriate. The letter also directed schools to reduce due-process protections for the accused, typically men.

Doe insists that Title IX must protect men as well as women. In punishing him for sexual assault on the basis of allegations that were either unfounded or refuted by facts to which both sides of the dispute agreed, the lawsuit argues, Yale discriminated against him on the basis of his sex in violation of Title IX. CONTINUE AT SITE

Adding to the proof that the left is basically a fundamentalist cult, the University of Regina has unironically set up a confessional booth so that men can confess to the sin of being … well … men. Masked as an initiative to combat sexual harassment, the university’s Man Up Against Violence program is a function of identity politics designed to emasculate men. The first step in that emasculation is requiring men to seek forgiveness for the sin of being a man.

For the record, real men do not enact violence against women. Period. As I raise my son to be a man, and I am raising him to be a man in ways that embrace masculinity, I’m teaching him to respect women and to defend them. Teaching my son that masculinity means respecting and protecting women is a cardinal sin of the left, of course. Fathers like me are pilloried for daring to believe that women might need a man to occasionally protect them. That’s the kind of sin that demands repentance in a leftist confessional booth and then penance of some sort.

Lest you think that the confessional booth set up by leftists at the University of Regina is a one-off event, pay attention to the number of emasculated males who apologize for being men. Many liberal men use their social media accounts as a confessional booth, of sorts. Exhibit A:

It takes little more than typing in the words “men apologizing for being men” to uncover a treasure trove of emasculated men seeking forgiveness for the sin of being men from their new religious leaders. And if you think that I’m overstating the religious aspect of the left, keep in mind that the University of Regina has simply decided to do away with the informality of their cultic practices and formalize those practices by using the language and methods of overt religiosity.

In the 1970s, Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones was a compadre of Harvey Milk. There was a time when the Peoples Temple was a shining feather in the left’s diversity cap. Of course, in a somewhat revision of history, liberals claim that Milk and the liberal elite of San Francisco were conned and then held against their will, in a manner of speaking. According to Harvey Milk apologists, Jim Jones was a dangerous dude and Milk was snookered by the charismatic cult leader but eventually realized the truth. They protest (too much and too loudly) that Milk was frightened and quietly yet earnestly warned others about Jones and the Peoples Temple.