RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/27/the-demon-in-democracy/
Earlier this month, Polish political philosopher Ryszard Legutko was supposed to deliver a lecture at Middlebury College in Vermont. A few hours before the event took place, college administrators called off the event, explaining the decision was based “based on an assessment of our ability to respond effectively to potential security and safety risks for both the lecture and the event students had planned in response.”

Legutko is a professor of philosophy at Jagellonian University in Krakow, Poland, specializing in ancient philosophy and political theory. He has served as a Polish government minister and a member of the European Parliament. He’s also an ardent anti-Communist with traditionalist views. That was enough, evidently, to make him a “threat” to the “safety” of Middlebury students.

Legutko gave a lecture anyway to a small group of students in a political science class. “All this was done in defiance of the college administration,” he later told the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher. “I was smuggled in a student’s car to the campus and entered the building through the backdoor.” Encounter Books editor and publisher Roger Kimball writes about the incident and its aftermath here.

In 2016, Encounter published Legutko’s latest book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. In it, Legutko argues that liberal democracy “tends to develop the qualities that were characteristic of Communism: pervasive politicization, ideological zeal, aggressive social engineering, vulgarity, a belief in inevitability of progress, destruction of family, the omnipresent rule of ideological correctness, and the severe restriction of intellectual inquiry.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/27/want-to-fix-the-universities-here-are-two-options/

Once upon a time, long, long ago—in May 2005, in fact—I wrote an essay for The New Criterion with the optimistic title “Retaking the University: A Battle Plan.” That was back when I believed that the educational establishment in this country could be rescued from its wasting captivity in the arid pandemonium of political correctness.

I know, I know, it all seems so naïve now when the totalitarian, politically correct ideologues ruling most of our distinguished colleges and universities have succumbed utterly, indeed proudly, to The Narrative about race and sex, the putative evils of America, and, oh, so much else, and dissenting opinions, and the persons espousing them, are strictly excluded from the desolate though expensive eyries of insanity that define what we still call, without irony, our institutions of “higher education.”

A couple of years ago, students at Middlebury College (total freight-on-board, some 74,000 of the crispest per annum) covered themselves in shame by loudly protesting the great social scientist Charles Murray, first preventing him from talking, then violently mobbing him and one of his female faculty handlers, sending her to the hospital. I wrote about that disgusting incident in these pages at the time. “What happened at Middlebury,” I wrote, “was a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy.”

Every student who can be identified in that video should be expelled and Laurie Patton [the college’s president] should resign. The former have violated the basic compact of respect upon which liberal education rests and the latter has vividly demonstrated her incompetence.

Neither happened, of course, nor did anyone follow up on my concluding suggestion that “the college should be closed and its facilities repurposed as something useful—a menagerie, perhaps, in homage to the strange, intolerant creatures that cavorted there when it pretended to be an educational institution.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/fighting_back_against_the_indoctrination_that_has_replaced_education.html

The indoctrination of young Americans is the goal of those who control curricula in public schools and colleges. Faculty, administrators, and textbook writers all do their part to create a narrative of an America that should be ashamed of its racist exploitative past, and ready to overhaul a capitalist system that benefits the few and cheats the many by robbing them of their fair share.

The new Advanced Placement history textbook is a case in point. Paul Mirengoff writes at Powerline:

[B]eginning in 2020, many Advanced Placement students will be using an American History textbook that suggests President Trump is mentally ill and that depicts him and many of his supporters as racists. The book asserts that “[Trump’s] not very-hidden racism connected with a significant number of primary voters.” …

The textbook goes further. It says that Hillary Clinton supporters “worried about the mental stability of the president-elect.” …

The textbook clearly is using “Clinton supporters” as a device to plant the idea that President Trump is mentally unstable, a proposition for which there is no basis other than raw hatred of the man.

The book’s publisher defends its handiwork, saying that it underwent “rigorous peer review to ensure academic integrity.” No doubt.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/alexander-kahn-fear-and-cowardice-at-middlebury-college

Two years ago, I invited AEI scholar Dr. Charles Murray to speak at Middlebury College in Vermont. As is now well-known, the moderator of the event was injured after a riot broke out when she and Murray left the lecture hall.

While I was shocked by what had happened, I was proud of what I had done in inviting Dr. Murray and how the administration had acted to ensure that he could speak.

This past week, the pride I once had in my college dissolved entirely after the administration refused to secure a lecture by another controversial speaker.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273588/teacher-rejects-president-trump-subject-students-sara-dogan

Sixth grade student Bella Moscato and her family have gone public after the middle schooler’s teacher assigned her class to write an essay on a person they consider a hero—and then rejected Bella’s proposal to write about President Donald Trump.

Bella is a student at Samoset Middle School, part of the Sachem Central School District located in Long Island, New York. According to the 11-year-old, who was interviewed with her parents by a local news channel, the teacher made no secret of her distaste for our current president.

That teacher, says Bella, rejected Trump as a subject of her essay “because he spreads negativity and says bad stuff about women.” According to Bella, this statement was made in front of the whole class as well as another faculty member. Her teacher then told her to pick a different individual to profile in her assignment.

“The thing I didn’t get is she was okay with someone doing Barack Obama, but not okay with doing Donald Trump. That’s what got me angry and I didn’t like that,” Bella explained.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/middlebury-college-students-upset-conservative-speaker/

Protecting students from views that make them uncomfortable on campus is really not going to do them any favors in the long run.

In a meeting last week at Middlebury College, administrators apologized to students who were upset that a conservative speaker had been invited to campus — and pledged to do more to prevent right-wing speakers in the future.

Audio of the meeting, which was obtained by The College Fix, features three administrators trying to calm students who were offended by the invitation of Ryszard Legutko, a conservative Polish politician whose views they described as homophobic and Islamophobic.

It’s important to note that Legutko’s planned April 17th speech had actually been canceled a few hours beforehand, with administrators citing “safety concerns,” and Legutko wound up simply giving a small, private talk in a political-science professor’s class instead. According to The Fix, it seems as though the students at the meeting did not know that this talk had occurred, because it had taken place the same time that afternoon as the meeting.

Obvious from the audio of the meeting, the fact that the college had essentially canceled Legutko’s appearance was not enough — the students believe that he should have never been invited in the first place.

“There is a distinct compromise of the students who felt marginalized on this campus or who put effort into this protest, or this combat effort, they feel like their academic freedom has been compromised because they are not capable of learning because their emotional state is so distraught or their emotional energy is just consumed by this,” one female student said.

https://www.city-journal.org/free-speech-camille-paglia

To appreciate the significance of recent events at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts and at the University of Arizona in Tucson, it helps to recall briefly some landmark moments in the College Administrator Hall of Shame.

Claremont McKenna College, October 2015: a Hispanic student writes a lachrymose oped denouncing Claremont’s “western, white, cisheternormative upper- to upper-middle class values” that, she says, make her and other minority admits feel out of place. The dean of students thanks the student for her oped and asks if she would be willing to meet with Claremont’s administrators to help them “better serve students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold.” The phrase “not fitting the mold” was used by Claremont’s minority students themselves to describe their status; nevertheless, protests, hunger strikes, and marches engulf the campus, demanding the dean’s resignation for having described minority students as not fitting the school’s “mold.” The dean grovels before an angry group of students for over an hour, apologizing for her poor choice of words and promising to make amends. Claremont’s president Hiram Chodosh offers not one word of support for the dean, who soon resigns.

Yale, November 2015: a mob of minority students surrounds a respected Yale sociologist, Nicholas Christakis, and berates, screams, and curses at him for two hours. The students’ rage was triggered because Christakis’s wife, a child psychologist, had suggested in an email that Yale undergrads could choose their Halloween costumes without guidance from Yale’s diversity bureaucracy. One girl shrieks at Christakis: “Be quiet! . . . Who the fuck hired you? . . . You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting!” When Christakis meekly disagreed with another student’s claim that free speech allows “violence to happen on this campus,” the student shouts back: “It doesn’t matter whether you agree or not . . . It’s not a debate.” Four Yale diversity bureaucrats silently observed the professor’s scourging from the edges of the mob without coming to his defense.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273555/gay-jamaican-immigrant-defends-israel-students-daniel-greenfield

In 1985, a twenty-year old Jamaican immigrant came to this country with $120 in his pocket. Thirteen years later, he had a PhD. Two years later, he had begun his career teaching at DePaul University.

In 2019, a coalition of lefties, Islamists and anti-Semites at DePaul are demanding a safe space from him.

Dr. Jason Hill (pictured above) is a gay Jamaican immigrant who teaches philosophy and lectures about civil rights. But after defending Israel, DePaul student organizations, including Students for Justice in Palestine, a notorious anti-Semitic nationwide hate group whose members have praised Hitler and called for another Holocaust, United Muslims Moving Ahead (UMMA), an Islamist campus group, which invited a Muslim cleric who rationalized the murder of gay people, DePaul Socialists, and College Democrats, are demanding that a black gay professor undergo “racial sensitivity training”.

Also joining the local production of outrage theater is the Lambda Theta Phi fraternity.

The coalition of Hispanic frat boys, socialists and Islamists claimed that Dr. Hill’s defense of Israel and condemnation of Islamic anti-Semitism created “unsafe and uncomfortable spaces for everyone, especially Palestinian and Muslim students.”

How did Dr. Hill create an “unsafe and uncomfortable” space at DePaul? He used words. He expressed ideas. He wrote an article with arguments that the coalition doesn’t want to counter with its own ideas.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-get-fired-at-duke-11556133633

Zion Williamson isn’t the only star leaving Duke University after this academic year. But at least the basketball phenom is allowed to leave voluntarily to pursue an NBA career. A popular professor is being driven off campus for reasons that are not entirely clear.

After teaching for nearly two decades at Duke, Evan Charney was told last year by the university’s Sanford School of Public Policy that his contract would not be renewed after this academic year. He reports that he had not been warned about any problems with his teaching and was not told why he was being dismissed.

This week, as he prepares to depart, he describes what happened after he filed a complaint with Duke’s Faculty Hearing Committee. Unlike his Sanford colleagues, this outfit at least gave him some vague sense of why he was getting sacked:

Professor Charney’s tendency to provoke negative reactions, and perhaps harm, among some students in the classroom due to his confrontational teaching style—a style that had a tendency to be polarizing among students, particularly in a required Sanford course in which not all students could choose to have Professor Charney as an instructor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/professor-samuel-abrams-spoke-the-truth-he-still-pays-the-price/

Dissenters from campus orthodoxy often need a rare kind of personal fortitude.

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias — in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things — a larger problem has gone mostly unnoticed. Abrams’s research revealed that college administrators are more uniformly progressive even than college faculties. “Liberal staff members,” he wrote, “outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one,” making them the “most left-leaning group on campus.”

At the conclusion of his piece, Abrams made an argument that rang true to my more than 20 years of litigation experience — “ideological imbalance, coupled with [administrators’] agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas.”

This is exactly right. Administrators draft and enforce speech codes. Administrators are responsible for creating campus kangaroo courts. Administrators kick Christian student groups off campus, and administrators often take the lead in designing campus programming that features overwhelmingly progressive voices. While conservative media often focus their ire on random radical professors, administrators are busy engaging in the overwhelming majority of campus censorship.