RUTHFULLY YOURS

Three weeks after a coalition of professors publicly defended their right to censor Title IX naysayer and feminist intellectual Laura Kipnis, a Wellesley News editorial has caught viral flak from civil libertarians, conservatives, copy editors, and other sensible sorts for its clumsy defense of censorship in the name of sensitivity. All before the student paper’s server, and with it the editorial in question, went down Friday morning, that is.

“Many members of our community, including students, alumnae and faculty, have criticized the Wellesley community for becoming an environment where free speech is not allowed or is a violated right,” the editorial accurately observes. “Many outside sources have painted us as a bunch of hot house flowers who cannot exist in the real world.” True.

In their defense of the modern academy’s responsibility to assimilate the unenlightened, the students distinguish “free speech” from “hate speech.” But their failed experiments in sentence structure, as well as logical leaps none among the uninitiated could easily follow, backfire: “Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech.” The pronoun “it” floats free, unbound by any antecedent, after the semicolon. The editorialists may have meant the second half of the sentence as a coded message to the world outside their coddling cell: Shutting down rhetoric is hate speech, of course it is! Send help!

But, in a likelier reality, they’ve offered an object lesson in undergraduate groupthink. On your typical elite campus, divergence from the status quo merits hostile rebuke rather than debate: “[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.” And no one seems to remember her—or, I’m sorry, their—elementary writing mechanics or American history.

“The founding fathers put free speech in the Constitution as a way to protect the disenfranchised and to protect individual citizens from the power of the government,” they write. “The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging.” The unthinking reflex to stay safe from dissent and foster intellectual sameness at the expense of rigorous debate has no particular precedent in actual history—or really anywhere off campus, or in any prior generation.

“Vindictive protectiveness” may be the fault of turn-of-the-millennium helicopter parents, Facebook’s fostering of oversensitivity, widespread political polarization, or an emphasis on emotional reasoning in soft sciences.

Jonathan Brown, director of Georgetown University’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), brooks no disagreement. Having expelled this writer from a February 7 apologist lecture on Islamic slavery that provoked nationwide outrage, Brown ejected me from another Georgetown event on March 16.

I achieved infamy as a “Jihad Watch correspondent who had written sensationalist pieces about Georgetown events” according to Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of the über-establishmentarian Foreign Policy in her March 16 online article, “Islamophobia Inc.” Jihad Watch publisher Robert Spencer comprehensively rebutted this “lurid fantasy.” (For the record, I also report regularly for Campus Watch.)

Brown was visibly surprised when I entered Georgetown’s Alumni House for the opening dinner of the Peace Requires Encounter Summit. The summit ostensibly sought to “build relationships” — apparently only with those approved by Islamic supremacists — co-sponsors included the Muslim Brotherhood-derived Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Franciscan Action Network (FAN), and Unity Productions Foundation (UPF), a producer of pro-Islam films.

UPF’s Daniel Tutt, of Marymount University, invited me via email to the Friday-Sunday summit after I registered for the screening of UPF’s latest production, The Sultan and the Saint. Upon spotting me at Friday evening’s kick-off, an agitated Brown demanded that I leave the invitation-only event before summoning Tutt, who obsequiously acknowledged his mistake in having invited a “noted Islamophobe” who had “slandered” Brown. Tutt apologized to me before I left, but at Saturday’s screening he asked if I would disrupt the showing, a paranoid inquiry I denied.

Tutt’s previous writings demonstrate why he holds such a sinister perception of Islamic supremacism’s critics or as he puts it, a “growing right-wing populist reactionary neo-Fascist network.” He maintains that the current “intensification of Islamophobia must be understood and diagnosed primarily, but not exclusively, as the outcome of capitalist exploitation.” This false view excuses Islamic supremacist behavior and blames “the system.”

Alas, the feature film presented an equally whitewashed view of Islamic history with an examination of the 1219 meeting between St. Francis of Assisi and the Egyptian sultan al-Malik al-Kamil in Egypt during the Fifth Crusade. The film — as narrated by actor Jeremy Irons — falsely contrasts St. Francis “preaching about the Lord of love” while the “medieval Church still holds to the vision of a ferocious, vengeful God who summons believers to war.” Various scenes show al-Kamil as a boy reciting Quran 2:256, a verse often misunderstood by non-Muslims as documenting Islamic tolerance, and Muslims praying the Fatiha (Quran 1:1-7) with the key omission of its last verse. According to numerous authoritative Islamic interpretations, its terms condemn Jews and Christians. Irons avoids any such disquieting analysis as he concludes the film, stating that “angry, dehumanizing words sparked violence today as before. Transcending differences, the road to peace runs through the common humanity that we all share.”

The uproar over a Fresno State history lecturer’s tweets about assassinating President Trump is understandable, but in the end the outrage is pointless. It’s doubtful the feds will charge the fellow, given how outlandish and obviously hyperbolic the tweets are. Nor is he likely to be fired. All the commotion has accomplished is to turn a nobody into a left-wing martyr persecuted for “speaking truth to power.”

The fact is, there is nothing this guy said that wouldn’t be applauded by most faculty in the social sciences and humanities, even if they don’t have his gumption to say so out loud. The politicized university is entering its fifth decade, and was already a done deal when Alan Bloom publicized it in his surprising 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. Thirty years later, focusing on the stupid statements of individual professors, or in this case lecturers, does nothing to get at the root of the problem. They are symptoms of deeper structural changes in the administrative apparatus of most colleges, and these changes in part have been responses to federal laws, particularly affirmative action, sexual harassment law, and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. With federal agency thugs backing campus leftists by threatening administrators with investigation or the reduction of federal funds, it has been easy to transform the university from a space for developing critical thinking and intellectual diversity, into a progressive propaganda organ and reeducation camp.

The most important of these government-backed instruments is “diversity.” This vacuous concept was created ex nihilo by Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in the 1979 Bakke vs. University of California decision as a way to protect admissions “set asides” for minorities without falling afoul of the law’s prohibition of quotas. Since only a “compelling state interest” could justify exceptions to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination by race, which naked quotas obviously did, “diversity,” along with all its alleged social and educational boons, was by judicial fiat deemed a “state interest.” In 2003, Grutter vs. Bollinger, and again in the two Fisher vs. University of Texas cases (2013, 2016), the Supreme Court confirmed Powell’s legerdemain in order “to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body,” as Republican-appointed Justice Sandra Day O’Conner said in the first Fisher case.

Of course, there exists no coherent definition of “diversity,” and no empirical evidence demonstrating its power to improve educational outcomes or create “educational benefits.” If there were such pedagogical benefits from diversity, we would have long ago dismantled the 107 historically black colleges and universities. On the contrary, there is much evidence that mismatching applicants to universities damages minority students and segregates campuses into identity-politics enclaves.

But using race to privilege some applicants over others wasn’t just about admitting students. The campus infrastructure had to change, which meant the expansion of politicized identity-politics programs, departments, general education courses, and student-support administrative offices and services. As a result, the cultural Marxism ideology that created identity politics in the first place now permeates the university far beyond the classroom, and enables an intolerance for competing ideas, not to mention shutting down the “free play of the mind on all subjects” that Matthew Arnold identified as the core mission of liberal education. And this corruption is encouraged by federal law and its leverage of federal money that flows into higher education.

A group of activists at Harvard University have apologized for posting fake deportation notices in dorm rooms, explaining that they were simply trying to get people to think about how bad deportation is.

“We regret to inform you that a resident of this dorm has been detained indefinitely due to suspicious actions, suspected violent inclinations, or suspicion of being a deportable alien (i.e. questionable residency status),” the notice, which read “Harvard Special Investigations Unit” at the top, read.

The back — and only the back — of the flyer clarified that it was, in fact, “not a real notice,” and that the reason for the “unsettling nature” of it was to encourage “Harvard community members to reflect on the reality of people who face these kinds of unwarranted disruptions of life in unexplained suspicious circumstances before a state power that can hold ‘suspects’ indefinitely.” It also included information about an upcoming panel on incarceration. 



According to an article in the Harvard Crimson, the notice was signed by Harvard Concilio Latino, the Harvard Islamic Society, and the Harvard Black Students Association “and orchestrated by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee.” The Crimson reports that students from at least two of the groups — Concilio Latino and the Palestine Solidarity Committee — have already apologized.

In the apology statement from the Palestine Solidarity Committee, co-president Fatima M. Bishtawi explained that the purpose of posting those flyers was to make people think about the fact that people “do not always get to walk away from a notice knowing that it is fake.”

Bishtawi is right. Deportations and deportation notices are very, very real — but that’s exactly what made this whole stunt so disgusting. These activists say that they were trying to help people who may face deportation by getting others to think about what it must be like to face deportation, but apparently, they never stopped to think about the fact that making people who may face deportation think that they are at risk of being deported might not be the nicest way to help them.

It’s spring.

That means robins gotta chirp, chipmunks gotta hop and crybullies gotta bully while crying that they feel unsafe because other people who disagree with them exist. This latest tragedy takes place at Notre Dame which thought that it could pacify campus crybullies by inviting Pence instead of Trump. Surely not even campus crybullies could claim that Mike Pence makes them feel triggered.

Right.

Vice President Mike Pence’s scheduled commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame has prompted a protest by senior students who say that Pence’s presence on campus will make them “feel unsafe.”

Students Immane Mondane and Jourdyhn Williams have started a #NotMyCommencementSpeaker campaign against Pence’s May 21 address.

#NotMyEnglishLanguage.

“For me personally, [Pence] represents the larger Trump administration,” Mondane told the university’s newspaper. “His administration represents something, and for many people on our campus, it makes them feel unsafe to have someone who openly is offensive but also demeaning of their humanity and of their life and of their identity.”

Well there we go. The VP is offensive. Therefore we can’t have him on campus or it will traumatize local leftists.

Meanwhile Obama, whose administration represented the denial and demeaning of much of the country, had to be invited. Otherwise that would make the same folks feel unsafe. Meanwhile safe space culture is making students feel unsafe about expressing their views on campus left the crybullies accuse them of making them feel unsafe.

Ziad Ahmed is one lucky young man. Earlier this month, Stanford University invited him to join its Class of 2021. While this alone is a huge and rare honor, what generated headlines was the essay on Ahmed’s application. Asked “What matters to you, and why?” the Princeton, N.J., high-school senior wrote: “#BlackLivesMatter.” And then he repeated it 100 times.

“I didn’t think I would get admitted to Stanford at all, but it’s quite refreshing to see that they view my unapologetic activism as an asset rather than a liability,” Ahmed told Sarah A. Harvard of the website Mic. Ahmed, a Muslim American of Bangladeshi descent, pointed out why his essay was nothing more than an exercise in mindless duplication:

“The insistence on an explanation is inherently dehumanizing,” he said. “Black lives have been explicitly and implicitly told they don’t matter for centuries, and as a society — it is our responsibility to scream that black lives matter because it is not to say that all lives do not matter, but it is to say that black lives have been attacked for so long, and that we must empower through language, perspective, and action.”

Now that prose, whether you consider Black Lives Matter a civil-rights organization or a band of racial arsonists who inspire fatal attacks on law-enforcement officers, would have been worthy of a college-admissions application. Instead, Ahmed, who interned on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, produced something reminiscent of the sets of standards that Bart Simpson writes on the chalkboard at Springfield Elementary School. For instance:

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

Ahmed’s “essay” also recalls a shocking scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 thriller The Shining. Mentally disturbed author Jack Torrance (menacingly portrayed by Jack Nicholson) has been very busy writing his new novel on his typewriter. It turns out that page after page after page of his manuscript reads:

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

The average American has little knowledge of the extent to which our institutions of higher learning have been infected with a spreading cancer. One aspect of that cancer is akin to the loyalty oaths of the 1940s and ’50s. Professors were often required to sign statements that affirmed their loyalty to the United States government plus swear they were not members of any organizations, including the Communist Party USA, that sought the overthrow of the United States government. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down loyalty oaths as a condition of employment in 1964.

Today we’re seeing the re-emergence of the mentality that gave us loyalty oaths, in the form of mandating that faculty members write “diversity statements,” especially as part of hiring and promotion procedures. They are forced to pledge allegiance to the college’s diversity agenda. For example, the University of California, San Diego requires that one’s “Contributions to Diversity Statement” describe one’s “past experience, activities and future plans to advance diversity, equity and inclusion, in alignment with UC San Diego’s mission to reflect the diversity of California and to meet the educational needs and interests of its diverse population (http://tinyurl.com/mm6vzzq).” George Leef, director of research at The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, has written an article titled “Loyalty Oaths Return with Faculty ‘Diversity Statements'” (http://tinyurl.com/mxy363c). His article documents the growing trend of mandated faculty diversity statements — such as that at Virginia Tech, in which “candidates should include a list of activities that promote or contribute to inclusive teaching, research, outreach, and service.”

College diversity agendas are little more than a call for ideological conformity. Diversity only means racial, sex and sexual orientation quotas. In pursuit of this agenda, colleges spend billions of dollars on offices of diversity and inclusion, diversity classes, and diversity indoctrination. The last thing that diversity hustlers want is diversity in ideas. By the way, the next time you hear a college president boasting about how diverse his college is, ask him how many Republican faculty members there are in his journalism, psychology, English and sociology departments. In many cases, there is none, and in others, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans might be 20-to-1. Nearly 100 percent of political campaign contributions from liberal arts faculty go to Democrats. At Cornell University, for example, 97 percent of contributions from faculty went to Democrats. At Georgetown University, it was 96 percent.

A study by my George Mason University colleague Daniel B. Klein, along with Charlotta Stern, titled “Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Views of Social Scientists” (http://tinyurl.com/qxne3db), concluded: “The academic social sciences are pretty much a one-party system. Were the Democratic tent broad, the one-party system might have intellectual diversity. But the data show almost no diversity of opinion among the Democratic professors when it comes to the regulatory, redistributive state: they like it. Especially when it comes to the minimum wage, workplace-safety regulation, pharmaceutical regulation, environmental regulation, discrimination regulation, gun control, income redistribution, and public schooling.”

The fascist college trend that we are witnessing today is by no means new. As early as 1991, Yale University President Benno Schmidt warned: “The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.”

Rice University has decided to stop using the term “master” to describe the heads of its residential colleges over concerns that the word is associated with slavery.

The school will instead use the term “magister,” a classical Latin word meaning “teacher,” according to an April 6 memo from school officials as reported by the College Fix.

“It conveys the traditional role and duties of the people holding this position, without the negative historical connotation of the word ‘master,’” Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson stated in the memo. “We believe that ‘college magister’ holds true to our cultural roots, while eliminating the concerns and confusion about the previous title.”

Now, Hutchinson specifically mentions the “historical connotation” of the word, but it’s important to note that this “historical connotation” that some students were perceiving is very different from its actual history. As the school newspaper, the Rice Thresher, notes, the college began using the term in 1956, when it moved to a residential system based on the systems at Harvard and Yale — both of which “had adopted the residential system housing system as well as the term ‘master’ from Oxford and Cambridge.”

“At Oxford, the use of the term ‘master’ may have originated as a shorthand for ‘headmaster’ or ‘schoolmaster,” the Thresher explains.

(As the College Fix notes, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton have all already stopped using the term for the same reasons.)

Normally, when we talk about the “historical connotation” of a word being offensive, we talk about it having an offensive origin or that it’s a word that has been uniquely linked to something that’s problematic. For example, feminists often decry any use of the word “hysterical” because it comes from the Greek hysterikos, which means “of the womb” or “suffering in the womb,” and people used to use it to attribute a woman’s psychological distress to her having a uterus. That was the specific use of the word; it was never used to describe men. Personally, I have no problem with the use of “hysterical,” because it has since evolved to apply to a whole host of other scenarios, and getting offended by a word based on what it used to uniquely apply to seems a little insane to me.

The word ‘master’ plays such a large role in the English language — just how much are we going to have to change our current dictionary?

But this “master” situation is even more insane, because you cannot even make the case that the word was uniquely associated with slavery. Yes, it describes having control or authority over another (derived from the late Old English word mægester, which means exactly that) and that does describe the power dynamics of slavery, but it hasn’t been used uniquely for that purpose. It does, however, have a long history of being used in the context of academic authority in particular; it was used to describe “a degree conveying authority to teach in the universities” in the late 14th century. So basically, there’s a push to stop using a word to describe an academic authority that has roots in being used to describe specifically academic authority.