Tiana Lowe writes with misguided enthusiasm at National Review:
In the past fortnight, the Evergreen State College mob has incited violence against a professor, gotten said professor, Bret Weinstein, to flee campus in fear for his physical safety, inflicted $10,000 in property damage on campus, shut down classes, and forced graduation to be held off-campus as a result.
… Prior to going quiet after receiving mass-murder threats, Weinstein wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal warning: “The Campus Mob Came for Me—and You, Professor, Could Be Next.”… [T]he New York Times has found a mob victim sympathetic enough in Weinstein, a liberal professor, to publicly lambaste the mobs at Evergreen, who counter every question, comment, and even a hand gesture by shouting, “RACIST.”
“It’s just the way discourse goes these days,” Evergreen president George Bridges told the Times’s Frank Bruni. Even the Seattle Times, which has previously let Bridges wax poetic on, “Why students need trigger warnings and safe places” in its editorial pages, condemned Evergreen as having “no safety, no learning, no future.”…
With the world witnessing Evergreen’s Mizzou-scale collapse in real time, perhaps the Left has finally woken up to its own tendency to eat its own. [“Evergreen State Faces Condemnation from [T]he Seattle Times and [T]he New York Times“, June 8, 2017]
Lowe links to a piece by Frank Bruni, an unsurprisingly left-wing columnist at The New York Times (“These Campus Inquisitions Must Stop“, June 3, 2017). Bruni opens with a morally relativistic, irrelevant, and sweeping statement:
Racism pervades our country. Students who have roiled college campuses from coast to coast have that exactly right.
Pervades? Perhaps Bruni is thinking of the attitude of blacks toward whites. Most American whites don’t have the time or inclination to be racist; they’re trying to get into universities and get hired and promoted despite the favoritism that’s showered on less-qualified blacks by their condescending, leftist “betters”. Yes, there is a hotbed of racism in the U.S., and it is located in the media, among the professoriate, and in the soul of every collegian of whatever color who sees life through the lens of “racism”.
Bruni, having shored up his left-wing credentials, actually says a few sensible things. After recounting the travails of Professor Weinstein, whose cause is laudable to leftists because Weinstein is a leftist, Bruni turns to
that awful moment … when one of the dozens of students encircling Nicholas Christakis, a professor [at Yale], shrieked at him: “You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting!”
He and his wife, Erika, were masters at one of Yale’s residential colleges, and she had circulated an email in which she raised questions about the university’s caution against any Halloween costumes that might be seen as examples of cultural appropriation or hurtful stereotyping.
“American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience,” she wrote. “Increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition. And the censure and prohibition come from above, not from yourselves! Are we all O.K. with this transfer of power? Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity — in your capacity — to exercise self-censure?”
“Talk to each other,” she added. “Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”
Agree or disagree with her, she was teeing up precisely the kind of contest of ideas that higher education should be devoted to. And she did so, if you read the whole of her email, in a considered, respectful fashion.
No matter: She was pushing back at something — the costume guideline — that was draped in the garb of racial sensitivity. And that made her, ipso facto, an enemy of illumination and agent of hate.
She and her husband were driven from their roles in the residential college, though he still teaches at Yale. He posted several sympathetic tweets last week about Weinstein’s vilification. In one he wrote that his wife “spent her whole career” working with “marginalized populations” and has a “deep, abiding humanity.”
“But still they came for her,” he added.
You would think that the Christakises, having been mugged by reality, would have changed their political stripes. Life is an IQ test, and they failed the mid-term.
Bruni continues:
Like plenty of adults across the political spectrum, they use slurs in lieu of arguments, looking for catharsis rather than constructive engagement. They ratchet up their language to a degree that weakens its currency for direr circumstances. And they undermine their goals — our goals — by pushing away good-hearted allies and handing ammunition to the very people who itch to dismiss them.
Right-wing media have had a field day with Evergreen, but not because they’ve faked a story. No, the story was given to them in ribbons and bows.
That’s the real problem. Bruni is afraid that Evergreen State will be used to discredit “progressivism”. But “progressivism” discredits itself, every day in every way. The riots at Evergreen State and other universities are merely the contemporary equivalent of Stalin’s purges and “show trials“.
Another piece linked to by Lowe is an unsigned editorial in The Seattle Times, “The Evergreen State College: No Safety, No Learning, No Future” (June 5, 2017). Here’s some of it:
The public state college near Olympia has become a national caricature of intolerant campus liberalism in both The New York Times and Fox News. At least one professor has been harangued and classes disrupted by shouting mobs of students accusing the famously progressive campus of “systemic racism.”
That coverage apparently has incited anonymous threats of mass murder, resulting in the campus being closed for three days. In the critical last week of school, students have been deprived of learning by extremes on the left and right.
Caricature? How can reality be a caricature? How did the “extreme” right get into the act? It’s news to me that there were and are rightists of any kind among the thugs who seized control of Evergreen.
More:
Since the corrosive 2016 presidential election, Americans increasingly comprise a nation with citizens sealed in ideological bubbles; college campuses are often the most hermetically sealed of bubbles. When Weinstein, the professor, asked a yelling mob of students if they wanted to hear his answer, they shouted “No!”
Left-wing craziness at universities long predates the 2016 election. This is another transparent (but failed) attempt to spread some of the blame rightward.
Leftists like Bruni and the editorial board of The Seattle Times can’t see the real problem because they’re part of it. They’re like the never-say-die apologists for socialism who protest that “real socialism” has never been tried. What they can’t face up to — despite the failure of the too-long-lived Soviet experiment — is that “real socialism” necessarily leads to suppression and violence. The Soviet Union, Communist China, Castro’s Cuba, and other socialist regimes are real socialism in action, not failed substitutes for it.
Bruni and his ilk, past and present, are responsible for the turmoil at Evergreen and other campuses. Bruni and his ilk — too many parents, most school teachers, most professors of the soft stuff, most pundits, too many politicians — have been spoon-feeding leftism to the young people of this country for more than a century. That is to say, they’ve been spoon-feeding generations of young people an intolerant ideology which prevails only through violence or the clear threat of it. The particulars of the ideology shift with the winds of leftist fashion, but its main catch-words are these:
- liberty — to do whatever one feels like doing, and to suppress whatever one doesn’t like
- equality — which others will be forced to pay for, à la socialism, and bow to, as in “some are more equal than others”
- fraternity — but only with the like-minded of the moment.
Bruni and his ilk seem surprised by the virulence of their intellectual offspring, but they shouldn’t be. Dr. Frankenstein was a mere amateur by comparison with his 20th and 21st century successors, who must be blamed for loosing the monsters — students, faculty, administrators — who are destroying universities. Far worse than that, they and their elders are destroying the institutions of civil society.
Related posts:
Intellectuals and Capitalism
“Intellectuals and Society”: A Review
The Left’s Agenda
The Left and Its Delusions
The Spoiled Children of Capitalism
Politics, Sophistry, and the Academy
Subsidizing the Enemies of Liberty
Are You in the Bubble?
The Culture War
Ruminations on the Left in America
Academic Ignorance
The Euphemism Conquers All
Defending the Offensive
Superiority
Whiners
A Dose of Reality
God-Like Minds
Non-Judgmentalism as Leftist Condescension
An Addendum to (Asymmetrical) Ideological Warfare
The Left and Violence
Four Kinds of “Liberals”
Leftist Condescension
A Word of Warning to Leftists (and Everyone Else)
Another Thought or Two about Class
The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy