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Bonfire of the Humanities: Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2014— It's been a long time coming, but America's colleges and universities have finally descended into lunacy.
To the Class of 2014: Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2014— Dear Class of 2014: Allow me to be the first to offend you, baldly and unapologetically.
The Closing of the Academic Mind: William Kristol, Weekly Standard, May 5, 2014 — From Brandeis on the Atlantic to Azusa on the Pacific, an iron curtain has descended across academia.
The Villainization of Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Robert Fulford, National Post, May 17, 2014— In the early stages of the controversy over Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s cancelled honorary degree from Brandeis University, she looked like the victim.
Check Your Bigotry: Rex Murphy, National Post, May 17, 2014
Obama Unleashes the Left: Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2014
White Privilege: Sarah Boesveld, National Post, May 6, 2014
What 'Hard Work U' Can Teach Elite Schools: Stephen Moore, Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2014
At Princeton, Privilege Is: (a) Commonplace, (b) Misunderstood or (c) Frowned Upon: Marc Santora & Gabriel Fisher, New York Times, May 2, 2014
Daniel Henninger
Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2014
It's been a long time coming, but America's colleges and universities have finally descended into lunacy. Last month, Brandeis University banned Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as its commencement speaker, purporting that "Ms. Hirsi Ali's record of anti-Islam statements" violates Brandeis's "core values." This week higher education's ritualistic burning of college-commencement heretics spread to Smith College and Haverford College. On Monday, Smith announced the withdrawal of Christine Lagarde, the French head of the International Monetary Fund. And what might the problem be with Madame Lagarde, considered one of the world's most accomplished women? An online petition signed by some 480 offended Smithies said the IMF is associated with "imperialistic and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide." With unmistakable French irony, Ms. Lagarde withdrew "to preserve the celebratory spirit" of Smith's commencement.
On Tuesday, Haverford College's graduating intellectuals forced commencement speaker Robert J. Birgeneau to withdraw. Get this: Mr. Birgeneau is the former chancellor of UC Berkeley, the big bang of political correctness. It gets better. Berkeley's Mr. Birgeneau is famous as an ardent defender of minority students, the LGBT community and undocumented illegal immigrants. What could possibly be wrong with this guy speaking at Haverford??? Haverfordians were upset that in 2011 the Berkeley police used "force" against Occupy protesters in Sproul Plaza. They said Mr. Birgeneau could speak at Haverford if he agreed to nine conditions, including his support for reparations for the victims of Berkeley's violence. In a letter, Mr. Birgeneau replied, "As a longtime civil rights activist and firm supporter of nonviolence, I do not respond to untruthful, violent verbal attacks."
Smith president Kathleen McCartney felt obliged to assert that she is "committed to leading a college where differing views can be heard and debated with respect." And Haverford's president, Daniel Weiss, wrote to the students that their demands "read more like a jury issuing a verdict than as an invitation to a discussion or a request for shared learning." Mr. Birgeneau, Ms. McCartney, Mr. Weiss and indeed many others in American academe must wonder what is happening to their world this chilled spring. Here's the short explanation: You're all conservatives now. Years ago, when the academic left began to ostracize professors identified as "conservative," university administrators stood aside or were complicit. The academic left adopted a notion espoused back then by a "New Left" German philosopher—who taught at Brandeis, not coincidentally—that many conservative ideas were immoral and deserved to be suppressed. And so they were. This shunning and isolation of "conservative" teachers by their left-wing colleagues (with many liberals silent in acquiescence) weakened the foundational ideas of American universities—freedom of inquiry and the speech rights in the First Amendment.
No matter. University presidents, deans, department heads and boards of trustees watched or approved the erosion of their original intellectual framework. The ability of aggrieved professors and their students to concoct behavior, ideas and words that violated political correctness got so loopy that the phrase itself became satirical—though not so funny to profs denied tenure on suspicion of incorrectness. Offensive books were banned and history texts rewritten to conform. No one could possibly count the compromises of intellectual honesty made on American campuses to reach this point. It is fantastic that the liberal former head of Berkeley should have to sign a Maoist self-criticism to be able to speak at Haverford. Meet America's Red Guards. These students at Brandeis, Smith, Haverford and hundreds of other U.S. colleges didn't discover illiberal intolerance on their own. It is fed to them three times a week by professors of mental conformity. After Brandeis banned Ms. Hirsi Ali, the Harvard Crimson's editors wrote a rationalizing editorial, "A Rightful Revocation." The legendary liberal Louis Brandeis (Harvard Law, First Amendment icon) must be spinning in his grave.
Years ago, today's middle-aged liberals embraced in good faith ideas such as that the Western canon in literature or history should be expanded to include Africa, Asia, Native Americans and such. Fair enough. The activist academic left then grabbed the liberals' good faith and wrecked it, allowing the nuttiest professors to dumb down courses and even whole disciplines into tendentious gibberish. The slow disintegration of the humanities into what is virtually agitprop on many campuses is no secret. Professors of economics and the hard sciences roll their eyes in embarrassment at what has happened to once respectable liberal-arts departments at their institutions. Like some Gresham's Law for Ph.D.s, the bad professors drove out many good, untenured professors, and that includes smart young liberals. Most conservatives were wiped out long ago.
One might conclude: Who cares? Parents are beginning to see that this is a $65,000-a-year scam that won't get their kids a job in an economy that wants quantification skills. Parents and students increasingly will flee the politicized nut-houses for apolitical MOOCs—massive open online courses. Still, it's a tragedy. The loonies are becoming the public face of some once-revered repositories of the humanities. Sic transit whatever.
Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2014
Dear Class of 2014: Allow me to be the first to offend you, baldly and unapologetically. Here you are, 22 or so years on planet Earth, and your entire lives have been one long episode of offense-avoidance. This spotless record has now culminated in your refusals to listen to commencement speakers whose mature convictions and experiences might offend your convictions and experiences, or what passes for them.
Modern education has done its work well: In you, Class of 2014, the coward soul has filled the void left by the blank mind.
When I last delivered a commencement address via column to the Class of 2012, I complained about the dismaying inverse relationship between that class's self-regard and its command of basic facts. This led to one cascade of angry letters, blog posts and college newspaper columns from the under-25 set—and another cascade of appreciative letters from their parents, professors and employers. Of the former, my favorite came from a 2012 graduate of an elite Virginia college, who wrote me to say that "America has a hefty appetite for BS, and I'm ready and willing to deliver on that demand." I gave him points for boldness and cheekily wrote back asking if we might consider his letter for publication. The bravado vanished; he demurred.
Well, Class of 2012, I did you a (small) injustice. At least the pretense of knowledgeability was important to you. For the Class of 2014, it seems that inviolable ignorance is the only true bliss. It's not just the burgeoning list of rescinded invitations to potentially offensive commencement speakers: Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis, Condi Rice at Rutgers, Christine Lagarde at Smith and Robert Birgeneau at Haverford. In February, students at Dartmouth issued a list of 72 demands for "transformative justice." Among them: "mandate sensitivity training"; "organize continuous external reviews of the College's structural racism, classism, ableism, sexism and heterosexism"; and "create a policy banning the Indian mascot." When the demands weren't automatically met, the students seized an administration building.
At Brown, a Facebook page is devoted to the subject of "Micro/Aggressions," a growth area in the grievance industry. Example of a micro-aggression: "As a dark-skinned Black person, I feel alienated from social justice spaces or conversations about institutional racism here at Brown when non-Black people of color say things like 'let's move away from the White-Black binary.' " And then there are "trigger warnings." In Saturday's New York Times, Jennifer Medina reports that students and like-minded faculty are demanding warnings on study material that trigger "symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder." Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" was cited by one faculty document at Oberlin as a novel that could "trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more."
Similar Tipper Gore -type efforts are under way at UC Santa Barbara, George Washington University and other second- and third-tier schools. Did I just offend some readers by saying that? Sorry, but it's true. Any student who demands—and gets—emotional pampering from his university needs to pay a commensurate price in intellectual derision. College was once about preparing boys and girls to become men and women, not least through a process of desensitization to discomfiting ideas. Now it's just a $240,000 extension of kindergarten. Maybe Oberlin can start offering courses in Sharing Is Caring. Students can read "The Gruffalo" with trigger warnings that it potentially stigmatizes people with hairy backs.
This is the bind you find yourselves in, Class of 2014: No society, not even one that cossets the young as much as ours does, can treat you as children forever. A central teaching of Genesis is that knowledge is purchased at the expense of innocence. A core teaching of the ancients is that personal dignity is obtained through habituation to virtue. And at least one basic teaching of true liberalism is that the essential right of free people is the right to offend, and an essential responsibility of free people is to learn how to cope with being offended.
I'll grant you this: It's not all your fault. The semi- and post-literates who overran the humanities departments at most universities long before I ever set foot in college are the main culprits here. Then again, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out what it takes to live in a free country. The ideological brainwashing that takes place on campus isn't (yet) coercive. Mainly, it's just onanistic. There's good news in that. You can still take charge of your education, and of your lives. The cocoon years are over; the micro-aggressions are about to pour down. Deal with it. Revel in it. No consequential idea ever failed to offend someone; no consequential person was ever spared great offense. Those of you who want to lead meaningful lives need to begin unlearning most of what you've been taught, starting right now.
THE CLOSING OF THE ACADEMIC MIND
William Kristol
Weekly Standard, May 5, 2014
From Brandeis on the Atlantic to Azusa on the Pacific, an iron curtain has descended across academia. Behind that line lie all the classrooms of the ancient schools of America. Wesleyan, Brown, Princeton, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Berkeley, Bowdoin, and Stanford, all these famous colleges and the populations within them lie in what we must call the Liberal sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from the commissars of Liberal Orthodoxy. . . .
How can one resist the chance to echo Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech? Okay, it’s not a precise analogy. It’s true that liberalism isn’t communism. It’s true that today’s liberals deploy the wet blanket of conformity rather than the clenched fist of suppression. It’s true that communism crushed minds, while today’s liberalism is merely engaged in closing them. And it’s true that most of the denizens of our universities, unlike the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, embrace their commissars. But commissars they are.
On April 8, the admirable human rights campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali had an honorary degree from Brandeis University revoked because some of her criticisms of Islamism—and yes, even (God forbid!) of Islam itself—were judged by that university’s president “inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” Apparently two of Brandeis’s core values are cowardice in the face of Islamists and timidity in the face of intolerance. Less than two weeks later, on April 21, an appearance by the formidable social scientist Charles Murray at Azusa Pacific University was canceled by its president, two days before Murray was to have appeared. The administration was afraid Murray’s presence on campus might hurt the feelings of some Asuza students and faculty. The same day, at Eastern Connecticut State University, a professor told his creative writing class that Republicans are “racist, misogynist, money-grubbing people” who “want things to go back—not to 1955, but to 1855,” and that “colleges will start closing up” if the GOP takes control of the Senate this November. If only!
What’s striking about all three episodes isn’t so much the illiberal complaints of professors and students. It is the pathetic behavior of the university administrators. Thus, a spokesperson for Eastern Connecticut State University explained, “Our faculty has academic freedom to conduct their classes in whatever way they choose, this is not a university matter.” So what a professor says in the classroom “is not a university matter”? Apparently not. On the other hand, it turns out that the administrators of a Jewish university in Boston, a Christian school in California, and a state college in Connecticut are in agreement about what is a “university matter”: protecting the “university community” from discomforting thoughts. In an open letter to the students of Asuza Pacific University, Charles Murray wrote, “Asuza Pacific’s administration wants to protect you from earnest and nerdy old guys who have opinions that some of your faculty do not share. Ask if this is why you’re getting a college education.” The question is worth asking. Students and their parents should ask it. But the honest answer from the groves of academe would be: Well, now that you ask . . . yes.
In her statement on Brandeis’s withdrawal of its honorary degree, Ayaan Hirsi Ali noted, “What was initially intended as an honor has now devolved into a moment of shaming. Yet the slur on my reputation is not the worst aspect of this episode. More deplorable is that an institution set up on the basis of religious freedom should today so deeply betray its own founding principles. The ‘spirit of free expression’ referred to in the Brandeis statement has been stifled here.” But the founding principles of Brandeis are no longer its governing principles. The spirit of free expression is not the spirit of Liberal Orthodoxy. And it is the illiberal spirit of Liberal Orthodoxy that dominates, that governs, that controls our colleges and universities.
But there is an alternative to Liberal Orthodoxy. It is liberal education. Liberal education can be pursued today, as it has been for most of history, outside the official “educational” institutions of the society. Those institutions have embraced their closed-mindedness. But that doesn’t mean the American mind has to close. There is a great country out there beyond academe. In it, free speech can be defended and real education can be supported. Liberal education can be fostered even if the academy has become illiberal. The fact that our colleges and universities have betrayed the cause of liberal education means the rest of us have the grave responsibility—but also the golden opportunity and the distinct honor—to defend and advance it.
THE VILLAINIZATION OF AYAAN HIRSI ALI
Robert Fulford
National Post, May 17, 2014
In the early stages of the controversy over Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s cancelled honorary degree from Brandeis University, she looked like the victim. A survivor of Muslim oppression in her native Somalia, she’s an angry, influential critic of Islam. When Brandeis announced plans to honour her, students and Muslim organizations objected so passionately that the university cancelled her invitation. Much of the commentary treated this decision as unfair, a case of a frightened university surrendering to political correctness. As Ruth Wisse, a distinguished Harvard professor, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “In Nigeria, Islamists think nothing of seizing hundreds of schoolgirls for the crime of aspiring to an education. Here in the United States, the educated class thinks nothing of denying an honorary degree to a fearless Muslim woman who at peril of her life, and in the name of liberal democracy, has insisted on exposing such outrages to the light.”
But lately, much of the discussion has turned against Hirsi Ali. She now stands accused of a crime against multiculturalism: She has failed to be moderate. She has overstated her case, possibly even made a mistake or two. She once called Islam “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death.” She believes democracy and Islam are at war. No doubt about it, she’s not afraid to be harsh. As a result, journalistic opinion has transformed her from victim to villain. The New Republic has said that her various statements are so extreme they make her unworthy of honour. Salon magazine argued that her view of Islam is the same as the bigotry that informs U.S. foreign policy. The Economist stated what it considers a rule: “Wholesale condemnations of existing religions just aren’t done in American politics.” Apparently they violate some sort of national code of ethics.
Many in North America have come to believe that any criticism of Islam is inherently evil. But surely it is a sacred principle of the West that freedom of speech includes the freedom to discuss with frankness any religious authority or dogma. Democracy could not have developed beyond the medieval era without such criticism. Journalists now take it for granted that they can condemn the Roman Catholic Church for everything from tolerating child-abusing priests to denying the organized demands of nuns. Artists in the West routinely scrutinize the history of Christianity and Judaism. Hilary Mantel has been justly acclaimed for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, two great historical novels about the blood-stained, deeply hypocritical creation of the Church of England under Henry VIII in the 16th century. It would be absurd for Anglicans to mount an attack on these books; but one could easily imagine that parallel discussions of Islamic history would be condemned as Islamophobic.
Much of the academic world seems to believe that anything said in criticism of Islam must be the result of ignorance or malice or both. A clear idea of the atmosphere in elite American universities comes through in a recent book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?. The author, Lila Abu-Lughod, an anthropologist, has a PhD from Harvard and an appointment at Columbia as Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science. Harvard University Press published her book. Despite her credentials, she gives a highly anecdotal and dubiously grounded answer to the question in her title: No, they don’t need to be saved. Their situation satisfies many of them. She quotes a woman who tells her that “You need a man who knows how to rule.” She explains that in many cases parents alone do not choose a girl’s husband; sometimes the girl is also consulted. She scorns the poignant stories of women who left Islam, calling them sordid and pornographic. She says Hirsi Ali’s own story, told in Infidel, follows the usual pattern.
And why, Abu-Lughod wants to know, are we so worried about human rights? She implies that emancipation, equality and rights are particular interests of the West, not so significant elsewhere. “The values of consent and choice” may be fetishes. She also thinks we write too much about honour killing. She believes that the West doesn’t understand communities that have a “commitment to honour.” She doesn’t think the veil oppresses women any more than “the tyranny of fashion” in the West. Her book is worth noting as an example of an academic mentality that deadens and trivializes honest controversy. Immersion in the work of teachers such as Abu-Lughod warns students against defending the principles of their own society. It may explain why so few educated feminists show any interest in support for Muslim women.
Check Your Bigotry: Rex Murphy, National Post, May 17, 2014
Obama Unleashes the Left: Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2014
White Privilege: Sarah Boesveld, National Post, May 6, 2014
What 'Hard Work U' Can Teach Elite Schools: Stephen Moore, Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2014
At Princeton, Privilege Is: (a) Commonplace, (b) Misunderstood or (c) Frowned Upon: Marc Santora & Gabriel Fisher, New York Times, May 2, 2014
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