UNC-Chapel Hill: A Sanctuary Campus for Antifa on the Taxpayer’s Dime

The continued employment of an unhinged, violent anarchist as a lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says a whole lot about the university system’s standards when deciding who should influence the next generation. That is, such standards are non-existent—at best.

Dwayne Dixon, who this fall will be teaching ASIA 150, a large-lecture introductory course, is a member of an organization known as the Redneck Revolt that promotes violence as a political means. Dixon has twice been arrested at local events: Once in Durham for bringing a gun to a protest and once in Chapel Hill for assaulting a conservative reporter. Dixon bragged on Facebook about confronting James Fields with an AR-15 rifle, moments before Fields drove his car into a crowd of protesters at the Charlottesville, Virginia protests (and in doing so, perhaps pushing Fields’s emotions past the point of reason). During Fields’s trial, though, Dixon changed his story, claiming it was not Fields’s car he approached with his weapon, but another one.

And, especially important for his employment at UNC, there is email evidence that he uses his teaching position as a means to promote his particular brand of political activism—a clear violation of academic norms.

Taking each of these claims and the likely objections in order, Dixon is a member, or rather, a leader of the Silver Valley Redneck Revolt chapter in central North Carolina. Redneck Revolt has roughly 30 chapters around the country. It is aligned with another radical organization known as the John Brown Gun Club; some groups seem to use both names interchangeably.

One member of the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club in Washington recently made national headlines for being killed while attacking an occupied government building, the Tacoma Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center, with a rifle and Molotov cocktails.

One may be tempted to argue that the Tacoma event had nothing to do with Dixon’s North Carolina chapter, or that it was merely the action of a single disturbed individual. Yet, neither one of those things is true.

For one, the Washington John Brown chapter embraced the actions of Willem van Spronsen, the attempted terrorist; the group’s Facebook page lauds him for “his kindness, gentleness, and warm heart.” He is even praised for his attempted attack on the detention center:

Will cared deeply about making the world a better place and he felt injustice towards others as personal as a wound. He took direct action to protect traditionally marginalized and threatened communities. The rounding up of our neighbors into for-profit detention centers was not a semantics debate for Will, it was an abomination.

Additionally, although Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club left the Redneck Revolt network earlier this year, the split was amicable, and the founding principles of the Redneck Revolt are in line with those of the Puget Sound club and van Spronsen. They include:

We are an aboveground militant formation.

We stand against the nation-state and the forces which protect the bosses and the rich.

We believe in the right of militant resistance.

We are not pacifists. Redneck Revolt believes in using any and all means at our disposal to gain our freedom and true liberty.

We believe in the need for revolution.

Redneck Revolt believes that there will have to be a complete restructuring of society to provide for the survival and liberty of all people: “We will fight for the end of predatory exploitation of our communities, and the creation of a world where no one is without food, shelter, water, or any other means of survival.”

Exactly what “freedom” do Redneck Revolt members lack? And what do they mean by “true liberty?” In context, given the group’s purpose and activities, and focusing on the phrases “we are not pacifists” and “by any means at our disposal” (they are a heavily armed militia group), it would appear they wish for the freedom to assault those with opposing views and use terror to gain power.

And if they are against the nation-state, it would appear they would use whatever means at their disposal to bring it down. Also, a “complete restructuring of society” most likely indicates that they wish to create a fully collectivist society, likely through the redistribution of wealth by force.

Using the name of the 19th-century abolitionist John Brown as a source of inspiration, along with an emphasis on militancy, is also troubling. Brown attempted to stoke a civil war between the states by raiding a U.S. military installation, killing several soldiers in the attempt (and he may have successfully escalated tensions, by causing the Southern slave states to adopt a harder line instead of one of peaceful compromise and reconciliation).

If Brown is the model for an organization, and its members have conducted violent actions against the government without condemnation by the general membership, and they have deliberately instigated violence at protests, what possibly can be deduced other than that the organization rejects civil discourse and the rule of law?

Defenders of Dixon may point out that his criminal charges have been dropped for both North Carolina incidents. However, those decisions may be more reflective of the personal inclinations of members of the Orange and Durham Counties judiciaries rather than of his innocence. After all, Dixon was caught on camera holding a rifle and addressing the crowd in Durham, in defiance of a law on the books that criminalizes bringing a gun to “any parade, funeral procession, picket line, or demonstration.” He was obviously guilty, despite the dismissal of his charges. Additionally, the Chapel Hill charge was not proven false because of the facts but was instead thrown out for a technicality on the charging document by a liberal judge in a notoriously left-wing jurisdiction.

Also, the central question is not whether Dixon has been convicted of a crime, but of his “fitness” to teach. Even the American Association of University Professors has long agreed that there is a level of fitness beyond which somebody should not be teaching at a university. If Dixon, with his membership in a violent anarchist militia that supports Willem van Spronsen and his predilection for instigating actual violence does not reach that limit, who does?

Consider that, if his Facebook boast that he intimidated James Fields with a firearm is true, he should be considered morally, if not legally, complicit in Fields’ further violence. For Dixon’s gun-wielding would have naturally intensified a sense of impending violence to a person who was already distressed. Is one who is proud of such a thing “fit” for a university classroom? Rather, his bragging in this case suggests a disturbed individual who believes that the ends justify the means, even when people die. For the Charlottesville incident has served the political left well: For two years, it has used Fields’ vehicular assault as an example to broadly condemn the entire political right.

Next, the following excerpt from an email Dixon sent on November 14, 2018 shows that he openly regards his faculty position as a means to encourage political activism:

From Dwayne Dixon (dedixon) – dedixon@email.unc.edu

Good morning: We will start class at 2pm at Silent Sam where a protest is being held against the use of undercover police infiltrating among student groups.

The protest starts at 1:30 so if you can go earlier, then join!

Dixon’s classroom politicizing is a crucial factor. If he refrained from doing so, he could have at least made a claim for academic freedom. But by encouraging his students to join him in protest, he eliminates any pretension that he is conducting an impartial search for truth, the ideal upon which academic freedom is based.

One illustrative case is that of Arthur Butz, a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, who publicly denies the Jewish Holocaust. Butz is allowed to continue teaching because he does not discuss his political beliefs in the classroom—a reasonable solution to the conflict between a teacher’s First Amendment rights and the right of the university to control knowledge taught under its auspices. (Numerous court decisions have affirmed that right).

Northwestern President Henry Bienen made perhaps the definitive statement on the topic, in describing his reasoning about Butz’ continued employment:

Like all faculty members, he is entitled to express his personal views, including on his personal web pages, as long as he does not represent such opinions as the views of the University. Butz has made clear that his opinions are his own and at no time has he discussed those views in class or made them part of his class curriculum. Therefore, we cannot take action based on the content of what Butz says regarding the Holocaust—however odious it may be—without undermining the vital principle of intellectual freedom that all academic institutions serve to protect.

But if Butz qualifies for academic freedom because he keeps his personal political beliefs out of the classroom, as Bienen suggests, then the converse is also true: If one uses the classroom to expound on his or her political beliefs, then the academic freedom ordinarily granted for extramural (out of classroom) comments is not in force. Dixon clearly runs afoul of this constraint on academic free speech.

Furthermore, there is another huge difference between the academic freedom statuses of Butz and Dixon. Butz merely expresses a false or troubling belief about a historical fact, and he does not act upon it other than in writing. But Dixon not only incites violent opposition against the government in the present tense, he acts upon his beliefs in unlawful ways, including menacing people with firearms. If he had confined his activities to his inflammatory speech only, that speech would likely qualify for First Amendment protection. But because his actions—waving a gun around at protests—very much imply a real and imminent threat, he has no such defense.

So who among the state university system’s leaders feel Dixon should be influencing young minds? Who knows when his irrational self-righteous indignation will spin out of control—as it did for Willem van Spronsen—or his inflammatory rhetoric mixed with combat training will encourage somebody else to act out violently?

Dixon’s behavior has no academic freedom protection, nor, as a lecturer, does he even have the protections afforded tenure. His dismissal should be an easy matter.
Do they actually believe they are serving the public good by providing Dixon with, not just a livelihood, but a soapbox from which to forward his radical agenda?

Private colleges may hire whomever they want, but why should the people of North Carolina be forced to subsidize and provide platforms for those who would do them harm? Surely there are teachers of Asian Studies who do not promote violent anarchy—and act upon their beliefs.

Employing Dixon is analogous to hiring a member of the Ku Klux Klan. How would that work at UNC? A Klan member on the faculty, once discovered, would be gone in a heartbeat; trustees, administrators, and political office-holders would all be terrified about any potential backlash. Dixon’s behavior has no academic freedom protection, nor, as a lecturer, does he even have the protections afforded tenure. His dismissal should be an easy matter.

So why does he get a pass when other equivalent actors would be given the bum’s rush? After all, teaching at a public university is not a right; it is a privilege contingent upon one’s qualifications and good character. And one of the first duties of an educator should be to prevent violent madmen from using the university system as a means of support and gaining converts.

But academia has long been a sanctuary for political radicals on the left. For instance, UNC-Chapel Hill kept Howard Machtinger, an unrepentant indicted member of the Weather Underground, on the payroll for many years in a variety of administrative positions. Machtinger affirmed the violent intentions of the Weathermen in an interview, calling policemen “fair game.”

This practice of providing terroristic radicals on the political left with sinecures and launching pads for their political aims must end; doing so is not the same thing as maintaining the campus as a place of open inquiry, with academic freedom given to those with dissenting opinions. As Russell Kirk wrote, “we are not compelled to extend freedom to those who would subvert freedom.” And we are most definitely not compelled to give them jobs in the state-supported university system.

Of course, any official with the moral courage to question Dixon’s presence on the UNC campus will draw extensive fire in the public arena. Yes, the loudest voices in the faculty will take great offense, for any number of reasons; yes, many throughout academia or the media will accuse the responsible official of overstepping his or her authority or of violating Dixon’s academic freedom. But such naysayers will be wrong.

Real leadership means doing what’s right in the face of opposition. It is not just getting tickets to the big game, rubberstamping everything put in front of you, and avoiding the hard decisions.  And it is not just collecting a big salary for appeasing the most aggressive campus factions. Dixon’s continued presence indeed raises the very serious question of whether UNC has any standards for faculty members. If not, why should we, the state’s taxpayers, continue to fund UNC schools? If so, then somebody needs to do the job he or she was appointed to do and enforce them.

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Anarchist group at UT Austin threatens to dox incoming freshmen if they join conservative campus clubs

Earlier this month an anarchist group that consists of UT Austin students called the Autonomous Student Network shared a tweet threatening to dox students who considered joining the Young Conservatives of Texas and Turning Point USA during freshman orientation.

“Hey #UT23! Do you wanna be famous? If you join YCT or Turning Point USA, you just might be. Your name and more could end up on an article like one of these,” the tweet said, linking to previous doxxing posts of conservative students at the school. “So be sure to make smart choices at #UTOrientation.”

Last year the network released extensive personal information of pro-Brett Kavanaugh demonstrators at UT Austin, including their names, photos and contact information. It went so far as to post some of the phone numbers of the employers of students and encouraged its adherents to call them to get them fired.

Composed mostly of students at UT Austin, the group also actively encourages the harassment of conservative students, having praised the destruction of signs and tactics of physical intimidation during the pro-Kavanaugh demonstrations.

Based on its most recent tweet, it appears the Autonomous Student Network may be gearing up for another doxxing during orientation and beyond.

Asked if UT Austin will take any measures in response to the doxxing threats of conservative students by the ASN, the Communications Strategist of UT Austin Shilpa Bakre told The College Fix: “Students should never be targeted or face harassment for their affiliations, political beliefs or any other reason. The anonymous group behind this doxxing is not affiliated with the university, is not a registered student group, and should not present itself in that way. As they did last fall, University Police are continuing to work to ensure the safety of any targeted students and monitor for any potential criminal actions.”

According to a UT Austin spokesman in January 2019, the Autonomous Student Network is “not any kind of registered student organization.” But it claims to have partnerships with other Austin-based student groups and continues to call itself the “Autonomous Student Network-UT Austin” on its Facebook page.

In the past, campus officials have reportedly taken some actions to investigate threats against conservative students. University Police reviewed the incident in October 2018 of harassment against conservative students, which helped shut down the network’s original Twitter account and appeared to have reduced its use of university facilities, according to its Facebook page’s events calendar.

Despite the network listing a variety of campus events in years past on its Facebook page, UT-Austin spokesman J.B. Bird said officials are unaware of them.

“We have no knowledge of them ever having an event in a UT Austin facility,” he said in a telephone interview in The College Fix.

Despite this response by UT Austin, UT Austin Law School alumnus and contributing editor to Law & Liberty, Mark Pulliam, remains skeptical. He tells The College Fix, “UT has taken strong action in the past to prevent non-registered groups from posting notices on campus, but the Autonomous Students’ flyers are ubiquitous on campus. There is clearly a double standard.”

In reference to the doxxing threats from two weeks ago, he adds, “Unfortunately, I do not expect the UT administration to take any action. Under President Greg Fenves, UT has done little to protect the rights of conservative students on campus. When the YCT chapter’s rally in support of Brett Kavanaugh was disrupted by leftist protesters, Fenves was silent and the university’s belated response, by the Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement, sympathized with the [leftist] protesters.”

In response to this, Bird said: “The flyers are not ubiquitous on campus. If they are ever put up, they are taken down immediately and I am on campus everyday.”

But some students also remain unconvinced.

The Chairman of the Young Conservatives of Texas chapter at UT Austin, Lillian Bonin, said “I definitely don’t expect the administration to do anything at all; the line of ‘well we can’t verify any affiliation with UT’ has become too easy and effective at making the problem ‘go away’ at least from their perspective.”

Although she does not expect any physical harm from the ASN, she tells The College Fix, “Speaking for myself as someone who has received an out-sized amount of doxing and backlash repeatedly, even knowing academically that the actual threat of anything happening is minimal (despite them actively making death threats and threats of violence towards us) the general feeling of discomfort and constant threat is very real and never really goes away.”

Other students at UT Austin said they believe that UT Austin should speak out against this incident.

A current student at UT Austin who wishes to remain anonymous due to privacy concerns told The College Fix that “I think the administration should say something about this, and historically I believe the administration has. I doubt much action will follow through though.”

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Law School Teaching Going Off on Ideological Tangents

Back in 2010, I wrote a piece for the Martin Center entitled Bad Sociology, Not Law bemoaning the marginalization of common law doctrine in the American law school curriculum. My point then was that, increasingly, law students were just learning about legal doctrine in their classes rather than being called upon to master the prevailing legal doctrine itself in all its complexities.

Put differently, law teachers are devoting more classroom time to policy (what should be) and less to the prevailing law’s basic anatomy (what is). At Harvard Law School, for example, Agency, Trusts, Evidence, Business Associations, and Family Law are no longer required classes and have not been for some time.

Competently addressing the nuts-and-bolts needs of the middle class when it comes to the rendering of legal services has not been a serious pedagogical goal for quite some time now in most of the prestige law schools.

On the other hand, students in the first year at Harvard are required to participate in “ungraded reading groups” that “allow students to explore an intellectual interest outside the scope of the foundational first-year curriculum.” The course catalog informs us that “topics” are as “diverse” as “legal responses to terrorism, regulation of climate change, Biblical law, detective fiction, conservative jurisprudence, artificial intelligence, and bioethics.”

Over the last nine years, as one can see, the problem I lamented has gotten worse.

This drift from “the law” to “about the law” has an unfortunate political component to it that Northwestern University law professor John O. McGinnis exposed in his article The Embedded Left-Liberal Assumptions of the Legal Academy. His concerns are big picture and fully justified: “Universities should have as their objective the production of knowledge, not activism…And activism interferes with the university’s production of knowledge, because it leads directly to ideological discrimination and the erection of roadblocks of orthodoxy that impede truth seeking.”

In the legal academy, McGinnis continues, “[p]rofessors are overwhelmingly left liberal and there is substantial evidence that conservatives and libertarians suffer discrimination.”

That’s important, but my focus is less philosophical, more practical: This drift means that newly minted lawyers are less prepared than were their predecessors to represent the interests of their middle-class clients. This is true particularly in the non-criminal context, whether it be conveying a parcel of real estate, drafting a trust, or negotiating an employment contract.

Casebooks are being assigned in the required Property course, for example, that are different from the casebooks of a generation ago; some are very different in not a good way.

Since time immemorial, law schools had required a course in our law’s prevailing property doctrine. That doctrine, the product of centuries of evolution, is multi-faceted, complex, and hyper-technical.

There are shared property interests. Future property interests. Equitable property interests. The dreaded rule against perpetuities applicable to both legal and equitable property interests. Limitations on the right to exclude and limitations on the right to transfer. One can go on and on. A course in prevailing property doctrine posed many challenges for professor and student alike, and still does.

When it came to teaching prevailing property doctrine, there was little time for extensive musings on what the law ought to look like. Discussing the problem of “wealth inequality,” for example, was fine in the dorm room, but not in a traditional Property class.

Moreover, how can a student intelligently discuss what property law ought to look like if he or she hasn’t a clue what the law currently is, and how it came to be?

Or, how can a student grasp what a trust is, a trust being a fiduciary relationship with respect to property, if the student hasn’t a clue what a property interest is? No longer can I assume that the students who enroll in my Trusts courses have internalized basic property doctrine, a sine qua non to understanding the fundamentals of the trust relationship. The “modern” Property text shares some of the blame.

What did Property casebooks used to look like? Consider Casner and Leach, Cases and Text on Property. When one thinks of a “traditional” Property casebook, one thinks “Casner and Leach.”

Let’s let the authors, World War II veterans both of them, speak for themselves:

This case-and-text book has the following objective: (1) to give the first-year law student basic training [my emphasis] in property law, (2) to provide him with material that will enable him to make a judgment as to the adequacy of property law to cope with significant modern social problems, (3) to start the student along the road to becoming a lawyer and then to move onward with some celerity.

The reference to “coping with significant modern social problems” should not be construed as debating inequality, the merits of socialism, or what have you. Take gifting doctrine. The authors’ pedagogical philosophy is that

the first-year course in property should give the student a basic understanding of the transmission of wealth by donative transactions so that he can make an evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of what has emerged.

Doctrine, not indoctrination. True, 60 pages are devoted to the “indigent tenant,” but the focus is on the nuts and bolts of how the law has been coping with the societal problem.

At all times, the authors’ focus is on the client as an individual. In their introduction, they assert that “social consciousness” is not a sine qua non of being a good lawyer. True, a good lawyer should make his or her client aware of any “consequences to the community” of, say, placing a particular type of restriction on a parcel of land. “On the other hand, if he draws a will for a Rockefeller, or cross-examines a lying witness in a tort case while reflecting on the inequalities of the distribution of wealth, he is not likely to do the best job of which he is capable.”

So now let’s have a look at a Property text that is the antithesis of Casner and Leach, namely Singer’s Property Law: Rule, Policies, and Practices. The book’s introductory quotation, from Chief Justice Joseph Weintraub of the New Jersey Supreme Court, sets the stage: “Property rights serve human values. They are recognized to that end, and are limited by it.” Note that the focus is on “human values,” not on the individual and his rights under the law.

How can a student intelligently discuss what property law ought to look like if he or she hasn’t a clue what the law currently is, and how it came to be?
Singer comes right out and says that he and his co-authors “seek to present a contemporary introduction to the law of property, focusing on various pressing issues of current concern as well as the basic rules governing the property system.” The current concerns of whom one might ask. Suffice it to say they are not the current concerns of the conservative or libertarian.

Singer declares that “distributive justice” is a recurring theme in the book. Pages are devoted to his concerns as to how well property is “dispersed” in the United States. It is no wonder that few students nowadays who enroll in my Trusts course have mastered the critical details of prevailing property doctrine.

The practical problems with the Singer casebook relate to coverage and emphasis.

First, coverage. Take the law of gifts. Gifting is a common activity of the middle class. Moreover, equitable property interests in irrevocable trusts in the non-commercial context are generally created via donative transfer. Casner and Leach devoted almost 60 pages to gifts of personal property. Singer devotes essentially two pages to the subject.

Or take the law of bailment. A bailment arises when one person is temporarily in possession of another’s property. Tossing the car keys to the parking attendant can raise bailment issues. Bailment was threaded throughout Casner and Leach, but appears nowhere in the Singer index. Few newly minted lawyers nowadays could provide a coherent explanation of why a bailment is not a trust.

Now to emphasis. The fee simple, the life estate, the tenancy in common, the joint tenancy—these are core categories of property ownership that lawyers servicing middle-class clients need to know a lot about. Casner and Leach get right to those arrangements. In Singer, a student has to slog through pages of politically correct clutter before he or she gets to the fee simple, which is around page 748.

Up to page 748, the student has been expending critical time and energy and laptop capacity considering “discrimination and access to ‘place of public accommodation,’” “the right to be somewhere and the problem of homelessness,” “competing justifications of property rights,” and what have you.

Too many law students are not receiving basic training in prevailing property doctrine that would set them on the road to being in a position to competently service the legal needs of the middle class. Precious time and energy is being squandered on ideological tangents. That your son’s Property text may well not be your father’s Property text is not helping the situation.

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