I remember how it was -- JR
Another "cancellation" that perverts history
It is unreasonable to blame people for accepting the conventional wisdom of their day
IN 1914, 50 years after his graduation from Middlebury College and two years after completing his term as Vermont's 53d governor, John Abner Mead reached out to his alma mater with a generous offer.
In a letter to the college president that was forwarded to the board of trustees, Mead proposed to underwrite the construction of a campus house of worship — a "dignified and substantial" chapel that would reflect "the simplicity and strength of character" of the people of Champlain Valley and the state of Vermont. Specifically, wrote Mead, he would provide $60,000 to build a chapel at the highest point on the Middlebury campus, "to be known as the Mead Memorial Chapel."
The trustees readily accepted Mead's offer. A groundbreaking ceremony for the chapel was held in June 1914; the completed building was dedicated two years later. By then, the funds donated by the former governor had risen to more than $75,000 — the equivalent of $2.2 million today. The chapel soon became an iconic feature of the Middlebury landscape and the college's branding. It still is. But the building was recently stripped of its benefactor's name. Thereby hangs a lawsuit, and another chapter in the dismal annals of contemporary cancel culture.
On Sept. 27, 2021, with no advance notice, Middlebury workers were dispatched to remove the stone slab engraved with the words "Mead Memorial Chapel" from its niche above the building's entrance. With the name gone, bare brick was exposed beneath the pediment.
Hours later, Middlebury administrators issued a statement announcing that after a "deliberative process," they had decided to eliminate the name of the chapel's donor on the grounds that he had played a role in "advocating and promoting eugenics policies in Vermont in the early 1900s."
Mead thus joined a long list of prominent historical individuals whose names or images have been stricken, toppled, defaced, or expunged from public places of honor because things they did or said long ago are regarded today as shameful or benighted. Statues of figures as varied as Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, and the singer Kate Smith have been "canceled" in this manner, as have buildings named for Woodrow Wilson, the Sackler family, and Dianne Feinstein. In Boston, the street bearing the name of former Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey was renamed in 2018. A year later, Roxbury's central hub became Nubian Square, memory-holing the name by which it had been known for generations, that of Puritan governor Thomas Dudley.
Sometimes the case for removing a statue or a name from a building is undeniably compelling. I have long argued that monuments honoring leaders of the Confederacy — the vilest cause in American history — deserve no place in a free society. Too often, however, men and women whose careers were admirable and even heroic have been dishonored because in one notable respect they fell short.
Jefferson, for example, was among the most visionary, inspiring, and influential leaders in US history. But because he was a slaveholder, he is deemed by many to be unworthy of any honor. In his case and numerous others, historical figures are reduced by contemporary critics to a single, defining negative characteristic — and that moral failing is given more weight than all the good they may have achieved in a life of accomplishment and merit.
That is what Middlebury has done to Mead. And to rectify that unfairness, a more recent Middlebury alumnus — former Vermont governor James Douglas — has gone to court to get his predecessor's name restored to the chapel made possible by his munificence.
In a 79-page lawsuit filed in Vermont Superior Court, Douglas makes two essential arguments.
One is that removing Mead's name from the Middlebury chapel amounts to a breach of contract, since the former governor's offer to pay for the building was conditioned on its being called the "Mead Memorial Chapel." That understanding was expressed in numerous communications at the time, Douglas contends. Mead specified that the building to be constructed with his money would bear his family's name, and the college accepted that term. "The name 'Mead Memorial Chapel' was the essence of the deal and it was the entire deal — forever," the complaint reads.
Whether that argument will stand up in court is unclear. In a motion to dismiss Douglas's suit, the college argues that Mead's offer in 1914 was never made explicitly contingent on a permanent grant of naming rights and that "it certainly did not call for a reversion of the gift if the name should be changed more than one hundred years later."
But if Douglas's legal claim is iffy, the moral argument he makes is wholly convincing.
In prying the former governor's name from the chapel because of his support for eugenics — support that appears to have amounted to little more than a single passage in Mead's farewell speech as governor — Middlebury College "sullies the reputation of a decent man," Douglas maintains. The college "has obliterated any memory of the selfless acts and the altruistic contributions John Mead made to his nation, state, county, town, church, and to Middlebury College itself."
Those acts and contributions were considerable. Mead, an orphan who worked to put himself through school, became a successful doctor, businessman, and philanthropist. He served as Vermont's surgeon general, a state senator, the mayor of Rutland, and lieutenant governor before being elected to the state's highest office in 1910. As governor, Douglas observes, Mead was a progressive who supported women's suffrage, toughened child labor laws, and strengthened campaign finance statutes.
John A. Mead, who graduated from Middlebury College in 1864, went on to become a physician, a businessman, the governor of Vermont, and a philanthropist.
It is true that he was sympathetic to eugenics and believed that "undesirable" people, such as the mentally ill and criminally insane, should be restricted from procreating. But in the early decades of the 20th century, that was the mainstream progressive view, enthusiastically embraced by leading thinkers, scientists, and activists, including Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, and Helen Keller. Mead's single 1912 speech on the subject was, by modern standards, profoundly unenlightened. But it changed nothing and was not a subject he pursued further. Not until 1931 did the Vermont legislature pass a bill for the sterilization of "mentally unfit" people. By that point, Mead had been dead for over a decade.
Whatever else might be said about Mead's views on eugenics, they didn't define his life or his legacy. They were far outweighed by the good he did as a citizen, a public official, and an alumnus of his college. To strip his name from the landmark chapel he provided because his once-conventional support for eugenics is now disfavored doesn't amount to an honorable grappling with history. It amounts to tawdry virtue signaling by an institution that should be better than that.
With or without Mead's name, the chapel he built will continue to stand tall. A pity the same can't be said for the president and trustees of Middlebury College.
https://jeffjacoby.com/27020/middlebury-college-flunks-a-history-test
************************************************Conservative Efforts To Roll Back DEI in Higher Education Sweep Through Another State
Ohio college students should thank Jerry Cirino. The Republican state senator has written a bill designed to spare those students instruction in the type of sordid thinking that sees all of life in terms of group power dynamics, cancels opposing views, preaches color consciousness, and discourages merit.
In other words, Cirino wants to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, requirements from Ohio’s public university system.
One of the nation’s largest, with 14 four-year research universities, 24 regional campuses, 23 community colleges, and 13 graduate schools, Ohio’s higher education system would be better off without DEI.
Some Ohioans, of course, don’t see it Cirino’s way. That’s to be expected, but what’s hard to grasp is the degree of demagoguery that has met his bill.
What this criticism shows, once again, is the instability produced by the type of regime politics America is gripped by at the moment. We are arguing not over fine policy points, but what type of regime we will have.
To describe the two camps briefly, those on the Left claim that America is systemically racist, in the sense that the American system itself—everything we do—oppresses members of the “marginalized” categories. From this leftist perspective, DEI training is needed to deprogram the American mind and reset it with a greater awareness of racial matters.
On the other side, people say no: Although there certainly are racists (just as there are murderers and rapists), the system itself is not racist. America is also far from being an oppressive state. Although the government can and should do nothing about “thought crimes” or freedom of association, state and federal civil rights laws adequately protect against true discrimination.
The conservatives in this latter camp say that diversity, equity, and inclusion practices themselves often violate the spirit and letter of statutes that proscribe race-conscious decisions by the government and the private sector. They also affirm that DEI in practice at public colleges unconstitutionally compels speech, enforcing the view of America as being racist and oppressive.
Cirino’s anti-DEI bill is an attempt to correct these wrongs, among others. This comprehensive legislation also addresses many aspects of higher education in Ohio that are in need of reform, from the terms of trustees to making syllabuses digitally searchable.
But the key part of the bill would prohibit “any mandatory programs or training courses regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion.” This section deals mostly with banning compelled speech or requiring particular ideas as a condition of admission, hiring, or obtaining a degree.
One section, for example, would order the boards of trustees of colleges and universities in the Ohio system to require their institutions to “affirm and declare that the institution will not encourage, discourage, require, or forbid students, faculty, or administrators to endorse, assent to, or publicly express a given ideology, political stance, or view of a social policy, nor will the institution require students to do any of those things to obtain an undergraduate or post-graduate degree.”
Cirino’s bill, which has many other sponsors, passed the state Senate, headed to the state House, and may appear on the desk of Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, for his signature.
The legislation also supports viewpoint diversity, attempting to ensure that universities “will seek out invited speakers who have diverse ideological or political views.”
It also would eliminate the practice of canceling conservative speech. It would require that an institution of higher learning “declare that its duty is to ensure that, within or outside the classroom, the institution shall not require, favor, disfavor, or prohibit speech or lawful assembly.”
The bill moreover rightly would bar the Chinese Communist Party, China’s ruling organ, from influencing America’s young minds. It says that “no state institution of higher education shall accept gifts, donations, or contributions from the People’s Republic of China or any organization the institution reasonably suspects is acting on behalf of the People’s Republic of China.”
These are commonsense approaches, but they are being demagogued by a leftist professoriate that runs the university system as its fiefdom.
One ethnic studies professor, Timothy Messer-Kruse, seized on the bill’s single use of the term “divergent” in a definition—“‘Intellectual diversity’ means multiple, divergent, and varied perspectives”—to make outlandish claims.
The bill, writes Messer-Kruse, would require him “to teach the ‘divergent’ theory of racial construction, which is that race is a biological, fixed, natural attribute of humankind.”
The professor continued: “It requires me to teach the ‘divergent’ theory of civil rights, which is that the Constitution allows for the legal separation of races and that this is a justifiable form of equality. It requires me to teach that the South seceded because it wished to defend states rights against the unlawful aggression of the Lincoln administration.”
But none of this is true. These lines are meant to scare good people who are too busy to read the bill. In fact, the legislation would entrust to professors “the exercise of professional judgment about how to accomplish intellectual diversity within an academic discipline.”
The teachers unions are up in arms, too, demagoguing the bill and crying about the limitations on China’s influence.
Fighting DEI will not be politically easy, as Cirino is finding out. But for the more than half a million students attending Ohio’s institutions of higher education, it’s worth it.
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The sinister side of making ‘misgendering’ a disciplinary offence
Should ‘misgendering’ someone be a disciplinary offence? One Oxford college seems to think so. Yesterday, Regent’s Park College posted a ‘Trans Inclusion Statement’, burnishing its existing bullying and harassment policy. On a long list of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ that might warrant punishment is ‘consistently using incorrect titles, pronouns or names to refer to a trans person’ – also known as ‘misgendering’ or ‘deadnaming’ someone.
The obvious problem here is that the list of speechcrimes provided could apply to almost anyone who simply doesn’t believe in the eccentric tenets of gender ideology
The timing can’t have been coincidental. All eyes were on Oxford this week due to the strangely controversial appearance at the Oxford Union of gender-critical feminist Kathleen Stock, whose great heresy is to believe in biological sex and women’s rights. There were protests and demands the event be cancelled. Regent’s Park College says it has been working on this policy ‘since 2022’, but just so happened to choose this week – of all weeks – to publish it.
‘Regent’s Park College celebrates and values the diversity of its student groups, workforce, and visitors, and we aim to create a place for them that is welcoming and inclusive’, the statement begins. Which might sound reasonable enough. After all, no sane person is in favour of bullying and harassment, certainly not bullying and harassment fuelled by hatred of a minority group.
But the more you dig into the document, the more it becomes clear just how stretched the definition of bullying and harassment has become these days – and how, certainly where the trans issue is concerned, this poses a direct threat to free thought and speech.
Alongside the prohibition on ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’ we are told students must not deny or dispute ‘the validity and / or existence of a trans person’s identity’, make ‘jokes about trans people or their trans status’, or refuse ‘to treat a person in accordance with their affirmed identity’. Such behaviour, the document suggests, is tantamount to abuse.
One could easily see a situation in which some unpleasant person could deploy all these tactics and more to make someone’s life hell. But harassment is harassment, regardless of how you go about it. The obvious problem here is that the list of speechcrimes provided could apply to almost anyone, however reasonable or well-meaning, who simply doesn’t believe in the eccentric tenets of gender ideology – or who simply shows insufficient deference to them.
Take ‘misgendering’. There are an awful lot of people who cling to the view, held by everyone until about five minutes ago, that you cannot change sex – not least because it is an observable scientific fact. Some will happily refer to trans people using their ‘preferred’ pronouns, because they see it as somewhere between a courtesy and a harmless fiction. But others would just rather not. Must they really be compelled to do so – to lie, essentially – under pain of punishment? Compelled speech corrodes freedom of speech.
The pronouns thing is particularly insidious given the fact that we mainly use someone’s pronouns when that person isn’t around. (When you’re out for a drink with a friend you don’t turn to them, at the appropriate time, and say ‘would she / her like another pint?’) What is ultimately being demanded here is that you change how you think about someone, and how you describe them when they aren’t there, not just how you address them.
As for this demand that all staff and students treat people ‘in accordance with their affirmed identity’ – which according to the policy needn’t mean he or she has had any medical treatment – this is an affront to safety as well as conscience. What if a female student would rather not have a male-bodied individual in the women’s loos – and dares to say so? This whole approach seems particularly foolhardy given the small, but not insignificant, number of abusive, nefarious men who have abused the notion of ‘gender self-ID’ in recent years in order to gain access to women’s spaces.
The Regent’s Park College policy is testament to the doublethink of our age: it exhorts its residents to be ‘inclusive’ while excluding anyone of an opposing view. Worse, it would happily compel students to say things they don’t believe and act in a way that is against their conscience. We need to rediscover the true meaning of tolerance. Everyone is entitled to their views so long as they don’t impose them on anyone else. Is that really so difficult? In the gender wars of today, apparently so.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/the-sinister-side-of-making-misgendering-a-disciplinary-offence
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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