I remember how it was -- JR
The BlackLivesMattering of Higher Ed: Some Notes from the Field
When the University of Chicago English Department announced over the summer that, in response to the protests after the death of George Floyd, they would only admit graduate students willing to work in Black Studies (a proclamation that, after media attention brought criticism, they recently removed from their webpage), observers of the increasing dominance of extremist ideas on race and race relations in higher education were not surprised.
Indeed, as things go ever crazier inside American universities with respect to racial politics, it becomes more and more difficult for those of us on the inside, watching things deteriorate on a daily basis, to give those not here on the ground a concrete sense of the full extremity of what is happening.
From my vantage point as an academic sociologist, I have seen the disturbing process of what we might call the BlackLivesMattering of American higher education from quite close up, as my discipline is one of the main sites of the creation and propagation of the absurdly fantastic ideas responsible for this development.
For example, Patricia Hill Collins, a former president of the American Sociological Association, is one of the inventors of the notion of intersectionality. This is the reverse status hierarchy by which one is able to determine, from the combination of group categories that make up an individual’s identity—class, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.—what one’s privilege/victimizer and oppression/victim score is, and thereby rank oneself against others in those same crude and collectivist terms.
A more-recent ASA president, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, was an early proponent of “color-blind racism” as a way to maintain, in light of the fact that racist behavior has decreased considerably in the past half-century, the radical effort to account for all contemporary racial disparities by reference to the evil-doing of whites.
In his view, though slavery and Jim Crow disappeared, the white supremacy that birthed them never died—it only went undercover. While blacks were once crushed by whites who paid attention to their racial identities, now they are mercilessly dominated by whites who refuse to do so, because in not thinking of blacks solely in terms of their racial identity these color-blind racists give cover to the ghostly operation of systemic racism.
This latter term is never effectively defined, of course, but in this view, it needs no argument to support it. It exists by virtue of asserting its existence. Racism is always, everywhere the only possible cause of all the difficulties blacks face.
These were founding figures in the current radicalization of academic discourse on race, whose core writings date from the ‘90s and early ‘00s. In that time, a short few decades ago, such ideas were still considered rather fringe. Today, they are mainstream—Ibram Kendi’s much-touted writing is deeply indebted to these and other predecessors—and they inform a vast amount of what happens in higher education, from the formal and institutional to the everyday and interactional.
How does the BlackLivesMattering of American higher ed look on the ground, in particular institutions? Permit me to offer a few exemplary ethnographic observations from my campus, a small eastern liberal arts university, less radical than some, likely reasonably representative of what’s happening in many other places.
Within a day or so of the breaking of the George Floyd story nationally, a petition appeared on our faculty listserv. It asserted, among other things, that our university was, like the rest of the United States, a place in which pernicious and insidious anti-Black sentiment, both conscious and unconscious, was prevalent, due to the legacy of four centuries of systemic violence. “It is, sadly, who we are,” the writers intoned, and they pledged to support efforts to ensure the physical safety of black members of the campus community, who were presumed to be under some serious threat of harm, and to combat white supremacy.
In short order, dozens of professors had signed it.
A few hours later, though, there was a response from another group of faculty who attacked the first group—not for their factually deprived virtue signaling, but for being insufficiently committed to “centering Blackness” in their critique of racism. Some of the signatories of the petition, it was pointed out, have apparently mentored white male students instead of their black female fellows, an intolerable oversight in light of the necessary work required to make our campus truly black-affirming and anti-white supremacist.
Over the next few days, an array of subsequent statements appeared. One, authored by a university administrator, declared that in America people with “melanated skins and experiences” do not have the same right to life enjoyed by others.
A succinct summary of the proceedings came from another of the presenters, who solemnly proclaimed that “America is a white supremacist state and anything that happens here is going to be about racism.”
Another collective statement appeared, and this one called on the university administration to enact a long list of changes. There were, of course, the usual demands for greatly increased minority hires and admissions and fundamental changes to the curriculum to reflect antiracism and criticism of privilege, but the university was also admonished to engage in lobbying efforts in the local community to ensure that black employees and students are not mistreated off-campus.
The writers also demanded that a study be undertaken and published on the history of the ways in which the university has benefited from slavery, land theft, and discriminatory labor practices.
Since then, the number of events related to race, racism, and antiracism here has accelerated at a pace sufficient to absorb a fair percentage of one’s working day. In one panel discussion, it was claimed that black students on campus felt “unsafe” and campus security would need to make adjustments to change that situation, though no evidence to support this feeling was presented.
In another event, a group of about ten faculty gave snap talks describing how racism infects their disciplines and how much work will need to be done to root it out. One speaker discussed the rioting and looting in some American cities in light of rioting in the 1960s. He was meticulously careful, though, never to use the term “riot” to describe the near-burning down of Detroit in July 1967, which at the time of its occurrence was the single most destructive such event in American history, and the recent destruction of Minneapolis to the tune of perhaps $500 million in damages. These were all “rebellions,” and the deaths of the rioters and snipers and other criminals responsible for all the mayhem were “murders” by police.
A succinct summary of the proceedings came from another of the presenters, who solemnly proclaimed that “America is a white supremacist state and anything that happens here is going to be about racism.”
These ideas did not appear in higher education overnight. I remember once, a few years ago, as I sat in my office waiting for a student to come discuss a paper, overhearing a group of colleagues chatting in the hall. “The Navaho believe that all white people are evil,” one noted. “Isn’t that an empirical fact?” responded another. They all laughed enthusiastically.
Such beliefs, once limited to half-jesting hallway chats, are now part of the official language of colleges and universities. The toxic ideology to which I was first exposed during my training as a graduate student in the 1990s was then confined to small sites within a few academic departments, published in academic journal articles that few read, presented at conferences to small cultish groups, but from the first, its proponents sought to find ways to infect other parts of the university system.
The political crisis in the country of the present moment has presented today’s purveyors of these and still worse ideas with an ideal opportunity for advancing the revolution. When the BlackLivesMattering of the universities is complete, a vast array of facts, reasoned intellectual perspectives, and legitimate areas of debate will become officially enforced taboo. This is not hyperbole. The people who hold the toxic ideas driving this revolution say as much in frank and unblinking terms.
Professor Kendi, the high priest of the movement, at least for the moment, who just received $10 million from the CEO of Twitter for his Boston University “Antiracist Center,” is unapologetic about the crude binary nature of this worldview: you are either with him, or you are a racist. There are no other options.
In 20 years, I have never been more worried about the future of American higher education.
Conservative Student’s Lawyer Calls On Biased Head of School to Resign
I broke the story on October 13 that Episcopal High School in Northern Virginia initiated disciplinary proceedings against a 17-year-old high school student, Mackenzie, for sharing her conservative viewpoints on social media. The next day, her lawyer Jesse Binnall appeared on Tucker Carlson to discuss the expensive private school’s mistreatment of his client.
Alumni of the prestigious boarding school were shocked to learn of the discriminatory disciplinary proceedings against a conservative student, and that the school permitted leftist teachers and students to bully and harass Mackenzie without repercussions. Alumni have since reached out to Binnall and told him that they contacted Episcopal and voiced their outrage.
Charles Stillwell, Head of School, appears to be aware of the impending publicity nightmare. Without providing details, he sent out a statement to students in response to Binnall’s public comments, alleging that “the situation is far more complex, and different than what is being presented,” and stated that "we do not discipline students for their political positions." A board chair followed suit.
Binnall and his client immediately disputed the insinuation that there is more to the story.
“In reality, the school is hiding behind the horror of its administrators’ actions, trying to use it as a cover by hoping that the school’s community and the public will believe that there must be more to this. There is not,” Mackenzie said in a statement. She fortified her position by providing an email dated October 10, 2020, which clearly states: “The School’s decision is for Mackenzie to appear before the Discipline Committee for her recent posts.” The school emailed her screenshots of five Instagram posts for which she is being disciplined: four are reposts of PragerU and one is a repost of a conservative discussing the lack of value in student loans (and public forgiveness of those loans) for majors like “gender studies.”
According to Mackenzie’s lawyer, Episcopal High School officials put out “wrong, deceptive and misleading statements” against his client and are “downplaying the severity of their political viewpoint discrimination.” Jesse Binnall was outraged at their response and immediately called for Charles Stillwell to resign as Head of School for his uncontrolled bias.
Binnall is also demanding that Episcopal High School issue a public apology to Mackenzie for their discriminatory, absurd and insulting treatment of a young woman who simply holds mainstream conservative viewpoints. “Episcopal High School owes Mackenzie a public apology; it owes all of its students, faculty, and alumni a promise that this will never happen again. Most importantly, it should immediately exonerate Mackenzie and cease any further discipline.”
Binnall was unable to offer any details about the expected date or manner of the disciplinary proceeding. “We still don’t know the time, place, or procedures for how they will consider Mackenzie’s case. They have kept the entire process shrouded in mystery,” he explained.
The 1619 Project: down, but far from out
Despite sustained criticism, this wretched New York Times initiative is still being promoted in schools.
Since its launch in August last year, the New York Times’ 1619 Project has been challenged over its accuracy and integrity. The latest blow comes from within the Times’ own pages. Bret Stephens, a conservative-leaning op-ed columnist, wrote that ‘for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and Pulitzer Prize – the 1619 Project has failed’.
The 1619 Project seeks to revise American history with a tendentious thesis: it claims that 1619, the year that 20 Africans arrived in the English colonies, and not 1776, marked the beginning of America, its ‘true founding’. According to the Times, the US was forged to preserve slavery, not the freedom and equality promised by the Declaration of Independence. America is a racist nation by design, and thus illegitimate, says the 1619 Project.
In his Times piece, Stephens tries to be balanced, praising the project’s ‘ambition’. But he is ultimately damning, saying that the 1619 Project is a ‘thesis in search of evidence’ and an attempt to establish a ‘capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded’. Most of all, Stephens accuses Times writers of abandoning proper journalism, and playing at being historians. ‘The larger problem’, he writes, ‘is that the Times’ editors, however much background reading they might have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes’.
Stephens’ blast caused uproar among Times staff. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead writer for the 1619 Project, was furious, saying the criticism was racial: ‘These efforts to discredit my work simply put me in a long tradition of BW [Black Women] who failed to know their place’, she tweeted. The New York Times Guild (employee union) also took to Twitter to slam Stephens, writing: ‘It says a lot about an organisation when it breaks it’s [sic] rules and goes after one of it’s [sic] own. The act, like the article, reeks.’
Well, it says a lot about a newspaper when its employees do not know the difference between ‘it’s’ and ‘its’ – twice in one sentence. Not only was this tweet embarrassing for America’s leading newspaper, it also showed journalists demanding that management censor and punish a fellow writer. As it happens, the union’s response was entirely in keeping with the woke sensibilities and behaviour of the Times newsroom. In June, employees exploded in a social-media hissy-fit after the Times published an op-ed by Republican senator Tom Cotton. That led to James Bennet, the opinion-page editor, losing his job. And these same employees, who are now so upset about Stephens for breaking the ‘rules’, had no hesitation in going after Bari Weiss, a Times editor who was the subject of persistent harassment and personal attacks for expressing traditional liberal views. Given the Times’s management’s record of bowing to the demands of the woke, Stephens may be the next one out the door.
It is hard to think of a high-profile journalistic initiative that has received as much incisive and sustained criticism, from academics, politicians and many others, as the 1619 Project has. While the project’s defenders try to portray these attacks as politically partisan, as just another round of the culture wars, the criticism has come from across the political spectrum, from both conservatives and traditional liberals.
Soon after publication of the 1619 Project, leading authorities on American history spoke out and exposed its multiple factual errors and unsupported assertions. Five prominent historians penned a letter to the Times in December 2019, arguing against the project’s ‘displacement of historical understanding by ideology’. One was Sean Wilentz, a liberal historian at Princeton and author of No Property in Man, which explores the issue of slavery and the founding fathers. Wilentz recently told the Washington Post about his initial reaction to Hannah-Jones’ lead essay: ‘I threw the thing across the room, I was so astounded, because I ran across a paragraph on the American Revolution, and it was just factually wrong.’ Indeed, Wilentz and others find the essay’s central claim – that the colonists’ primary motivation in fighting the American Revolution was to maintain slavery – to be patently false.
In the face of this criticism, Hannah-Jones and Jake Silverstein, the project’s editor-in-chief, refused to issue corrections and declined to engage in debate. The Times, said Silverstein, had ‘concluded no corrections are warranted’. Then in March, Leslie Harris, a professor of history at Northwestern University and a fact-checker for the Times, revealed she had identified numerous errors when reviewing the 1619 Project, but the Times ignored all of them. Harris, who is sympathetic to the project’s mission, told the Times that the statement ‘the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America’ was false. In response to Harris, the Times added a ‘clarification’ to Hannah-Jones’ essay, saying that ‘some of’ the colonists wanted to protect slavey – yet even this revised formulation is misleading and has little support among historians.
The Times has clearly been feeling the pressure, and has been trying to back off from its most controversial claims. A few months ago, Hannah-Jones claimed conservatives were distorting the 1619 Project, because she ‘does not argue that 1619 is our true founding’. In an interview on CNN, she repeated the point. But Hannah-Jones is trying to rewrite history. As Conor Friedersdorf, writer for the Atlantic, has documented, there is abundant evidence in Hannah-Jones’ public speeches and writing that she has argued for 1619 to replace 1776 as America’s founding.
A few weeks ago, historian Phillip Magness, writing in Quillette, discovered that the Times had surreptitiously edited the digital version of the project’s text to remove the phrase ‘our true founding’. The Times provided no explanation why it had amended copy so central to the project’s goal of ‘refram[ing] American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year’. It just went down the Orwellian memory hole.
Recently Hannah-Jones sought to defend herself. ‘I’ve always said the 1619 Project is not history’, she wrote: ‘It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and therefore national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is about the past.’ The reality is that her work is neither history nor journalism – it is narrow propaganda. As she herself admits, she is using and trashing the past to advance her particular agenda in the present.
Hannah-Jones also makes clear that the purpose of the 1619 Project is to make war on the past in order to undermine America’s national story, which is centred on the promise of freedom and equality. And it’s working. Over the summer, rioters spray-painted ‘1619’ on a toppled statue of George Washington. Then, to a New York Post headline that read ‘Call them the 1619 riots’, Hannah-Jones tweeted in response, ‘It would be an honour. Thank you.’
Last month, at a White House conference on American history, Trump lambasted ‘the New York Times’ totally discredited 1619 Project’. Unfortunately, as much as it deserves to be, it has not been ‘totally discredited’. That is because large swathes of the American cultural elite are fully on-board with the outlook of the 1619 Project.
Take the leaders of the Times, a giant and influential cultural institution. They decided to turn this initiative from a series of essays into a ‘Project’ in the first place. And while the Times may now appear to be on the defensive, the project continues to be widely promoted far beyond the Times itself. There will be an upcoming series of Oprah Winfrey-produced films and a multi-series of books based on the 1619 Project, published by Random House. And, by awarding the 1619 Project its prize, the Pulitzer Committee gave it its elite stamp of approval.
Most worrying of all is the Times’ attempt, in conjunction with the Pulitzer Center (which is unaffiliated with the prize), to bring the 1619 Project into classrooms. Schools in Buffalo, Chicago, Washington DC and elsewhere have already announced they have adopted the project’s curriculum, with the Pulitzer Center claiming that 3,500 classrooms across the country are using its materials. This includes a lesson plan that calls for ‘all grades’ to read Hannah-Jones essay ‘in full’. In other words, an essay for a project that Hannah-Jones herself insists is ‘not a work of history’, is being taught as historical truth to thousands of impressionable young people.
The Times’ latest moves to downplay the more strident aspects of the 1619 Project are really a divide and conquer strategy. On the one hand, it wants to keep liberal opinion-makers onside, so it tweaks the project to make it appear less radical. And it can then claim only Trump and conservatives are opposed to the 1619 Project. On the other hand, the 1619 Project is free to roll full-steam-ahead into schools, and indoctrinate children into thinking they should be ashamed of their country, and that all black kids are victims, all white kids are oppressors.
Despite its latest setbacks, then, the 1619 Project is unlikely to fade away. To think it might is to underestimate the extent to which the American cultural elite has abandoned the country’s founding ideals and embraced a divisive and dangerous identity politics. Its members already believe America’s past is shameful, and that its people should feel guilt and express remorse. The 1619 Project has found an all-too-receptive audience.
We should not underestimate what is at stake here. The 1619 Project wants to delegitimise the US’s founding principles, and the universalist Enlightenment tradition from which they emerged. We shouldn’t confine our opposition to such a destructive objective to the media. It must be opposed in our schools, our universities and our wider communities, too. The good news is that we have a much more inspiring, unifying and truthful story to tell than do the divisive ideologues of the 1619 project.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/16/the-1619-project-down-but-far-from-out/
Is herd immunity the key to opening schools and economy?As students close in on the first quarter of the school year, frustrated parents want to know when their students will return to school. Daily they are taking to social media to vent and seek answers. Here are two recent postings on a private Facebook group dedicated to reopening schools in Fairfax County, Virginia:
“How can high school football players practice when children cannot go to school? Are they offering other extracurricular activities like band and drama?”
“I don’t know why so many schools will not get creative with reopening. My kids in private school have been in-person since September. The school got creative to make it happen with restrictions. It’s the teacher’s unions that continue to make a fuss, and their blunt shut down solutions ignore the negative consequences to the kids. The schools can make it work and keep the kids in school—they just need to be flexible and creative.”
Into this emotionally charged environment comes a new declaration signed by more than 34,000 medical doctors and health scientists from around the world opposing lockdowns to curb the spread of COVID-19. The Great Barrington Declaration states the measures are causing “irreparable damage” to the economy and to the futures of students who are falling behind.
Instead of shutting everything down until a vaccine is available, these doctors say focus should be on minimizing mortality and social harm until herd immunity is reached. Herd immunity refers to when enough of the population becomes immune to an infectious disease to beat it, which the doctors say will eventually be reached for all populations, and can be assisted by, but not dependent upon, a vaccine.
“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk,” the declaration states.
The scientists met last week with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who later tweeted about the meeting: “We heard strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration’s strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace.”
But the Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins has denounced “focused protection” as “fringe” and “dangerous” without offering any productive pathways forward to getting our kids back to school.
As parents try to make sense of these vastly divergent views, New York City may provide insights. In 2020, an estimated 1 in every 4 residents of New York City have contracted Covid since the beginning of the year, or close to 2.1 million according to data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation(IHME) tracking estimated infections statewide combined with the confirmed number of Covid cases in the state, 53 percent of which were in the city.
IHME also projects that New York’s peak in cases this cold and flu season will be in January and will be 85 percent lower than in March when cases peaked. Why?
A recent report in the New York Times raises the possibility that New York City may be on its way to approaching herd immunity. “I’m quite prepared to believe that there are pockets in New York City and London which have substantial immunity,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the Times, adding, “What happens this winter will reflect that.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio opened public schools for in-person learning earlier this month. At the end of the first week, out of nearly 2 million students and teachers there were 305 Covid cases. That is an infection rate under 1 percent. “We’re not seeing any unusual number of students or staff anywhere in the city testing positive,” de Blasio said on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer.
De Blasio added, “What I think is fair is the school environment has been made extremely safe, and I thank you and all educators and everyone in the schools, because with the social distancing, the face mask wearing by everyone, the cleaning, everything has been working in the schools.”
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning said, “People are rightly concerned about their children’s health, but rather than harming all kids through school shutdowns, school districts across the nation should allow parents to choose whether their children are ready to re-enter the classroom or not. Parents know if their kids are thriving in the online learning environment and should be empowered to make this critical choice for the future of their own kids, rather than having it dictated to them. The COVID crisis has created unique challenges and it is time for school districts as well as state and local governments to engage in creative flexibility so that we can move forward while recognizing the dangers inherent for particularly vulnerable populations.”
While many on the left like to use the refrain, “follow the science,” it seems they only want to follow the science that fits with their political agenda. In this case, more than 34,000 medical experts are calling for an end to the lockdowns, but the left is choosing to ignore the science. They do so at the peril of our students and our larger economy. And if the vaccine does not work, herd immunity may be the best we can hope for.
http://dailytorch.com/2020/10/is-herd-immunity-the-key-to-opening-schools-and-economy/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
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://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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