I remember how it was -- JR
British university won't back down on race tsar snub as head insists giving Tony Sewell degree honour would upset students
A university has refused to reverse its decision to deny the Government’s race tsar an honorary degree.
The head of Nottingham University claims controversy over the award would overshadow its degree ceremony, upsetting students and their families.
The Daily Mail revealed last month that Nottingham had withdrawn its offer to Tony Sewell after his controversial report concluding there was no evidence that the UK is institutionally racist. The report led to angry outbursts from Labour and the race relations lobby.
A group of 50 Tory MPs wrote to the university to demand a rethink, pointing out that Nottingham had given honorary degrees to Chinese diplomats who deny their country’s Uighur genocide.
Now vice-chancellor Professor Shearer West says that going ahead with the award to Dr Sewell – who won his PhD at Nottingham in 1995 – would overshadow its students’ own graduation ceremonies.
She said that because honorary degrees were conferred at the same events the rules had been changed some years ago ‘to preclude awards to figures who – either consciously or through no fault of their own – become the subject of political controversy, so that a day of celebration for our graduates does not also attract such controversy’.
This was ‘to ensure our graduates do not have a potential distraction overshadow their celebration’.
Professor West said that if the award had gone ahead ‘it would have left our graduates and their families with a diminished experience for this essential rite of passage, particularly when so many have been denied this very special day by the Covid-19 pandemic and have had to wait’.
Tory MP Sir John Hayes, who organised the letter, said: ‘The university are wriggling on the hook.
The excuse that Tony Sewell’s honorary degree might have disturbed graduating students is about as thin as it could possibly be.
‘The implication is that the students are such snowflakes and are so unused to robust argument and counter-argument after three years studying at Nottingham that they can’t cope with what the university calls controversy.’
The MPs’ letter criticised the decision to rescind Dr Sewell’s degree ‘simply because he earned the ire of a few frustrated ideologues for his widely welcomed work’ on the Government’s race report.
They added: ‘Dr Sewell is a uniquely distinguished alumnus of your university, having spent years helping thousands of black children from poor backgrounds into higher education.’
They pointed out the ‘absurdity’ of the decision when other recipients of honorary degrees from Nottingham included former Chinese ambassador Liu Xiaoming, who dismissed Uighur re-education camps as ‘fake news’, and Najib Razak, the ex-Malaysian PM jailed for 12 years for embezzlement.
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Mask mandates back at some NYC colleges, universities as COVID cases rise
Some colleges and universities in New York City have reinstituted mask mandates amid a rise in COVID-19 cases.
Columbia University, the affiliated Barnard College and Pace University have all started requiring masks again in at least some indoor settings.
Columbia reinstated mask rules on Monday “based on the current situation and in an abundance of caution,” according to school communications obtained by The Post.
The policy, which requires students to wear non-cloth masks, is expected to remain in place through the final weeks of the spring semester.
Instructors, however, still have the option to remove their masks while teaching.
The Ivy League school had nixed the requirement on March 14, only to bring it back less than a month later.
Partner school Barnard College has also temporarily reinstated the requirement in classrooms, dining halls, libraries and other indoor spaces, according to the student newspaper.
Pace University, meanwhile, moved to reimplement its mask mandate in all public spaces on its Big Apple campus effective Monday. Its facilities in Westchester, which according to officials remained at “low risk status,” won’t be affected by the new rules.
In an internal letter obtained by The Post, Pace officials said events can continue as scheduled and dining halls will remain open, but masks are required when not actively eating.
High-quality masks have been required at New York University wherever in-person attendance is mandatory and prolonged, such as in classrooms and meetings, according to its website.
“The good news is that people who are vaccinated are at very low risk of serious infection even if they test positive,” wrote Brian Anderson, executive director of Emergency Management and Environmental Health and Safety. “But our hope is to keep case rates as low as possible to protect everyone in our community.”
A CUNY spokesperson told The Post that masks are optional at its campuses and offices, though many people continue to wear them.
“The University monitors CDC guidelines and regularly consults with our State and City health officials,” he said. “Should the circumstances require a reconsideration of this or any other policy, the necessary changes to keep the CUNY community safe will be made.”
Fordham and St. John’s universities are still mask-optional for vaccinated students.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/12/nyc-colleges-universities-reinstate-mask-mandates/
**************************************************Princeton’s Mixed-Up President Discards Free Speech and Demonizes Its Defenders
Say what you want about Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University—he is a principled man. The problem is that he holds principles that are in serious conflict with one another. In this, he is not alone: Most people hold contradictory views on complicated matters. But because Eisgruber is the leader of one of the top universities in the world, where I have taught mathematics for 35 years, his confusion has real consequences.
To his credit, Eisgruber sincerely believes in academic freedom, a fact that explains why Princeton was the first educational institution, after the University of Chicago, to adopt the so-called Chicago Principles of free expression.
However, he also quite sincerely holds the belief, consistent with the progressive view, that a main goal of the university is to advance “social justice”—a principle whose advocates proclaim it to be of urgent and totalizing importance. In holding these two beliefs together at the same time, Eisgruber may be demonstrating the power of a first-rate intelligence, which, as Princeton dropout F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, shows the “ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” He is perhaps also in danger of becoming a comic opera character in the middle of an unfolding tragedy that threatens the foundations of higher education in the United States.
Social justice sounds appealing and may well be worth pursuing in a variety of institutional settings, universities included—provided we all agree on what social justice means and that bringing it about is not incompatible with the more obvious, traditional goals of academia, namely the creation, preservation, and transmission of truth and beauty. This is the true telos of a university, and it is inconceivable in the absence of free speech.
But social justice is another matter altogether. By definition, social justice implies something quite different from impartial justice. All modern ideologies that invoke social justice, including the kind embraced by Eisgruber, appear to envision societies in which group inequalities are not to be tolerated. Of course, achieving anything close to uniformity requires strong, top-down measures of redistribution and reeducation—that is to say, indoctrination—as well as the punishment of dissent and marginalization of dissenters. All of these “socially just” practices are naturally incompatible with free speech.
Ignoring the disappointing, and often tragic, lessons of past historical experiments with social justice imposed by heavy-handed bureaucratic means in places like the former Soviet Union, my native communist Romania, or contemporary China, Princeton’s president believes that the university can have it all: social justice, free speech, and an academic commitment to excellence in the search of knowledge. Possibly this scheme might work if Princeton’s president had a more nuanced view of social justice; as things stand, however, this principle is in obvious contradiction to the other two.
Unfortunately, Eisgruber’s view of social justice seems to be the off-the-shelf version promoted by “progressive” ideologues who see the redistribution of jobs and honors on the basis of skin color and self-assigned identity groupings—and the overt censorship of anyone who disagrees with them or opposes their drive for institutional power—as central to their conception of “justice.” Foundational to this approach are the tenets of critical race theory, which mandate a framework in which the United States as a whole and Princeton University in particular must be understood to be systemically racist. According to CRT, denying this framework is prima facie evidence of systemic racism.
What to do? Well, to cure Princeton of racism, we need, of course, a large and energetic group of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucrats whose main functions are to monitor every possible manifestation of racism and other -isms, however small or unlikely, and, more importantly, to reeducate students, faculty, and fellow administrators through a battery of invasive anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-colonialist, and anti-Western programs, turning the long-standing ideal of the university as a sheltering home for free inquiry on its head in order to produce something more like a very expensive reeducation camp for the children of American elites, and for the people whose job it is to cure them. (A few years ago, it should be said, Eisgruber promised not to impose mandatory DEI training programs. A DEI-infused orientation is now mandatory for all freshmen, but we still hope he will otherwise keep his promise.)
The idea that Princeton is systemically racist is nonsense: As I have argued elsewhere, it is one of the least racist institutions in the world. Nevertheless, Eisgruber’s repeated assertions over these past two years that he heads a racist institution, including a letter addressed to the university community in the fall of 2020, informs Princeton’s whole DEI agenda—and, indeed, seems on most days to be driving the mission of the entire university.
One example of how Princeton is mishandling things: At the mandatory freshman orientation last August, all members of the incoming undergraduate class of 2025 were subjected to an unbalanced presentation of the racist past and supposedly systemically racist present of their new home, which they were called upon to bravely dismantle.
In the long list of famous Princeton figures of the past who were and are denounced as racists in the virtual gallery titled “To Be Known and Heard” is my colleague Joshua Katz. A distinguished “white” professor in the Classics department, his mentorship of a prominent Black classicist is a matter of public record. Indeed, the only visible blemish on Katz’s otherwise perfectly non-racist history is a brief comment he made in July 2020 in an article he penned in response to an actually racist petition—a now-infamous July 4th faculty letter signed by hundreds of our colleagues. Here is what Katz wrote:
"The Black Justice League, which was active on campus from 2014 until 2016, was a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands."
In order to damage Katz’s reputation as much as possible, the creators of Princeton’s rogues’ gallery of racists, an official document that bears the copyright of the university’s Board of Trustees, omitted the parenthetical words “(including the many black students).” Keep in mind that any student who had doctored a quotation, especially intentionally and with malice, would likely have been suspended.
The gallery also quotes Katz from the same article, as follows:
"Recently I watched an “Instagram Live” of one of its alumni leaders, who—emboldened by recent events and egged on by over 200 supporters who were baying for blood—presided over what was effectively a Struggle Session against one of his former classmates. It was one of the most evil things I have ever witnessed, and I do not say this lightly."
The gallery omits any mention of Katz’s response when he was asked by The Daily Princetonian to clarify what he meant by “terrorist” and “Struggle Session,” or what he has said about these matters elsewhere. This is what Katz wrote:
"... the BJL went after one fellow black student with particular vigor, verbally vilifying her in public at every possible opportunity, calling her all sorts of unsavory epithets and accusing her of “performing white supremacy.” Other students, as well as faculty and administrators, were accused, without evidence, of being “racists” and “white supremacists.”
A distinguished colleague who knows the facts and watched the video confirms that the university was aware of the abusive activities of the BJL and that Katz’s description of the “Struggle Session” was accurate.
The gallery also omits any mention of the outpouring of support that Katz has received in a host of student, media, and academic venues. Instead, it quotes from the official denunciation promulgated by Katz’s department and, using bold font, provides outrageous quotations from two other members of the Princeton faculty. One of them, who has now moved to Harvard, accuses Katz of “race-baiting, disguised as free speech”; the other, who holds a University Professorship (the highest faculty rank), states that “Professor Katz … seems to not regard people like me as essential features, or persons, of Princeton.”
In short, the gallery vilifies Joshua Katz as a racist when there is no evidence for this assertion. In order to make the accusation seem plausible to incoming students, it fails to present any of the abundant positive evidence to the contrary.
It is hard to describe this kind of nakedly slanderous and provocative treatment of one of Princeton’s own faculty as anything other than the deliberate public abuse of an individual by an institution in the hopes of compelling silence from any other would-be dissenters from an increasingly rigid and compulsory orthodoxy of the type that we do not generally associate with universities, but rather with the medieval church.
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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)
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