Academia’s Push to Fire Even the Few Academics Who Don’t Tow the Leftist Line

Townhall.com ^ | June 12, 2020 | John R. Lott Jr

[Kaslin]

Once upon a time, academics would debate each other when they disagreed. They would publish papers or write letters. Seminars got heated, but people didn’t take the disagreements personally.

Today, academics demand that their opponents be fired.

University of Chicago Professor Harald Uhlig has learned this lesson the hard way. In a series of Tweets, Uhlig questioned the sensibility of Black Lives Matters’ goal of defunding police. He worried: “Too bad, but #blacklivesmatter per its core organization @Blklivesmatter just torpedoed itself.” Instead, he wrote: “We need more police, we need to pay them more, we need to train them better.” He went on to equate defunding the police with being a “flat-earthers.”

In response, prominent Democrat economists such as Paul Krugman, Obama administration chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen, Justin Wolfers at the University of Michigan, and many others called for Uhlig to be fired as editor of the prestigious Journal of Political Economy. A professor that I know at the University of Michigan emailed me: “It is not just Wolfers. I have received emails from a colleague and doctoral students (past and current) urging action against Uhlig that just take for granted that disagreement with their position is beyond the pale.”

Although most academic economists are Democrats, they also overwhelmingly believe that law enforcement deters crime. The whole field is based on the simple idea that if you make things more costly, people will do less of it. If you raise the price of apples, people will buy fewer apples. But it also applies to crime. If you make crime riskier for criminals (with higher arrest rates or longer prison sentences), people will commit less crime.

But instead of trying to understand why economists think the way that they do, many on the left would rather just shout racism. A New York Times reporter Tweeted out: “Economics is overwhelmingly white, and has a reputation for being dismissive of (if not openly hostile to) Black economists.”

Economists estimate that changes in arrest rates account for about 16 to 18 percent in the variations in murder rates between places, and that conviction rates explain another 12 percent. The death penalty is also a deterrent to committing murder, and explains an estimated 12 percent of the variation in murders.

If you want to get rid of the police, that will mean no arrests, no convictions, no prisons, and no death penalty. This change would be so far outside anything that the US has ever experienced, but it may very well cause an 80 percent or more increase in murder rates.

Economists also find that the benefits of policing are greatest in those areas where crime rates are highest — namely poor, black, urban areas. These neighborhoods would stand to lose the most by defunding the police.

The media have helped create a biased perception that is far from the reality of shootings by police. The Crime Prevention Research Center (where I serve as president) found that when a white officer kills a suspect, the media usually mention the race of the officer. When the officer is black, any news coverage rarely mentions the race of the officer.

After accounting for whether the suspect who was shot was armed or committing a crime and other factors, including the average differences across police departments to deal with cultural differences in departments, we found that black officers were at least as likely as their white peers to kill black suspects, and actually more likely to kill unarmed blacks than were white officers.

Uhlig's claim that we need to train our officers better is the opposite of claiming that there is no problem to be addressed, but there’s no evidence of systemic racism in our nation’s law enforcement.

It’s not too surprising that young news reporters are agitating to get people fired. That's the sort of radical intolerance that our colleges are now breeding.

We should openly debate whether the Black Lives Matter agenda will do more harm than good to blacks, not shut down intellectual discourse by trying to get people fired.

[TheConservativeBanker]

As evidence, I have been pushed into retirement at a school where I have taught for 10 years primarily because I did not refrain from advocating capitalism and Western Civilization which birthed it in finance courses.

[JimRed]

ACADEMIC (ak-uh-DEM-ik): An individual who is unwilling or unable to create or provide any goods or services of value to others, who pontificates while hiding out in a college or university and expects to be paid for it, usually from public funds.

[dsrtsage]

They tried that in Cambodia. Results were not good.

[A_Former_Democrat]

Why didn’t you sue the bastards?

That more than anything will shut them up

[gundog]

“Tow” a line? I call that trolling.

[faithhopecharity]

the political climate on many campuses (including a lot of taxpayer-subsidized colleges!) is hard core commie/nazi/progressive/leftist and ....
extremely doctrinaire.

complete with tons of leftwing propaganda from both administrators and unions supposedly representing the working conditions/wages of faculty and staff

anyone daring to express ANY opinions, even leftist viewpoints, that doesn’t use the currently-correct buzz words (like now, intersexuality, BLM, defund the cops, etc.)
is suspect... and yes, the admin can make things so difficult to punish, force even tenured personnel OUT

[Hildy]

We let this happen. WE DID. This has been going on for decades. It’s not like we don’t talk about it. But that’s usually all we do is talk. We are reaping what we sowed.

[Honorary Serb]

The extreme leftist punisher of the “politically correct” Dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, is the BIGGEST disgrace in American higher education!!!!

[TheConservativeBanker]

As further confirmation, I offer the following article from Bacon's Rebellion (https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/) a Virginia based political blog: (Apologies in advance for my ineptitude with html)

VCU Has Gone Full Social Justice Warrior
Posted on June 10, 2020 by James A. Bacon
Virginia Commonwealth University is making no effort to sugar coat the message. It has taken sides in America’s culture wars. And it will crush anyone on its campus who doesn’t go along.
In remarks to the VCU board of visitors Friday, Aashir Nasim, Bice President of Institutional Equity, Effectiveness and Success, laid out the case with startling clarity. He was not going rogue. He spoke with the full approval of the university administration, and his full remarks can be found on the VCU website. (https://news.vcu.edu/latest/key-issues/Remarks_by_Aashir_Nasim_PhD)

Sounding the refrain of America’s systemic racism, he made it clear that he and the administration, aren’t the slightest bit interested in debating those who might disagree. “We certainly don’t worry if people outside of VCU don’t think we are considering all sides of an issue when we send statements of solidarity and support that are centered on our core values as a university,” he said. “We will not get looped into parsing the false dichotomies between party crowds on our beaches during stay-at-home orders and protesters in the streets of our major cities after curfew.”

Under the direction of President Michael Rao, the university formed a task force in 2018 of 80 faculty, staff and students to provide recommendations regarding bias and discrimination. Since then, Nasim said, the university has been working on implementing the following:

Physical environment.

VCU is developing a plan, to be submitted to the board this fall, to “dismantle the remaining vestiges of an unwanted history on our campus.”

Adjudicating microaggressions.


“We realize the deleterious effects of death by a thousand microaggressions,” Nasim said. The university is revising its non-discrimination policy to create an “alternate pathway” for adjudicating matters “in a way that is affirming for those who have been aggrieved.”


Non-discrimination training.

The university has completed a non-discrimination module for employees. “However,” said Nasim, “while mandatory non-discrimination courses increase accountability and compliance, evidence shows they do not change attitudes and cognitions.” Therefore, the university has developed a compendium of diversity and inclusion courses, seminars and programs for faculty and staff. (It is not clear if these additional courses will be mandatory.)
,
Gender identify diversity.

VCU will launch a program, Call me by my name,” that will “make inclusion real … by recognizing that individuals have the right to use names other than their legal name, to identify with the gender they know themselves to be, and to utilize the pronounces that best fit them.”

Incident reporting, feedback. and responsiveness.
VCU will make it easier for employees and students to report adverse events. As an aside, the university is overhauling its curriculum to “implement inclusive teaching pedagogies that are student-centered and meet our students where they are in terms of their learning trajectories.”



Let me boil this down for you.


VCU is mandating its non-discrimination training that will engender hyper-sensitivity to perceived “micro-aggressions.”


The university will encourage students and employees to report these micro-aggressions. These might include failure to call a transgender person by his/her/its/whatever preferred pronoun.

New methods of adjudicating these instances will be “affirming for those who have been aggrieved.”

In sum, VCU is building a totalitarian system around “social justice” principles. It is not sufficient simply to comply. As Nasim makes clear, it is necessary to “change attitudes and cognitions.”

Submit or you will be crushed. The radical Left plans to run VCU as a political re-education camp, which tells us that’s how, if it gets the chance, it will run the United States. If you aren’t terrified, you aren’t thinking.

[faithhopecharity]

true

[cgbg]

The left changes the rules so often that they will not be satisfied until each citizen reads a pre-approved script before they speak.

[TheConservativeBanker]

To many other things to do. My wife has Huntington’s Disease and I have other interests which this situation has freed me to pursue. I have always avoided litigation when possible, because it anchors you to the past and makes the present and future a lot less fun.

[aimhigh]

I’m surprised we have heard the term, McCarthyism, applied. It fits perfectly.

[gogeo]

Ouch.

[gogeo]

Decades, yes.

[ProgressingAmerica]

We need citizen historians who can put pressure on them from the outside.

They think they control the narrative. They only have a house of cards which can be easily toppled.

[M-cubed]

Google——>> Mike Adams UNC

[faithhopecharity]

True especially for the taxpayer funded schools

[Hildy]

What are you talking about? A house of cards? WE HAVE LOST THE HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS and pretty soon all Institutions. I don’t mean to be doom and gloom, but this did not happen in a vacuum. We need more than just “talk.” We have to do what the left does. Use lawsuits and pressuring defunding.