Posted on 09/01/2020 5:40:06 PM PDT by DeweyCA
In a piece published today in The Atlantic, John McWhorter writes that he is getting as many as 50 emails a week from academics who are living in fear that their careers could end at any moment. Their fear isn’t the coronavirus it’s the creeping leftist orthodoxy which treats any disagreement as cause to hound someone out of their job. McWhorter labels it a new form of Maoism on campus, complete with struggle sessions straight out of the Cultural Revolution:
A statistics professor says:"I routinely discuss the fallacy of assuming that disparity implies discrimination, which is just a specific way of confusing correlation for causality. Frankly, I’m now somewhat afraid to broach these topics … since according to the new faith, disparity actually is conclusive evidence of discrimination."
The new mood has even reached medieval studies; an assistant professor reports having recently just survived an attack by a cadre of scholars who are “unspeakably mean and disingenuous once they have you in their sights,” regularly “mounting PR campaigns to get academics and grad students fired, removed from programs, expelled from scholarly groups, or simply to cease speaking.”…
Overall I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. A history professor reports that at his school, the administration is seriously considering setting up an anonymous reporting system for students and professors to report “bias” that they have perceived. One professor committed the sin of “privileging the white male perspective” in giving a lecture on the philosophy of one of the Founding Fathers, even though Frederick Douglass sang that Founder’s praises. The administration tried to make him sit in a “listening circle,” in which his job was to stay silent while students explained how he had hurt them—in other words, a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of the Cultural Revolution…
Especially sad is the extent to which this new Maoism can dilute the richness of a curriculum and discourage people from becoming professors at all. One professor has stopped teaching James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” after Black students claimed that it forced them to “re-live intergenerational trauma.” I have heard from not one but two philosophy doctorates who left academia. One explained that he was driven out by the “accelerating creep of what felt to me a pretty stifling orthodoxy. The hiring market was dominated by a concern for diversity statements, the ability to teach fairly ideologically-slanted courses on philosophy and critical race theory or philosophy and gender, etc.; and more generally it felt progressively less like a profession where I could opt out of those trends while still being a competitive job applicant.”
McWhorter points out that most of the people he’s hearing from are not conservatives. Most consider themselves left-of-center. But in academia today being on the left doesn’t really matter unless you hold all of the same views as the far left.
How widespread is this? It’s hard to say but McWhorter points to a poll of 445 academics carried out by the Heterodox Academy. Asked how they would feel expressing their views on a controversial issued at work, more than half said they would be “very concerned” or “extremely concerned” that it would hurt their career. That’s obviously not a great situation for having people discuss different points of view about contentious topics. With numbers like that self-censorship is guaranteed. And that only ensures that the cultural revolutionaries have de facto control of what is said and taught on campus.
I’ve said before that as bad as the situation has been on some campuses, the far left is still a minority of the student body. But reading this piece you have to wonder how much longer that will be the case. How long before the meltdown at Evergreen State College is being replicated everywhere? If I had to guess, I’d say it will happen a lot sooner than anyone expects.
As I was writing this, Rod Dreher posted this example. Professors at Northwestern law school were apparently expected to denounce themselves as racists. I wonder if anyone was brave enough to refuse?
With any luck.
I’ve been very interested in the Cultural Revolution. The best resource is Laszlo Montgomery’s podcast on Chinese history. He’s done about 100 podcasts, It starts around episode 82 and it goes on for about 8 episodes.
The impetus for the Cultural Revolution was the spectacular failure of the Great Leap Forward, which looks to me like the single biggest clusterfock in one country in history. Mao’s central management and incompetence led to massive famines which killed somewhere from 22-35 million, plus or minus.
Chinese students had nothing to lose by the early 60’s and they were manipulated by numerous factions into widespread bloodshed. Interestingly, Wuhan was one of the hotbeds of radicalism because the city was otherwise considered to be a piece of shit at the time. It led to the Wuhan incident which involved bloodshed between at least three warring factions.
The odd thing is that the American Maoists are almost polar opposites from the Chinese students of the 60’s. The neo-Maoists are overpriviledged, pampered, largely ignorant of Chinese history in the 50-70s, and appear to adopt ideologies out of peer-pressure. I think they are perfectly capable of murder in the name of Love and Peace, but they are soft, stupid, and I don’t see them as willing to sacrifice for The Cause, especially if it involves going without Starbucks and laptops.
Bring out the dunce caps
Marxists, Maoists, et al forming the Vanguard Party.
You can never be radical enough
The universities are overwhelmingly filled with red diaper Marxist babies. They have been for decades. This is nothing new.
Bookmark.
I like John McWhorter. Anyone who subscribes to The Great Courses Plus needs to watch his course on Language Families of the World. He is very funny and informative. He is also not very PC, so I was disappointed to read a recent column by him where he gave a lukewarm condemnation of the speech police and even endorsed capitalizing Black but not White and banning the word “niggardly”. Academics are going to have to accept that academics have wrought this mess and if they want to save their profession they are going to have to fix it. It is apparent to me that a small number of them are actively involved in this subversion, but the rest of are complicit through their inaction. For a long time, people in hard sciences and math have gone along with this crap on the theory that if they humor the mob, they will be left alone to do their work. But now, we have 2+2=5 and physics is racist. They have a choice to make. Fight it and maintain the integrity of their disciplines, or cave and watch their institutions collapse. Most universities live on the full tuition paid by foreign students. How long are parents going to send their kids far away and pay that kind of money to have them only learn how to be pissed off? How long will they remain world class when the discourse centers around who uses what pronouns? They need to think about this because the American people are not in the mood to pick up the slack. Rich Americans will send their kids elsewhere to be educated, and the rest will no longer have the resources to get a quality education. Harvard has been at the top of the heap for a very long time, and they will be astonished at how far and fast they can fall. And fall they will if they do not stop making up their truth and get back to and searching for it.
I just read this and searched to see if it was posted, so thank you for doing that.
Here is a link to the full piece, it’s really not long at all. I like McWhorter as a writer and this is a good piece.
The Atlantic has actually been running a few good pieces that go against the MSM Narrative. They ran an excellent one about the Covington students media debacle by a woman whose name I am not 100% sure of. Very Irish name, maybe Caitlyn Flannagan, something like that. It was an EXCELLENT piece, couldn’t believe they ran it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.