I'm sorry. As much as I would like to celebrate this piece, it is the same "I need to swim in the deep end of the pool (meaning listening to the full set of arguments and debate from all sides), but I cannot stop clutching the edge of the shallow end for safety and comfort".
"But just to take the perspective of free expression and free speech, one of the tragedies, at least in my view, was the ways in which free speech became associated with the right wing, and a very conservative, extreme faction of the right wing. When our students hear “viewpoint diversity,” they think of Milo Yiannopoulos. ... Ben Shapiro or Ann Coulter…. I've had this conversation with my students many times. They ask “Why do we need Milo Yiannopoulos on the campus?” ... I'm like, “No, we don't need Milo Yiannopoulos on the campus.” Let's bring in Michelle Alexander, who wrote The New Jim Crow,... Or, let's bring in Glenn Loury, who will talk about affirmative action as an assault on black excellence."
Clutching the shallow end. In effect, censoring conservative voices for the comfort of leftist thinkers that are also clutching the shallow end but at least periodic swims to the middle and back. Maybe that is the best those on the left can do as their ideological imprinting seems a psychological need being filled. But it is still censorship. It is still failing the students on the campus to have their views challenged and to open up their minds to different pathways of thinking.
“You have been very vocal in criticizing, for example, some of the kinds of anti-CRT bills that Ron DeSantis has passed in Florida.”
I don’t know how Amna Khalid can be truly opposed to the “woke” censorship problem on campus while still supporting CRT (which is a subset of CT “critical theory”). CT is a toxic parasitic mind virus and fake scholarship. It is an ideology… a cult ideology. It is a destructive and disruptive tool of the radical cultural Marxists that have infiltrated the administration of the education system and many other institutions. CT derived “woke” and its intent is clearly documented within the text of the critical theory scripture… that there is no objective truth, and everything is relative to achieving group political power. With CT there are only two groups, the oppressed victims and the privileged oppressors (apparently only white males, Asians and non-Democrats). CT and CRT are completely illiberal. The ideology is incompatible with liberalism.
Related to this though is another important, and related, factor. Criminalizing hate, a human emotion that can never be accurately defined or identified, was the beginning of the end of Western enlightenment and the end of the liberal ethos that propelled adopting countries to such marvelous global success. This simple, but fatal, decision opened a Pandora's Box of new "thinking" that attracted the cockroaches of totalitarian dreams. The campus woke use this emotive luxury virtue signaling pull to justify more censorship. Because if you dislike hearing someone else opposing your ideas, you can simply claim that their speech is hate speech.
Those interested in saving the world should focus on the elimination of all hate-related laws as being incompatible with all western liberal ideas. It will be a difficult position given the obvious luxury virtue-signaling draw to say "I am against hate!" One the most idiotic slogans the cultural Marxist activists have adopted.
Once we go beyond the lecturing, hectoring and posturing, are our colleges and universities preparing educated graduates to be mature and productive participants in our democratic constitutional republic and in a changing world? If not, why spend the money, time and effort? The questions could not be answered easily 50 plus years ago when I was an undergraduate. Now, however, no one seems to be asking.
For better or worse (certainly worse), Universities (including Harvard) are a bastion of intolerant, religious, anti-truth thinking these days. Consider two propositions, “sex is a spectrum” and “race has no biological basis”. Neither statement is evenly remotely true. However, 99% of Harvard students and faculty would affirm the “truth” of these statements, at least publicly. Like it or not, universities have become deeply irrational. It is somewhat unclear if the race nonsense or the sex nonsense is more deeply held. This academic insanity is somewhat new (perhaps not, see below). From “Sex is a Spectrum” (https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/08/07/sex-is-a-spectrum/) a comment by Spencer
“Lol. I introduce students every semester to various non-overlapping or barley overlapping graphs by sex. Every year their jaws drop further. Twenty years ago barely an eyebrow was raised.”
The converse point is that Harvard and other universities were deeply religious and intolerant even years ago. The famous book “The Blank Slate” was written in 2003. The Summers affair (at Harvard) is from 2006. The Pinker/Spleke debate is from 2005. It was clear then (and still is) that Spelke was/is a liar. Was she ever punished for lying? Of course, not.
Of course, these problems are by no means limited to Harvard. Over at Yale, a talk was given on 'The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind'. The speaker (Dr. Aruna Khilanani) explicitly fantasized about killing innocent white people and then was offended because Yale would not give her the recording. The following is from her speech.
“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor. (Time stamp: 7:17)”
These issues are by no means limited to elite universities. At University of Southern Maine, an instructor (Christy Hammer) dared to say that there are two sexes All but one student (21 of 22) walked out in protest. The one student later caved to the fanatics. Of course, Hammer was entirely correct.
The Liberal Patriot provided a ray of hope today, pleasantly free of the ideological cant that Professors Khalid and Snyder, as much as I agreed with many of their points, seemed unable to completely escape:
This was refreshing and disappointing in equal measures. It's always nice to hear academics defending free inquiry and argument while disparaging the pernicious influences of the moral hall-monitors among the students and administration.
It was disappointing to hear a steady theme of certainties woven through the conversation. We don't need to hear Ann Coulter. No serious scholar of American History questions X (with a little conflation of historical and current racist structures). America was a great place even though Bush was president. Using a euphemism for a racial epithet like we're ten years old. My impression is that the participants are constitutionally liberal and tolerant, but there was no indication that the Overton Window should be opened much wider than it is now.
I'm sorry. As much as I would like to celebrate this piece, it is the same "I need to swim in the deep end of the pool (meaning listening to the full set of arguments and debate from all sides), but I cannot stop clutching the edge of the shallow end for safety and comfort".
"But just to take the perspective of free expression and free speech, one of the tragedies, at least in my view, was the ways in which free speech became associated with the right wing, and a very conservative, extreme faction of the right wing. When our students hear “viewpoint diversity,” they think of Milo Yiannopoulos. ... Ben Shapiro or Ann Coulter…. I've had this conversation with my students many times. They ask “Why do we need Milo Yiannopoulos on the campus?” ... I'm like, “No, we don't need Milo Yiannopoulos on the campus.” Let's bring in Michelle Alexander, who wrote The New Jim Crow,... Or, let's bring in Glenn Loury, who will talk about affirmative action as an assault on black excellence."
Clutching the shallow end. In effect, censoring conservative voices for the comfort of leftist thinkers that are also clutching the shallow end but at least periodic swims to the middle and back. Maybe that is the best those on the left can do as their ideological imprinting seems a psychological need being filled. But it is still censorship. It is still failing the students on the campus to have their views challenged and to open up their minds to different pathways of thinking.
“You have been very vocal in criticizing, for example, some of the kinds of anti-CRT bills that Ron DeSantis has passed in Florida.”
I don’t know how Amna Khalid can be truly opposed to the “woke” censorship problem on campus while still supporting CRT (which is a subset of CT “critical theory”). CT is a toxic parasitic mind virus and fake scholarship. It is an ideology… a cult ideology. It is a destructive and disruptive tool of the radical cultural Marxists that have infiltrated the administration of the education system and many other institutions. CT derived “woke” and its intent is clearly documented within the text of the critical theory scripture… that there is no objective truth, and everything is relative to achieving group political power. With CT there are only two groups, the oppressed victims and the privileged oppressors (apparently only white males, Asians and non-Democrats). CT and CRT are completely illiberal. The ideology is incompatible with liberalism.
Related to this though is another important, and related, factor. Criminalizing hate, a human emotion that can never be accurately defined or identified, was the beginning of the end of Western enlightenment and the end of the liberal ethos that propelled adopting countries to such marvelous global success. This simple, but fatal, decision opened a Pandora's Box of new "thinking" that attracted the cockroaches of totalitarian dreams. The campus woke use this emotive luxury virtue signaling pull to justify more censorship. Because if you dislike hearing someone else opposing your ideas, you can simply claim that their speech is hate speech.
Those interested in saving the world should focus on the elimination of all hate-related laws as being incompatible with all western liberal ideas. It will be a difficult position given the obvious luxury virtue-signaling draw to say "I am against hate!" One the most idiotic slogans the cultural Marxist activists have adopted.
Once we go beyond the lecturing, hectoring and posturing, are our colleges and universities preparing educated graduates to be mature and productive participants in our democratic constitutional republic and in a changing world? If not, why spend the money, time and effort? The questions could not be answered easily 50 plus years ago when I was an undergraduate. Now, however, no one seems to be asking.
For better or worse (certainly worse), Universities (including Harvard) are a bastion of intolerant, religious, anti-truth thinking these days. Consider two propositions, “sex is a spectrum” and “race has no biological basis”. Neither statement is evenly remotely true. However, 99% of Harvard students and faculty would affirm the “truth” of these statements, at least publicly. Like it or not, universities have become deeply irrational. It is somewhat unclear if the race nonsense or the sex nonsense is more deeply held. This academic insanity is somewhat new (perhaps not, see below). From “Sex is a Spectrum” (https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/08/07/sex-is-a-spectrum/) a comment by Spencer
“Lol. I introduce students every semester to various non-overlapping or barley overlapping graphs by sex. Every year their jaws drop further. Twenty years ago barely an eyebrow was raised.”
The converse point is that Harvard and other universities were deeply religious and intolerant even years ago. The famous book “The Blank Slate” was written in 2003. The Summers affair (at Harvard) is from 2006. The Pinker/Spleke debate is from 2005. It was clear then (and still is) that Spelke was/is a liar. Was she ever punished for lying? Of course, not.
Of course, these problems are by no means limited to Harvard. Over at Yale, a talk was given on 'The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind'. The speaker (Dr. Aruna Khilanani) explicitly fantasized about killing innocent white people and then was offended because Yale would not give her the recording. The following is from her speech.
“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor. (Time stamp: 7:17)”
These issues are by no means limited to elite universities. At University of Southern Maine, an instructor (Christy Hammer) dared to say that there are two sexes All but one student (21 of 22) walked out in protest. The one student later caved to the fanatics. Of course, Hammer was entirely correct.
The Liberal Patriot provided a ray of hope today, pleasantly free of the ideological cant that Professors Khalid and Snyder, as much as I agreed with many of their points, seemed unable to completely escape:
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-great-awokening-of-higher-ed
This was refreshing and disappointing in equal measures. It's always nice to hear academics defending free inquiry and argument while disparaging the pernicious influences of the moral hall-monitors among the students and administration.
It was disappointing to hear a steady theme of certainties woven through the conversation. We don't need to hear Ann Coulter. No serious scholar of American History questions X (with a little conflation of historical and current racist structures). America was a great place even though Bush was president. Using a euphemism for a racial epithet like we're ten years old. My impression is that the participants are constitutionally liberal and tolerant, but there was no indication that the Overton Window should be opened much wider than it is now.