Elsewhere (246)
September 09, 2017
Further to this item here, on the academic heresy of affirming bourgeois values, Aryssa Damron has more:
The National Lawyers Guild chapter at the University of Pennsylvania Law School condemned Penn professor Amy Wax’s recent op-ed, in which Wax, along with a co-author, lamented the “breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture” and declared: “All cultures are not created equal.” The members of Penn’s National Lawyers Guild wrote that Wax’s comments are a “textbook example of white supremacy and cultural elitism” and alleged she is a “segregationist” with “bigoted views.” “We call on the administration,” Penn’s National Lawyers Guild wrote, “to consider more deeply the toll that this takes on students, particularly students of colour and members of the LGBTQIA community, and to consider whether it is in the best interests of the school and its students for Professor Wax to continue to teach a required first-year class.”
When asked for evidence of Professor Wax’s supposedly “segregationist” views and her alleged endorsement of “white supremacy,” the indignant students chose not to oblige. But hey, witches must be burned.
Entirely unrelated, Pamela Paresky on things that mustn’t be thought, or at least articulated:
Today, for what seems to be an increasing proportion of the educated left, even the mere willingness to discuss certain kinds of facts is “harmful.” The data in the [Google] memo… was beside the point. Or perhaps more accurately, the fact that [James Damore] was willing to cite it was the problem... As John McWhorter has pointed out, “certain questions are not to be asked.” And when they are, they are received “with indignation that one would even ask them.” Even more pernicious, however, they inevitably lead to the implication that not only is asking these questions a symptom of the problem, but the presence of the asker is, too… Perhaps what makes the Google scenario stand out from even the most astounding campus reactions is that Google is not a college campus, but a company. And not just any company, but one responsible for much of the scientific, historical and objective facts that many, if not most of us find online.
Charles Cooke on academia’s mental agoraphobia:
If our colleges continue down this road, they are going to create a host of extremely weird, hyper-sensitive people who have no earthly idea how to converse and interact with the sane… Ideally, universities would be far more tolerant, open, and intellectually diverse than the “real world.” Ideally, they would host genuine and untrammelled free inquiry, and in a manner that is hard, if not impossible, to replicate elsewhere… The old archetype is of the student who leaves his stuffy parents and has his mind expanded by learning. “You don’t understand,” he says, when returning home. The new archetype, by unlovely contrast, is of the student who can only express himself when outside of his professors’ earshot.
And Berkeley’s fainting couch has been wheeled out once again. Because apparently Ben Shapiro endorses “white supremacy, misogyny and xenophobia,” and engages in “fascist intellectual thuggery.” Which I suppose means acknowledging facts. The trauma-inducing event featuring Mr Shapiro can be viewed online here on September 14.
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