Orthodoxy Enforcement on Campus
The Outrage Circus has set up permanent camp at many of America’s colleges and universities, where the silencing mob’s worst instincts are routinely indulged, if not encouraged. The academy is where the outrage arts are taught, where the craziest outrage rules and trends take shape, and where, perversely, the values of free speech and free thought are valued least. Even if students aren’t active participants in the insanity, they marinate in this milieu for approximately four formative years of their lives. Professors and other circus ringmasters work diligently to ensure that the proper lessons are learned, even if by some form of social osmosis. If you ever find yourself surveying the state of our national discourse and quietly wonder how things got so bad, look no further than the ivy-covered buildings and manicured quads that dot our map from coast to coast.
Decrying the speech-stymieing madness that too often prevails on American college campuses may be well-trod ground, but it is more fertile ground than ever. Many others have chronicled the existence and enforcement of highly restrictive speech codes on campus, the serial disruption of “offensive” speakers’ remarks, the mistreatment of nonleftist groups and students, and the freezing out of ideologically unenlightened faculty. We are not inclined to recapitulate these countless, endless battles. They’re alternatively enraging and depressing. We do, however, salute liberty-minded organizations who voluntarily wade into these skirmishes on a daily basis—perhaps the most prominent, indispensable, and indefatigable of which is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE. The group’s YouTube page features a video exhorting students, “Don’t shut up—stand up for speech.” How subversive.
Columnist and eminent public intellectual George F. Will aptly describes the toxic anti-intellectual culture the Academy has wrought for itself: “It [has] made campuses, which should be islands of intellectual curiosity and free expression and vigorous debate, into islands instead of wary people walking on eggshells, eager not to offend the constantly shifting standards of what is, and is not, discussable.”
In the name of diversity and tolerance, diversity of thought will not be tolerated. “End of discussion!” bellows the “safe space” faculty liaison. “You shouldn’t be thinking those thoughts, let alone expressing them.” Many colleges may be gun-free zones, but the campus speech and thought police are armed to the teeth with regulations, tools of intellectual intimidation, and an ever-expanding glossary of speech-squelching terms. Three examples spring to mind.
Privilege: In short, your “privilege” is any form of status you may hold (race, gender, upbringing, sexuality) that confers a historic social advantage on your group, and is therefore an inborn advantage for you. The first thing you need to know about privilege is that you almost certainly have it, and it must be “checked” at all times. Before one weighs in on any issue, or engages in a conversation with a coworker, or orders lunch at a deli, one owes it to society to reflect on the panoply of privileged statuses bestowed upon one by the circumstances of one’s birth. This is important for anyone who is not, say, a differently abled,1 genderqueer Pacific Islander who was raised by wolves in a rain forest devastated by climate change. It is uniquely important for white heterosexual males, who achieve the trifecta of coveted privileges. If you are a white heterosexual male, you are to very seriously consider anything you might say or think pertaining to people who are different from you. When in doubt, don’t speak.
Those who may be unsure about the level of guilt they ought to feel by virtue of their existence may consider logging on to a cheeky website called CheckMyPrivilege.com.2 It features a short and handy privilege quiz, featuring questions such as, What is your gender? Possible answers: trans, genderqueer, cis,3 or trans (passable). The most progressive among us may notice that these options are nowhere near comprehensive. Facebook recently added dozens of choices beyond “male” and “female” to its gender category. Offerings include “gender-fluid” and “intersex.” If you’re even slightly confused by this nomenclature, you’d best check your privilege. And remember, the most effective way to check your privilege is to remain silent on any number of political and cultural questions because you and your type have already had your say—unless, that is, your privilege requires you to “speak out.” The rules are complicated. Consult your local safe-space faculty liaison for details, and be sure to ask for the current month’s guidelines.
A University of Albany website describes a common college diversity activity called the “Privilege Walk,” in which students start shoulder to shoulder in a line and are told to step forward or backward depending on their life experience. For instance, “If you are a white male, step forward,” “If you attended grade school with people you felt were like yourself, take one step forward,” and “If you’ve ever felt unsafe walking alone at night, take one step backward.” At the end of the activity, the physical distance you’ve created between yourself and your classmates is supposed to merely encourage “reflection and realizations” not “blame” or “isolation.” Make no mistake, though, those at the front are meant to experience shame and guilt.
Triggers: Words, phrases, or topics that may offend an observer’s sensibilities (the more delicate, the more socially responsible!), thus “triggering” an upsetting and/or hurtful response. Triggers are ubiquitous, leading to the creation of crucial “trigger warnings,” designed to alert potential offendees that an imminent subject of discussion may cause them to have a sad. (Common problematic topics include race, sex, sexual assault, sexual abuse, violence, and mental illness.)
The liberal New Republic covered this issue in March 2014, after the student government at the University of California at Santa Barbara passed a “Resolution to Mandate Warnings for Triggering Content in Academic Settings,” including disclaimers on course syllabi—literally bowdlerizing curricula. Writer Jenny Jarvie cites a number of primary sources and articles in her piece, including a document produced by Oberlin College’s Office of Equity Concerns.4 It urges faculty to:
Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression, to remove triggering material when it doesn’t “directly” contribute to learning goals and “strongly consider” developing a policy to make “triggering material” optional.
For a look at how this works in practice, consider an opinion column penned by Rutgers student Philip Wythe, who writes that a syllabus that included The Great Gatsby—an infamously traumatic novel cruelly assigned to American high school sophomores—should include the following content advisory, TW: “suicide,” “domestic abuse,” and “graphic violence.”
This trend proves to be a bit too much for even the Obama-endorsing editors of the Los Angeles Times, who published a house editorial on the subject of triggering. Its headline read, “Warning: College Students, This Editorial May Upset You.” Its conclusion:
As psychologists point out, a post-traumatic response is just as likely to be triggered by something that has nothing to do with subject matter: a glimpse of the same blue-colored clothing that was visible during a traumatic event, or a certain scent that was in the air that day. Colleges cannot bubble-wrap students against everything that might be frightening or offensive to them.
We’re shocked and dismayed that even at a paper like the Los Angeles Times, it seems as though many editors’ privilege remains worrisomely unchecked.
Microaggressions: Writing at the American Psychological Association’s website, a writer named Tori DeAngelis describes racial microaggressions as “racism…so subtle that neither victim nor perpetrator may entirely understand what is going on.” So be on the lookout for that. DeAngelis and other sources credit Harvard psychologist Chester M. Pierce with coining the term in the 1970s; his successors have been refining the concept ever since. The New York Times reports in a March 21, 2014, article by Tanzina Vega that a “recent surge in popularity” in microaggression-related hypersensitivity can be traced to a 2007 essay by Columbia University professor Derald W. Sue.
Vega notes that Sue “broke down microaggressions into microassaults, microinsults and microinvalidations,” authoring a book on the subject entitled Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. It’s no doubt a white-knuckle5 thrill ride of a read. In his writings, Sue laments that microaggressions are often perpetrated by “well-meaning white people.” Tread carefully, friends. Your good intentions are no excuse.
This chapter, we can safely assume, amounts to a straight-up aggression (macroaggression?), but any of its sentences or turns of phrase may qualify as microaggressions—also known as virtually anything that offends anyone for any reason. Because individuals’ thresholds for offense are varied, microaggressions are literally everywhere.
White guilt alone isn’t enough to absolve you from these sometimes-imperceptible sins. Brown University’s Micro/Aggressions Community Facebook page has attracted roughly 900 “likes,” equivalent to 15 percent of the school’s undergraduate population. Established in 2013, the page serves as a clearinghouse for students to anonymously submit (unverifiable) examples of microaggressions suffered at the hands of fellow students and faculty. The group’s administrators include this request in the “about” section: “So that people who have ‘liked’ this page are better able to take care of themselves (especially if they have been affected by similar situations), if people could submit TRIGGER WARNINGS associated with their stories, it might make for a safer page environment.” (“Safe” = “not being exposed to ideas or thoughts that disrupt one’s coddled worldview.”) This site is not parody. A tasting menu of actual submissions:
As a genderqueer person, every time someone complains that gender-neutral pronouns are “too weird” or “not grammatically correct” it disappoints me (not to mention triggers). Is obeying antiquated grammar rules really more important than the feelings and identities of your friends and loved ones?
I have been struggling recently with upper-class white people who use their queerness to “access” and then speak for my oppression as a working-class person of color.
A white man recently told me he is “tired of so many people telling” him that he is entitled for sharing his opinions about oppression. First of all, why do you think that’s an okay thing to say to a person of color? Please tell me more about how tired you are. It must be truly tiring when the world ceases to act as a private platform for the dissemination of your thoughts and opinions. It must have been difficult to face a lifetime of people not listening to your opinions because of your entitlement. Now, I’m not gonna say that your opinions should always be discounted. They are welcome in the right time and in the right way…
Your opinion counts, bro, as long as it’s stated at the “right time,” and in the “right way.” At least one contributor to the forum was able to cut through the absurdity: “As a white, cisgendered male from a middle class family…never mind.” Administrators, who approve all posts, may not have realized that may have been a sly critique of their premise. So sly and subtle, in fact, that it might qualify as a microaggression. Or even a nanoaggression (working definition: an insult so slight that literally no one perceives it, yet it exists nonetheless, and must be guarded against).
Now that we’ve concluded our primer on the lexicon of speech-stifling grievance mongering, kindly allow us to make three important points: First, our disdain for the privilege police shouldn’t be confused with blind denial that some races and classes of Americans have enjoyed supremely privileged statuses over the history of our nation. To ignore that reality would be ahistorical and idiotic. Nevertheless, past and current disparities are not legitimate excuses for stoking the fires of resentment, nor do they justify the shutting down of ideas and speech via guilt-based manipulation. One’s position at the end of the “Privilege Walk” ought to have minuscule bearing on the value of one’s opinions.
By demonizing groups of people on racial, gender, and socioeconomic grounds, the privilege obsessives are in fact constructing their own privilege structure, wherein the only “legitimate” and “authentic” voices belong to the traditionally nonprivileged. The goal of this is not to “give voice to the voiceless,” or whatever feel-good slogan they’re spouting; it’s to subordinate and disqualify political and social views that don’t hew to a certain ideological program. If a white man patronizingly informing a black woman that her opinions are only “welcome at the right time, and in the right way” shouldn’t fly (and it shouldn’t), then neither should the reverse dynamic.
Second, our ridicule of the “trigger warning” club is not a dismissal of the very real condition known as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suffered by some soldiers returning from the battlefield, and survivors of scarring episodes of abuse or assault, to cite two common examples. Triggers can be real and traumatizing. We reject “trigger warning” hysteria because we believe PTSD to be so serious. Trivializing a genuine psychological phenomenon as a means of ensuring that “progressive” college undergraduates never endure the horror of hearing something that might upset them is an insult. It diminishes and cheapens the real thing.
Finally, our ostentatious eye-rolling over “microaggressions” is not an endorsement of rudeness or insensitivity. We’d be a happier, better nation if more people made more of an effort to treat others with kindness and respect. And we’d be a happier, better nation if others chose to forgive or shrug off unintentional or perceived slights from well-meaning fellow citizens. If only there were some sort of “rule,” if you will, that captured the essence of this spirit of mutual respect and empathy. Distilling such a sentiment down to a single sentence6 would be golden. Someone could probably sell a lot of books.
Back to our recurring theme: the purpose of triggers and privilege checking and “microaggressions” is to create a culture in which uncomfortable conversations do not happen. Where difficult thoughts are not explored. Where anodyne political correctness is the default setting, and where violators will be punished. This would be terrible anywhere. It’s especially terrible at college, where young people are theoretically supposed to feel free to find themselves, to expose themselves to new ideas, and to develop critical thinking skills.
GEORGE WILL AND “SYNTHETIC OUTRAGE”
As the debunked Rolling Stone/gang rape imbroglio of December 2014 demonstrated, sexual assault on college campuses is a hot, emotionally fraught topic these days. So George Will knowingly and bravely stepped into a minefield when he penned a nationally syndicated column earlier that year that dared to question the terms of the debate on this subject. “When [campuses] make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate,” Will wrote. “Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses—by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations—brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates.” Will was sharply critiquing an Obama administration effort to discourage sexual assault (a worthy goal if there ever was one) that featured what he argued was an overbroad affront to due process, justified by highly suspect statistics. His core argument:
Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of “sexual assault” victims. It vows to excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults.
The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent—too high but nowhere near 20 percent.
Education Department lawyers disregard pesky arithmetic and elementary due process. Threatening to withdraw federal funding, the department mandates adoption of a minimal “preponderance of the evidence” standard when adjudicating sexual assault charges between males and the female “survivors”—note the language of prejudgment. Combine this with capacious definitions of sexual assault that can include not only forcible sexual penetration but also nonconsensual touching.
In taking on a sacred cow, Will invited a firestorm of criticism that echoed beyond the reflexively close-minded precincts of the academy. Team Outrage instantly sprang into action. Four Democratic senators7 fired off a letter to the Washington Post, Will’s flagship newspaper, airing their grievances against the column:
Your thesis and statistics fly in the face of everything we know about this issue. More egregiously, you trivialize the scourge of sexual assault, putting the phrase in scare quotes and treating this crime as a socially acceptable phenomenon…Your column reiterates ancient beliefs about sexual assault that are inconsistent with the reality of victims’ experiences, based on what we have heard directly from survivors. Your words contribute to the exact culture that discourages reporting and forces victims into hiding and away from much-needed services…There is no acceptable number of sexual assaults; anything more than zero is unacceptable.
By questioning the way sexual assaults are calculated and dealt with, Will was fueling “rape culture.” So shut up, George, they explained. The Post published Will’s retort (emphasis ours):
I have received your letter of June 12, and I am puzzled. You say my statistics “fly in the face of everything we know about this issue.” You do not mention which statistics, but those I used come from the Obama administration, and from simple arithmetic involving publicly available reports on campus sexual assaults. The administration asserts that only 12 percent of college sexual assaults are reported. Note well: I did not question this statistic. Rather, I used it.
I cited one of the calculations based on it that Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has performed. So, I think your complaint is with the conclusion that arithmetic dictates, based on the administration’s statistic. The inescapable conclusion is that another administration statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college is insupportable and might call for tempering your rhetoric about “the scourge of sexual assault.”
As for what you call my “ancient beliefs,” which you think derive from an “antiquated” and “counterintuitive” culture, allow me to tell you something really counterintuitive: I think I take sexual assault much more seriously than you do. Which is why I worry about definitions of that category of crime that might, by their breadth, tend to trivialize it. And why I think sexual assault is a felony that should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, and not be adjudicated by improvised campus processes.
It requires an aggressive form of ignorance, not terribly uncommon in the United States Senate, to dispute Will’s math or warp his thesis into a downplaying of the seriousness of sexual assault. Will’s eloquent rebuttal did little to satiate the political bloodlust of the professionally outraged. To the Outrage Circus, his actual arguments were secondary at best. His status as a “rape denier,” or whatever, was an opportunity to shut him up more broadly.
The National Organization for Women (NOW) called for his firing, and a group called UltraViolet took out ads urging newspapers to drop Will’s column. Only one paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, did so—and its opinion editor was subsequently embarrassed by radio host Hugh Hewitt. The editor, having run out of intellectual runway, hung up on Hewitt midinterview. UltraViolet also collected nearly ninety thousand signatures demanding that Will lose his job for employing “hate speech” and—ta-da!—“dog whistles.” According to the Weekly Standard’s Mark Hemingway, the group’s cofounder is a woman named Nita Chaudhary, who is married to Jesse Lee, a senior Obama White House official.8
The InstaMob wasn’t limited to shrieking anonymous Internet commenters or Twitter users. It included four senators, NOW, and a deeply connected spouse of an influential administration official. Will stood firm and prevailed—and a great deal of credit is owed to the hundreds of editors who chose not to capitulate. In a discussion with us, Will reflected on the episode without regrets:
I’ve written well over 4,000 columns. I write about books, I write about electoral outcomes, I write about issues like the Ex-Im bank, I write about court rulings, and I think those are all interesting and important to write about. And I try to do so conscientiously. But every once in a while, you have to do something that is terribly important. This subject was one of those. When the federal government uses its vast megaphone for propaganda, and does so for the purpose of disseminating spurious statistics, and does that for the purpose of arousing passions, and tries to arouse passions for the purpose of sweeping away due process protections surrounding criminal accusations, it’s at that point that a columnist actually earns his keep. You have to take a stand against the manufactured hysteria of a government engaged in conscienceless propaganda. The synthetic hysteria, which is probably the biggest manufacturing product in our economy these days, just indicated to me that I had struck a target worth striking.
He’s taken the firestorm in stride, defending his premise and delivering deliciously George Willian insults to his elected critics:
The four senators wrote a singularly unconvincing letter, which I think I had no particular trouble refuting. Remember, they’re senators. They probably didn’t read my column, they probably didn’t write the letter—that was done by some staffer who put it in front of them, and they signed it. Senators are too busy to be knowledgeable, and they pass on to their next grandstanding episode.
My assertion was that if you really take sexual assault seriously, as our criminal justice system does and as we as a society do because we have established rape as second only perhaps to murder among serious felonies, then you say that as soon as rape is charged, you should turn this over to the criminal justice system. Now what you hear from campuses is that it takes too long. Well, yes, that’s called due process. There are always people with a kind of lynch mob spirit who say “We’re all for due process except when we’re not, and we’re in a hurry, and delays amount to justice denied.” Can’t be done. That’s what I meant when I said that if you really take rape seriously, and if you continue to use rape and “sexual assault” as interchangeable synonyms, then you ought to be all the more determined that those who are accused should be subjected to the criminal justice system, not to some jerry-built, improvised campus process.
On the subject of our thesis, Will said he isn’t quite as concerned about unhealthy societal trends toward silencing as we are. He agrees that “there certainly is an increase in name-calling as a substitute for reasoning, and invective as a substitute for evidence, on the part of some people.” He chalks some of this up to the “democratization” of the public discourse: “Thanks to modern technology, [more people] can in some sense be participants in the public forum. By lowering all barriers to entry to the public forum, by democratizing access to the public forum—which is a very good thing—the Internet has made it so that the inability to read, write or think is no longer a barrier to entry. So you have an awful lot of ignorant and hysterical people who I think know they’re ignorant, and whose hysteria is meant to cover up that fact. They shout at the margins of public discourse. We should view this with a bemused disdain because they’re making a ruckus, perhaps noted by people of similar persuasions, but I don’t think they’re having many consequences.”
In the realm of campus life, however, Will is on board, full stop. “Here, I think you’re entirely right. Colleges are designating one percent of campuses a ‘free-speech zone,’ neglecting the fact that James Madison designated the United States of America a free-speech zone in the First Amendment,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that we’ve come to expect this, but campuses often have the lowest possible standards of due process and intellectual integrity.”
One of the reasons Will says he doesn’t share our concerns about the state of the national conversation is how this specific episode was resolved. “The St. Louis Post-Dispatch dropped my column, and a couple weeks later, another paper in the St. Louis area picked it up,” he explained. “So I had 476 newspapers carrying my column before I wrote that one, and I have 476 today. So I think the bark of these people is much louder than their bite. I’m not hurting right now. This doesn’t bother me. This is part of doing my job.” (A few weeks after our interview with him, Scripps College pulled the plug on a planned event with Will. The speech was to have been part of “a program designed to promote conservative views on campus,” according to the Claremont Independent.)
Though we applaud his attitude, and celebrate this defeat of the Outrage Circus, we can’t endorse his conclusion. George F. Will is a man with an extraordinary media platform at his disposal, a strong public reputation, a first-class intellect, and a support network gathered and fortified across decades of public life. He emerged from this demagoguery cyclone unscathed, but others haven’t been so fortunate. Many, if not most, people lack the resources and wherewithal (and sometimes even the opportunity) to resist the outrage inertia. So it is with no small amount of irony that we respectfully suggest that Mr. Will, um, check his privilege. This is awkward.
BLURRED LINES
What if you’re not a superstar columnist, but an average working stiff who runs afoul of this insanity? We give you the maddening tale of a North Carolina disc jockey who was sent packing due to his alleged contribution to “rape culture.”9
The Wire reports that in April 2014 a University of North Carolina student named Liz Hawryluk was minding her own business, enjoying a Saturday night out with friends at a local Irish pub, when her world came crashing down around her. The venue’s DJ played Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,”10 which peaked at number one on the American pop charts. A scandalized Hawryluk sprang into action:
Hawryluk asked the DJ…to stop playing [the song] because it “triggers” victims of sexual assault. After Hawryluk spoke out about the incident on social media, Fitzgerald’s fired the DJ…“Fundamentally, all I was aiming to do is to create a safe space in the Carolina community,” she explains. “In a lot of ways, violent or graphic images that allude to sexual violence are triggers.”
After she left the bar, Hawryluk “took to her Facebook” to complain, and some sympathetic students posted an “open letter” to Fitzgerald’s manager Kyle Bartosiewicz in a UNC online magazine, The Siren. Fitzgerald’s spokeswoman Lauren Shoaf then issued an apology and assured the public that the offending DJ would never spin at Fitzgerald’s again.
Bear in mind that this Tar Heel bien-pensant wasn’t claiming that she was triggered by the song, only that a victim might be triggered by it. All she was trying to do, “fundamentally,” was to create a “safe space” in which a number-one hit could be banned at a college bar, and in which a DJ could be fired for committing the grievous offense of playing it. The resulting open letter featured the Twitter hashtag #KeepUNCSafe and included, naturally, a trigger warning “for violent, threatening language and perpetuation of rape myths” at its outset. The screed concluded with a call for a boycott of the establishment until its manager was “held accountable for harassing Liz” and “not taking the safety of our community seriously.” In case readers hadn’t gotten the point, it states in bold font that “rape culture exists everywhere.”
Yes, “Blurred Lines” is highly sexually suggestive, and no, we probably wouldn’t write a song that included the lyric “I know you want it.” Then again, we also wouldn’t show our faces in public if we’d subjected the music-listening public to this masterful poetry:
You wanna hug me…
What rhymes with hug me?
Charming. A 2013 Daily Beast column denounced the song as “kind of rapey,” and the tune ended up being formally prohibited at a number of British universities.11 Out of curiosity, how many of the people who were aghast at reports that Sarah Palin had attempted to ban books in Wasilla, Alaska (she hadn’t), are also enthusiastic members of the itchy-“trigger”-finger-ban brigade? We’d imagine the overlap is significant.
We don’t object to a debate about “Blurred Lines.” What we object to is preemptively declaring your opponent too insensitive to engage. Olivia Lubbock, Zoe Ellwood, and Adelaide Dunn of the University of Aukland law school took a different tack than Liz Hawryluk, registering their distaste with a perfect mirror image of the original video, campily objectifying their male counterparts and rewriting the original song with feminist lyrics.
We ain’t good girls/
We are scholastic / Smart and sarcastic / Not fucking plastic.
Listen mankind!
If you wanna get nasty / Just don’t harass me / You can’t just grab me.
That’s a sex crime!
More speech, more effective, more fun.
Returning to Chapel Hill, let’s consider the plight of the DJ. He got canned for playing a wildly popular song—which was quite literally his job. Correction: He got canned because the bar’s management was disoriented and frightened by aggressive agitators accusing them of encouraging rape. They figured that the easiest way to make the problem disappear was to issue a groveling apology and offer up a sacrificial lamb to appease the mob. After all, all they’re trying to do is sell some beer. They need a “rape” boycott like they need an ID raid from the local cops. As a result, some dude who was just trying to pay his bills by spinning records ended up needing to check his bank account in addition to his privilege. None of the news stories we encountered included the DJ’s name, and our attempts to find him came up empty. Given everything that went down, we strongly suspect this person is perfectly content to remain anonymous. Is this the type of country we want to live in?
It is the kind of country one Trevor Dougherty wants to live in. Dougherty, who performs as a DJ under the name Good Ratio (of course he does), is on board for firing other DJs who violate the unwritten UNC code of art sensitivity. “I just think it’s totally unacceptable for DJs in a college town—or anywhere—to play it,” Dougherty told the Daily Tar Heel. “As a good DJ you can do better than playing a track that is so overplayed and so insensitive.” Who does Trevor think should decide which tracks get a DJ fired, one wonders? Perhaps Trevor himself? After all, the best, ahem, ratio for him would presumably be one mediocre but assiduously socially acceptable DJ for all the parties. Hire DJ Good Ratio today! Ugh.
COMMENCEMENT REGRESSION
Every year, some conservative outfit is bound to release a study demonstrating that right-leaning college commencement speakers were outnumbered by their left-leaning counterparts by a margin of 716-to-1, or whatever. We know we’re supposed to be outrageously outraged by this, but our general attitude is meh. It is what it is: insular, self-selective, limiting, and boring. We wish things weren’t this way,12 but we just don’t have the bandwidth to be angry about it. We’re more interested in the increasing number of commencement speakers and honorary degree recipients who are disinvited from speaking, withdraw from ceremonies amid controversy, or are stripped of their honors. We wondered if these sorts of incidents were, in fact, rising in frequency, or if we were falling prey to some blend of confirmation and recency bias. (“Things are worse than ever! Which has to be true because we believe it!”) A May 15, 2014, USA Today column by our Fox News colleague and liberal-leaning commentator Kirsten Powers confirmed our sense of things:
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, this trend is growing. In the 21 years leading up to 2009, there were 21 incidents of an invited guest not speaking because of protests. Yet, in the past five-and-a-half years, there have been 39 cancellations.
Capitulations to howling mobs beget more capitulations to howling mobs.13 Powers, whose intellectual honesty and heterodox brand of liberalism is refreshing, penned her piece toward the tail end of 2014’s tumultuous graduation season—during which the Outrage Circus rousted three accomplished women from ceremonies they’d been invited to address.
Marquetiquette
In the fall of 2014, a philosophy instructor at Marquette University named Cheryl Abbate informed her undergraduate students that bigoted opinions would “not be tolerated” in her classroom. This policy evidently entailed a strict ban on “homophobic comments,” including any expression of opposition to same-sex marriage. When a student in her Theory of Ethics course pushed back against Abbate’s speech-stifling decree, she shot back that dissatisfied parties would be well advised to drop the class. The student complied.
That undergraduate, in turn, wrote an e-mail to a political science professor at the school, describing what had just happened. Professor John McAdams was appalled by the story and wrote an online post blasting Abbate’s actions. McAdams was promptly suspended from teaching and thrown off campus by administrators, pending an investigation into his conduct. In a statement to the Washington Post, a Marquette spokesperson explained that by criticizing Abbate, McAdams had failed to live up to the university’s “values” of respecting all community members’ “value and worth.” (What about the undergraduate’s “value and worth”? Never mind.)
Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor and a blogger for the Post, noted with dismay that Marquette’s official handbook indicates that merely stating one’s opposition to same-sex marriage as a matter of public policy could be deemed highly offensive by other community members and could amount to “unlawful harassment” (emphasis ours). He concluded:
Universities, it seems to me, shouldn’t just take the most liability-avoiding, speech-restrictive position in such situations—if they want to continue being taken seriously as places where people are free to investigate, debate and challenge orthodox views. A professor at Marquette (not Prof. McAdams) tells me: “[T]he new harassment training, which McAdams mentions on his blog and which we as faculty all had to go through this fall, has a chilling quality to it…basically urging people, when in doubt, to refrain from expression.” A sad thing to see at a university.
Sad, but hardly atypical.
To get a sense of just how much things have changed, and not just by the numbers, travel back with us to a time known as 1990. It was a time when Wilson Phillips was “Hold[ing] On” and 90210 just debuted. It was also a time of greater openness to intellectual diversity on campus, as illustrated by a debate over First Lady Barbara Bush’s invitation to give Wellesley College’s commencement speech. A group of 150 students objected to the invitation, notably not because of Bush’s politics, but because they claimed it “honor[ed] a woman who has gained recognition through the achievements of her husband, which contravenes what we have been taught over the last four years at Wellesley.”14
The president and first lady responded graciously to the students’ concerns, arguing for Bush’s perspective as valuable to women of a younger generation, and faculty members acknowledged the complaints but did not fold to them. Perhaps most striking, “[t]he petition protesting Mrs. Bush’s invitation did not demand that it be withdrawn, and Mrs. Bush is expected to attend the ceremony on June 1,” the New York Times reported contemporaneously.
What enlightened times! Fast-forward to present day, and let’s see how things are “progressing”:
Condoleezza Rice—Let’s start by smushing in15 some context: in 2011, Rutgers University (the state university of New Jersey) extracted $32,000 from its mandatory student activity fee fund for the privilege of welcoming MTV’s “Snooki” to campus. According to a Star-Ledger account of the ensuing production, the Jersey Shore star’s appearance was punctuated by sage and original advice (“study hard, but party harder”), hair product tips (“it smells good and stays in good”), and all manner of hijinks: “Snooki…brought eight students on stage to teach them the ‘Jersey Shore’ fist pump and her signature ‘tree branch’ dance. [She] also judged a ‘Situation’ contest to see which of five male students had the best abs.” When a student asked about inspiration in her life, Snooki courageously offered a glimpse into her soul: “Being tan. When you’re tan, you feel better about yourself.” She departed with an unforgettable au revoir to the sold-out audience: “I love you, bitches!”
Three years hence, loud and relentless protests prevented America’s first female African American secretary of state16 from delivering Rutgers’s commencement address. Dr. Rice’s sin was being a member of the infernal Bush administration. The school’s student newspaper, the Daily Targum, described the atmosphere on campus leading up to the speech: “More than 100 students interrupted a senate meeting yesterday to talk to [University president Robert] Barchi after he failed to show up when more than 50 protesters staged a sit-in last Monday, occupying his office in the Old Queens building.” One hundred students, egged on by left-wing faculty members, disrupted a student senate meeting to valiantly defend the core human right never to be subjected to the views of speakers with whom one disagrees. That’s in the Constitution. And the Bible.17 Anti-Rice agitators carried signs reading WAR CRIMINALS OUT, chanting, “Cancel Condi!” In a telling juxtaposition, the Rutgers–New Brunswick faculty council passed a resolution urging the administration to rescind Rice’s invitation to speak, whereas the elected student assembly “voted 25–17 to welcome Rice to the campus,” according to the Christian Science Monitor. Small-minded professors remain the vanguard of campus intolerance. Perhaps some of the Rutgers faculty were simply manifesting their base fear of “the other”—the “other” being a highly accomplished intellectual powerhouse.
Nevertheless, the cacophony from a tiny band of left-wing students—and a larger group of anti-intellectual “intellectuals”—caused enough of a stir to convince Rice to back out of the speech. National Review broke the story, quoting Rice’s gracious public statement on her decision:
Commencement should be a time of joyous celebration for the graduates and their families. Rutgers’ invitation to me to speak has become a distraction for the university community at this very special time.
I am honored to have served my country. I have defended America’s belief in free speech and the exchange of ideas. These values are essential to the health of our democracy. But that is not what is at issue here. As a Professor for thirty years at Stanford University and as its former Provost and Chief academic officer, I understand and embrace the purpose of the commencement ceremony and I am simply unwilling to detract from it in any way.
Good luck to the graduates and congratulations to the families, friends and loved ones who will gather to honor them.
Heaven forbid a “distraction” impede on anyone’s “joy.” The jackals quickly declared victory. An anti-Rice student ringleader told the Daily Targum he was “happy that all our actions and pressure as the University community have led to our ultimate goal which was to not have a war criminal speak at our commencement.” The self-appointed “university community” of at most 150 active student protesters achieved their “ultimate goal,” allegedly on behalf of the school’s 45,000 undergraduates, thousands of whom were denied the opportunity to hear from a woman whose life journey has been nothing short of extraordinary. One of the few genuinely electric moments of the 2012 Republican National Convention was Secretary Rice’s goose bumps–raising ode to the American dream. This passage in particular drew a thunderous and sustained standing ovation from the packed arena:
On a personal note, a little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham. The segregated city of the South where her parents cannot take her to a movie theater or to restaurants, but they have convinced her that even if she cannot have a hamburger at Woolworth’s, she can be the president of the United States if she wanted to be, and she becomes the secretary of state.
Thank goodness Rutgers graduates were spared the ordeal of hearing from that woman. Rice’s withdrawal prompted a backlash from some of America’s less totalitarian precincts, including from a number of appalled liberals. But the perpetually enraged raged on. Their mindless indignation was captured in an Esquire blog post written by University of Virginia media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan. He congratulated those intrepid few students for “refusing to forget” Rice’s actions, which “dishonored herself and her country.” He accused her of “lying” America into an “illegal” war, and allowing 9/11 to happen by “ignoring clear warnings.” Such a “disgrace” has “no business pretending [to] have the moral authority to preside over a graduation ceremony at a great American university,” he fumed.
Fortunately, Stanford—which has employed Ms. Rice in several prestigious capacities, and which is listed exactly 64 slots ahead of Rutgers and 19 slots ahead of UVA in US News & World Report’s 2014 rankings18 of national universities—never received that memo.
Christine Lagarde—Smith College is an elite, private, all-female institution in central Massachusetts. The school’s recent fund-raising campaign was dubbed “women for the world.” One worldly woman, however, was deemed unworthy of being listened to by the school’s 2014 graduates. Christine Lagarde is among the most influential and powerful women on planet Earth. She began her career as a successful labor and antitrust attorney, becoming the first female chairman of her firm’s global executive committee in 1999. Between 2005 and 2011, she served in the French government, attaining the important role of finance minister in 2007. She was the first woman to hold that position in any G7 country, according to her official biography. Midway through 2011, Lagarde was named the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Only eleven people have ever held that title, of whom she is the only woman.
It may have come as a surprise, therefore, when her selection as Smith’s commencement speaker was met with an anonymous online petition to dump her for such crimes as contributing to “imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” Again, she is a French labor attorney who broke the glass ceiling at one of the world’s most powerful organizations. The document’s short statement allows that Lagarde’s biography is impressive, but concludes that more than five hundred signatories “do not want to be represented by someone whose work directly contributes to many of the systems that we are taught to fight against. By having her speak at our commencement, we would be publicly supporting and acknowledging her, and thus the IMF.” In a letter to Smith’s president, Lagarde wrote:
In the last few days, it has become evident that a number of students and faculty members would not welcome me as a commencement speaker…I respect their views, and I understand the vital importance of academic freedom. However, to preserve the celebratory spirit of commencement day, I believe it is best to withdraw my participation.
And thus, an entire campus’s “celebratory spirit” was dictated by a squealing few, and a female titan of achievement was silenced—a devastating blow to the “patriarchy” if there ever was one. Girl power. Many students and faculty rushed to express their dismay at this development, but the damage was done. In a curiously titled19 local newspaper column, Smith associate professor Elisabeth Armstrong defended the students and faculty who objected to Lagarde’s invitation and created the climate that led to her withdrawal. “Commencement is a celebration. It celebrates the development of hard-won knowledge and thoughtful ethics, tested by arguments and counter-arguments, in a rigorous and diverse learning environment,” she wrote. “Dissent over who should hold the honor of giving the commencement speech is deeply linked to the celebration in this ceremony.” Yes, and loaded, cartoonish attacks against fantastically qualified speakers is “deeply linked” to their decisions not to be harangued by self-righteous assholes. Armstrong asserted that Lagarde chose to allow her speech to be stifled, which is her fault, not the fault of those whose actions precipitated that decision. Believe it or not, we half agree with this sentiment; she shouldn’t have given in. That said, the active refusal to politely sit and listen to a richly accomplished speaker betrays a juvenile self-importance that is neither bold nor “celebratory.” It’s rigidity and rudeness dressed up as “principle,” and it’s cheered on by smug lefties like Professor Armstrong. Quelle surprise.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali—A tireless advocate for women’s rights and an unremitting critic of Islam, Ms. Ali possesses real courage in an era in which that word is frequently and ludicrously defined down. A native of Somalia, Ali was subjected to genital mutilation as a child, before fleeing to the West to escape a forced marriage arranged by her family. A piece in the Economist traces her political journey in the Netherlands, where her activism drifted “steadily rightward,” culminating in her election to parliament as a member of the center-right Liberals. She wrote the screenplay for a controversial and provocative 2004 film, Submission, which was harshly critical of Islam’s subjugation of women.
The man with whom she collaborated on the project was an outspoken, brash filmmaker and writer named Theo van Gogh. After the film’s release, Van Gogh was murdered in broad daylight by a radical Muslim on the streets of Amsterdam. The assailant repeatedly shot Van Gogh, who witnesses say begged for mercy as he lay bleeding on the street. His last words, reportedly, were “Can’t we talk about this?” They could not. A particularly grisly end of discussion. The jihadist attempted to decapitate Van Gogh before pinning a five-page letter to his corpse. The letter was addressed to Ali and included an explicit death threat. Her ordeal and life story is powerfully catalogued in a lengthy 2007 UK Independent profile entitled “My Life Under a Fatwa,” as well as her book, Infidel.
Though we don’t share all of Ali’s views on Islam and believe some of her condemnations to be overly broad and counterproductively abrasive, her opinions are rooted in her own experiences. She, more than most, has truly earned the right to speak out—and she’s done just that, in breathtakingly brave defiance of those who’ve vowed to snuff her out for doing so. We would therefore have been eager to attend her scheduled speech at Brandeis University’s commencement ceremony, at which she was to receive an honorary degree. But the speech never happened, and the degree was never awarded. The New York Times summarized the outrage industry’s impact on this turn of events in an April 8, 2014, article by Richard Pérez-Peña and Tanzina Vega:
At first, it was bloggers who noted and criticized the plan to honor Ms. Hirsi Ali, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Within a few days, a Brandeis student started an online petition against the decision at Change.org, drawing thousands of signatures. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights and advocacy group, took note, contacting its members through email and social media, and urging them to complain to the university.
The controversy jumped from a handful of blogs to a major online petition, to a full-court press from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the activist group that works relentlessly to silence critics of Islam.20 The group fired off a letter denouncing Ali as a “notorious Islamophobe.” Phobias, Ali might retort, are typically defined as irrational fears. But regardless of whether the fear of bad press, demonstrations, and angry letters is irrational, Brandeis’s administration succumbed to it. In a statement, the university revoked its offer of an honorary degree, inviting Ali to visit the campus at an undetermined future date to “engage in a dialogue.”
A few days later, Ali published a truncated version of her prepared remarks in the Wall Street Journal. Her comments invoked the Boston Marathon bombing and 9/11, and condemned the surge in antiwoman violence in Islamist-controlled regions. Without further comment, here is a portion of her undelivered speech (emphasis ours):
When there is injustice, we need to speak out, not simply with condemnation, but with concrete actions.
One of the best places to do that is in our institutions of higher learning. We need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking, where all ideas are welcome and where civil debate is encouraged. I’m used to being shouted down on campuses, so I am grateful for the opportunity to address you today. I do not expect all of you to agree with me, but I very much appreciate your willingness to listen.
…The connection between violence, particularly violence against women, and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to students, faculty, nonbelievers and people of faith when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect. So I ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Is it blasphemy—punishable by death—to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform. I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation…Is such an argument inadmissible? It surely should not be at a university that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust, at a time when many American universities still imposed quotas on Jews. The motto of Brandeis University is “Truth even unto its innermost parts.” That is my motto too.
Oof. Ali’s exhortations for free exchange and critical thinking, rather than the prevailing paralysis of “dogmatic orthodoxy,” didn’t fall on deaf ears. They fell on no ears, for the very reasons she intended to caution graduates against. The Yale Muslim Students Association also protested Ali’s 2014 appearance on campus, sending off a furious letter to event organizers condemning her “hate speech.” They pronounced themselves “highly disrespected,” complaining that Ms. Ali lacked the “credentials” to discuss Islam, and warning that listening to her words would be “uncomfortable” for members of the “community.” We wouldn’t want that, would we? Though we wonder: Would it be more or less uncomfortable than the process of genital mutilation?
At Brandeis and elsewhere, the task of piercing swaddled, privileged twenty-two-year-olds’ “safe space” cocoon was left to others. And to their credit, certain others accepted that gauntlet. Following this spate of graduation kerfuffles, Michael Bloomberg—the billionaire former mayor of New York City whose heroic efforts to ban large soft drinks has earned him deserved scorn—did something important. He used the high-profile platform of Harvard University’s 2014 commencement address to repudiate the one strain of intolerance that is aggressively enshrined and administered on many college campuses.
“Today, I’d like to talk with you about how important it is for that freedom to exist for everyone, no matter how strongly we may disagree with another’s viewpoint,” he said. “Tolerance for other people’s ideas, and the freedom to express your own, are inseparable values at great universities. Joined together, they form a sacred trust that holds the basis of our democratic society. But that trust is perpetually vulnerable to the tyrannical tendencies of monarchs, mobs, and majorities. And lately, we have seen those tendencies manifest themselves too often, both on college campuses and in our society.”
He went out of his way to highlight the pronounced ideological homogeneity among elite university faculties, citing the Federal Election Commission statistic that fully 96 percent of 2012 presidential campaign contributions from Ivy League faculty and employees went to Barack Obama. He joked that more disagreement existed within the old Soviet Politburo, warning that the 96 percent figure “should give us pause.” He averred that universities cannot be great with a faculty that marches in ideological or partisan lockstep, warning that such a hive-mind culture deprives students of a “diversity of views.” He then confronted the commencement purges head-on, and in no uncertain terms (again, emphasis ours):
Requiring scholars—and commencement speakers, for that matter—to conform to certain political standards undermines the whole purpose of a university. This spring, it has been disturbing to see a number of college commencement speakers withdraw—or have their invitations rescinded—after protests from students and—to me, shockingly—from senior faculty and administrators who should know better. It happened at Brandeis, Haverford, Rutgers, and Smith. Last year, it happened at Swarthmore and Johns Hopkins, I’m sorry to say. In each case, liberals silenced a voice—and denied an honorary degree—to individuals they deemed politically objectionable. That is an outrage and we must not let it continue. If a university thinks twice before inviting a commencement speaker because of his or her politics, censorship, and conformity—the mortal enemies of freedom—win out. And sadly, it is not just commencement season when speakers are censored. Last fall, when I was still in City Hall, our Police Commissioner was invited to deliver a lecture at another Ivy League institution—but he was unable to do so because students shouted him down.
Please excuse us as we pick ourselves off the floor. For a guy whose values-imposing priorities as mayor were so often confounding and vexing to conservative critics, he cleared away the nonsense and homed in on perhaps the single most important message a speaker in that setting could have championed. And he did so aggressively and eloquently. Bravo. Encouragingly, his commentary was interrupted with several bouts of applause, even as some in the audience—and especially on the dais—squirmed noticeably. But clapping for the idea of diversity of thought is much easier than standing up to the silencers, particularly when you share their worldview.
Were it not so sad, we would relish the irony that the voices of three women, two of them women of color who had overcome tremendous odds to get to their positions, were the voices liberal college campuses felt should be most urgently shunned. The data on college commencement speakers shows not only a dearth of ideological diversity, but also a lack of the racial and gender diversity about which campus leftists are usually so concerned. A 2013 survey of such speakers by American Enterprise Institute scholar Kevin Hassett found only 23 percent were women, and a vanishingly small proportion of those were minority women. In 2014, campus liberals did more than any white patriarchy could ever have hoped to keep those numbers down. We’re all worse off for it.
You may have noticed that Bloomberg mentioned another 2014 example beyond the trio we’ve already relayed: Haverford College. That instance is worth touching on briefly because of how it turned out. By way of background, Haverford’s invited commencement speaker, Robert J. Birgeneau, withdrew from participating after a few dozen students and faculty raised a stink over an episode that had occurred at UC Berkeley during Birgeneau’s tenure as chancellor. (Campus police had used force against a student protest in 2011.) The outrage clique wrote a letter to Birgeneau, insisting that he “meet nine conditions, including publicly apologizing, supporting reparations for the victims, and writing a letter” explaining himself to the Haverford “community,” as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer. Birgeneau took a pass. The school’s replacement speaker, former Princeton president William Bowen, devoted his address to an upbraiding of the noisy pack that had driven Birgeneau away. He chided them as “arrogant” and “immature,” rejecting one agitator’s assessment that Birgeneau’s withdrawal represented a victory. “It represents nothing of the kind,” Bowen intoned. “In keeping with the views of many others in higher education, I regard this outcome as a defeat, pure and simple, for Haverford—no victory for anyone who believes, as I think most of us do, in both openness to many points of view, and mutual respect.”
As we established earlier, George Will agrees that “most of us” still believe in open dialogue and mutual respect. We want to agree, and mostly do. But you wouldn’t have this book in your hands if we weren’t concerned about the direction things are heading.
TALE OF TEARS
Let’s take a few moments to examine the curious case of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has replaced Barack Obama as the Left’s hottest political crush. Warren has ruled out a 2016 presidential run on several occasions thus far, but that hasn’t dampened the spirits of “Ready for Warren” grassroots supporters, who’ve printed up posters, placards, and sundry swag. They’ve also produced a painfully bad unofficial campaign music video, which we’d suggest looking up on YouTube if we didn’t like you so much. (Sample lyric: “We need a leader who will stand for all the corporate bullies, political cronies—run, run, run; run, Liz, run!” Also, we think they meant “stand up to,” but it’s an understandable Freudian slip in the Obama era.)21
Warren’s views are predictably doctrinaire in their leftism. One of her primary contributions to the national conversation was pioneering the “you didn’t build that” argument on wealth and “fairness.” An online viral clip depicts Warren passionately promoting class warfare at a 2012 private event, gesticulating sharply as she informs her entranced audience that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.” Warming to the task and raising her voice to a low shout, Warren explains how entrepreneurs and businesspeople “moved [their] goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for,” and that they hired workers whom “the rest of us paid to educate.” Her point is that all American success is due to the efforts of the collective, which is why “the rich,” who it must be noted pay for roads just like the rest of us, owe everyone else a fair (read: larger) share of the fruits of their labor. President Obama later reprised a very similar sentiment on the campaign trail.
Warren and Obama invert the truth. The government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. Without private-sector wealth, earned by individuals and groups of individuals, the government literally could not exist. Americans have entered a social compact in which we’ve agreed that the government should take responsibility for maintaining the commons and enforcing the rules in order to allow individuals to strive and flourish. We surrender our hard-earned money in the form of taxation in order to fund those core resources. To claim that nobody’s success is truly their own because they’ve benefited from basic services for which they’ve already paid is a gross distortion of the American system and a frontal attack on merit and achievement.
Side rant: The primary villains of Warren’s backward morality tale, naturally, are the wealthy, who already pay the lion’s share of taxes in this country. According to the federal government’s own figures, the top 1 percent of U.S. wage earners were responsible for 68 percent of all federal tax receipts in 2011. Not just federal income tax,22 mind you, all federal taxes. Beyond the major tax increases President Obama has managed to put into place, he has packed recent budget proposals with every soak-the-rich taxation gimmick imaginable, yet they’ve all fallen massively short of achieving balance. Former Vermont governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean is one of the few progressives who’s been willing to spill a dirty little secret on this subject. In order to glide along Democrats’ preferred path to a European-style social democracy welfare state, he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in December 2012, “everybody needs to pay more taxes, not just the rich…we’re not going to get out of this deficit problem unless we raise taxes across the board.” His fellow panelists, we should note, nodded along in agreement. Let’s see if that useful reality check finds its way into future Warren harangues. Frankly, her message could apply to average working stiffs just as much as it does to “millionaires and billionaires.” Look, middle-class worker, congrats on your $52,000 annual household income, but let’s face it: you couldn’t get to your office without government roads, and you couldn’t type up those invoices without government schools saving you from illiteracy, so you’re going to have to cough up some more cash for Uncle Sam. You owe it to the rest of us.
In any case, we didn’t bring Ms. Warren up to bore you with tax policy. We brought her up as an ideal bookend to this chapter, which began with a discussion of the politics of “privilege.” At a crucial moment in her career as an academic, Elizabeth Warren formally
self-identified as a Native American. Problem: based on all available evidence, Elizabeth Warren is not a Native American. When this uncomfortable complication became an issue in her 2012 Senate campaign against Scott Brown, Warren unleashed a dizzying—and at times, surreal—array of excuses and explanations, including that she’d always been told she was Cherokee. Her “papaw” (grandfather) had “high cheekbones, like all the Indians do” (actual verbatim quote). We have both, at times, hesitated to use Warren’s own words in public appearances addressing this matter lest we be accused of racism for merely repeating her gauche assessment of Native American physical markers—“high cheekbones”—and dumb puns.
A genealogist stepped forward and stated Warren was one-thirty-second Cherokee, a claim that was subsequently downgraded to unproven. A Washington Post fact-checker stated that “Cherokee groups have demanded documentation of her professed ancestry”—there are actual rules and standards for these sorts of claims—“but she hasn’t delivered.” She did, however, point out that she’d contributed recipes to a Native American–themed cookbook called Pow Wow Chow (we swear we are not making any of this up), several of which were later alleged to have been plagiarized.23
The issue is that Warren didn’t merely tell a few friends about her family folklore after a few glasses of Chardonnay—she used that dubious folklore to officially list herself as a highly sought-after racial minority at several major junctures in her professional career. Upon graduating from Rutgers law school and teaching at a series of lower-tier institutions, Warren catapulted into the Ivy League when the University of Pennsylvania hired her in 1987. Just over a decade later, she reached the pinnacle of her profession when she was invited to join the faculty at Harvard Law. What changed? She listed herself as “white” and declined minority status at places like Rutgers and the University of Texas, but began listing herself as a Native American in professional directories at an opportune moment. Back to the Post story:
Warren first listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty in 1986, the year before she joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She continued to list herself as a minority until 1995, the year she accepted a tenured position at Harvard Law School.
What a coincidence! To recap, this white woman decided that she’d start claiming Native American lineage just prior to making a blockbuster career jump into the Ivies, and continued to “check that box,” so to speak, until she was safely ensconced as a tenured professor at the nation’s most prestigious law school—at which point she decided to drop the designation. She and her defenders have insisted that her (unverified, at best) status as a minority played no role whatsoever in her advancement, but that doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Both Harvard and Penn touted her as a treasured minority faculty member in official literature. Harvard did so amid heavy criticism over its lack of diversity. In some sense, this arrangement was a win/win. The universities got someone they could parade in front of the “celebrate diversity” police, and Warren was rewarded with cushy, high-paying jobs oozing with prestige and opportunities for networking and advancement—which could come in handy for, say, an eventual U.S. Senate run. But if she didn’t suddenly begin exploiting family rumors to classify herself as a Native American for cynical self-serving purposes, why did she do it? Her answer, via the Boston Herald:
I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off.
Ah. She self-listed as a Native American for the better part of a decade in hopes of getting invited to a luncheon by, um, “fellow” Native Americans, then finally abandoned the dream after she received tenure at Harvard. Since she was so keen on rubbing elbows with “people who are like I am,” Warren must have been an active participant in Harvard’s Native American program, right? Wrong. Harvard Law graduate and conservative writer Joel Pollack tracked down the executive director of Harvard’s Native American Program (HUNAP), who told him that “Warren had not, to her knowledge, participated in the program’s events while Warren was a professor at Harvard.” Raise your hand if you’re shocked by this. Anybody? Bueller?24 Trivia nugget: According to the standard presented in the Warren case, Mary Katharine is a Native American political commentator and writer. There is a relatively unsubstantiated rumor in her family that she has a distant Cherokee relative. She looks forward to commenting on the issues important to her community and any luncheons or promotions that should happen to come her way.
In her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance, Warren reflects on the controversy with self-pity. She says she was “stunned” by the attacks, accusing Republicans of “attacking my dead parents,” and saying of the flap, “I was hurt, and I was angry.” Indeed, one can only endure so many microaggressions. Spare us the crocodile tears,25 Senator. As far as the evidence is concerned, Elizabeth Warren appears to be a white person who pulled off an effective racial fraud for her own benefit. She’s “stunned, hurt, and angry” because people finally connected the dots. None of this ended up derailing her campaign, of course, because northeastern liberals aren’t especially bothered by lying frauds who flout the rules of privilege checking, so long as they’re sufficiently liberal (see: Blumenthal, Richard). But a national audience may not be quite as forgiving. Incidentally, the next time you bump into some smug hipster tut-tutting about privilege checking, politely ask his opinion of Ms. Warren. She is, after all, a white woman who not only failed to check her privilege; she actually invented and asserted reverse-privilege status, parlaying it into great personal and financial gain. She should, in theory, be anathema to the privilege police. Let us know how that conversation turns out.
Once again, the convoluted rules apply to conservatives, not people like Liz Warren. Because the rules aren’t intended to be meted out consistently. They’re meant to enforce an ideological orthodoxy. Tough luck, conservatives. If you want to avoid these headaches and aspersions, just get with The Program.
In Their Own Words
Sometimes the silencers don’t even attempt to camouflage their contempt for free speech and disdain for average people. Michael Yaki is one of four congressionally appointed members on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and a former senior adviser to Nancy Pelosi. At a July 2014 USCCR hearing exploring the propriety and constitutionality of university speech codes, Mr. Yaki advanced a theory that young adults shouldn’t be entitled to the same First Amendment rights as everyone else because their brains are still developing (via law professor Eugene Volokh):
Certain factors in how the juvenile or adolescent or young adult brain processes information is vastly different from the way that we adults do. So when we sit back and talk about what is right or wrong in terms of First Amendment jurisprudence from a reasonable person’s standpoint, we are really not looking into the same referential viewpoint of these people, of an adolescent or young adult, including those in universities,” he said. Later in the proceedings, Yaki wondered aloud how opponents of restrictive speech codes could possibly apply their free speech advocacy, “in the atmosphere of colleges and universities as you have a population of young people, who for lack of a better word, don’t process in the same way that we do when we’re in our late 20s and 30s.
Professor Volokh, who testified at the hearing, dissented against Yaki’s view on his Washington Post–hosted blog, Volokh Conspiracy (July 30, 2014): “This strikes me as quite misguided: While no doubt young adults are different from older adults—whether in their brain functioning as such, or in their experience, emotional maturity, and the like—that hardly justifies restricting their right to speak, or restricting speech that can be heard by them, especially when they are old enough to vote.” This wasn’t some fringe figure arguing that free speech shouldn’t exist in any traditional sense on college campuses, Volokh pointed out; this was the position of “a political figure who holds a significant position in the federal civil rights establishment.”
We wonder whether young adults—aged eighteen through “late twenties”—might resent the implication that their still-developing brains are unable to properly “process” potentially offensive forms of speech and expression. How far would Mr. Yaki and his ilk be willing to take their hypothetical First Amendment loophole? And since he evidently believes that these young people may not be sufficiently mature or mentally stable to handle the whole free speech thing, would Mr. Yaki also advocate pushing the voting age back to thirty? He presumably wouldn’t want immature, undeveloped brains deciding elections, would he? Yaki defended himself in an interview with Campus Reform, asserting that he was simply asking questions, designed to help him “understand the challenges of this issue.” He said the “million dollar question” is how to protect the “mental and physical security” of students in a manner that “doesn’t require” stomping all over their constitutional rights. Yaki added that for much of his life, he’s considered himself a “First Amendment absolutist.” You keep using those words; I don’t think they mean what you think they mean, Professor.
CAMPUS MADNESS: “HUMP DAY,” BUMPED
GEICO insurance has a knack for producing memorable spokesmen—from the aggrieved cavemen to the sophisticated Gecko. “Fifteen minutes…” One popular TV spot featured a camel in an office setting, excitedly informing his coworkers that it was “hump day” (i.e., Wednesday). Mindless, amusing fun. How it had anything to do with insurance, we have no idea…but we remember the spot, so it achieved its goal. Capitalizing on the campaign, a student group at Minnesota’s St. Thomas University organized an on-campus event called “Hump Daaaaaaaay!” For two hours on a Wednesday afternoon, students could come to the quad and have their photo taken with a real, live camel. According to Campus Reform, the camel was “owned by a local vendor, and trained for special events.” But the ever-vigilant sensitivity squad couldn’t countenance this innocent fun. A handful of students took to Facebook to complain that the presence of a camel on campus could be “racially insensitive to Middle Eastern cultures.”
A Minneapolis Star Tribune article on the flare-up dryly noted that the university had previously brought a live reindeer to campus without kicking up any hue and cry (way to drop the ball, Scandinavian Students Society), and that nobody seemed to take issue with a mechanical bull featured at a “Southern hospitality” event a few weeks earlier. But a handful of joyless do-gooders decided that the mere presence of a camel might be interpreted as racist.26 If you’re not sensitive to this egregious microaggression, it may be time to check your damn privilege. By the way, good luck with beach day at the lake next year, guys. Beach → Sand → Desert → Arabia → Muslims → BANNED.
CAMPUS MADNESS II: COMMEMORATING “THE DIALOGUE”
Lech Walesa endured years of persecution at the hands of Communist authorities in his native Poland as he toiled to overthrow an oppressive, Kremlin-controlled regime. For his human rights advocacy and remarkable courage as the leader of the Solidarity movement, Walesa earned a Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. He was elected by his fellow countrymen less than a decade later as Poland’s first president of the post-Communism era. Chicagoland’s Northeastern Illinois University named a building in Walesa’s honor in 2009, “tout[ing] the university’s connection to the Polish community, including its student exchange programs with universities in Poland,” according to the College Fix.
But things went sideways in 2013, when Walesa erased his life’s work with a demeaning comment about gay members of Poland’s parliament. A gay student at NEIU raced to demand that Lech Walesa Hall be immediately renamed, warning that its continued existence “could potentially lead to an increase in suicides by gay students.” And that’s not all. Lech Walesa’s name emblazoned on the side of a building was tantamount to a burning cross or a swastika, this young man argued, adding that the administration was effectively endorsing the equivalent of a “Hitler Hall” on campus.27 A CNN article about the controversy is paired with a photograph of eight protesters holding rainbow flags outside the offending edifice, one carrying a placard that reads INJURY TO ONE IS INJURY TO ALL. Such profundity. Its potential applications are literally endless.
Eventually, more than four hundred signatures were gathered on a petition to have Walesa’s name stricken from the building—which brings us to our exciting conclusion, which truly defies satire. The university declined to accede to the mob’s demands, but also sought to convey how deeply seriously their grievances were being taken. They proposed a formal Dialogue (every mention of this forum by the university featured a capital D) regarding Walesa’s comments, at which various “stakeholders” could have their say. The meeting’s minutes were placed into the university archives, and the school commissioned a piece of art to “memorialize the Dialogue” in a “permanent display.” Other Outcomes (again with the dramatic capitalization) included the establishment of a LGBTQA28 resource center, plus “an optional question regarding sexual orientation” has been added to NEIU undergraduate and graduate applications. Roughly one year after the momentous Dialogue, the Executive Advisor Council passed a resolution calling for the renaming of Lech Walesa Hall anyway. University president Sharon Hahs responded with a four-page letter that declined their recommendation “with regret” and reminded the vaunted “community” about the Dialogue and its Outcomes. As of last year, the piece of art was “still in process.” We won’t keep you posted.
1 Disabled.
2 Guy’s score: 25. Ruling: “Advantaged.” Also, we are 95 percent sure this website is satire.
3 You, dear reader, are almost guaranteed to be this.
4 Oberlin’s policy has been tabled. For now.
5 We regret this racial microaggression.
6 Matthew 7:12
7 Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Robert Casey (D-PA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Richard Blumenthal (D-bunked Vietnam War veteran).
8 Some liberals on Twitter decided that the Standard’s reference to Ms. Chaudhary as the “Wife of White House Media Director” in its headline was sexism unto itself, for diminishing her individual accomplishments. A cursory search reveals the Standard also referred to astronaut Mark Kelly, who has quite the career and identity of his own, as “[Gabrielle] Giffords’ husband,” because it’s common practice to refer to a spouse using his/her relationship to the public-figure spouse in question.
9 We loathe this term; much more to come in chapter 6. “Rape culture” is the idea that communities writ large, and not just the perpetrators themselves, are responsible for those awful crimes. If you’re interested in reading about something that might truly qualify as rape culture, google “Rotherham.”
10 Let the record reflect that Guy detests this seemingly interminable song. Mary Katharine thinks it’s pretty catchy. Valuable writing time was wasted debating this point.
11 Hectorers Without Borders.
12 We’d be very happy to help even things out. We charge very reasonable, very un-Hillaryesque speaking fees.
13 We should point out that conservatives have occasionally gotten in on this act, too. Some successfully targeted Michelle Obama’s commencement address at a Kansas high school, while others pressured Notre Dame to rescind its offer to President Obama to deliver the school’s 2009 commencement address.
14 A strange complaint considering Wellesley boasts perhaps the most famous alumna to have ever “gained recognition through the achievements of her husband,” Hillary Clinton.
15 If you don’t already get this reference, you don’t want to know.
16 President George W. Bush appointed the first two black secretaries of state in American history. A clever ploy, no doubt, to distract from his more telling racist dog whistles.
17 Citations not found.
18 Yes, we’re aware. These rankings aren’t necessarily comprehensive or reflective of educational quality because the formula on which they rely isn’t blah, blah, blah…Also, Mary Katharine proudly attended one of those “best-value” state schools that has yet to become sophisticated enough to hound prestigious speakers off of campus. Go Dawgs.
19 “Let’s agree to disagree at college commencements.” Agreeing to disagree generally involves…not hounding away the person with whom you disagree.
20 See: Juan Williams, chapter 4. We thought you may be interested to know that CAIR was listed as an unindicted coconspirator in the infamous Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, which resulted in the 2008 conviction of five leaders of a Texas-based Muslim “charity” organization.
21 The folksy guitar strumming melody plays over a collection of soundless clips of Warren’s rousing speech at a left-wing conference, which spelled out progressivism’s “eleven commandments.” That confab, Netroots Nation, was held, appropriately enough, in Detroit, whose leaders have scrupulously followed a number of those commandments down a path into unprecedented bankruptcy and dysfunction. Gushed one attendee after the address, “I think I just became pro-dictatorship!” Out: Impeach the imperialist war criminal, BusHitler! In: #Warren4Dictator4Lyf!
22 The Tax Foundation reports that in 2011, the top 1 percent paid just over 35 percent of the nation’s federal income tax bill, more than the bottom 90 percent of wage earners combined.
23 One of the red-flagged recipes called for “imported mustard,” Worcestershire sauce, cognac, and fresh crabmeat, prompting our blogger colleague Allahpundit to quip that those ingredients were “all presumably readily available to a, er, 19th-century agrarian Cherokee settlement in Oklahoma.” It’s okay to laugh.
24 Trigger warning: Truancy, violent home invasion, exposure to Charlie Sheen.
25 Add crocodile tears to the aforementioned crab recipe for a delectable taste enhancement!
26 No word on whether any students of Middle Eastern descent were actually offended. We also can’t help but wonder how many of them were even around to potentially claim umbrage at this…Catholic university in Minnesota.
27 Professor Godwin, call your office.
28 This stands for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Asexual/Allies.” Quick story: When the University of Colorado’s “visiting scholar of conservative thought”—let that title marinate for a moment—poked fun at this expanding alphabet soup jumble by referring to it as “LGBTQRSTUW (or whatever letters have been added lately)” in an online column, the chairman of the school’s faculty assembly accused him of using language “bordering on what most people would say is hate speech.” Most people. Hate speech. Silence! Imported, token conservatives are to be seen and not heard.