Rod Dreher's Blog, page 645

As the Social Justice Warrior campus madness spreads, it is remarkable to me that none of the GOP candidates have stood up against this stuff. I’m sure they’re all terrified of being called racist, but they need to find their voice. Whether they do or they don’t, I am certain that this movement is making a lot of 2016 Republican voters of people who may not like the GOP all that much, but who are worried about turning the country over to the Loony Left. Hillary Clinton, as a Clinton, heretofore had not been considered part of the Loony Left, but with her full-throated endorsement of everything the SJWs come up with — laws mandating the right of penis people to use women’s bathrooms, for example — a lot of moderate voters are going to wonder just what it would mean to put the US Justice Department in the hands of SJW sympathizers.

If I were on Team Hillary, I would be gravely worried about how to handle this. Black Lives Matter has already crashed one of her campaign events.  The campus left is going to keep pulling her further to the cultural left on these matters. I don’t think she’s got a credible Sister Souljah moment in her, because deep down, I think she believes the radicals are right.

UPDATE: A reader sends a hilarious example of how deep the crazy goes: a mainstream feminist website posts an article teaching the faithful about trigger warnings — and has a trigger warning. That’s right: a trigger warning on an article about trigger warnings. There really is no limit to what the SJWs will do.

A reader who is a college professor posted this comment last night:

There is a demonstration tomorrow on my campus to show solidarity with the black students at Mizzou whom the organizer claims are being terrorized. It was strongly suggested by my department chair that the faculty attend to show solidarity.

This is a big deal and it is not over.

I corresponded with the reader, and verified his name and where he teaches. You would probably be surprised that an institution of this character, in this place, would have this. He asked me to keep those identifying details off this blog for his own professional safety, so I will. Point is, this is not going away. I don’t mind if students have demonstrations (but “terrorized”?); it’s the “strongly suggested by my department chair that the faculty attend” is what is chilling.

Speaking of terrorized, at Mizzou, a professor made a very serious political error by sending this to his students:

He apparently thought he was encouraging them to be strong in the face of online threats. But he learned who the real bullies are when this kind of thing began to happen:

Professor Dale Brigham reduced the terroristic threats to “bullying”. Unacceptable. Especially when the target isn’t on your back. #Mizzou

— ☯☽♥Sojourner♥☾☯ (@SoJoXOXO) November 11, 2015

And this:

Get #DaleBrigham up outta there too #ConcernedStudent1950 — Huey Uchiha (@OhLordTaylore) November 11, 2015

And note well this (the screen shot of the e-mail sent to Dale Brigham is far too profane for me to post here, but you can read it by following this link).

Which prompted this:

The university has reportedly declined to accept his resignation. I find it discouraging that he let these cretins make him feel that he had to resign, but when you read the tweet that I didn’t embed — and you should — you can see why somebody would be so disgusted by what campus life has become that they wouldn’t want any part of it any more. Still, I wish he had stood his ground.

Will somebody let us know when the grown-ups once again have control of Mizzou’s campus? At this point, I find it almost more disheartening that students who oppose this left-wing McCarthyism are standing by and letting it happen without protest. The administration there is destroying the school’s reputation.

I want to commend two men of the left — academic Freddie de Boer and journalist Jonathan Chait — for taking strong stands against the insanity. First, this post from de Boer, who is not really a liberal, but an actual leftist. He teaches at Purdue. Excerpt:

As I’ve said before, there’s a confusing and frustrating divide on these issues for me. One part of my life, the part that engages with the broader political conversation, is filled with well-meaning liberal and left people who say “oh, there’s no illiberal attitudes among college students — that’s all a conspiracy by the conservative media.” These people, generally, are not on campus. Meanwhile, my extensive connections in the academy, and my continuing friendships with many people who are involved in the world of campus organizing, report that this tendency is true — and often justify it, arguing that this illiberalism is in fact a necessary aspect of achieving social justice. It’s disorienting and frustrating to get arguments of denial in one part of my life and arguments of justification in another.

Even worse, though, is a common response I hear: OK, yes, there are college students who display illiberal attitudes and aren’t very committed to free speech. But they’re just college students, and they’ll grow out of it, and who cares what a bunch of 19 year olds think, anyway? I find this very frustrating as well. Teaching college students is the only job I’ve ever really wanted. It’s uncool to talk about having a calling, but I have one, and it’s to be a college educator. And that means that it’s my job to take college students seriously. To take their intellectual and political commitments seriously. I would be abdicating my responsibility to them if I just dismissed these passionate political protests as a fad, a transitory phase that they’ll get over someday. I’m not sure that’s true. But even if it is true, right now, these young people are filled with a profound sense of moral and political responsibility. My own life was enriched by college educators who took my intellectual and political commitments seriously, who never treated them as juvenile, temporary, or unimportant. I can’t fail to provide students with the same respect today.

And here’s Jonathan Chait, writing in New York magazine. Excerpts:

The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)

And:

That these activists have been able to prevail, even in the face of frequently harsh national publicity highlighting the blunt illiberalism of their methods, confirms that these incidents reflect something deeper than a series of one-off episodes. They are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal. People on the left need to stop evading the question of political correctness — by laughing it off as college goofs, or interrogating the motives of p.c. critics, or ignoring it — and make a decision on whether they agree with it.

So, what’s it going to be? If you were a teacher at a college or university, and your department head strongly suggested that you go to a demonstration to show solidarity, would you do it?

UPDATE: Black students demonstrating at Emory have issued a risible list of demands:

“They do not provide any type of resources for black students to thrive and succeed at the University,” she said to the group. “Emory prides itself on being diverse so they lump us in here and just expect us to swim.”

In addition, she listed numerous demands for Emory administration that were later posted publicly online. The group’s demands are:

     recognition of traumatic events for black students by the University

     institutional support for black students facing trauma on campus

     repercussions or sanctions for racist actions on campus

     the consultation of black students and faculty during the implementation of diversity initiatives

     higher compensation and positions for black staff and administrators

     tighter job security for black administrators

     increased funding and decreased policing for black student organizations

     more faculty of color in all departments

The demand for racial privilege is really quite something. The protesters blocked traffic, on account of their feelings:

“I hope all of y’all heard me today,” [the protest leader] shouted. “This what I’m feeling. This is what we’re feeling. And if it’s not recognized then we’ll come back again, and the next day, and the next day. And we will block traffic and you won’t eat and you won’t sleep and you’ll run out of gas. Do you understand me?”

Er, wow.

UPDATE.2: Now, Ithaca College protestors calling for president’s removal:

The chant: “Tom Rochon. No confidence” echoed across campus Wednesday, shouted by at least a thousand students who took part in a “Solidarity Walk Out” at Ithaca College.

The demonstration was a response to ongoing concerns of racial injustice on the campus of 6,723 students.

“We stand here in solidarity,” a woman standing with POC at IC, People of Color at IC, said into a microphone Wednesday in front of hundreds. “Our hearts are heavy with the pain of Mizzou and Yale and Smith and every person of color on a college campus simply because of the color of their skin, the texture of their hair or their ancestry. This a problem of the nation. However, how can a campus dedicated to preparing us for the real world not actively foster growth to our consciousness of oppression and privilege?

This is interesting. Emphases mine:

Those sentiments were echoed by a woman who stood with POC at IC, shouting from Free Speech Rock: “We desire his resignation, not his input.” She went on to list some goals, including Rochon to resign or be removed from his position, a “radical transformative change in government and structure at Ithaca College” and “we want to bring a sense of safety, emotional stability and dignity to the experiences of POC at IC, other marginalized groups and the intersection between us as well as the entire Ithaca College community.”

The students want the administration of their college to make them feel okay. How the hell did we get to this moment? Come, backlash, come quickly.

UPDATE.3: Lucky Freddie de Boer — he teaches at a college that looks like it’s going to stand on free speech and open inquiry. This letter went out from the Purdue president to faculty and staff:

November 11, 2015

To the Purdue community,

Events this week at the University of Missouri and Yale University should remind us all of the importance of absolute fidelity to our shared values. First, that we strive constantly to be, without exception, a welcoming, inclusive and discrimination-free community, where each person is respected and treated with dignity. Second, to be steadfast in preserving academic freedom and individual liberty.

Two years ago, a student-led initiative created the “We Are Purdue Statement of Values”, which was subsequently endorsed by the University Senate. Last year, both our undergraduate and graduate student governments led an effort that produced a strengthened statement of policies protecting free speech. What a proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale. Today and every day, we should remember the tenets of those statements and do our best to live up to them fully.

Sincerely,

President Mitch Daniels

(I didn’t want to let Veterans Day pass without reprinting this post from earlier this year, about a great American  it was my honor to meet. All this mess happening on college campuses should not take our eyes off of real American heroes, with real courage, moral and otherwise.)

In his new memoir The Wind In the Reeds, Wendell Pierce tells the story of his father Amos, and the old man’s struggle for justice. Amos — forgive me, but having met him, I can only call him “Mr. Amos” — fought in the Battle of Saipan in World War II. When he was discharged through Fort Hood, his papers had not yet caught up with him. When Mr. Amos told the white WAC officer processing him that he had been awarded medals for his bravery, she refused to believe that a black man was capable of such valor, and sent him on his way without his due.

When the Defense Department caught its error and wrote to the veteran to ask him if he wanted his medals, Mr. Amos refused. And yet, he did not raise his sons to hate the country that treated him this way. Wendell remembers this event from his childhood, when his dad took him to a boxing match in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in the Black Power era:

That night at the Municipal Auditorium, the national anthem began to sound over the PA system, signaling that the fights would soon begin. Everyone stood, except some brothers sitting in the next row down from us. They looked up at my father and said, “Aw, Pops, sit down.”

“Don’t touch me, man,” growled my dad.

“Sit down! Sit down!” they kept on.

“Don’t touch me,” he said. “I fought for that flag. You can sit down. I fought for you to have that right. But I fought for that flag too, and I’m going to stand.”

Then one of the brothers leveled his eyes at Daddy, and said, “No, you need to sit down.” He started pulling on my father’s pants leg.

That was it. “You touch me one more time,” my father roared, “and I’m going to kick you in your f—-ng teeth.”

The radical wiseass turned around and minded his own business. That was a demonstration of black power that the brother hadn’t expected.

Many years later, in 2009, Wendell learned of the medals his dad had been denied, and worked with a local TV reporter, and US Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office, to get his father his due. Army records showed that Amos Pierce had in fact been awarded six medals. He finally received his medals in a special ceremony in October, 2009, at the World War II Museum in New Orleans. You can read the story here, and see a photo of Mr. Amos, his (now deceased) wife Althea, and Wendell.

In The Wind in the Reeds, Wendell writes:

[Black veterans] loved the country that persecuted them, and treated them like the enemy. To me, that is a vision of supreme patriotism. It’s like my father always said to my brothers and me, every time we would see a triumph of American ideals: “See, that’s why I fought for that flag!”

Amos Pierce never stopped fighting for that flag, and never stopped loving it, either. On the day he finally received his medals, he said nothing at the formal ceremony, but in the gala afterward, he decided that he wanted to offer a few words to the crowd.

He hobbled over to the microphone, and despite his hearing loss, spoke with ringing clarity.

“I want you all to remember those who didn’t come back, I want to dedicate this night to them,” he said. “So many who fought didn’t even have a chance to live their lives. I was given that chance, as difficult as my life has been.”

Daddy thanked the audience for the honor, saying he was not bitter for having been denied the medals for so long. He was simply grateful to have them now.

“We’ve come so far as a country,” he continued. “I’ve realized now a lot of what we were fighting for.”

And then he paused. It took all of his strength to stand as erect as possible at the podium. He saluted crisply, and said, “God bless America.”

That’s when I lost it. For someone not to be debilitated by pain and anger and embarrassment after all he had been through; who fought for this country when this country didn’t love him and wouldn’t fight for him; to come back from war and still have to fight for the right to vote and the right to go into any establishment he wanted to – that made me think of the vow he made to me as a child: “No matter what, son, I will never abandon you.”

I have never known a greater man than that old soldier on the night he received his due.

I read that chapter aloud to my own father in the last weeks of his life. I couldn’t get through that passage without choking up, and then sobbing. When I looked up to apologize to my dad for not being able to continue, I saw that he too was crying.

It’s an amazing book, about a terrific family.

Not long ago, I was feeling very down and frustrated about our country, and doubting my own loyalty to it. Then I thought about what Amos Pierce had been through, and how he had suffered both in war, and then the humiliation of having his bravery denied, simply because of the color of his skin. Yet his faith in America did not waver.

And then I felt ashamed of myself.

African-American journalist Terrell Jermaine Starr says Tim Tai, the Mizzou photographer manhandled by protesters, had a right to cover the demonstration, From his WaPo op-ed:

We in the media have something important to learn from this unfortunate exchange. The protesters had a legitimate gripe: The black community distrusts the news media because it has failed to cover black pain fairly.

Wait, who gets to decide that the First Amendment doesn’t apply because people in a public space don’t like the way the press has covered their “pain”? More Starr:

These student protesters were not a government entity stonewalling access to public information or a public official hiding from media questions. They were young people trying to create a safe space from not only the racism they encounter on campus, but the insensitivity they encounter in the news media. In the outsized conversation that erupted about First-Amendment rights, journalists drowned out the very message of the students Tai was covering.

And:

Establishing a “safe space” was about much more than denying the media access; it was about securing a rare space where their blackness could not be violated. Yes, the hunger strike, the safe space and other student demonstrations were protests, and protests should be covered. But what was fueling those protests was black pain. In most circumstances, when covering people who are in pain, journalists offer extra space and empathy. But that didn’t happen in this case; these young people weren’t treated as hurting victims.

Oh, for freak’s sake, really? You are a journalist and you believe that? You believe that journalists have to sympathize with the people they cover in order to have the right to cover them? College students who allegedly heard ugly words as “hurting victims”? The mind boggles.

Tell you what, Terrell Jermaine Starr. You write about Russia. Here’s one of your pieces, from the Kyiv Post, headlined, “How The West Can Stand Up To Putin”.  If you show up in Russia to cover a protest, and you are surrounded by Russian citizens who refuse to let you do your job because you haven’t covered Russian “pain” fairly, and you haven’t treated Russians as “hurting victims,” don’t you dare whine about it.

The willingness of students, professors, and now a professional journalist, to support and even demand censorship (or self-censorship) is one of the more astonishing and depressing aspects of this mess.

A friend who is a Yale alumnus forwarded this to me, which he received from the university. Note the highlighted parts:

Dear Members of the Yale Community,

In the past week, many of you have written to us to express your support for two of Yale’s central values: respect for our diverse community and the freedom to speak and be heard. You have written as students, staff, faculty, alumni, and friends of the university, in many cases to share personal struggles that stretch far before any of last week’s events, in other cases to stand by ideas that define the university’s mission, and in still others to do both. As we plan the next steps, we want you to know that you have our full attention and support.

We cannot overstate the importance we put on our community’s diversity, and the need to increase it, support it, and respect it. We know we have work to do, for example in increasing diversity in the faculty, and the initiatives announced last week move us closer toward that goal. At the same time, we are proud of the diversity on our campus and the vibrant communities at the Afro-Am House, the Asian American Cultural Center, La Casa Cultural, and the Native American Cultural Center. We are proud to support our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer students, staff, and faculty. We are proud to support women. And we are proud to attract students and scholars from around the world, of all faiths and traditions, and with all levels of physical ability. We are committed to supporting all of these communities not only by attending to their safety and well-being but in the expectation that they will be treated with respect.

We also affirm Yale’s bedrock principle of the freedom to speak and be heard, without fear of intimidation, threats, or harm, and we renew our commitment to this freedom not as a special exception for unpopular or controversial ideas but for them especially. We expect thinkers, scholars, and speakers, whether they come from our community or as invited guests, to be treated with respect and in the expectation that they can speak their minds fully and openly. By preventing anyone from bringing ideas into the light of day, we deny a fundamental freedom — and rob ourselves of the right to engage with those ideas in a way that gets to the core of Yale’s educational mission. We make this expectation as a condition of belonging to or visiting our community.

Protest and counter-protest are woven into the warp and weft of the Yale that you see around you today, and we embrace the right of every member of this community to engage in protest. The news and social media have reported threats, coercion, and overtly disrespectful acts, and these actions have added to the distress in our community. They are unacceptable. But we have also seen affirming and effective forms of protest, most notably in Monday’s march for resilience, which brought together over 1,000 students, faculty, and administrators to show solidarity for students of color. Students are gathering to share thoughts and feelings in helpful and supportive ways, faculty are offering teach-ins, and those affiliated with the cultural houses are championing change in constructive ways.

Forty years ago, explosive debates about race and war divided Yale’s campus, and in response the university formed a core set of principles to support protest and counter-protest. Those principles, available in a document known as the Woodward Report, apply today just as they did then. C. Vann Woodward, who chaired the committee that produced the report, recognized that “It may sometimes be necessary in a university for civility and mutual respect to be superseded by the need to guarantee free expression,” but he also cautioned that, “The values superseded are nevertheless important, and every member of the university community should consider them in exercising the fundamental right to free expression.” We give the principles in this report our fullest support, and we urge you to read this document. You can find it here. As an institution of higher learning, we must protect the right to the free and open exchange of ideas – even those ideas with which we disagree. At the same time, we do this on a campus that values civility and respect. We do not believe these are necessarily mutually exclusive.

We are grateful for your questions, your involvement, and your engagement, and we renew our pledge to take further actions to improve the climate on campus and support and enhance diversity; we will share those steps with you before Thanksgiving.

Sincerely,

Peter Salovey
President
Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology

Jonathan Holloway
Dean of Yale College
Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies

Well, let’s see. What has happened to Jerelyn Luther, the undergraduate who distinguished herself  by berating her college master profanely and abusively in public? Here’s the video; be careful, though, her language is NSFW:

The Daily Caller discovered more info about her:

What limited information can be found about Luther, though, indicates a privileged background that makes her tirade against Christakis all the more baffling. Besides the obvious privilege inherent in being able to attend Yale, one of the world’s most elite (and expensive) universities, Luther also hails from the wealthy, low-crime city of Fairfield, Connecticut. Her family home isn’t luxurious but has an appraised value of more than $760,000. Her short profile at The Yale Globalist describes her as an avid traveler who wants to visit at least 3/4 of the world’s countries, a hobby that’s hardly available to the impoverished.

One of the most fascinating revelations regarding Luther’s identity, though, is the fact that she played a role in Christakis becoming master of Silliman College in the first place. In her tirade, Luther screams “Who the fu*k hired you?” at Christakis. But further research reveals that Luther actually served on the search committee that chose Christakis as the master of Silliman College. So, when Luther screams “who the fu*k hired you,” the answer is, in some part, herself.

Her tirade was absolutely revolting, and if Yale means what it told its alumni in that letter, it will require her to issue a public apology to Nicholas Christakis and to the Yale community, or it will expel her.

I believe nothing will happen to the foul-mouthed Jerelyn Luther. Nor do I believe anything will happen to the whineypants Jencey Paz, who advocated in the pages of the Yale Herald for Christakis to silence himself. “And I don’t want to debate,” she infamously said. “I want to talk about my pain.”

Has anyone from the university taken Jencey Paz aside and taught her that a Yale education entails “the right to the free and open exchange of ideas – even those ideas with which we disagree”? I’m not holding my breath.

The thing is, I don’t believe that Salovey and Holloway are being intentionally dishonest. I think they honestly believe that about the institution they lead. They are academics and administrators at one of the world’s greatest universities, heirs to the grand tradition of Western thought and education. They are not the kind of men who support censorship. Therefore, in their minds, they do not support censorship.

Except when it gets right down to it, they do. Watch especially what happens — or doesn’t happen — to Jerelyn Luther.

I would be very happy to be shown that I am wrong.

UPDATE: I didn’t realize when I posted that excerpt from the Daily Caller that it contained a link to her family’s home address. A reader just pointed that out in a Tweet, and I took out the link. I apologize for that; I should have checked more closely.

A libertarian friend DMs me on Twitter to say this post is “vicious” and that I should “accept victory.” In what sense did my side emerge victorious? I asked. She said that Yale affirms the 1974 Woodward Report  defending freedom of expression, which is victory. I still don’t see it. The letter to alumni says that Yale upholds the value of “civility and respect.” It also says:

We expect thinkers, scholars, and speakers, whether they come from our community or as invited guests, to be treated with respect and in the expectation that they can speak their minds fully and openly. By preventing anyone from bringing ideas into the light of day, we deny a fundamental freedom — and rob ourselves of the right to engage with those ideas in a way that gets to the core of Yale’s educational mission. We make this expectation as a condition of belonging to or visiting our community.

In what sense is an undergraduate standing in a quad screaming at a professor to “shut up,” and cursing him an example of “civility and respect”? I don’t understand how real learning can take place if a student is at liberty to treat a professor with such shocking disrespect, in an attempt to silence him, and expect no sanction from the university. Which I doubt very much she will get (the Jencey Paz thing is just silly). Maybe this is the difference between conservatives and libertarians, but I think the basic order of a university requires students hierarchy, and students expected to behave with particular respect towards professors and administrators. If Jerelyn Luther gets away with this, particularly in light of the fact that Christakis humiliated himself by apologizing to the mob, it will give lie to Yale’s statement about the importance of civility and respect on campus.

Cops in Missouri arrested a 19-year-old jerk for making a violent racist threat on the popular public chat service Yik Yak — which is supposed to be anonymous, but guess what, kids? It’s not! Ha ha! Elderly git that I am, I didn’t know what Yik Yak was till a New Orleans friend recently showed me how it works. Caitlyn Dewey at the Washington Post explains:

Yik Yak is essentially a public, anonymous, location-based message board: After downloading the app, you can post anything you want to nearby readers — who can then comment, up-vote or down-vote your “yak,” also anonymously.

Since it was founded by two recent college grads in 2013, the app has proven particularly popular among students, who often use it to trade the sorts of jokes and campus gossip that — in this ultra-Googleable age — they wouldn’t want to post under their real names. But it’s also posed major, repeat problems, at universities especially, when students abuse the app’s promise of anonymity.

More:

Slate’s Amanda Hess has argued, convincingly, that the app actually helps empower people who might otherwise be marginalized or ignored: certainly, there are plenty of instances in which students have used Yik Yak to spread positive messages or to draw attention to important causes.

Well, maybe. I dunno. To use Yik Yak, you have to be in the immediate geographic area covered by the service; Yik Yak is a localist phenomenon. My New Orleans friend says when he’s around the campuses of Tulane and Loyola and checks in on Yik Yak, the conversation is dominated by two things: 1) students arranging polymorphously perverse sexual encounters, and 2) students expressing their deep and abiding loneliness — that is, their inability to satisfy their desire to make a human connection.

I suspect those two things are connected in ways we don’t really want to think about.

I wonder if the college students who have been using the app to arrange sexual encounters are bothered by the fact that it’s not really anonymous? Gizmodo writes:

Yik Yak plays up the fact that you don’t have to attach your name to what you post on its virtual board. At one point, its tagline was, straight up: “No profile, no password, it’s all anonymous.”

But, you know, it’s not.

Your name doesn’t appear publicly attached to stuff you post on Yik Yak, but if you do something criminal, like threaten to kill students, the app cooperates with law enforcement. It can provide your account information, geolocation logs, and other identifying data. Yik Yak can turn everything it has over to police in cases like the Mizzou threats to help catch the shit jockeys posting bile.

Investigators have already used Yik Yak’s identifying data to catch students making threats against schools in New York, Michigan, Indiana, and Alabama.

Gizmodo explains further how you aren’t really anonymous on Yik Yak. Now, to be sure, you can be reasonably confident that no law enforcement agency is going to subpoena your Yik Yak records to find out who you went to bed with, and under what circumstances. Now, at least. I wonder, though, how long those records are kept, and if, in the future, someone at the NSA wanted dirt on someone who had risen to prominence in public life, and was seen by the government as a threat? Maybe Walter Kirn is right: “If you’re not paranoid, you’re crazy.”

The former German chancellor and publisher of Die Zeit died this week at 96. I learned a lot about him from his obituary in his newspaper. Note this well:

Schmidt was an interesting study on the difference between politicians and statesmen. He wasn’t interested in the fleeting well-being of his party or even that of his government or himself. He was focused on finding solutions and remaining true to his principles, beneath which everything else was subordinated. His adherence to the NATO Double-Track Decision, against both his own party and widespread public opposition, is just one example. Like few others, he was able to dissect problems with surgical precision, distinguishing the unimportant from the important, the effect from the substance, the emotional from the rational. That also made him confident on a personal level. There really wasn’t anything one couldn’t talk with him about. And when it came to his own weaknesses, particularly as he aged, he exhibited an Anglo-Hanseatic approach: nicely self-deprecating.

Periodically, he would look at the younger generation with benign condescension. For Schmidt — who was born just weeks after the end of the German Empire, experienced the Nazi period as a soldier and, subsequently, witnessed the establishment of German democracy — those born later often seemed maladjusted: no serious problems but all kinds of expectations, sensitivities and minor aches and pains. Up until a few years ago, he would frequently utter the following sharp-tongued sentence: “He hasn’t yet grown up.”  And, as is often the case with verdicts that one finds particularly offensive, there was an element of truth to it. Or, he would say: “You can’t judge that. You didn’t experience it first-hand” — mostly in reference to war and the destruction it wrought. Once, I said: “Yes, and I am happy that I didn’t experience it first-hand. I think there can be different ways of growing up.” After that, he never uttered the sentence again. It was, after all, possible to contradict him, without him taking offense: yet another characteristic that separated him from most other politicians (and journalists). Those who feared him, and approached him with particular servility as a result, would be confronted in such a manner that they wanted to sink into the ground.

Is such a figure even possible in the West today? Serious question.

I’ve talked a few times here in recent days about the hostile work environment that conservatives may face on campus, at least in humanities and social sciences departments. I keep getting letters like this one, which I’ve altered to protect the grad student who sent it:

I’ve thought about writing you concerning the events of this week, but I probably said enough in the comments. And really, what more is there to say? How upset I am? (I am very upset). How disgraceful the reaction has been among academicians? I haven’t seen a single critical word spoken about the situations at Yale or Mizzou by any of my grad student or professor friends on social media. Mostly it’s been ignored. The few people who have said anything are uncritically positive, as though there’s no reason anyone who wasn’t a racist/bigot/whatever wouldn’t reflexively support the protestors. As though there just aren’t any good reasons to stop and think about whether or not there is anything going on here other than Bull Connor style racism.

Whatever. The idea of the Benedict Option is already having a real impact on my career plans, because even in the absence of all of this insanity I’ve been thinking long and hard about whether I want to play the “game” of higher education in the typical high-stakes way: prestigious postdoc one place, prestigious postdoc in another place, tenure track position in a third place, angled into a prime job somewhere else. I just don’t want to drag my family though that. Even if being a white-ish male wasn’t going to be held against me, and the fact that I work on [deleted] instead of trendy bullsh*t wasn’t going to be held against me, I have been having second thoughts about the role, if any, that I would ideally like to take in the American academy. I guess I’ll still apply for jobs. I don’t know. Lately what I’ve been thinking was to try to get an adjunct gig while I’m writing up my dissertation, and see what happens from there, but it’s hard to overstate just how upsetting this past week has been to me. Up until last week, somewhere in the back of my mind I still thought that maybe there was some way I could find my place in the American academy. That hope has been all but extinguished.

From another conservative, this one an academic in France; I’ve edited this slightly to make him hard to identify:

I really want to thank you for your blog, which does function as an excellent ongoing participative think tank, with you as director and main contributor. I think it can make a true difference in the future : keep on your work, I think you keep drawing more and more people to you and leading them to think, and hopefully to act (BenOp).

Much of what you describe in the US has happened over the pond as well. I’ve seen it in my [institution], in the general package, ambience, in the selection process as well (vetting more and more conservative students out at the entrance exam in favor of objectively inferior but PC and left wing students). The professional formation remains top level but much liberal crap being taught at undergrad level : biased sociology and gender theory but less and less philosophy and literature.

About social justice warriors: your comparison to Robespierre and the terrorists is entirely valid. There is a sentence which rings a bell : “We don’t have leaders, we follow consensus”. You should read Augustin Cochin, a historian and sociologist having devoted his short career (killed in action in World War I) to thought societies and the Jacobin decision-making in Revolutionary France. Some of his works are translated into English. A part of François Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution is about Cochin’s thesis. Cochin was a Catholic grand-bourgeois but born fifty years later. Furet was a famous scholar and, as a former Communist during his youth, he got a personal experience of the liberal thinking at its purest and most wicked (if he had been a millennial and not coming of age in 1945, he would have certainly been a young fire-breathing SJW).

Merci! Your comment about the Benedict Option reminds me that all people of good faith who are devoted to the Western tradition — Christians, certainly, but also Jewish, Muslim (I’m thinking about our frequent commenter here “Jones,” a believing Muslim, but also someone I count as an ally), and non-believers in the Allan Bloom mold — need to organize, and when possible or desirable, form institutions.

I also received an e-mail from a young academic who is a political conservative and a practicing Christian. He has a job in a highly competitive field, and considers himself lucky to be employed. But the culture on his campus is so heavily dominated by SJWs that he has to keep his mouth closed and his identity hidden, out of fear. He says that he works with “some good, kind people,” but that the intellectual atmosphere on his campus is suffocating.

“I respect my colleagues’ opinions, and find some of them intriguing,” he writes. “But you can’t debate them; their opinions just are. There is only stasis, no dynamism. What kind of intellectual environment has an overriding characteristic of stasis?”

He says that if it stays like this, he will probably leave academia, and find something else to do. He’s young, and cannot imagine spending the rest of his career in this bog, where “diversity” is a sham to mask the exercise of raw ideological power from the Left.

This kind of thing is what the blogsite Heterodox Academy was formed to fight. It is not an initiative of conservative academics. Its leading light is the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a self-described secular liberal, but one who is greatly concerned about what the one-party state that is campus life is doing to the function of the university, and the work it produces.

In this talk, Haidt explains why certain academic communities become tribal. Excerpt:

Morality binds and blinds, and so, open-minded inquiry into the problems of the Black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along. Sacralizing distorts thinking. Sacred values bind teams together, and then blind them to the truth. That’s fine if you are a religious community. I follow Emile Durkheim in believing that the social function of religion is group binding. But this is not fine for scientists, who ought to value truth above group cohesion.

There’s a term you’ve probably heard in the last 5 years: the “reality based community”. It was a term used contemptuously by Karl Rove at the height of Republican power, when it looked as though the invasion of Iraq had been a smashing success, and Republicans could make their own reality. When the term was brought to light in 2004, liberals then embraced it, because liberals believe that they have science on their side, while conservatives are blinded by religion and ignorance.

But if it’s true that morality binds and blinds, then no partisan community is based in reality. If a group circles around sacred values, they’ll evolve into a tribal moral community. They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value. You can see this on the right with global warming denialism. They’re protecting their sacralized free markets. But when sacred values are threatened, the moral force field turns on, and beliefs fall into line. We become intuitive theologians.

He goes on to claim that social psychology, his own field, is a “Tribal Moral Community,” one that is “bound together by liberal values and then blind to any ideas of findings that threaten our sacred values.” You need to read the whole thing, but in short, he advances three points to support that claim:

1) We have taboos and danger zones

2) A statistically impossible lack of diversity (Haidt could only find one social psychologist in the entire field who openly identifies as a conservative; he polled the room of social psychologists to which he was speaking, and found that liberals outnumbered conservatives by, get this, 266 to 1)

3) Closeted Conservatives. On that point, Haidt says:

I recently came across this narrative, written by a young gay woman in 1985:

Until about a year ago, I was very quiet about my sexual orientation… I often didn’t understand the sexual jokes made by my colleagues… the people making the jokes thought that we all felt the same way, and I certainly wasn’t going to reveal that I disagreed. That would have been much too awkward.

JB was really the first person I talked to about my sexual identity. He made me feel more comfortable and seemed to want to hear other perspectives…. Since then, taking PT’s class opened up a dialog and others have shared more as well. Before I thought that I was completely alone and was afraid to say much because of it. Now I feel both somewhat obligated to speak up (don’t want others to feel as alone as I did) and also know that I have more support than I originally realized.

Compare that text to this political coming out narrative, which was sent to me last week, as I was searching for conservative social psychologists. One of my friends said, in response to my email survey, that he knew of two grad students who might be conservative. I wrote to each of them and asked them about their experiences in social psychology. Both of them said they are not conservative, but neither are they liberal, and because they are not liberal, they feel pressure to keep quiet. One of them wrote this to me. As you can see, it’s nearly identical to the coming out narrative.

In fact, it differs by just five words, because that’s all I had to change to convert this text… into this text, which I told you, falsely, was a coming out narrative from 1985. This is the text of the email that was sent to me last week, by a graduate student who is here in the room with us right now. She and other non-liberal students would like to come out of the closet, just as gay students wanted to 25 years ago. I think we have an obligation to help them.

Of course it’s a moral issue, and the moral argument about political discrimination is being developed by Richard Redding, at Chapman University Law School. But I’m going to set that aside. I’m not even going to make the moral argument. Rather, what I really want to emphasize today is that it is a scientific issue. We are hurting ourselves when we deprive ourselves of critics, of people who are as committed to science as we are, but who ask different questions, and make different background assumptions.

If you care at all about the issue of conservatives and bias in academia, you need to bookmark Heterodox Academy. Take a look at the contributors to it. They are not all conservatives. In fact, some are fair-minded liberals, like Haidt and Harvard’s Steven Pinker, who are doing the hard work of standing up to their own side, for fairness and real intellectual diversity on campus. I am so grateful to them for their courage in this campus climate of left-wing McCarthyism.

In that vein, here’s a good blog post by Thom Lambert, a gay Mizzou professor who writes to support the protesters, in general, but has some strong words for them. For example:

I could not really support my Mizzou students in this difficult time if I did not point out a few things.

First–The top administrators of a school of 35,000 people cannot prevent all instances of racism. Ignorant, mean people are sometimes going to yell slurs from their pick-up trucks when they drive through campus. Drunken frat boys are occasionally going to say ugly things. When you ambush the homecoming parade, to which parents have brought their small children for a rah-rah college experience, some people are not going to be nice to you. Those ambushed may be taken aback and may not say all the right things. People who draw things with poop are especially hard to control. Be prepared: The people who replace the deposed president and chancellor at Mizzou are unlikely to prevent every racist incident on our campus.

Second–The U.S. Constitution forbids state institutions from employing racial quotas. Having been involved in hiring at Mizzou for a number of years, I can assure that we bend over backward to fill open positions with qualified minority applicants. It is highly unlikely that Concerned Student 1950’s demand that the percentage of black faculty and staff at Mizzou be raised to 10% by 2017-18 can be implemented in a manner consistent with constitutional obligations. You should know that.

Third–Free speech means more than the freedom to express views with which you agree. I honestly think most Mizzou students understand this point, but I’m afraid that the administrator and communications professor in this video don’t grasp it. Lest you be misled by their ill-advised bullying, you should know that the First Amendment is for everyone.

Fourth–Unreasonable demands have consequences. We will survive this, but Mizzou has been badly weakened. I can’t imagine that the press accounts from the last week will help with minority student and faculty recruitment next year. That’s a shame, because based on my encounters with a great many minority students and professors at Mizzou over the past twelve years, I believe most have had good experiences. Perhaps they haven’t been honest with me. Or perhaps the situation has changed in the last couple of years. If so, I’m terribly sorry to hear that. But, following the events of the last week, I can’t imagine that next year will be better.

Fifth–Regardless of your take on the events of the last week, I hope you will not let bitterness reign in your hearts. Unlike many of my gay friends from conservative religious backgrounds, I chose years ago not to write off those people who were once unkind to me. I’m glad I made that choice. I hope any Mizzou student who is currently feeling marginalized for any reason will keep calm, carry on, give others the benefit of the doubt, and be open to reconciliation.

So, Mizzou students, I support you. But I will not coddle you. You’re adults and should be treated as such.

A traitor to his class, clearly.

Finally, on the subject of Benedict Option alternatives to the current higher education model, check out this essay by J. Zachary Bailes and Gary Daynes, on the website CraftEducation.org. They write:

Today, national trends are working against independent schools and colleges. The expansion of charter schools has attracted some students who would formerly have attended independent schools. Proposals for free community college, or free tuition at public universities, threatens a significant portion of independent colleges. Most attention in the education media focuses on public K-12 schools, public universities, and highly selective private universities, leaving most independent institutions invisible. Across the K-16 spectrum, concerns about cost and about the public value of an independent education make it seem unattainable, even to many who would value and benefit from it, or socially useless for those who can. And economic inequality makes those concerns real for many.

Given this national context, independent schools cannot hope to flourish alone. Instead, they need to engage other trends in American life– the heightened importance of the non-profit sector, the taste for innovation and entrepreneurship, the resurgence of urban neighborhoods and small cities, the rise of the local–and the people whose lives and work are enhanced by those trends. Doing so supports the conditions in which independent schools flourish. And it enhances the likelihood that they will flourish in the future.

What follows is a set of theses that outline the rationale for and shape of a movement on behalf of independent schools and the ecosystems–organizations, systems, and policies–that support them.

More:

If independent schools are to exist in a context that supports their flourishing, they must acknowledge the following:

they are local entities, embedded in particular places, not nationally significant or distinct from the places in which they are located. The vast majority of independent school and college students come from places close to the school’s physical location. Schools must be comfortable with those students and commit to the well-being of the places where they stand, rather than strive to distance themselves from their actual homes, develop a national profile, or attract the majority of their students from far away.
they are non-profit organizations, not private schools. The term “private” reflects both an organizational model and a level of self-interest inimical to the true nature or values of most independent schools. As non-profit organizations, then, schools must foreground their obligation to the public good, and to the public policies that define and protect their roles in society.
they are part of an ecosystem of other, similar organizations (the independent sector or civil society). Therefore, they benefit when other non-profit and local entities flourish. In fact, their natural allies are small businesses, churches, civic organizations, arts organizations, cultural groups, and social services. These organizations are the basis of robust communities. And they are the source of students and supporters of independent education.

Read the whole thing. If the campus left and its ideologues in power are bound and determined to wreak destruction on academic institutions, then it falls to the excluded to be creative. Let’s come together and think, and build while they destroy.

UPDATE: Blog Goliard writes:

Haidt’s little “coming-out narrative” exercise helps illuminate something that we should be pointing out again and again and again, and force them to explicitly defend.

That is, that “safe spaces” and “diversity” and the whole constellation of rights claims are not and never were meant to be for everyone. What they’re building is not a system where everyone is treated with respect and consideration, but one where the elect are able to demand protection from and satisfaction for every last thing that displeases them, while they are given license to hector and bully the non-elect, who have precisely zero right to feel safe and respected and have their “existence validated”, whatever the hell that means.

Or, to state it much more succinctly: the screaming Yalies’ “safe space” affirmatively requires that the Christakis’ life on campus be made unsafe. And that’s not a bug of SJW-ism…it’s a feature.

I do not like Ted Cruz, no I don’t, don’t, don’t. But he made a good point last night, highlighted in his answer on immigration:

What was said was right, the Democrats are laughing because if Republicans join Democrats as the party of amnesty, we will lose. And you know, I understand that when the mainstream media covers immigration, it doesn’t often see it as an economic issue. But I can tell you for millions of Americans at home, watching this, it is a very personal economic issue. And I will say the politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande. Or if a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press. Then we would see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our nation. And I will say for those of us who believe people ought to come to this country legally and we should enforce the law, we’re tired of being told, it is anti-immigrant. It’s offensive. I am the son of an immigrant who came legally from Cuba. To seek the American dream. And we can embrace legal immigration while believing in the rule of law. And I would note, try going illegally to another country. Try going to China or Japan. Try to go into Mexico. See what they do. Every sovereign nation secures its borders and it is not compassionate to say we’re not going to enforce the laws and we’re going to drive down the wages for millions of hard-working men and women. That is abandoning the hard-working men and women.

(Via National Review)

Not too many lawyers, bankers, or journalists have to use public hospitals in cities with large illegal immigrant populations. If they did, I bet you would see a Strange New Respect in the Establishment for enforcing immigration laws.

Here’s a good example of that, from  a posting by the Washington Post‘s media blogger Erik Wemple, regarding the outrageous intimidation by a Missouri mob against photographer Tim Tai. Wemple is talking about faculty/staff members Melissa Click, Chip Callahan, and Janna Basler, all of whom were caught on video intimidating Tai and trying to stop him from doing what his legally protected, that is, photographing a news event in public space:

These three university employees had a chance to stick up for free expression on Monday. Instead, they stood up for coercion and darkness. They should lose their jobs as a result.

I don’t think I would go that far, but if I did not agree with the cultural politics of Click or Callahan (who is chair of the Religious Studies department), I would not take a class from either of them, because they are on video proving that they are intolerant of basic First Amendment liberties. They have demonstrated that they lack a basic quality required of teachers in a university: respect for free speech, including freedom of the press. Should that cost them their jobs? Again, my instinct is not to go that far, but at least they should be severely reprimanded.

The point here is that the illiberalism of the Mizzou protests became clear to Wemple (or so it seems) when these academics interfered with something he understands: newsgathering. (Though I wonder: why does he not chastise the students who muscled Tai out of the way. What gives them a pass? Their youth? These are adults, every one of them.)

This is normal human behavior, I guess, but I wonder how many journalists were entirely uncritical, even sympathetic, to the Mizzou protests until the protesters were recorded turning on journalists? For that matter, I wonder how many journalists are experiencing ideologically-based cognitive dissonance over all this, separating out the disgusting anti-First Amendment behavior of the mob from the overall protest, which they are determined to see as a sacred cause.

I’m reminded of the report I highlighted last week, the study that found soaring death rates among middle-aged white working class people, from suicide, drug addiction, and alcoholism. Angus Deaton, the Princeton economist who co-authored the study with his wife, another Princeton economist, said, “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this.”

The report got some notice in the media, but not a lot, certainly not commensurate to the scale of the problem. Now, it could be that major media organizations are preparing follow-up reports, which can’t be done well overnight. But I doubt it. Major-media reporters don’t know people like these. And they think of them as the Wrong Sort of Person.

So, let’s consider the University of Missouri situation (and not Yale, because what working class person ever thinks his son or daughter will go to Yale?). I bet more than a few parents of undergraduates at Mizzou are like my parents: working-class people who couldn’t afford any option other than the state universities. Mizzou is not really affordable: in-state tuition, room, board, and expenses are over $25,000 per year. Absent scholarships, working-class students are going to have to go seriously into debt to attend there.

A white working-class mom and dad see the fight going on there, and see Social Justice Warriors dictating policy to the university. They see the board running the state university system imposing a new level of (no doubt costly) “diversity” bureaucracy, and imposing political re-education  mandatory diversity training (but of course, no mandatory First Amendment training). They may well wonder if their own kids will be treated fairly in class, and whether or not their kids stand to be reported to campus police if some thin-skinned person finds something their kid said to be “hurtful.” They’re paying $25,000 a year for their kids to put up with that? Really?

Are journalists getting past their liberal bias and finding these people to talk to? Do they care? I am not a working class person, but I am facing sending a kid to college in a couple of years, and trying to think about how I’m going to pay for it. You had better believe that my wife and I will be thinking long and hard about the kind of education our son is likely to receive for the investment we make in it. We will not spend that kind of money, or go into debt, for him to spend four years at an unserious, politically contaminated place like Mizzou or Yale, where students who aren’t interested in debate, but who just want to talk about their pain, have the power to humiliate and emasculate a nationally known scholar who defended the apparently radical notion that college students are adults, and free speech ought to be tolerated.

If we, as people with a lot more means than working class folks, are losing faith in the American university as an institution, and do not believe we can afford to be anything less than extremely cautious about where we send our kids to college, given the cost, how much more must white working class parents, and students (after all, they will be carrying the loans) feel right about now, watching all this play out?

Noah Smith, a finance professor, writes about the Deaton study:

Economists may yet manage to tease out a reason from among the thicket of trends and variables. But this may simply be one of those times when economic theory isn’t that useful. After all, there exists no good economic model of drug abuse and suicide in the first place. The roots must be somehow sociological and psychological.

In fact, the deterioration of the American white working class is evident in other areas. Divorce rates have risen dramatically for this demographic group, even as they have fallen for the more educated. In other words, family breakdown is now as severe among the white working class as it was among the black working class in the 1960s, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his famous report.

Is family breakdown the cause of alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide? Possibly — after all, families are an incredibly important source of emotional support. But that merely leads us to the question of why family breakdown is occurring in the first place.

Here’s a possible explanation that takes us back to economic factors. Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. economy started trending toward greater inequality. The less-educated lost the semi-skilled jobs that they had held in previous decades. The uneducated class became a floating low-skilled labor force, which decreased themarriageability of white working-class men. That impaired family formation. A couple of decades later, the lack of family support started to take a big bite out of the emotional health of working-class whites, causing them to turn to alcohol, drugs and suicide once they reached middle age.

What happens when those people stop turning on themselves, and start turning on the people who run this country? Trump is not going to win, but if a more skilled politician follows him — someone like Ted Cruz — speaking to the same frustrations, we are going to be in trouble. Yet the clowns who run the institutions in this country only want to talk about the “pain” of some of the most privileged people to walk the face of this earth. The pain of the working classes — white and otherwise — does not really register.

I’ll repeat the excerpt from Houellebecq’s novel Submission that I quoted in this space last night:

History is full of such blindness: we see it among the intellectuals, politicians, and journalists of the 1930s, all of whom were convinced that Hitler could “come to see reason.” It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.

I would invite journalists, academics, and professional class people to think about what this little campus p.c. revolution so many of you are embracing says to the huge number of people outside your narrow circles of privilege. Houellebecq is speaking to you. You are waging a culture war on the people who are not like you. They know you hate them, and are pulling the ladders up behind you. When the university system collapses — as it will, because we cannot afford it — do you really think they are going to give a damn? Do you really think that they will, in the end, have any more concern for free speech, fair play, and other classically liberal values than you have shown? Here’s a hint: there are a lot more of them than there are of you. And sooner or later, some rough beast is going to come along and inspire them to vote.

This is beyond depressing:

“I have disappointed you and I’m really sorry,” Nicholas Christakis told about 100 students gathered in his living room on Sunday for a meeting also attended by Jonathan Holloway, the dean of Yale College, and other university administrators. Christakis said his encounter on Thursday with students in the college’s courtyard, in which numerous black women upbraided him for being inattentive to them, broke his heart, according to a voice recording of the conversation provided to The Washington Post.

“I mean it just broke my heart,” Christakis said. “I thought that I had some credibility with you, you know? I care so much about the same issues you care about. I’ve spent my life taking care of these issues of injustice, of poverty, of racism. I have the same beliefs that you do … I’m genuinely sorry, and to have disappointed you. I’ve disappointed myself.”

The man threw himself and his own wife under the bus. The humiliation is an ugly thing. He begged forgiveness for defending free speech and inquiry on a college campus. This was an act of total cowardice. I am embarrassed for him, but at least we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt what kind of place Yale is, and who runs that university.

This comment appeared on an earlier p.c. on campus thread:

Count me in as another young academic who is on the verge of leaving the academy altogether, especially after this week. The current climate of higher ed, coupled with the insanely exploitative labor practices of the academy (practices, mind you, perpetrated by people who are ever prating on about class inequality), leave me with no real desire to teach a generation of students who are uninterested in my class apart from their garnering a wholly unearned A on their transcripts and who believe that every little feeling merits validation and encouragement. I hate that my leaving the academy would mean that I’m essentially ceding the academy to these people, but the headache and the fear of falling foul of ideological policing isn’t worth it, especially not for what I’m being paid. No currently untenured conservative Christian stands a chance in this environment. Either he will be found out for what he is, or the cognitive dissonance of believing one thing while outwardly assenting to another will overwhelm the psyche. We might as well start planning what to do with our degrees in other fields.

There has to be some place for scholars like that to go. Why can’t we create them? Commenting on the gutlessness of American universities in the face of Social Justice Warrior-ism, political correctness, careerism, therapeutic mumbo-jumbo, and the inability of authorities within these institutions to stand up to the demands of the young, commenter Fiestamom writes:

My children attended (and still attend) a small non diocesan Catholic high school. The kids get are getting a good Classical education and it is very Catholic. But this school is all about college placement.

It is infuriating. The school is giving the kids a great Catholic foundation, then houndng the kids to spend their next four years at these SJW indoctrination centers. I had to cajole and plead with my 18 y/o to attend Community College for two years. Are the teachers and administrators not seeing the stories about the SJW’s, the hookup culture, the false rape accusations?

I wish more Catholic and Christian schools saw the value in classically educating future plumbers, hairdressers, electricians, etc.

Absolutely. There are bound to be quite a few parents like my wife and me who are sick of this nonsense, and would love our kids, both in high school and college, to get actual educations. I want them to attend a college where they will be taught by men with chests and women with backbones, not quivering Christakises who abase themselves before some of the most privileged young people on the planet. I know there are some colleges and universities out there that care about the Western tradition, and real knowledge, not just trivial political posturing and narcissism. Just this fall, I’ve seen great things within honors and humanities programs at Villanova, Baylor, and Union. One of you readers said in a comment that the collapse of higher education (meaning, I take it, the moral and intellectual collapse) opens up a Benedict Option opportunity for existing “Great Books” schools  and programs that educate from within the Christian humanist tradition — as well as opens up an opportunity for creating new schools and programs.

The classical Christian education guru Andrew Kern has written about the differences among Progressive, Traditionalist, and Classical approaches to education:

At the root of the classical approach is a commitment to the belief that things have a nature and that we can know them according to their natures and treat them in ways fitting to their natures. In addition, things have a purpose, and love enables its object to fulfill both its purpose and its nature. In the classical tradition, the object of a science is to know the nature of a thing. The object of an art is to refine one’s ability to know the nature of things. The sophist or Progressive educator does not believe we can know anything. The traditionalist believes that we can know only through the tradition. The classicist believes that we can perceive the nature of things and relate to them according to their natures. What does your teaching lead your students to? That will tell you which of these theories you hold.

Back in January, in the Q&A period after a speech I gave on Dante, a young woman who appeared to be of graduate student age stood and demanded to know why I thought Dante had anything to teach us today, given that he was a white male yadda yadda. I confess I was not prepared to answer a question as ignorant and impious towards the past as that one, and can’t remember what I told her. A college professor approached me after the talk and said that the young woman’s question reflects the way Dante and other Greats are taught in the university today.

It made me angry. As you know, I didn’t discover Dante until I was 46 years old, and he changed my life. I don’t really blame my high school and university for not introducing me to Dante, though I wish someone had decided that all college-educated people in the West need to have read Dante. Still, reading the Divine Comedy taught me that I was a slave in ways I had not fully comprehended, and set me free.  I cannot possibly express the depth of my gratitude for what Dante gave me; he brought me out of myself, opened my mind, and reinvigorated my soul. It grieves me — no, it infuriates me — to imagine that colleges and universities teach that Dante is a poisoner of young minds.

Yesterday I traded e-mails with a friend who is in graduate school studying literature because he deeply, truly loves it. He’s depressed and angry over what’s going on at Yale and Mizzou. Where do people like him — young scholars who really love literature — go with their lives and vocations?

In short, where are the academic monasteries that will guard knowledge and keep the light burning through this new Dark Age? Let’s strengthen the ones we have, and build new ones — and let these institutions of learning boast of defying the spirit of the age.

The cowardice and demoralization we see in academia now, especially in the humanities, didn’t come from nowhere. It came from progressives within academia who convinced generations that the Western intellectual tradition is nothing but a façade for power. It came from business types and “practical” men, people who see education in an entirely instrumental way, and for whom the humanities are negligible, because they produce no profit (“What does it profit a man to gain the world but lose his soul?” is not a question that occurs to them). It came from a public that is largely indifferent to such things, and that cares more about the quality of the football team than quality of the faculty. And it came from a culture that has slipped into a sophisticated barbarism, an outlook held by people who cannot be bothered to care for its past or anything higher than their present desires.

This is not going to end well.

So, there’s blame to go around everywhere, but the greatest part of it rests on the shoulders of this society’s elites — academic, political, media, legal, business — who have failed in their mission to steward the culture and civilization from which they are the primary beneficiaries. When I think about the faculty and administrators (“men with souls made of cotton candy,” in National Review‘s withering phrase), I recall the passage from Michel Houellebecq’s newly translated novel Submission, in which his narrator talks about the fate of those who would not believe the prophet Cassandra’s predictions:

History is full of such blindness: we see it among the intellectuals, politicians, and journalists of the 1930s, all of whom were convinced that Hitler could “come to see reason.” It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.

Similarly, consider Christians in this country, who have raised two generations of children who know little or nothing about the faith and its traditions, and who don’t grasp why they should care. They can contemplate its death without any particular dismay, and are doing so, not only because parents failed, but also because the elites in charge of their institutions — religious schools and colleges, seminaries, churches — failed to comprehend the times, and failed to love what they had been given to care for and to pass down.

Can we older Christians imagine the viewpoint of young people who feel that Christianity offers them nothing? You might say that the kids feel entitled, but I tell you, when I hear many of my Christian friends in their 30s and 40s talk about the weak-tea religion in which they were raised, I can easily imagine why someone would give that nonsense up. I think of church people I know who watch parents dropping their kids off at Sunday school, but who never darken the door of the church themselves. The message moms and dads like that telegraph to their kids about the importance of religion is stronger than anything that gets said inside the church.

We can lament the auto-destruction of the church and the academy, or we can do something about it. We can prepare for the disintegration, and form communities of people who do love the faith, and who do love the Great Tradition, and who have ceased to trust institutions and elites within them to transmit that love to the young. We must strengthen those that stand, and start new institutions where there are no others.

A Catholic friend of mine says that there are no small number of Catholics in his city who are sick of the diocesan school system, because they believe it is compromised by secular values and the entire “success” mentality — meaning “success” as defined not by the actual teachings of Roman Catholicism, but rather by middle-class, upwardly-mobile professionals. The Catholic schools in that city are better than the public schools, but they are still pretty dismal from the point of view of Catholics who actually want to pass on the faith to their children. He tells me that if someone would start a classical Christian school there like St. Jerome’s in Hyattsville, Maryland, they would be an instant success.

I believe it. It’s time to quit thinking about these things, folks, and to start doing something about them. Organize! Don’t wait to be saved! The displeasure of a football team just took down the president and chancellor of a major state university. And whining students who just wanted to talk about their pain compelled a distinguished scholar to apologize and beg forgiveness for defending free speech and open inquiry. If those aren’t signs of the times, what is?