Spectator Life

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. My old college roommate and I were sitting on a 180-pound wild male boar. Neither of us were habitual hoggers. It was our first rodeo. Florida Route 710, the Beeline Highway from Palm Beach to Indiantown, is a two-lane straight shot out of the tropics and into the scrub near Lake Okeechobee. In the Twenties, a Baltimore banker, S. Davies Warfield, built a railroad into central Florida from Palm Beach. Up went Indiantown’s gridded streets and houses, and the Mission Revival-style Seminole Inn, where Warfield’s niece Wallis Simpson stayed both before and after marrying Edward VIII. But Warfield’s plans were scuppered by two hurricanes and the Depression.

Stacked up next to lessons on queering Shakespeare, feminist interpretive dance, and non-binary archery, studying journalism is only mildly less ridiculous than many courses offered by the academy today. Yet each time my alma mater’s increasingly woke newsletter arrives in the mail I’m stunned these programs still exist. I think, these poor students are being led so far astray, as I was, by studying journalism. Today, more than ever, it is harming, not helping, their future career. I came out of school in 2005, before iPhones, before Big Social Media, before journalism was completely dead, when reading the news on your computer was unpleasant and people mostly still bought print.

Campus debates over free speech have raged through the pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in recent years, as columnists turn their sights upon university quads. With all this attention, President Trump signed an executive order in March to limit funding for schools failing to support freedom of expression. To learn more, Cockburn stopped by a debate on Tuesday on the resolution, 'Are college campuses eroding free speech?'.Hosted by the McCain Institute, Robby Soave, associate editor of Reason, and FIRE vice president Samantha Harris argued in the affirmative, while Wesleyan University president Michael Roth and Georgetown’s Free Speech Project director Sanford Ungar argued — somewhat — against the proposal.

Like growing numbers of public high school students across the country, many California kids are receiving classroom instruction in how race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship status are tools of oppression, power and privilege. They are taught about colonialism, state violence, racism, intergenerational trauma, heteropatriarchy and the common thread that links them: 'whiteness'. Students are then graded on how well they apply these concepts in writing assignments, performances and community organizing projects. At Santa Monica High School, for example, students organize and carry out 'a systematized campaign' for social justice that can take the form of a protest, a leaflet, a workshop, play or research project.

University of Pennsylvania Professor of Law Amy Wax was subjected to a smear campaign following her remarks at the National Conservatism Conference on July 15, 2019. A writer for the website Vox, Zach Beauchamp, characterized Wax’s statements on immigration as 'an outright argument for white supremacy.' The founder of the conference, Yoram Hazony, quickly denied Beauchamp’s allegation. Hazony tweeted, 'In fact she made no such argument.' Beauchamp held his ground and offered what he said was a transcript of part of Wax’s remarks. Others, such as David Marcus, Rod Dreher, Jeremiah Poff, Steve Sailer, Mark Pulliam, and Steven Hayward  pointed out that Beauchamp had completely mischaracterized Wax’s remarks.

As President Trump ponders restrictions on Chinese tech company Huawei, the FBI is warning American universities about espionage by Chinese researchers and academics. The FBI now advises research universities to track and observe Chinese students and faculty for signs of intellectual property theft. In the last year, the federal government has voided or re-evaluated the visas of 30 Chinese academics for this crime. In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray commented on China’s intelligence operation. China, Wray said, has 'pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation any way it can, from a wide array of businesses, universities, and organizations'.

I agree with Bernie Sanders, at least to a point. It is lamentable how students are expected to pay back an average of almost $40,000 in debt after they graduate from college. Frankly, it might be a good idea to cancel it, and if the money can be raised from Wall Street, well, so much the better. Yes, I know the conservative arguments against this move. Does it not penalize people who have paid off their debts? It makes no difference to them. Should conservatives oppose the cutting of regressive taxes because people have already been paying them? A more challenging argument was made in a blunt form by Matt Walsh: 'I guess I'm meant to cry tears of sympathy for all of these college grads with student loan debt. Somehow I just can't muster a single tear.

Higher education is dominated by liberal professors and progressive impulses. Conservative professors like me are often apprehensive about teaching in the dominant method, lecture based classes. It’s in the humble seminar, with students and professor debating around a table, that viewpoint diversity can thrive, and discussions of conservative thought survive.Colleagues tell me that they are regularly afraid of the scenario when their class spirals out of control and blows up. In the safe-space, trigger warning, micro-aggression climate of the campus, a professor’s intentions and statements are easily mischaracterized.

Even in our age of outrage, Harvard’s decision to rescind its offer of admission to Parkland survivor Kyle Kashuv is surprising. Kashuv apologized immediately after foolish, insensitive and racist remarks that Kashuv had made as a 16-year-old resurfaced online. He apologized again to Harvard after the university reached out to him to get the full story. Despite this, Harvard has withdrawn its offer and rebuffed Kashuv’s attempt to appeal the decision in person. Harvard’s response runs entirely counter to the stated goals of any university. Institutions of higher learning are predicated on the notion that young adults are capable of developing toward maturity. That’s why they leave their friends and families and delay entering the workforce.

The Equal Measures 2030 report is out. Publications from Forbes to the Guardian have jumped on data showing that not one of the 129 countries that had signed on to the 2015 pledge to achieve gender equality by 2030 were even close to getting there. The EM 2030 SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) Gender Index is the first of its kind. Its ambitions, spanning all continents, are high. So it’s not surprising that all of the goals were not met. But if you dig beneath the naysaying headlines, and review which goals were not met and which indices show favorable results, equality for women and girls worldwide isn’t quite as unattainable as this year’s failing grade suggests.

Did the Victorians execute dozens of men for sodomy? Yes, according to Naomi Wolf, who has a PhD from Oxford and a vivid imagination. Are Mizrachi Jews an ‘identity category’ of ‘Palestinians’? Yes, according to Marc Lamont Hill, possessor of an intellect so powerful that he professes at Temple University in two specious fields, Media Studies and Urban Education. The correct answers are no, and no, so see me after class. Last night, old people across Britain choked on their cocoa as Wolf plugged her book Outrages on BBC Radio. Wolf, having visited the archives of the Old Bailey, London’s chief court, claims to have discovered ‘several dozen executions’ of gay men in Victorian Britain, and has written a book about how awful the Victorians were.

‘In 55 years of association with Harvard, I can’t remember a worse violation of academic freedom than this one. And Harvard has had a few,’ Alan Dershowitz tells me in this week’s Censored in the City podcast. https://audioboom.com/posts/7260600-is-there-still-academic-freedom-at-harvard Activists on the left have been working hard to change definitions and distort values for some time. We shouldn't be surprised that they’ve started succeeding. At first it was simple. One word at a time, like how you define the meaning of safety or assault. Then it became about bigger ideas. The left, who once championed free speech and academic freedom, began distorting how we should think about and advocate for those values.

The freedom to debate ideas in our nation’s colleges and universities is under attack. That much is well known. The only group on campus that can push back against the tide of censorship and silencing of speakers on campus are the students themselves. Higher education is supposed to be a place of intellectual discomfort, and students should object when their institutions silence dissenting ideas. The latest round of administrative overreach and censorship in response to unpopular views comes courtest of Middlebury College in Vermont and is instructive. Middlebury’s administration canceled a lecture last week that would have featured Ryszard Legutko, a controversial professor of philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Poland and a member of the European Parliament.

Last year Peter Thiel argued that American universities were as corrupt as the Catholic Church was 500 years ago. Thiel, stretching the analogy somewhat, suggested that bloated legions of college administrators are like the layabout priests of the old Church. The practice of paying indulgences was analogous to the runaway tuition fees of today. Reform is the only route to salvation, he wrote: ‘We need a sort of reformation. I’ve often described the universities as the atheist church. It’s not going to reform itself from within. The reformation will come from without.’ In the past few days it has become clear what this reform looks like when it comes from within. Though it has a $1.

Camille Paglia has joined the ever-growing list of women in the metaphorical stocks being pelted with accusations of transphobia. A number of blue-fringed students at her university are demanding she be fired for her statements criticizing some women who bring charges of sexual assault, and because of her comments about transgender people. ‘I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows’, she said in 2017. Why are they bringing this up now, you may ask? Why ever not? I am still hounded and bullied by the cabal for a comment piece I wrote in 2004.

Undergraduates at Georgetown University have voted to pay reparations to descendants of slaves the school once owned. Meanwhile, Democratic candidates for the 2020 US presidential nomination unanimously support creating a commission to study slavery’s impact on African Americans, with a reparations program as a possible outcome. These are the latest victories of an international movement for reparations which, despite its flawed and misguided justifications, continues to grow. Reparations means compensation from Western European and American governments for the systems of African chattel slavery once practiced throughout the Americas. Campaigners also cite post-slavery racial injustices against ‘Afro-descendants’, and the colonization and genocide of Amerindian peoples.

‘Patriots in Action!’, Turning Point USA tweeted on Thursday, above a picture of their seven-strong student group at Fresno State University in California. The patriots are acting because last week a Fresno State professor named Daniel Cady interrupted their pro-Second Amendment campus protest by calling them ‘so, so pathetic’. ‘GOOGLE “Kalergi Plan”’ are the words on the giant beach ball held by one of Charlie Kirk’s magnificent seven, Nick Sciaroni. Kirk and TPUSA luminary Candace Owens are perhaps too busy palling around with the president to police their members’ behavior, but they might not want to associate their movement with the ‘Kalergi Plan’.

It’s cultural Marxism week at Spectator USA. The dialectic of Enlightenment, prodded by the Angel of History, has forced us to confront the false consciousness of late capitalism and to choose between Eros and Civilization, socialism and fascism. Yay! If that sounds like drivel, it’s because it is. The meaningless bits in the previous paragraph are meaningful phrases in the mad Marxist dreamland of laugh-a-minute lefties Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Theodore Adorno, and that other one that Adorno wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment with.