Spectator Life

Graduation season is almost upon us and since not a single high school had the foresight to ask me to give their commencement address (probably because I dropped out of college in my first semester), I thought I’d share the speech the Class of 2019 really needs to hear... Hello graduates. I’ll keep it brief because I know your attention spans have been decimated by social media; I realize I’m not a meme or a gif and I’ve got approximately four seconds to grab your attention, so here goes. Don’t go to college. It’s a scam. Before you or your well-meaning ‘tiger parents’ who buy into the prevailing wisdom that a college degree is necessary to be successful in life take to Twitter to rile up a mob and ruin my life — hear me out.

Sarah Lawrence College claims that its mission is to graduate students who are, ‘diverse in every definition of the word.’ Unfortunately, recent events which have been in the national eye, suggest otherwise. And this story involves me. Seizing on an op-ed I wrote for The New York Times a few months ago, in which I questioned the lack of ideological balance of the school’s extracurricular programming, a group of student protesters calling themselves the Diaspora Coalition labeled me a racist misogynist. They demanded that my ‘position at the College be put up to tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of color.

We knew Felicity Huffman from Desperate Housewives, but we didn’t know how desperate a mother she was until now. Huffman and Lori Loughlin of Full House are the two celebrities caught in the Operation Varsity Blues dragnet, along with 31 other individuals who paid as much as $500,000 per dimwit child to one William ‘Rick’ Singer, all so their pampered, ignorant, SAT-flunking little darlings could get into ‘good’ schools where they could snort Xanax, butt-chug ketamine, and slob around in sweatpants and flip-flops like inmates in a mental hospital — just like their more intelligent peers, apart from the Asians, who actually study and are America’s last chance. Let us count the ways in which college admissions are corrupt.

Universities are not the calmest of places just now, what with fights over free speech and the endless claims of harassment and intimidation. Add in the crippling debts from a college education, and many students might be wondering why they bothered at all. But never mind the on-campus animosity and rivalries, a university education ultimately has a beneficial effect on those who go through it – and not just in a financial sense. It make us more trusting and optimistic about the intentions of other people. That is the clear conclusion of the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey on Community and Society, which I co-authored. The survey asked graduates aged 24 and over three questions about interpersonal relations.

Of all the slightly dubious documents Michael Cohen supplied with his opening statement today, one stood out to Cockburn: the threatening letters the lawyer had sent to Trump’s old schools and colleges. Cohen sent legal missives to Fordham University and the University of Pennsylvania, warning there would be dire consequences if they were to release Trump’s academic records. ‘The release or disclosure [of academic records] in any form...is expressly prohibited by law, with any violation thereof exposing the subject educational institution to both criminal and civil liability...The criminality will result in jail time,’ the lawyer wrote to Fordham. Cockburn couldn’t help but wonder: why bother?

While so much of higher-education in the United States is dominated by politically active and overwhelmingly liberal college administrators – the ever growing professional class of administrators who call the shots outside the classroom – it turns out that that not every college looks like those in New England which has a 25:1 ratio of liberal to conservative administrators. As warnings about the diminution of viewpoint diversity become louder, understanding where and why there are some schools that are not completely progressive in orientation should be better understood and one explanation for this is geography: America’s institutions of higher education are deeply embedded in and influenced by the local communities where they are spatially situated.

Three female students are suing Yale and several campus fraternities for ‘alleged gender discrimination and for fostering a sexually hostile environment,’ reports the Yale Daily News. The lawsuit fits into a broader, national conversation happening on college campuses around the country about the role of fraternities, sororities, and any on-campus organization that discriminates on the basis of sex. Increasingly, campus activists — and, in the case of Harvard, sometimes college administrators — are calling for single-sex institutions to be forcibly integrated. I’m biased on this issue, but so are the plaintiffs, whether they recognize it or not.

Two local entrepreneurs are applying to open a weed shop next to the supermarket and just around the corner from our family neighborhood in Cambridge, Mass. So I went to the community meeting at the local VFA. The meeting was at four in the afternoon, when most of the parents were at work or on the school run. Hardly anyone turned up. The entrepreneurs were highly entrepreneurial, friendly, and professional. They stacked the room with their old friends, all firm advocates for the healing virtues of getting totally toasted, day in, day out. They came with a slide show, and promises to create jobs for the local community, including LGBTQ people and reformed convicts.

The pattern has become familiar: A group of intellectually curious, usually conservative, students invite a speaker to their campus. There is pushback, sometimes from other students, sometimes from alumni, sometimes from the faculty, and sometimes from a combination of the three. The administration then makes the wrongheaded decision to cancel the speech. Last week, Grand Canyon University released a statement explaining their decision to cancel a Ben Shapiro speech that was scheduled to take place on campus. It wasn’t the first time Shapiro had been uninvited from a campus, and unfortunately, I’m absolutely confident it won’t be the last.

‘There is a place in academe for scholarship that responsibly weighs the benefits and costs to children of sex with adults,’ says Lisa Ruddick, professor of English at the University of Chicago. Yes, you did read that right. A professor at one of the US’s top universities identifies ‘benefits’ for children in having sex with adults. She also thinks that ‘academe’, which is French for people like her, is the place to do it. Ruddick was prompted to these lofty reflections by a 2005 article in the journal ELH: English Literary History by Kevin Ohi. Kevin Ohi is now a professor at Boston College, specializing in ‘queer theory, aestheticism and decadence.

The students of Covington High School, Ky., were the subject of a recent viral video which shocked me to my very core. Everything about this encounter triggered me. Their obvious disrespect of a proud Native American as he bravely made his way towards this group of vile, contemptuous MAGA hat-wearing teenage boys, banging his Ceremonial Drum of Peace and chanting a mystical tribal incantation (presumably in order to ward off the sickening Aura of Trumpism) disturbed me so greatly that I actually did a small vomiting. The final straw came when the courageous Native American Vietnam veteran came to a stop and peacefully hammered on his drum directly into a young boy’s disgustingly smug face. What did this hateful Apostle of Trump do?

The Native American man with the drum who – now so infamously – approached a group of high schoolers from Covington, Ky., on Friday has been widely identified as a Vietnam veteran. But he isn’t one. The man is called Nathan Phillips, and he identifies with the American Indian Movement, an extremist separatist organization tied to at least one murder. He was singing their song when he approached the kids. He told the Washington Post that he was ‘blocked’ by the students, though later video evidence suggests that that was an exaggeration, to put it mildly. Phillips remains adamant that the boys should be punished for what they did to him, and has refused to meet with them.

A little row at Ohio State University, which Cockburn would like to document, if he may. Victor Espinosa, a lecturer in sociology at Ohio State University, has been telling students that they are forbidden from using the term ‘illegal immigrant’ to describe immigrants who did not enter the country through the legal method. Because – drum roll – it is offensive. Mr Espinosa has written to at least one student telling them they ‘will not be allowed to use the term illegal to refer to an unauthorized immigrant’ because it ‘dehumanizes, marginalizes and racializes the people it seeks to describe.

The British government’s new white paper on immigration has been shaped by a social norm which argues that the white British ethnic majority’s interest in limiting the pace of cultural change and facilitating assimilation is racist. The emphasis on skills rather than numbers, on economic over cultural considerations, and on rebalancing immigration away from Europe speaks to this. The document reflects the thinking of both Brexit and Remain politicians. Yet it does not align with the motives of many who voted Leave, or a considerable chunk of those who voted Remain. These voters seek lower levels of immigration, and research shows that this is driven more by identity threat than by economic considerations.

It’s well known that the question of who can speak and on what topics has become a flashpoint for controversy on our nation’s college and university campuses. I experienced intimidation firsthand after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times in which I questioned some of seemingly liberal, lopsided programming at Sarah Lawrence College (one of the most proudly progressive schools, where I am a tenured professor). I suggested that more balance was needed given our polarized times and reiterated my concerns about collegiate ideological echo chambers. Within hours, my office door and surrounding corridor was vandalized. Pictures of my family were taken and bumper stickers that I had placed on the door to create a welcoming environment for students were stripped off.

In nearly every state, the legislature is nervous about the public universities it finances. And fair enough. Apart from sports, the state colleges in America tend to make the national news only when protests break out, and protests tend to be driven by a radicalism that reveals the school protesters are far to the left of the legislatures of even the more liberal states. Such national news embarrasses the legislators, who send querulous letters to the school officials, with distant threats of cutting state funding. Which tempts those officials to surrender preemptively to activists, in the hope of avoiding protests. Conservatives in America typically blame the radicalism of college administrators for, say, the academic banning of conservative speakers on campus.

‘Don’t quote me on this,’ the professor says. ‘Let’s just say Kavanaugh is not going to be the last professor who’s not going to be teaching at Harvard. And several of them are tenured, and they’re going to have to leave.’ The professor teaches at a top university in the Northeast. We’re talking hours after Brett Kavanaugh’s withdrawal from teaching a course on the history of the Supreme Court at Harvard next January. That would have been the tenth time that Kavanaugh had taught that course. Now, however, he has become part of the Supreme Court’s history, and not in the way that he wanted.

‘Kavanaugh’s Drinking Should Be Investigated,’ says the headline on Slate, a reference to the admission by Mark Judge, a schoolfriend of Brett Kavanaugh’s, that he sometimes got ‘black out’ drunk. This prompted a wit on Twitter to remark: ‘Guys, I think conservatives won the culture wars.’ https://twitter.com/the_pike_man/status/1044763862174715904 Reading that brought me up short. I’m a social liberal and an economic conservative, and have always told myself that people like me have won: liberals won the culture war and conservatives won the economic war, at least in the US and the UK. But what if it’s the other way round? Let’s start with the culture war. If liberals won, how do you explain the following?

What’s gone wrong with the American university? Everything, really: politicised teachers — agit profs, we might call them — inciting know-nothing students; pusillanimous presidents cringing before mobs of ‘activists’; teaching standards hollowed out, with classes taught by grad students and adjuncts; the ‘mission’ turned from teaching something useful to Social Justice, the healing of a universe sullied by white capitalism, and the endless milking of alumni for donations; and all of it at a cost that’s been rising ahead of inflation every year since 1980, while teaching standards and the value of a degree have been steadily dropping. Take Yale University, for instance.

According to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, America’s universities have succumbed to ‘safetyism’, whereby students are protected from anything that might cause them anxiety or discomfort. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, published this week, they attribute the spread of ‘trigger warnings’, ‘safe spaces’ and ‘bias hotlines’ on campus to a misplaced concern about the psychological fragility of students. In their view, millennials aren’t ‘snowflakes’, but imagine themselves to be on account of having been surrounded by over-protective parents and teachers.

Everyone knows the real reason people like Donald Trump are sceptical of climate change is that conservatives are fundamentally anti-science. Some doubt science because it conflicts with their religious beliefs; others because its implications might mean radically shifting the global economy in an anti-growth or heavily statist direction, which goes against their free-market ideology; others because, being conservative, they are prisoners of their dogmatism, need closure and fear uncertainty. I hear this all the time from lefties on social media. And there seems to be some evidence to support it.

Britain seems to be following America down a dangerous path. There’s your politician David Lammy accusing Oxford and Cambridge of racial bias — and refusing to listen when they point out they simply accept whoever gets top grades. Then there’s the author Lionel Shriver, pilloried because she dared to suggest (in this magazine) that privileging identity quotas over talent might be a mistake. It seems the UK is succumbing to the same madness over diversity and quotas that has plagued the US for half a century. The hope is that quotas lead to a fairer, more tolerant society, but the reality is very different. American institutions have enshrined diversity and inclusion as their guiding principles.

Possess the wrong firearm after dark just one block west of Vermont Avenue, and the Los Angeles Police Department will have you pinned to the ground before you can say, “I can’t breathe.” Serially molest hundreds of your patients from your perch as the sole full-time gynaecologist at the University of Southern California Engemann Student Health Center, and it appears the bureaucrats and billionaires who run the school will protect you for years.By now the story has broken into national news, namely that Dr.

Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s Evangelical Christian finishing school, gathers three times a week for “convocation”, a worship service with guest speakers from all backgrounds. Attendance is mandatory, but students say the man delivering today’s sermon would have filled the 8,000-capacity venue regardless. Because today, the Ben Shapiro show has come to Liberty. A lot of people don’t like Shapiro. His critics on the right dislike him even more than his critics on the left - “the alt-right think I’m a cuck Jew,” he tells his podcast audience. A touch of jealousy there, perhaps – Shapiro may be a bit soft for many of his rivals on the internet. What really hurts, however, is that he’s a bigger deal than all of them now. And his fans worship him.

Across the street at the Museum of Fine Arts, there is an extraordinary collection of Georgian furniture and paintings from Boston just before the revolution. It all seems a lot more sumptuous than the sort of thing that would have been found in a contemporary English town of 15,000. The colonials were, of course, more lightly taxed than the British, yet they rebelled. Might it have been to do with sovereignty and ‘taking back control’? I suppose it worked out for them. Still, when I asked my study group at Harvard’s Kennedy School whether Brexit was a good idea, not a single hand went up.

Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76. Here, Kate Chisholm describes listening to the Cambridge professor deliver the 2016 Reith Lectures: You don’t expect to be brought close to tears by the Reith Lectures, which are after all at the most extreme end of Radio 4’s commitment to ‘educating’ its audience. Yet when Stephen Hawking delivered this year’s talks at the Royal Institution in London (in front of a lucky audience of listeners and scientists) there was both much laughter and a heightened sense of emotion.