Spectator Life

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 Despite this, Harvard has withdrawn its offer and rebuffed Kashuv’s attempt to appeal the decision in person.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.

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.