Spectator Life

I have always admired the tag corruptio optima pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst. Take the Ivy League. These super-rich, super-prestigious institutions are so wealthy and so beguiling because, once upon a time, they represented and — more to the point — successfully transmitted to their students the prime civilizational values of our culture. We’re told, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, that the light we see from distant stars is very old and, in some cases, is light from stars that were long ago extinguished. It is same with the Ivy League and their near competitors. Today, they are utterly bankrupt — not financially, of course. No, in a good old greedy capitalist sense, they are filthy, stinking rich.

Last July 17, my daughter, Solveig Gold, married (then) Princeton professor Joshua Katz. It was a glorious, indeed transcendent (as one friend put it) celebration of the glory of God and the power of love — attended by a large gathering of the canceled, the not-yet-canceled and a lucky few who are seemingly uncancellable. Last month, as the world now knows, he was fired. If you haven’t yet read Solveig’s piece in Bari Weiss’s Substack, put mine aside and read hers first. It is beautiful and inspiring. Mine, by contrast, is merely mad as hell. In July 2020, Joshua published a piece in Quillette taking vigorous exception to the now infamous July 4 “Princeton faculty letter.

Princeton University’s Board of Trustees voted to fire tenured classics professor Joshua Katz on Monday — and the reason why has Cockburn adjusting his monocle to look a bit closer at the circumstances. Katz first came under scrutiny in 2018 for a consensual sexual relationship he had with a student at least a decade prior. At the time, he was suspended from his job for a year without pay. Then, new allegations arose that Katz had not been fully honest nor had fully cooperated with the previous investigation. Much to the chagrin of any frat guy looking to him for advice on how to score, Princeton gave him the boot.

Monsters, of course, come in a variety of shapes and forms, but they have some deep commonalities. Among these are a voracious appetite, an affinity for darkness, and a talent for evasion. They are hard to kill and very dangerous, especially to the innocent and the naive. Often they inspire a perverse kind of worship. I have been thinking about monsters as I contemplate the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mandates that have swept through the nation’s schools, colleges, and businesses, and nearly every other institution of note. The National Archives has a “Diversity and Inclusion Program.” So does Major League Baseball. So does the American Public Gardens Association. One is hard put to find a significant public body that is not committed to DEI.

Over the last month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis and his like-minded legislature have escalated a feud with the Walt Disney Company. Last week, the state stripped Disney of its unique land privileges and tax advantages. What began over a contested Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law has grown into a cautionary tale in corporate woke. The law prohibits sexual orientation and gender identity lessons in kindergarten through third grade and — this feature has been far less publicized — forbids school personnel from concealing “healthcare services” for older kids from their parents. Dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by media partisans, the law has become a parents' rights lightning rod.

A new poll found that Americans overwhelmingly support the language of the Parental Rights in Education bill signed into law by Florida governor Ron DeSantis this week. Celebrities at the Oscars on Sunday night shrieked about the alleged attack on LGBT rights and Disney executives were caught on tape promising to create more queer content for children in response to the so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill. A poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies indicates that these woke institutions are wholly out of step with the concerns of normal Americans. When registered voters were shown the actual language of the bill, which prohibits age or developmentally inappropriate sexual education in pre-K through third grade, they supported it by more than a two-to-one margin.

The alphabet people screamed in bloodcurdling unison Monday as Florida governor Ron DeSantis coolly signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill. Dubbed, in lockstep, by activists and the mainstream media the "Don’t Say Gay" bill, the words "gay," "homosexual" or anything similar don’t appear anywhere in the six-page law. Quite clearly, the law states that "a school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." A few things to note here: "primary grade levels" are defined in Florida as age three to grade three.

Roland G. Fryer is a tenured professor of economics at Harvard — an anointed member of the elite by most definitions. He is also black, widely published and the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur “genius” grant for his work on the black “achievement gap” in grade school. Fryer was a student of Nobel laureate Gary Becker and a close associate of other economists who focus on rigorous analysis of empirical data. That's led him to observations that were a bit unsettling to higher education orthodoxies. For example, Fryer found that the academic achievement gap accelerates between kindergarten and eighth grade. He also found that controlling for a few variables, the initial disparity disappeared.

Surveying the effect of British education on families, G.K. Chesterton wryly observed in his 1910 book What’s Wrong with the World: “The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.” Little more than a decade later, the compulsory public education movement was to pick up steam across the United States, often presented as a necessity for the protection and wellbeing of American children. History, Mark Twain might say, is rhyming.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten has had a busy two years. Keeping students out of schools, helping teachers fight for permanent, paid truancy, watching her liberal columnist friends write slobbering, glowing profiles of her in the New York Times — these are things that can really take it out of a woman. So, Cockburn has absolutely no patience for the right-wing internet trolls (or Russian bots, possibly?) who had a good laugh at Ms. Weingarten’s expense this week after she had a small spelling error on Twitter. “We #StandWithUkriane,” Weingarten wrote on Wednesday in a since-deleted post. Big deal, says Cockburn. She was only one letter off, which is almost as good as spelling “Ukraine” correctly. Ms.

In 2014, Sandra Y.L. Korn, a Harvard undergraduate, published a column in the Harvard Crimson, in which she denounced “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom.” Korn’s preferred alternative was what she called “academic justice.” Under this doctrine, a university would drop the silly pretense of letting proponents of dumb, bigoted or politically naive ideas have their say. Instead, Korn asked, “If our university community opposes racism, sexism and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom?’” Korn’s screed provoked a lot of attention.

The president of the University of North Texas, Neal Smatresk, said in a campus-wide email Tuesday that students who oppose medical transitions for children suffering from gender dysphoria hold "intolerant views". Smatresk's email was sent to the campus community in response to an event hosted by the Young Conservatives of Texas with Texas House candidate Jeff Younger, who has proposed banning surgical and medical interventions for children who claim to be transgender. "I know the last several days may have felt particularly difficult for the transgender members of our community, due to the intolerant views of a handful of campus members," Smatresk wrote.

In January, the Department of Justice dropped charges against Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen, a mechanical engineer accused of concealing illicit ties to the Chinese government early last year. United States Attorney Rachael Rollins said regarding the decision, “After a careful assessment of this new information in the context of all the evidence, our office has concluded that we can no longer meet our burden of proof at trial... Today’s dismissal is a result of that process and is in the interests of justice.” In a vacuum, this story may not be all that noteworthy — prosecutors drop charges all the time for a variety of reasons.

In January, the American Association for the Advancement of Science released its 2021 annual report on diversity equity and inclusion, Nurturing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Scientific Enterprise. The message? Those who are non-white, non-male, non-straight, etc., are apparently being barred from exploring science’s “endless frontier.” Such a thing could only come about if the sciences were governed by a kind of Jim Crow. For the good of science, this needs urgent correction. The AAAS will point the way. The claim seems odd.

Georgetown University, my alma mater, informed alumni this week that they will require Covid-19 vaccines and booster shots for attendees of the upcoming reunion celebration for the classes of 1970, 1971, 2015 and 2016. I sent the following letter to the Office of Alumni Relations to share my outrage at this policy, which I've reprinted below: To whom it may concern, My name is Amber Athey and I am a graduate of the College, Class of 2016. I am writing to express my deep disappointment and concern that Georgetown will be requiring all attendees of its fifth and fiftieth reunion celebration to have received a Covid-19 vaccine and booster shot. It is unacceptable that the university will prevent unvaccinated and unboosted alumni from reuniting with their classmates.

While pundits bicker about whether bills targeting critical race theory in schools are ethical or constitutional, an equally important question is whether they’re effective. While such legislation is a workable stopgap to loathsome practices like affinity groups, it can only work as a temporary measure. CRT is manifested not primarily as a set of explicit ideas to be taught like the freezing point of water or the causes of World War Two. Rather, it’s a philosophy that informs the instruction, curriculum, and policies of various districts. We cannot outright ban CRT from our schools anymore than we can ban the influence of philosopher John Dewey. When the culprit is a belief system, bans are the wrong tool.

The first time President Trump was impeached by House Democrats was for his “high crime” of having a telephone conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. There were some other minor details — and Trump was acquitted on February 5, 2020. While the impeachment failed to deliver his removal from office, it did elevate a minor figure to the stature of hero among die-hard Trump haters: Alexander Vindman, who served on the National Security Council. Vindman had conjured the story that Trump’s phone call entailed an impeachable “abuse of power.” Vindman’s feverish dream excited others, but there was no substance to it. Heads of state have hard-ball conversations all the time.

Jordan Peterson has left his professorial post at the University of Toronto. He announced his departure with characteristic blunt honesty in Canada’s National Post. Peterson first came to my attention in 2016, as he did for many, for his refusal to bow to demands to use novel pronouns preferred by the transgendered. For this, he was denounced as a bigot, his university threatened his career, his speaking events were disrupted, all done under the cloak of civility: all transgender people wanted was respect, to be addressed as who they were. How dare Peterson be so uncivil? Lost in the shrieking winds that enveloped him was his basic point: it’s no longer civility when it's backed up by the force of law.

Public schools have had a rough few years. Since the start of the pandemic, parents have pulled more than one and a half million kids out of the public education system and turned elsewhere. Anecdotally, Catholic and other private schools in our area have wait-lists miles long now, filled with public school refugees. By some estimates, too, homeschooling rates doubled between spring and fall of 2020, and haven’t dropped significantly since. We were part of the public-school-to-homeschool exodus in early 2020 — and in our opinion, a lot of the public commentary attempting to explain the phenomenon misses the mark. Most theories focus almost exclusively on Covid lockdowns. There’s certainly a lot there to be angry about.

The Washington State Board of Health has convened an advisory group to examine the possibility of including Covid vaccines in the mandatory immunization schedule for children in public K-12 schools and daycares. Unsurprisingly, many parents and concerned citizens — both vaccinated and unvaccinated — are strongly opposed. Public interest converged on the issue ahead of a health board meeting held January 12, at which the immunization advisory group gave a preliminary briefing. Over 3,500 pages’ worth of comments from the public were posted on the Board’s website ahead of the meeting. The letters provided valuable insight into common opinion on mandatory Covid shots for children.