Further to this sorry episode, Seth Barron on the rise of the Mao-lings (and their enablers-turned-victims): 

Videos from Evergreen State College show mobs of students —mostly but not only black— haranguing their professors and accusing them of racist abuse. The college president, George Bridges, is heckled, insulted, mocked, and ordered to stand with his arms firmly at his sides because his gestures are considered threatening to the students, who have invaded his office and refused to leave. Bridges complies meekly with all demands, including buying gumbo for his captors.

It’s tempting… to view the outrage at Evergreen (and Middlebury, and Berkeley, and Claremont McKenna, ad nauseam) as an American recurrence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when students were encouraged by the ruling class to torment any teachers suspected of reactionary deviance. But the modern college campus is staffed and led by progressives, who have created the conditions for, and invited, students’ PC tantrums. In Marx’s classic formulation, history is repeating itself, but as farce…

In the Evergreen videos, we see Bridges [an advocate of “critical race theory,”] struggling to be as passive and compliant as possible with the crowd of angry students occupying his office. When he is yelled at for saying “Please,” he apologises. When he admits to having a claustrophobia-induced panic attack, he is derided and told to “get to work” transcribing the mob’s demands. Bridges could have called the campus police at any time to end the illegal occupation of his office and his imprisonment, but he ordered them to stand down — presumably because, according to his own academic doctrine, police intervention is necessarily fascist and racist.

See also this display of prostration. Because the intimidation of staff and the screeching of racist epithets must be rewarded, at least in academia, as “exemplary leadership in enhancing race relations.” 

Peter Wood on the adolescent vanities of campus administrators

[Middlebury president, Laurie] Patton the other presidents who stand by and do nothing are not just appeasers of the student mobs; they are diffident admirers. They dare not say outright that the raw authenticity of black students tearing the place up with the connivance of white “allies” gladdens their progressive hearts. They know the alumni wouldn’t like that. But these presidents will do all in their considerable power to protect their cohort of mischievous social justice warriors. Those mobs threatening conservative speakers and insufficiently enthusiastic progressive professors are a badge of honour for the college presidents whose greatest fear is that they will be left out of the Great Historical Moment.

And Phil Magness on the Children of Marcuse and their selective intolerance

The underlying argument — that certain ideas are too “dangerous” to be tolerated on campus, thereby making them “exempt” from the principles of free speech and academic freedom alike — is an increasingly common one among campus radicals. Following recent events at Berkeley, the editor of a student paper ran an entire series of political editorials in this vein espousing the use of violence to shut down controversial speakers and ideas. The logic of this claim is symptomatic of a frenzied paranoia afflicting the illiberal campus left. It is also deeply ingrained in the pseudo-scholarly fever swamp of Critical Theory… [However,] if one admits the principle that academia is obliged to deny a platform to specific ideas on account of their demonstrated propensity to do harmful and horrendous things, then one must necessarily exclude Marxists from that platform on account of Marxism’s track record of murder and devastation, which is empirically unparalleled in all of human history.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.




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