Lifted from the comments, here’s an interview with Professor Amy Wax. Topics touched on include academia’s practised unrealism, declining competence, and the seeming irrelevance of whether a thing is true:
You know, the word truth never appears in his op-ed… Usually, it was falsehoods that undermine trust, back in the good old days, and truth that supported trust. Now they’ve turned that completely on its head. Whether what I said is true or not seems completely irrelevant.
The discussion, at 24:45, of who gets to define extremism – and, very much related, The Party Of Shoplifting – is, I think, entertaining and rather on-the-money.
Update, via the comments:
The complaints against Professor Wax were compiled, with some enthusiasm, by the law school’s Dean, Theodore Ruger, who claims to have experienced “lasting trauma” after hearing Wax speak. This, remember, is a supposedly grown man. An intellectual.
Ruger’s improbable assertion echoed those of several students who would have us believe that Wax’s mere presence on campus is “physically and emotionally harming all of us.” And whose list of grievances included one student who resented the expectation that in order to win a debate, she “had to prove herself” – i.e., make a compelling argument – and another who was crushed by the suggestion that affirmative action policies can leave their supposed beneficiaries academically unprepared.
At which point, the word irony springs to mind.
This, then, is the standard at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. Where tuition is a mere $76,000 a year.
So far as I can see, Professor Wax’s heretical comments – whether on the statistical benefits of bourgeois values, or on cultures of dysfunction, or on “equity” versus competence, or on her own students’ performance disparities and drop-out rates – have yet to be refuted by those trembling with indignation. They have, however, been denounced as “hate speech,” “racist,” “segregationist,” “white supremacy,” etc.
Apparently, among our betters, it is now scandalous to suggest that a way to minimise the risk of poverty and imprisonment is to be diligent and hardworking, charitable and civic minded, and to “eschew substance abuse and crime.”
Again, $76,000 a year.
At which point, it’s perhaps worth repeating this, from an earlier post on those supposedly traumatised by Professor Wax and the fact that she exists:
Hence the bizarrely narrow range of permissible opinions, the unmentionable statistics, and the zeal with which transgressions are punished.
Update 2:
In the comments, ccscientist adds,
And the result is very often disaffection and resentment, which is eagerly redirected, not least by many of Wax’s critics, towards “whiteness,” or “white supremacy,” or “structural racism,” or some other self-flattering conspiracy theory. The resentment may be misdirected, or entirely unearned, but it is exploitable.
It’s also worth remembering that Wax’s comments about performance disparities and drop-out rates among her own students were prompted by Glenn Loury, who had noted, correctly, that such disparities must necessarily result from racial favouritism and wildly varying standards in admissions. A point he explains more fully in the short, and very much recommended, video embedded here.
Wax was essentially confirming Loury’s own reasoning, and stating clearly what Loury had cautiously tip-toed towards. And yet she, unlike he, is demonised and punished for articulating a statistical necessity, an observable fact. As Wax puts it, common knowledge, albeit of a kind studiously ignored by those doing the punishing and puffing out their chests.
As Wax says in the video linked above,
And noticing the knot, the mental contortion, is very much forbidden.
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