Reheated (136)

Having, as she does, a degree in gender studies, Ms Myers is vexed by many things. Such as being asked, kindly, while pregnant, whether she was expecting a boy or a girl. This, we’re informed, is not “a simple question with a simple answer.”

Says she, “My partner Brent and I had found out our child’s sex chromosomes in the early stages of my pregnancy, and we had seen their genitals during the anatomy scan. But we didn’t think that information told us anything about our kid’s gender.”

No, of course. No clues there. No information at all, in fact. Just random noise.

Needless to say, Ms Myers’ website and Twitter feed are an endless churn of unconvincing smiles and rather desperate progressive signalling. We learn, for instance, that “Knowing the sex of a baby… does not tell us anything about the child’s… attitudes toward climate change.”

We also learn that Ms Myers’ “environment” – by which I assume she means her home, social circle, academic workplace, and the leftist lifestyle-hustling circuit – is, “like yours, a patriarchy.” She just knows this, you see, by some paranormal means, and no evidence is forthcoming. Indeed, it seems there’s no expectation that evidence might be appropriate, for this and many other things.

Our author’s male partner, Brent, whose views aren’t deemed worthy of sharing, presumably agrees. If he knows what’s good for him.

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.

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.

But if a person’s worldview and piety, and social standing, are based on a series of fairly obvious lies, they will tend to be touchy. This can, of course, be extrapolated to describe an institution, many institutions, an entire elite culture. Hence the bizarrely narrow range of permissible opinions, the unmentionable statistics, and the zeal with which transgressions are punished.

It occurs to me that if an overweight educator, or would-be educator, presents her own fatness as a kind of moral elevation, a political piety arrived at via victimhood, and then demands oversized desks, plus-sized seats without arms, modified lifts, modified bathrooms, modified auditoria, “and more” – and does all this while sidestepping responsibility for her own rotundity – then students would do well to question the motives and credibility of such a person.

And when a teacher or grad student fails to convince a class and promptly blames that failure on some alleged-but-undemonstrated sexism or “weight stigma,” as if that were both obvious and the only conceivable explanation, this is not necessarily proof of injustice or unrecognised talent.

Likewise, when a grad student insists that the self-serving claims of self-defined victims, including her own, should not be questioned or verified, then this isn’t an obvious basis for respect or academic gravitas. Yet, says Ms Reidinger, “I tell students it isn’t the job of the marginalised to prove their marginalisation and that we must take the words of those who suffer discrimination as true and legitimate.”

In short, don’t question me.

This, we’re told, constitutes “critical thought.”

The seminar, since you ask, is the work of Cresa Pugh, a woman who lives in Brooklyn, obviously, and who boasts of “decolonising” and “interrogating” many things, while arriving at entirely predictable conclusions.

You see, being a grubby, antisocial prick and stealing from a library or grocery store is giving it to the man, man. An exercise in “radical ethics” and the “aesthetics of theft.”

At which point, readers are invited to imagine Dr Pugh being robbed in broad daylight – a bag-snatching or phone-snatching or possibly a mugging – and her subsequent search for some aesthetic in the experience.