In other academic news, it turns out that if you dare to punish students who use coercive mob tactics to threaten and intimidate non-leftist speakers and those who wish to hear them, then you are creating “an unsafe and threatening environment” for students who want to use threatening and coercive physical tactics. And also you’re racist, which rather goes without saying. Apparently, any hint of consequences for thuggish and censorious behaviour merely affirms “white supremacy” and will “suppress and criminalise” students whose own attempts to suppress veer towards the criminal. 

This, we’re told, is “unfair.”

The thinker of these deep thoughts, Charles H F Davis, a professor of education at the University of Southern California and the director of USC’s Race and Equity Centre, is aghast at the prospect of students being suspended if found to have repeatedly engaged in violence or disorderly conduct with the intention of suppressing debate. The professor also accuses Ben Shapiro, a speaker who’s been on the receiving end of student thuggery, of advancing “racist rhetoric,” while omitting any evidence to support this claim. We are, however, informed that this unspecified “hate speech” is “a form of violence itself.” To which, presumably, any actual violence – say, by leftist students exulting in mob force – is merely a form of payback. Physically coercive tactics are, says Professor Davis, employed only in desperation by “those… willing to labour in the name of justice” and whose “very minds, bodies and spirits” depend on these lively and vigorous forms of expression, which are “clearly a demand for greater racial equity and inclusion.”

Readers are invited to find justice in this short but somewhat instructive video here, filmed during Mr Shapiro’s visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in November last year, and in which a lone female journalist experiences first-hand the bottomless compassion of these brave student labourers.

Such is academia’s Clown Quarter, where the best and the brightest are nowhere to be seen.

Lifted from the comments, University of Pennsylvania teaching assistant Stephanie McKellop signals her wokeness to lesser beings: 

That’s this lady here. The one whose areas of expertise include “race, gender and the body,” “self-marriage” and, wait for it, “racial blame.” And who announces, rather proudly, “The classroom is the place YOU get to control the social setting.” A mixed blessing, I suspect. 

Update:

From the pages of Inside Higher Ed: 

Stephanie McKellop, a graduate teaching assistant in history, says she is under attack by fringe-right groups for using progressive stacking in her classes and then tweeting about it. Worse, she says, the university is cowing to such groups instead of supporting her. She’s claimed on social media that her classes were cancelled this week and she may be asked to leave her programme.

According to sociology professor Jesse Daniels, a supporter of Ms McKellop, the negative public response – which included a spectrum of students, educators and parents, of various hues and orientations – is “ripped from the playbook of the far right.” So if you object to overt racism in the classroom, racism framed as piety, then there’s something suspect about you, something marginal. Ms McKellop prefers to dismiss her critics as “white nationalists” and, inevitably, “Nazis.” Readers may wish to ponder how any students who object to this “progressive stacking” policy – i.e., blatant, self-satisfied racial discrimination – will also be designated, and subsequently treated.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a conservative student at a small, low-key meeting of College Republicans in a space you’ve booked in advance, in the campus library, when suddenly a crowd of indignant leftists force their way in and start shouting and behaving hysterically, and randomly calling you names, and who then blame you for the disruption that they themselves are causing.

Because, and I quote, “Your existence is a disturbance.”  

Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” voodoo’s encroachment on science and technology: 

Columbia’s vice provost for faculty diversity and inclusion regurgitates another classic of diversity boilerplate to justify this enormous waste of funds. “The reality is that you can’t really achieve excellence without diversity. It requires diverse thought to solve complex problems,” says vice provost Dennis Mitchell. Mitchell’s statement is ludicrous on multiple fronts. Aside from the fact that the one thing never sought in the academic diversity hustle is “diverse thought,” do Mitchell and his compatriots in the diversity industry believe that females and underrepresented minorities solve analytical problems differently from males, whites, and Asians? 

Somewhat related, this. It’s remarkable just how readily all of this “diversity” and wokeness boils down to a mental image of a teacher turning to one of his students and saying, “You, the brown boy. What’s the negro perspective on this engineering problem?”

See also this, added via the comments. 

Arthur Sakamoto on what happens when you challenge the racial assumptions entrenched in sociology departments: 

People are afraid to critique this paradigm [of “white privilege” and systemic racism] because it’s so ideologically popular. Privately, some people have told me that [by challenging it,] I’m, quote, “suicidal.” […] I’ll be frank with you — I’ve been submitting to the American Sociological Review on Asian Americans for the past 25 years and apparently there’s no data good enough to convince the reviewers that Asian Americans have reached parity with respect to white people. Every single one gets rejected. What happens is, when the paper doesn’t conform to the conventional wisdom [of “white privilege”], the methodological standards are raised. But if you argue that there is discrimination, then the methodological standards are relaxed. 

Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” pseudoscience: 

Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse in recent years as “implicit bias.” Embraced by a president, a would-be president, and the nation’s top law-enforcement official, the implicit-bias conceit has launched a movement to remove the concept of individual agency from the law and spawned a multi-million-dollar consulting industry. The statistical basis on which it rests is now crumbling, but don’t expect its influence to wane anytime soon… The need to plumb the unconscious to explain ongoing racial gaps arises for one reason: it is taboo in universities and mainstream society to acknowledge inter-group differences in interests, abilities, cultural values, or family structure that might produce socioeconomic disparities.

Needless to say, the Implicit Association Test, while very much in fashion, is wildly inconsistent in its results and utterly fails to predict actual behaviour, the latter a detail belatedly and reluctantly admitted by the originators of the conceit, whose methodology – one might say cheating – is quite laughable.  

If the IAT were valid, a high implicit-bias score would predict discriminatory behaviour, as [test creators Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji] asserted from the start. It turns out, however, that IAT scores have almost no connection to what ludicrously counts as “discriminatory behaviour” in IAT research — trivial nuances of body language during a mock interview in a college psychology laboratory, say, or a hypothetical choice to donate to children in Colombian, rather than South African, slums.

When the peddlers of a test, an alleged curative for unconscious racism, count practically any kind of behaviour, including the random positioning of a chair, as proof of “discrimination” and unjust inclinations, alarm bells should ring, quite loudly. This is the realm of “diversity” Scientology, and the kinds of leverage in play may well attract people whose own motives are not entirely benign.

And then of course there’s this:

Greenwald and his co-authors had counted opposite behaviours as validating the IAT. If test subjects scored high on implicit bias via the IAT but demonstrated better behaviour toward out-group members (such as blacks) than toward in-group members, that was a validation of the IAT on the theory that the subjects were overcompensating for their implicit bias. But studies that found a correlation between a high implicit-bias score and discriminatory behaviour toward out-group members also validated the IAT. In other words: heads, I win; tails, I win.

Do read the whole thing. It’s quite long, but there’s lots to chew on.

Very much related, Jordan Peterson here. From this longer video. 

Via Herb Deutsch.