CNN's aptly titled "Offbeat News" section carried the following item Friday: "Scientist Burns Penis With Hot Laptop". This would be, among other things, an argument against blogging in the nude.

John Reed has published an anti-capitalist parody of George Orwell's classic, Animal Farm. Entitled Snowball's Chance, the book was inspired by the events of 9/11:

Mr. Reed said he was watching the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on television in his East Village apartment on Sept. 11 when the idea came to him to rewrite the Orwell classic. "I thought, `Why would they do this to us?' " he remembered. "The twin towers attack showed us that something is wrong with our system, too."

He decided, he said, that the world had a new form of evil to deal with, and it was not communism. It was the evil, he said, within American corporate capitalism itself, and American arrogance in protecting its interests in the Middle East oil fields. To Mr. Reed, "Animal Farm" was the ultimate expression of pro-capitalist ideology. "It has inoculated generations of schoolchildren against the evils of communism," Mr. Reed said.

Mr. Reed says he is definitely one of those in the anti-Orwell camp. "I really wanted to explode that book," he said of "Animal Farm." "I wanted to completely undermine it."

The Orwell estate is not happy about this:

William Hamilton, the British literary executor of the Orwell estate, objected to the parody in an e-mail message to the James T. Sherry, the publisher of Roof Books, saying, "The contemporary setting can only trivialize the tragedy of Orwell's mid-20th-century vision of totalitarianism."

"The clear references to 9/11 in the apocalyptic ending can only bring Orwell's name into disrepute in the U.S.," Mr. Hamilton wrote.

One hopes that when schools assign this book--and they will--they will at least have students read it alongside Orwell's original. It would be nice if they would assign some Friedrich Hayek, too, but that's probably too much to ask.

The bottom line on Harvard law school's proposed speech code:

"What I do find amazing is that it should be considered at a law school, any law school, because one thing that law schools do is study the constitution and these codes are clearly in violation of the First Amendment," said Harvey Silverglate, a Harvard Law graduate and civil liberties litigator.

Silverglate is also co-founder and co-director of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), an organization that regularly--and successfully--challenges schools when they infringe on the civil liberties of students and faculty. Here he captures the exceptionally disturbing nature of the situation at Harvard. It's one thing when undergraduates demand rules and regulations that violate the First Amendment--such demands are usually motivated by ignorance, and are tempered proportionally by education. But it's another thing entirely when law students at one of the nation's most elite law schools demand unconstitutional policies. It says they neither understand that law nor respect it; it says they are in the business of rationalizing ill-conceived agendas rather than mastering the rationale embodied within the U.S. Constitution; it raises serious questions about the quality of legal education in this country, and it bodes poorly indeed for the future of civil liberties in the U.S.

UPDATE: John Rosenberg notes that law schools have long been in the business of helping the courts make constitutional law regarding race by losing illegitimate cases.

In English schools, geography has been infected by PC; it is now a means of promoting an environmentalist agenda:

Pupils are leaving secondary school knowing "everything about pollution but nothing about rivers or mountains", say researchers from Canterbury University.

Their study found that geography lessons are dominated by "environmental values and attitudes" and do not provide pupils with enough information to form their own views. The new "greenwash" approach is being promoted by the Government, exam boards and geographical associations, the study claims.

One exam board, Edexcel, is accused of making a virtue out of providing fewer facts to pupils, boasting that its new GCSE syllabus "contains the same core geography [as before] but in less depth".

The study gives warning that the emphasis in the classroom has shifted from knowledge to "environmentalism, sustainability and cultural tolerance".

It concludes: "Replacing knowledge with values means that the subject has become less academic, less rigorous, less demanding and less interesting."

Crucial point: one of the selling points of the PC curriculum is that it is a dumbed-down curriculum. All politics aside, teaching "proper" attitudes toward minimal, selectively edited material is a lot easier than than either teaching a subject in its full complexity or teaching students to think for themselves (to the extent that such an oxymoronic concept is possible). A teacher does not have to be a good teacher to impart PC values toward slanted "facts." Nor does a student have to be a good student to earn high grades: the PC classroom is one organized around the idea that "learning" is equivalent to telling the teacher what he or she wants to hear; what the teacher wants, in turn, is to hear students regurgitate what has been fed to them. In such a classroom, no expertise is required. Neither is thought. In a world where teachers come increasingly from the lower ranks of college students and where are often not trained in the subjects they teach, the PC curriculum is a godsend of a very pragmatic, if tragic kind.

Worth a look: this Washington Times piece on "civic feminism".

The National Labor Relations Board has determined that graduate students at Penn are eligible to form a union. The Penn administration, like administrations at Brown, Tufts, and Columbia, will be appealing the decision, arguing that graduate students are primarily students, not employees, and contesting the coherence of the NLRB's decision. Here is Penn's official statement, issued yesterday:

This afternoon we received word that the National Labor Relations Board's Regional Director issued a Decision and Direction of Election finding that certain graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania are employees when they are teaching and research assistants at the University. The NLRB has directed an election to determine if a majority of these graduate students desire to be represented by a Union.

The complicated decision arbitrarily divides and discriminates among graduate students in determining who would be eligible to vote and who would not. For example, the decision includes some professional masters degree students in the proposed bargaining unit and excludes other comparable professional masters degree students. Even the regional director recognizes that there is no basis for the distinction drawn between PhD candidates in the natural sciences (excluded) and the social sciences (included). The regional director says that she is "compelled to follow the NYU case," even though she concedes that she would "otherwise agree with the University's contention that Natural Science RA's should be treated the same way as other RA's."

The decision makes no sense for graduate students at Penn. We hope that the students themselves, like their counterparts at Cornell, would come to the same conclusion.

We disagree with this decision and plan to appeal to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, as have Brown, Tufts and Columbia.

We will continue to keep you informed of future developments in this important matter.

I'm with the admins on this one. Yes, graduate students do the lion's share of teaching and grading on many university campuses; yes, they do an exceptional amount of lab work for research scientists. Yes, graduate students tend to have impoverishingly small stipends and inadequate benefits; yes, they deserve better. But the solution to the problem is not to unionize. The solution is to end the situation that currently enables graduate students to claim that they are employees of the university.

Grad students are not employees, though they are exploited sources of labor. The distinction is a fine one, but I think it is also foundational. Graduate students do not, for example, have to interview for their teaching positions; they are guaranteed a certain amount of teaching in their offer of admission, as part of their funding package. Graduate students need that teaching experience in order to be viable job candidates; learning to teach is part of their graduate education, and time spent in a classroom is essential to that process. Where universities break down is in failing to make graduate student teaching an adequately mentored, truly guided learning experience. Dumping grad students into undergraduate classrooms that the faculty would do just about anything not to be in--freshman writing, introductory language courses, and so on--sends a loud message that a) this is work no one wants to do; and b) graduate students are going to do that work because they can be forced to. It's not hard to imagine the alienation this causes, and it's easy to see how that alienation would crystallize as that of Marx's "alienated labor" (not least because so many grad students are steeped in Marxist theory).

But I still contend that even though this is an understandable response to an unpleasant, not to say abusive, situation, it is still a misguided one. The Penn administration has been right when it has argued that it is important for grad students to see themselves as members of the scholarly community, and that the oppositional relationship to the university that is embodied in the concept of the union will damage that. But they have erred--as have all other administrations who have opposed the move to unionize recently--in their response to the problem. Trying to block a union simply creates more antagonism in already alienated graduate students; more to the point, it does not address the problems to which the union effort is a response.

In its most elemental form, the problem is this: there are more students being taught at universities than the standing faculty are willing to teach. Graduate students bear the brunt of this unwillingness, picking up the slack for the faculty even as they are themselves the beneficiaries of the faculty's pedagogical neglect. Too often, grad students spend more time teaching than being taught; more specifically, they are too often expected to teach without the attentive guidance of experienced teachers. The rhetoric of apprenticeship is used to justify grad student teaching even as there is little or no attempt to make the experience live up to the language. That would, after all, involve extra work for the faculty. Which would defeat the purpose of putting so many grad students in so many unproctored classrooms.

Far from unionizing, which formalizes a wrongheaded institutional approach to graduate student teaching, the solution is to put the faculty back into the classroom (and the lab). At elite research universities like Penn, faculty have an absurdly light teaching load (usually two courses per semester, each of which meets two or at most three times per week), the idea being that the bulk of their time is dedicated to their research and their committee work. Much hot air is expended extolling the virtues of this pedagogical system, and loving attention is given to how teaching a 2/2 load is much more time-consuming than it looks. Be that as it may, the load is still too light, and the priorities are still wrong.

Increasing the standard teaching load for fulltime faculty to a 3/2 or even a 3/3 and hiring more faculty as needed will put more professors back in the classrooms where they should be, get more graduate students out of the classroom more of the time, allow more mentoring to happen for grad students when they do teach (perhaps by making it possible for them to team-teach with experienced teachers when they are starting out), allow grad students to feel more like students who are learning than like labor that is exploited, and send the strong message that teaching is indeed the primary project of university professors instead of an unpleasant afterthought.

I know it's a pipedream, but I'm going to dream it anyway. Even if this vision can't come true, just having it makes it more possible to see that graduate student unions are symptoms of a widespread problem in graduate education rather than the solution.

The Halloween fallout continues:

Hundreds of students at Union College are up in arms about a student who dressed as a pimp for Halloween. His costume consisted of blackface, an Afro, and a purple velvet coat. The student will appear before the school Conduct Board, and could face anything from a warning to suspension.

At Swarthmore, campus-wide consciousness-raising is taking place after a student donned blackface for Halloween. The student apologized publicly, explaining that he painted his face black on the spur of the moment, as a way of satirizing his less-than-stellar dancing abilities.

At the University of Mississippi, administrators are debating whether to reinstate Alpha Tau Omega after an offensive photograph was taken at last year's Halloween party. In the photo, one frat member dressed as a policeman held a gun to the head of another wearing blackface and a straw hat while kneeling and picking up cotton. Ole Miss has hired the Institute for Racial Reconciliation to perform a "cultural audit" of race relations on campus.

At Oklahoma State, Alpha Gamma Rho has agreed to disciplinary sanctions after two fraternity brothers came to a Halloween party dressed in offensive costumes: one wore KKK robes while the other wore blackface, overalls, and a bandanna with a Confederate flag print. In the photo that was taken of the two, a noose dangled above the head of the student in blackface.

And of course there are the cases at UT Knoxville and UVa. The UT students were dressed as the Jackson Five; the students at UVa were dressed as Venus and Serena Williams, and a black Uncle Sam. FIRE has put together a fascinating catalogue of past blackface cases as well as the relevant First Amendment law.

I catalogue the cases because I want to stress the highly stylized pattern that surrounds the wearing of blackface on college campuses. It's almost always fraternity brothers who do it; they almost always do it at Halloween; they always incur the righteous wrath of the campus; that wrath doesn't distinguish between dressing as tennis stars and dressing as Sambo; there is always some kind of discipline; often, in the process of doling out the discipline, administrators violate the offenders' constitutional rights; there is also always talk of institutionalized racism--the history of minstrelsy is always invoked, as are the less-than-optimal numbers of black students on the campus in question. To say that blackface episodes signify the presence of unreconstructed racism on campus is to miss the wider picture, which is that the donning of blackface is one scene in a complex campus-wide dramatization of the racial tension built into the multicultural agenda that presides over an increasing number of college campuses.

Fraternity members wear blackface not because they don't know that it will be seen as racist, but because they know it will. They are deliberately flouting campus convention with their costumes; I would argue that blackface says less about the racial awareness of its wearer than it does about his rejection of politically correct codes of conduct. The white male fraternity brother is the emblematic oppressor on campus today--he symbolizes all that the many speech codes, harassment policies, sensitivity workshops, and diversity requirements cluttering up his campus most revile. To use the phraseology of oppression theory, blackface as it is worn on campuses today might more rightly be understood as a form of resistance than a sign of neanderthalism. That doesn't make it right. But it might help explain it.

UPDATE: The Washington Times has more.

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has a fine NRO piece on why campus speech codes are a bad idea. It's worth a careful read.

The national office of the Kappa Alpha fraternity has lifted its suspension of UVa's chapter after determining that none of those who wore blackface to its Halloween party were members of the fraternity. Officials at UVa say this this does not "effect" [sic] their own "local investigation" however, and the campus chapter of Kappa Alpha remains suspended by the school. Though no Kappa Alpha members wore the offensive costumes, some argue that the fraternity is nonetheless responsible for them:

Okem Nwogu, vice chairman of the Black Fraternal Council, was critical of the lifted suspension, saying he felt the Kappa Alpha Order is still accountable for the offensive actions because they co-sponsored the party.

"Accountability has to be placed on Kappa Alpha and Zeta Psi because they controlled access to the party," Nwogu said. He described the acts as "blatantly ignorant," adding that both fraternities are "guilty by omission" for not controlling the content of their party.

Nwogu added that the costume of the individual dressed as a blackfaced Uncle Sam was particularly offensive because of the historical context of blackface.

"Blackface is a reference to minstrel shows, where white men dressed up as plantation slaves and imitated black musical and dance forms in a derogatory and paradoxical manner," Nwogu said. "That's a symbol of a time when black people were subjected to all different sorts of discrimination and racist practices. Black people weren't treated as equals."

The concept of "controlling the content of [the] party" is a telling one: in that choice of words, the reporter inadvertantly refutes the argument she is reporting by casting the entire gathering, not just individual costumes, as a form of expression. In effect, her words suggest that the "accountability" demanded by Nwogu is synonymous with censorship.

Tom Paulin has indicated that he is "receptive" to Harvard English's renewal of its retracted invitation to him to deliver the annual Morris Gray Lecture. A staff editorial in the Harvard Crimson argues both sides of the issue: that the department's reversal "sets a disturbing precendent [sic] of allowing speakers who promulgate hate speech and religiously based violence to address this campus under the Harvard imprimatur," and, in an addendum labelled "Dissent: A Principled Reconsideration," that "the English departmentís decision to re-extend its initial invitation to controversial poet Tom Paulin is a positive step toward maintaining a free and open exchange of ideas at Harvard," noting that "the invitationís prior rescinding, under administrative and student pressure, only contributed to a climate of institutional hostility to a particular side in this political debate over Israelóa thoroughly destructive force to the health of an academic community." It's a good give and take.

UT Knoxville may be finally laying last month's embarrassing blackface episode to rest, but that doesn't mean other schools don't want to experience it for themselves. The University of Virginia is the newest addition to the growing list of institutions where fraternity members have convulsed their campuses by wearing blackface to a costume party. The short story is that some members donned blackface to dress as Venus and Serena Williams and a black Uncle Sam for a Halloween party, while others wore "brownface" and still others wore costumes "mocking ethnicities" (the Washington Post is distressingly vague about what these costumes were). Pictures were taken and posted to a password-protected web site where visitors could order prints; they have now been removed.

So far, events are unfolding according to pattern. Zeta Psi and Kappa Alpha have been suspended by their national organizations pending investigation, and university officials have denounced the insensitivity of the costumes (in the words of Aaron Laushway, assistant dean of students and director of fraternity and sorority life, "I find such representations hardly fun Halloween costumes, but rather despicable displays of ignorance, intolerance and jocular folly"; in the words of Patricia Lampkin, vice president of student affairs, "This is not reflective of what the University stands for. Anything that makes any statement against another race is absolutely abhorrent.") Now it's time for UVa to show it knows more about free speech than the admins at UT Knoxville initially did; it's also time for the students at UVa to show they understand that the proper response here is not to demand speech codes, sensitivity training, forced apologies, and expulsion of the offending individuals, but to counter expression they deem insensitive with forceful expression of their own.

An editorial in UVa's Cavalier Daily today profiles FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and champions free speech on campus. So maybe there is hope.

UPDATE: John Rosenberg has more.

Critical Mass is proud to honor Berkeley rhetoric professor Daniel Boyarin with the coveted Gilmore Award. Boyarin earned this recognition for this comment in today's Daily Californian: "Barak is an evil man, he is a violent man, a racist and a liar." Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak spoke at Berkeley last night.

Harvard English has reissued its invitation to poet Tom Paulin. The Harvard Crimson notes that this reversal may have an interesting domino effect: in the wake of Harvard's cancellation of Paulin's lecture, the University of Vermont cancelled a Paulin appearance that would have taken place today.

Harvard English Chair Lawrence Buell said that a major factor in the department's unanimous decision to re-invite Paulin to speak was ìwidespread concern and regret for the fact that the decision not to hold the event could easily be seen, and indeed has been seenóboth within Harvard and beyondóas an unjustified breach of the principle of free speech within the academy.î The language is telling--if Buell's statement is accurate, this amounts to a confession that Harvard English is motivated less by the desire to promote open expression than by concern about what people think. There is no acknowledgement that the reason the disinvitation was seen as "an unjustified breach of the principle of free speech within the academy" is that it was one.

Quote of the day: "These are people with extraordinarily thin skins who want to be treated as adults but insist that Mommy, Daddy, and the dean come to their rescue instead of debating in the market of free ideas." --Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, commenting on the Black Law Students Association's demand for a speech code that would ban--and punish--offensive speech in the classroom.

The Boston Globe had the details yesterday morning; the quote above is from the Chronicle of Higher Education's coverage today (subscribers only, alas).

This is what I had to say about the Harvard situation when it was brewing last year:

These students are supposedly the creme de la creme. They represent the nation's finest college graduates, and will become some of the most influential and powerful lawyers, judges, and law professors in the land. And yet they can't hear the "n" word without decompensating. So mortally bludgeoned are they by one professor's completely legitimate, if awkwardly phrased, comment that "feminists, Marxists, and the blacks" have done nothing to advance tort law that they can't physically attend his lectures for fear of further psychic injury (in fact, critical race theorists and feminist legal theorists such as Catharine MacKinnon have completely screwed tort law by eroding the crucial distinction between words and acts). Another law prof upset students so much that he has simply been removed from the classroom. The administration has promised to hold faculty workshops on diversity this summer (Blue Eyed, anyone?), and may even bless Harvard with a racial harassment policy.

How will these fragile young legal souls handle the gritty reality of professional life after law school? Will they sue disrespectful clients for harassment? Will they demand "time-outs" in court when they get ruffled by opposing counsel or hostile witnesses? Will they show no commitment whatever to the laws they are bound to uphold, and devote themselves instead to banning, censoring, and sanctioning everything and everyone that give them a bit of a twinge? These are neither idle nor paranoid questions. We should all be asking them. We should all be watching the anti-intellectual, hystericizing effects of universities' "commitment to diversity." And we should be extolling the virtues of thick skin, reasoned debate, and a sense of social purpose that does not get its energy from our narcissistic need to feed and feed and feed our ever so pleasurable, profitable pain.

Today, Penn will release an update on last year's controversial Gender Equity Report. The update details the steps Penn has taken over the past year to ensure that the hiring process is as "equitable" as possible. Penn Provost Bob Barchi elaborated for the Daily Pennsylvanian:

Departmental accountability was among the many steps identified in the report. Barchi said he is working with deans to ensure that all searches for new faculty members comply with gender equity guidelines.

Although the University does not make hires based solely on any applicant's gender, Barchi said the University is striving to make gender equity a priority in all search processes.

"We want to make sure that every hire appropriately takes into consideration opportunities for women and that we provide every opportunity to make sure that we have gender equity in every one of our searches," Barchi said.

Specifically, Barchi said the composition of faculty search committees should reflect the number of women in the given field. He added that search committees should strive to compile an applicant pool that accurately mirrors the gender distribution in the respective field as well.

The update reveals that several problematic search processes have arisen in the last year.

"In several instances over the past year, deans have identified search processes that were not designed to promote gender equity sufficiently," the report states. "In those instances, the deans asked that the search process be corrected to assure the appropriate consideration of women candidates."

Barchi said that this type of hold-up in the search process would discourage departments from not seeking an appropriate composition of candidates.

In addition, the update details ways the University has created incentives for establishing gender equity. For example, the University established a new fund to support the recruitment and retention of women faculty.

Addressing "inequity" by engineering proportionality is bizarre enough in debates about college admissions. It's positively surreal in this context. The flawed logic is breathtaking:

1) Academe is not representative government. Its emphasis is supposed to be on excellence, not on modelling demographic distribution. A department can pursue an ideal gender distribution or it can pursue an ideal mix of scholars. It cannot do both at once. The implication seems to be that departmental excellence can be maintained--or even acquired--by making a candidate's sex a primary factor in his or her job candidacy. But unless academic excellence is synonymous with demographics, the logic does not hold.

2) The logic of the plan does not even hold if you look at it on its own terms. The requirement that search committees mirror the gender distribution in the field in order to bring departments into line with the numbers elsewhere cannot, by definition, be met. Penn is instituting this rule in large part because other schools have made more "progress" toward "equity"; in other words, because the numbers in certain departments do not measure up to the numbers elsewhere. The only way to make search committees in "under-feminized" departments conform to this requirement is to put women on them who are not experts in the field. This is insulting both to the women (who are there as tokens and whose presence is supposed to inhibit the discrimination that would presumably take place in their absence) and to the legitimate members of the search committee (whose ability to judge candidates fairly and impartially is not trusted). Not ethical, and not even workable: departments with comparatively few women will be put in the impossible position of vastly overworking those women faculty they do have. In the name of gender equity, they will be compelled to exploit women faculty.

3) It does not sound from the Provost's comment as though logic was a high priority in devising these new policies. It does sound, however, as though punitive inconvenience was. I've written before about Penn's institution of "disincentives" to hiring men, and we see here what those disincentives are: failure to conform to the policy results in arrest of the search, which in turn means that no hire gets made and that at best the search will have to be repeated the next year, at great cost of time and energy to all. Worst case scenario: the deans don't approve another search, having decided that the department either can't run one properly or is functioning fine without a new faculty member, or both. Hiding behind the new requirements for equitable hiring practice is the threat of departmental decimation: hire women, the policy seems to say, or you may not be hiring at all.

There's much more to say. But for now, I'll just say I'm disappointed and point readers who want more to my earlier postings on this issue.

Conservative students at Amherst and Tufts are taking on the hypocrisy of the campus diversity crusade by adopting its rhetoric. Both schools reserve special "diversity" seats on the student senate to ensure that a certain number of minorities will always be present in student government. And at both schools, conservative students are arguing that as members of under-represented groups, they should be allocated "diversity" seats of their own. Their point? True diversity is not ethnic diversity, but diversity of thought.

In today's Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz profiles Harvard Law School's descent into the bathos of sensitivity training (subscribers only, alas). Following several episodes of what the Harvard Black Law Students Association called "racial outrages" last year, Harvard has instituted a workshop for entering law students entitled "Managing Difficult Conversations." Rabinowitz is witheringly on target:

At Harvard Law today, skill in hard combative argument is no longer prized, nor even considered quite respectable. Indeed, first year law students can hardly fail to notice the pall of official disapproval now settled over everything smacking of conflict and argument. That perception can only have been strengthened by a new program for freshmen, called "Managing Difficult Conversations."

In the lesson books provided, students learn the importance of empathy. "Emotions need to be acknowledged and understood before people can problem solve," another lesson teaches. In a book by the program's chief creators we learn that "A Difficult Conversation Is Anything You Find It Hard To Talk About." Not the sort of wisdom that would have taxed the minds of the students. Still, the purpose of the three-hour sessions did elude one otherwise accepting attendee, who reports that the discussion leaders seemed to circle around specific issues, and that he had the feeling there was a real subject here not yet clear or acknowledged.

He was not the only one wondering about the substance of these meetings. The freshman had just gained entry to the most elite of the nation's law schools. For upward of $32,000 a year tuition, he could learn that a difficult conversation is anything a person finds hard to talk about, and that "logic/reason" have to be combined with "emotions and personal experience" in order to be persuasive. He would not have learned, at such a session, that all the negotiating strategies, all the emphases on emotion and personal history and subtext being advanced at these workshops, was exactly opposite of what legal training was supposed to teach. He would not learn here that the law deals in objective truth that it is concerned with fact. That what is said is determinative, not what is left unsaid, not subtexts, not emotions, expressed or other, not personal history.

[...]

One senior member of the faculty marveled that the school was now training law students to stigmatize conflict. Just before his own class went off to attend the workshops, he slipped them all pieces of paper -- these filled with quotes from Supreme Court Justices's opinions holding that free speech is supposed to invite dispute.

Boston attorney Harvey Silverglate, who tracks assaults on free speech at universities, describes the workshops as "an exercise in thought reform disguised as an effort to help students improve their negotiation skills." Dean Todd Rakoff, the program's overseer, stands foursquare behind it, nonetheless. The students needed these skills for their careers, he argues. As to free speech, "We are absolutely in favor of uninhibited debate, in a workable fashion."

Why the school's administration yielded to the pressure to punish two senior professors charged with racism, one because of a misunderstanding of his meaning, another because of an attempt to turn an ugly episode into an educational one -- instead of standing by them -- remains unexplained. Nor has anyone in that administration explained why, instead of a rational assessment of these hysterically inflated incidents, the school's dean was moved to give instant implicit assent to the strange notion that racism was running riot at Harvard Law. Both of these subjects would, of course, make for difficult conversations.

Indeed.

Worth noting: it's not just Harvard that is allowing advocacy groups to leverage instances of "racial insensitivity" for their own ends. At many schools across the country, such groups use these instances to make loud, unyielding, often off-topic demands for everything from mandatory diversity training for all students to more money for minority hiring to the creation of entire departments in the "problem" area. They don't always get all they ask for--but they always do get something, and it's always more than they should be getting. As one practiced student advocate at UT Knoxville said, apropos of the recent blackface incident, the list of demands made by black student organizations is deliberately excessive: "It's like asking for a dog, when you only want a fish." Among the demands were that the students who donned blackface be expelled, that all incoming students take an oath of loyalty to the goal of racial harmony, and that UT establish a black studies department. They won't get all those things--but it's worth noting what they will ge. Almost as soon as the blackface incident became public, UT Provost Loren Crabtree stated that the "fraternity clearly needs to go through some training on diversity and some training on racial tolerance and racial sensitivity, and we expect that they will have to do that." He also announced that UT would institute racial sensitivity training next year as part of freshmen orientation. Penn State did something similar a couple of years ago, forcing entering freshmen to attend a seminar on racial sensitivity after several racial incidents rocked the campus.

It's a pattern worth considering, not least because sensitivity training is often a punishment meted out to student offenders. That the same type of session can be used as a punishment and as a supposedly proactive form of training speaks loudly to both the punitive nature of the workshops entering students are increasingly required to attend (it's as if new students are paying for the "insensitivity" of others) and to their political mission (to indoctrinate in the name of educating). What Harvard and UT Knoxville and other schools who play the sensitivity game have in common is a solid, increasingly entrenched record of treating new students as proven offenders, of using the "insensitivity" of others as an excuse to try to shape--intrusively, unapologetically--the sensibilities of others.

CUNY is deservedly taking it on the nose for denying tenure to a prominent young historian because he was not "collegial." This is a growing trend, one that is transparently designed to enable departments to fire people they don't like or whose politics turn out not to be in conformity with campus norms. I've written at length in the past about the glaring problems inherent in using that entirely subjective and abusable category, "collegiality," as a criterion in tenure cases, concentrating on a disturbing case in the biology department at Nevada-Reno. In that piece I note that the American Association of University Professors--the official watchdog organization for academic freedom--has become concerned enough about this growing trend to issue a formal statement about the ethical morass that is formed when collegiality becomes a decisive factor in tenure cases. The CUNY case proves the AAUP's point--not least because the alleged episodes of "uncollegiality" on the part of this professor centered on his suggestion that his department make hires on the basis of merit rather than gender preference and that a proposed panel on 9/11 should represent more than one viewpoint. When such sensible and ethical statements qualify someone as "uncollegial" and cost him his job, you know both that academic freedom is a farce and that the academy itself is more committed to perpetuating bias than to fostering the exchange of ideas.

I got some really thoughtful mail about my post on how radical feminism has made it acceptable to publicly revile men as inherently inferior to women.

Some of it is anguished, not just at the anti-male vitriol that has become part of feminist etiquette, but also at our collective inability--or unwillingness--to recognize this for what it is and to acknowledge its terribly damaging effects:

The power of mainstream feminism to set agendas, control public discussion, and move legislation (through both their liberal and conservative proxies) has caused untold harm to millions of people in this country. People just don't get it - the concrete consequences I mean. Do they think its cute or just a bunch of dumb broads?

From the sexual harassment industry, to frivolous restraining orders and false accusations as punishment, to the denial of male DV victims, to the gutting of due process and equal protection for men, to affirmative action, to 700+ womens studies programs spewing Msinformation and hate, to VAWA, to the assault on divorced fathers and their children, to the ceaseless torrent of hostility directed at the male children growing up today (much of it rather subtle), feminism is creating a dystopia with greater ramifications than any movement I can think of (other than the really awful examples like nazism). But it rarely makes the news. Anti-white PC is quite often criticized now - Belafonte, and the NJ poet laureate come to mind as recent examples. What about feminism? I think our society is afraid to face it.

Do we need to wait until men just explode with resentment and rage before anything changes? Do we need to raise a generation or two of boys and men who so fear and hate women that bitterness reigns, anti-woman violence spikes and the family disappears? Do we need to wait until boys suicide rate is 10X girls, as if 5X is not enough. Do we need to wait until 80% of colleges freshmen are female? Do we need to wait until males are entirely phased out of medical research? Is anybody awake out there????

The combination of biology, misguided conservative chivalry, and PC liberalism are an unbeatable force. Every other PC sickness in our society has some strong opponent as far as I can see, but not feminism. Men for the most part can not or will not criticize women or fight back. It just ain't natcheral - we want to please women, to woo 'em, win 'em, and you-know-what 'em. And just as importantly, many good women have been silent or bought into feminist myths.

Some of the mail sees a potential silver lining in the increasing hostility of certain strands of feminist screed, observing that building shrillness might be read as both a sign of desperation and a tacit acknowledgement that the movement's moment is past:

Yes, Ms. Greer has finally descended into madness. What is so unfortunate is the fact that she began as a truly promising and brilliant cultural critic, and could potentially have brought feminism to unthought-of heights of intellectual depth and respectability.

My opinion is that this kind of foolishness, which doesn't even manage to get my blood up anymore, is a manifestation of the fact that she and her ilk are becoming irrelevant--and they know it. So accustomed to being lavished with attention every time they throw their plate on the floor and spit their broccoli out, radical feminists are trying to find ever-more absurd means of commanding awe among the infantile and impressionable. That's also what's at the heart of their disrespectful and irresponsible efforts to bring sex--meaning actual, live sex--into the classroom. The more this tack fails (most thinking young women are on to them by now), the louder their little rhetorical death rattle will get. One gets the distinct impression that Greer is trying to recapture the good old days of Valerie Solanas, et al. It's a sad fate, but not altogether unexpected.

The fact is, this stuff is so self-evidently stupid, so completely wrong in nearly every factual assertion it makes, that only the press could find it newsworthy.

There is much truth in both positions. And for me the creepy thing is that even as many of the claims of radical feminism have been widely discredited, and even as more and more women refuse to call themselves feminists because they do not want to be associated with what they perceive as an obsolete hate movement, radical feminism continues to set social, political, and educational agendas. There are the widely circulated false statistics about eating disorders and rape; there are the discriminatory hiring and promoting practices adopted in the name of "gender equity"; there are the absurd studies about how girls are getting short shrift in school; there are the compensatory fellowships and grants designed to make up for this institutionalized sexism. I could go on.

Glenn Reynolds points to three excellent pieces on this subject today, one by Doris Lessing, one an interview with Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers, and one by Glenn Sacks. Also worth a look: Wendy McElroy's current column on feminist urban legends.

One of my favorite armchair sports is trying to pinpoint the moment where radical feminism merges with hate. Germaine Greer affords an unusually rich playing field in today's Guardian. The first two of many hateful paragraphs:

The truth is out. Men are much more trouble than they're worth. Sisters are doing it for themselves. Discarded males of all ages loiter in the streets, looking for trouble to get into and finding no lack of it. Male security guards shoot male football fans in Bratislava, male fans howl racist abuse and hurl chairs at each other, males train as suicide bombers, male heads of state stroll about discussing whether they could get away with another shooting war on the women and children of Iraq, and their male flunkies zoom around the world trying to talk other males into joining in. The Beltway Sniper turned out to be a man. And those "children" ejected from school for threatening to kill their teachers are actually boys. It doesn't do to say so. A kind of mad squeamishness prevents us from quantifying the nuisance value of maleness, possibly because if you actually tell men that they are damned nuisances, they are likely to behave even worse.

What can be the root cause of all this male dysfunction? Feminism, that's what. When feminism came along and drew women out from under men, men found themselves in freefall. Liberated women could change their own light bulbs and tap washers and engine oil, so men felt unwanted. Women who could earn a decent living could get their own mortgages and buy houses on their own, so they did and do, in their millions. No wonder men went off in an enormous sulk, refused to do their homework or tidy their rooms, ran round the streets shouting and screaming and writing on walls, balked at committing themselves in relationships, and wandered off into a fantasy world of pornography, sport and grotesquely violent video games. Women made men redundant; redundant tissue inevitably turns malignant.

And then the column wanders off into a long and creepy eugenic screed for why women are biologically superior to men in every respect and why men are, and always have been, "redundant."

Here's the game: substitute "white" and "black," or, if you are feeling trendy, "Muslims" and "Jews" for "women" and "men." Being a traditional type, I've chosen "white" and "black." The results are as follows:

The truth is out. [Blacks] are much more trouble than they're worth. [Whites] are doing it for themselves. Discarded [blacks] of all ages loiter in the streets, looking for trouble to get into and finding no lack of it. [Black] security guards shoot [black] football fans in Bratislava, [black] fans howl racist abuse and hurl chairs at each other, [blacks] train as suicide bombers, [black] heads of state stroll about discussing whether they could get away with another shooting war on [whites], and their [black] flunkies zoom around the world trying to talk other [blacks] into joining in. The Beltway Sniper turned out to be [black]. And those "children" ejected from school for threatening to kill their teachers are actually [blacks]. It doesn't do to say so. A kind of mad squeamishness prevents us from quantifying the nuisance value of [blacks], possibly because if you actually tell [blacks] that they are damned nuisances, they are likely to behave even worse.

What can be the root cause of all this [black] dysfunction? [White supremacy], that's what. When [white supremacy] came along and drew [whites] out from under [blacks], [blacks] found themselves in freefall. Liberated [whites] could change their own light bulbs and tap washers and engine oil, so [blacks] felt unwanted. [Whites] who could earn a decent living could get their own mortgages and buy houses on their own, so they did and do, in their millions. No wonder [blacks] went off in an enormous sulk, refused to do their homework or tidy their rooms, ran round the streets shouting and screaming and writing on walls, balked at committing themselves in relationships, and wandered off into a fantasy world of pornography, sport and grotesquely violent video games. [Whites] made [black] redundant; redundant tissue inevitably turns malignant.

Okay, so the substitutions sometimes cede into nonsense. But that only makes the temper of Greer's "discourse" that much more clear: hers is a discourse of irrational blame and vitriolic hate, a discourse in which one group is described as wholly superior to another group whose inferiority is treated as natural and right, a discourse that quite literally does not make sense--except, insofar, as it participates in the deliberate nonlogic of demonization. And yet it is printed in one of the world's most respected papers, the product of one of the twentieth century's most influential feminists. Its place in that paper speaks to how profoundly respectable hatred of men has become in our enlightened culture, as well as to the role feminism has played in making such hatred a badge of liberal propriety.

The bit about men being malignant tissue says it all. As Greer calls men a cancer on an otherwise healthy female society, so Hitler said that "The Jews are a Cancer on the breast of Germany"; so radical Islamists call Jews a "cancer" on Palestine.

UPDATE: William Sjostrom has more.

An op-ed in the Georgetown Hoya entitled "GU Must Protect Students, Not Offensive Speech" defends the recent theft from a freshman residence hall of newspapers containing "personal slurs":

The university needs to address this whole issue of ìoffensiveî speech. And it is time to jettison the platitude that ìbad speechî is only or best corrected just by ìmore speech,î and not by ìcensorshipî or, in the worst cases, just by ìeducation.î That non-policy was never more than an evasion by the university of its responsibilities.

Personal vilification, slurs and the like have no place at a Catholic university and they are clearly not correctable by just ìmore speechî or by ìeducation.î

[...]

Iíd like to hear from the Georgetown administration how ìmoreî speech could ever undo the damage of the dissemination of such ìbadî speech.

Like it or not, this university has a duty to do what it can to prevent the dissemination on its property of personal slurs.

Of course, that is often not easy. And, of course, different kinds of ìbadî speech call for different kinds of university responses. But the mindless repetition of that ridiculous mantra ìbad speech is to be corrected by more speechî is an insult to everyoneís intelligence.

Read the article to get the details of what was printed in the student paper. I don't recount them here because the details do not matter. What matters is how the author of this essay uses a single episode of inter-student nastiness to 1) excuse the crime of newspaper theft (he even puts the word "stole" in quotes; and 2) to call for sweeping, censorious, ultimately unenforceable speech codes on Georgetown's campus.

Georgetown is a private university, and that means it can have whatever speech code it likes. At present, it does forbid "offensive" speech, stating in its formal policy that ìexpression that is indecent or is grossly obscene or grossly offensive on matters such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation is inappropriate in a university community and the university will act as it deems appropriate to educate students violating this principle.î In practice, Georgetown has held to a relatively liberal position on speech--when confronted with complaints about the paper in question, Vice President for Student Affairs Juan C. Gonzalez said that the best course of action is to ìdrown it with more speech of your own making, not steal it.î This is commendable, and reasonable. But as we have seen countless times, it does not satisfy campus crusaders for forced sensitivity. The author of this screed, for example, comes right out and says he feels censorship is a right and necessary thing. He's tired of "the ridiculous mantra" known as the First Amendment. He's had it with "education." He wants people to be expressly forbidden to say unpleasant things, and then he wants to see those who say such things anyway be punished. This fascistic procedure, he seems to believe, will make the Georgetown campus a kinder, gentler place to be.

Never mind that it is not possible to define "offensive speech" in a way that will hold up under scrutiny--or creativity (I recall Andrew Dice Clay's appearance on Saturday Night Live back in the spring of 1990; my brother and I watched him absolutely confound the censors who were ordered to make sure none of his legendary profanity made it onto the air, simply by coining his own cache of dirty words as he went. His monologue was filthy--and yet, by network standards, squeaky clean).

Never mind, either, that you simply cannot force people to be nice. You can't even force people to agree that "being nice" is a worthy behavioral goal. Nor can you legislate sensitivity--not least because attempting to do so is itself a profoundly insensitive, not to say offensive, act. In its punitive fantasies, refusal to condemn theft or even call it by its name, and irrational belief that "bad speech" could be an operative disciplinary category, the editorial quoted above makes that abundantly clear.

I am struck, lately, by how often the concept of community standards is raised to defend restrictions of campus speech. Tuesday, also in The Hoya, a student wrote that the reason it was important to denounce Bat Ye'or and David Littman's invited talk on dhimmitude is that the opinions they expressed "threatened more to polarize our campus community than to educate about and debate a difficult topic":

While it is our job as students to bring to light difficult realities about our world that many people might not like to hear, we also have a responsibility to ensure that peace and civility are maintained within our classrooms, sponsored events and campus community at large. These goals can only be pursued in a respectful and cooperative environment that reflects Georgetownís values of interfaith dialogue and diversity of thought. Any incident that threatens this environment is detrimental, particularly to the Jewish students we have been elected to represent.

Similarly, the uproar about blackface at UT Knoxville and the recent cancellation of Tom Paulin's poetry reading at Harvard both center on the perceived threat unpleasant expression might pose to the sanctimoniously invoked "campus community." Lawrence Buell, Chair of Harvard English, explained that Paulin's visit has to be cancelled because it was causing "widespread consternation;" Twenty-one UT faculty signed a letter stating that the blackface incident was a "threat to the very fabric of our intellectual community," adding that "This needs to be a place where students can feel comfortable and safe - not just physically, but intellectually as well."

It's worth noting how coercively the nebulous concept of "community" operates in such moments (I myself have never felt that I belong to a "campus community," but I have been accused more than once of "shaming," "menacing," and "threatening" that same entity by people who want me to shut up). Community is a happy concept, seemingly innocuous. But it gets invoked on campuses as a means of making a call for censorship seem kindly and necessary. "Protecting the community" thus becomes a code phrase for enforcing conformity to a narrow and self-serving behavioral norm. Saying that a university "needs to be a place where students can feel comfortable and safe" is saying that a university must not be a place where students ever feel challenged or provoked. It is saying, in other words, that the university is not about education but the pursuit of a quasi-intellectual utopia where everyone pretends to think, study, and learn but the real priority is never to step on anyone's toes.

To speak of "feeling intellectually safe" is to utter oxymoronic nonsense. You can be committed to a collectivist ideal, or you can be committed to ideas. You cannot be committed to both--not, at any rate, in the current campus climate.

Regarding L'Affaire Paulin (see below), a reader writes:

You are absolutely on target regarding the Paulin affair. As much as I detest Paulinís statements, and as tempting as it might be to fall into line with Harvardís illiberal behavior ìjust this once,î I just canít. The fact is, the Harvard English faculty sent a message about more than Paulinís ìhate speech.î

When people argue for the curtailment of expression, what they often fail to recognize is that they are circumscribing their own rights. None of us has any more freedom of speech than the least popular speaker, as is often said. When someone says, ìPaulin has no right to say the things he said,î what they are really saying is, ìI do not have the right to say what Paulin said.î Thought of in this way, the matter is a little more serious.

I canít add much to what you already said on the subject, except to say that I am shocked at the number of peopleóconservatives, particularlyóapplauding this thuggish decision. They are stripping themselves of any reasonable grounds for complaint the next time David Horowitz gets the same treatment, and they are sure to be called to the mat for it at some point. It makes one wonder if there really is a principle at stake, from their perspective.

Ah, well. Suppression of speech is, I believe, the worldís second-oldest profession.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the Harvard English department's politically-motivated cancellation of Irish poet Tom Paulin's poetry reading, focussing in particular on the unethical role taken by Rita Goldberg, a lecturer in English who orchestrated the protest that led to the cancellation by telling her students what to think about the visit and then instructing them about how to protest it. Today's Guardian has more from Goldberg:

Rita Goldberg, who was involved in the Harvard protests, said that she supported Mr Paulin's right to free speech but felt she had a duty to inform the English department of controversies in Britain they might not have known about.

"I was very reluctant to do this, but I think Tom Paulin has crossed the line. Free speech is one thing, hate speech is another," Professor Goldberg said. "I think anti-semitism is on the rise, and Tom Paulin must be quite confused about his own relationship to Jews. He used a public platform to advocate violence, and that is incitement."

Israel, she said, "is a democracy with an active critical population of its own, and to make everyone a great mush of Zionists and Jews who are somehow like the SS has to be inflammatory. We all know in our gut when speech is hate speech and when it's perfectly rational discourse."

First, an aside: between this woman and the self-righteous literary twits at UT Knoxville, I think I can fairly say that the deservedly low public opinion of English professors can--and should--sink even lower than it already has. I say this as one who thought there was nowhere to go but up.

Now the fisk:

I was very reluctant to do this, but I think Tom Paulin has crossed the line.
No you weren't reluctant to "do this" (conveniently vague wording, that). You were thrilled to "do this." You got a charge out of "doing this." You are still getting a charge out of it. That's why you are talking up your role as Chief Sensitivity Officer of Harvard English in the media. Let's be precise about what it is you "did": you decided Paulin "crossed the line" (because he crossed your personal line); you convinced yourself that what you personally wanted was what was best for your students; you manipulated them into staging your protest by telling him Paulin's visit would hurt and offend them--when really you were hurt and offended by the prospect of his visit. You used your students. And now you are soaking in your pitiful little bath of glory when you should be hanging your head in shame.

Free speech is one thing, hate speech is another.
Wrong. There are some who argue that, but an argument is not a law. As of today the Constitution is still in the business of protecting unpopular speech. Hate, for the record, is not a crime. It may be morally repellant, it may even be frightening. But it is not a crime--not in the U.S. anyway. There are powerful ethical reasons for refusing to legislate matters of private conscience. There are also powerful practical reasons for not doing so, the first of which is that you can't define "hate speech." One person's hate is another person's truth.

I think anti-semitism is on the rise, and Tom Paulin must be quite confused about his own relationship to Jews. He used a public platform to advocate violence, and that is incitement.
The first point is irrelevant. What does the increase in anti-semitism have to do with Paulin's right to express his opinion? And what do your personal speculations about Paulin's mental health have to do with anything besides your own prurience? The second point is a distortion of fact. Paulin expressed violent views about Jews. They are shocking, even mind-boggling in their cruelty. But they are not incitement. He does not issue orders, he does not exhort particular individuals to specific acts of violence. He isn't doing much to promote reasoned opinion or considered tolerance with his statements, but he isn't inciting anyone to anything, either.

Israel "is a democracy with an active critical population of its own, and to make everyone a great mush of Zionists and Jews who are somehow like the SS has to be inflammatory.

True, but inflammatory speech is not illegal.

We all know in our gut when speech is hate speech and when it's perfectly rational discourse.
Fascinating and telling words from our expert in textual interpretation. They tell us what she is "thinking" with, or more precisely, they tell us that she is not thinking at all. She is acting on what she "knows" in her "gut." She is letting instinct, not careful consideration or reasoned argument, determine her opinions and her actions. She is doing this in a pedagogical setting, and it sounds like she is having quite an impact. For the record, "we" don't "all know in our gut" anything of the kind. This is a weak defense of an indefensible position. In its appeal to instinct and in its use of that appeal to cover over the utterly fickle, inconsistent, and self-serving nature of the statement--which licenses hate to be anything the person in power wants it to be--it is also the sort of thinking that we have learned historically to revile as an enabler of fascism.

The good news is that at least there is one English professor out there who not only gets it, but has enough spine to speak up. The Guardian balances Goldberg's irrational commentary with this from Jim Shapiro, Paulin's colleague at Columbia:

Jim Shapiro condemned Harvard's actions as "disastrous".

"I say this as somebody who is a Zionist, who teaches Jewish studies, who has opposed petitions on my campus for the university to divest from Israel," he said. "The idea of rescinding an invitation because someone has not passed a political litmus test establishes a very dangerous precedent.

"Do I think Tom said a stupid thing? Absolutely, and I know few people who haven't said stupid things. Do I think Tom is an anti-semite? I can say from extensive discussions with him on the Middle East that he isn't. These students have an absolute right to heckle Tom Paulin, but they do not have the right to force the university to rescind the invitation."

Well said. It's worth noting, too, that Harvard's original plan for dealing with the Goldberg-engineered unrest surrounding Paulin's visit was to provide an open forum after his reading where all views could be freely aired. They almost got it right. And then they punted.

Quote of the day: "He who remains silent in the defence of truth is a dumb devil. " From--you guessed it--Iraq's letter to the U.N.

The entire letter is a monument to poverty of expression. A prime and typical example:

However, representatives at the United Nations and its agencies, especially those from permanent member-states, instead of fellowship up on this and, hence, expose those responsible for the dissemination of lies and fabrications, were busy discussing the type and wording of the new resolution. They were indulged in what word or letter to add here or omit there, until they adopted a text under the pretext that is would be better to take the kicks of a raging bull in a small circle than to face its horns in an open space.

Another:

We have said to the member of the Security Council whom we have contacted, or who have contacted us, when they told us about the pretexts of the Americans and their threat to perpetrate aggression against our country, whether unilaterally or with participated from others, if the Council were not to allow them to have their way, that we preferred, if it ever became necessary to see America carry out its aggressions against us unilaterally, when we would have to confront it relying on Allah, instead of seeing the American government obtaining an international cover with which to camouflage its falsehood, partially or completely, bringing it closer to the truth, so that it may stab the truth with the dagger of evil and confronted the United States before when it looked as it does now, and this was one of the factors of its isolation in the human environment on the globe at large.

I was going to grade this illiterate tour de force and post my comments. But then I realized that if a student handed me a paper this poorly written--an ill-conceived rant, riddled with errors of grammar and syntax, clearly not proofread--I would not grade it. I would fail it.

Shall we place our bets on whether the U.N. has lower standards than a freshman composition class?

Faculty members at UT Knoxville have registered their disapprobation of the recent blackface incident on campus in a letter to the editor of the school paper. Nine of twenty-one signers are from the English department--a fact that, sadly, does not surprise when one considers the content and tone of the letter itself. The gist of their pious missive: every single person on the campus of the University of Tennessee is deeply implicated in the event, which speaks eloquently to the campus' continued participation in America's long history of racism against blacks; it is thus wrong to dismiss the episode as either a "joke" or a "racist 'mistake.'" It is, rather, "a threat to the very fabric of our intellectual community." Why? Because UT "needs to be a place where students can feel comfortable and safe - not just physically, but intellectually as well."

I am reminded of the parable of the boy who cried wolf. If this is the worst thing that ever "happens" to UT students (I hesitate even to participate in the victimized rhetoric that suggests one person's expression can "happen" to another, and that insists representations, like blows, wound), then they should all thank their lucky stars that they had the luxury of getting all righteously bothered about something so ultimately inane. They should also realize how much privilege, how much sheer cultural capital and personal entitlement, it takes to act like five frat boys' poor taste does real, lasting harm to the tender psyches of impressionable young students.

If ill-advised face paint is a "threat" to the UT community, if an offensive costume carries within it the weight of the entire history of American racism, if awareness that some fraternity boys wore blackface makes some students feel "uncomfortable" or "unsafe," perhaps the university should just shut down right now and send everyone home. Certainly, at the very least, no member of the campus community should be allowed to read the papers or watch the news or otherwise have potentially frightening contact with the outside world. Knowledge of how real people act in the real world might threaten the fabric of the campus community, membership in which is apparently conferred not on those who attend UT and teach its classes, but on those who accept that conformity to a rabidly censorious set of moralistic norms should be the condition of belonging.

Daniel Pipes wants to know:

* Why do American academics so often despise their own country while finding excuses for repressive and dangerous regimes?

* Why have university specialists proven so inept at understanding the great contemporary issues of war and peace, starting with Vietnam, then the Cold War, the Kuwait war and now the War on Terror?

* Why do professors of linguistics, chemistry, American history, genetics and business present themselves in public as authorities on the Middle East?

* What is the long-term effect of an extremist, intolerant and anti-American environment on university students?

I can offer a preliminary answer to that last one. Some students will imbibe the attitude wholesale, often without even knowing they are doing so. These are often your straight A humanities and social science majors; they become well-meaning, unthinking fellow travellers. Other students recognize in their professors a desire to indoctrinate, and lose respect for higher education. The upshot? One "long-term effect of an extremist, intolerant and anti-American environment on university students" is a massive increase in cynicism among college students. The honest cynics have the toughest time, as they lose the ability to take their own educations seriously. The dishonest ones--or, more softly, the pragmatists--recognize in their politicized classrooms the opportunity to score high grades with minimal effort. Regurgitating their professors' pet issues on exams and term papers, they pad their transcripts with the results of their strategic self-presentation. In short, they become politicians, or, if you prefer, good businessmen.

Not as many students as one might think simply absorb the intolerance that saturates so much of the campus climate--though neither do they graduate with a clear understanding of either the historical and philosophical rationale for America or the purpose of honest, open inquiry. Instead, they adopt a self-serving, cagey, often apolitical stance toward "education", one whose main aim is to learn to manipulate their environment--and their professors--to suit their own ends. As one colleague memorably told me when I was starting out as a college teacher, "If you think you smell a rat, you are actually smelling two."

The Harvard Crimson has more on the English department's decision to cancel tomorrow's scheduled appearance by the Irish poet Tom Paulin. Last April, Cairo's Al-Ahram Weekly quoted Paulin as saying that Israel is a "historical obscenity" and that "Brooklyn-born Jews" who settle in Israel "should be shot," adding ìI think they are Nazis, racists. I have nothing but hatred for them.î Paulin has also written one rabidly pro-Palestinian poem in which he refers to the "Zionist SS" (scroll down for the goods).

These facts are well known by now; they've made their way through the mainstream media and the blogosphere; they were the reason Harvard English cancelled Paulin's appearance. Yesterday the web practically did the wave when, as Eugene Volokh put it, Harvard "did the right thing."

One thing that remained a bit mysterious was what precisely went on at Harvard to cause such an unusual turn of events. The Crimson piece is enlightening on that point:

Though Paulinís remarks and frequent British TV appearances have created controversy at Oxford over the past few months, little was known in the United States about his work and views.

Rita Goldberg, a lecturer on Literature who had been familiar with his work, began gathering a protest as soon as Paulinís lecture was announced last week.

Goldberg sent out an e-mail to her students encouraging them not to attend the lecture, and asking them to contact the English department to protest the speech.

ìUnder rules instituted by the Rudenstine Administration, students are entitled to an environment free of racism, hostility and threatening speech,î she wrote. ìAn audience is oxygen to a poet, and the most effective way of showing your feelings is to deprive him of air.î

The controversy escalated after the Wall Street Journal published an article on Monday that described his anti-Israeli views and criticized Harvard for hosting him.

As word spread of the article and Paulinís controversial views through the University via various e-mail lists, protest mounted against the lecture.

Between 100 and 120 people, mainly undergraduates, e-mailed and called the department to protest the reading, according to Buell. They decried Paulinís views as hate speech, and said the Department should not give a forum to those who advocate violence and racism.

In other words, a member of Harvard's English faculty took it upon herself to decide that Paulin's personal views constituted, in and of themselves, a violation of Harvard's harassment policy. She determined, through some mysterious alchemical process unavailable to us