Rod Dreher's Blog, page 641

Arguing With Nothingness

A reader of this blog sent a screenshot from a Facebook feed he follows:

How on earth do you argue with a so-called Christian who believes that anybody who asserts any Christian orthodoxy at all is akin to Salafists? You don’t; that person has lost his reason entirely. Still, it’s fascinating that anyone would hold such an argument to be anything but embarrassing. This is extreme Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. A Muslim version of this would be calling oneself a Muslim but denying that Muhammad was Allah’s prophet — and saying that any Muslim who refuses to agree is just like the Salafists.

There’s no question that Hali Um William will either convert to a serious form of Christianity, or lose his faith entirely. The question I ask of you readers is: How do you decide when someone who believes the incoherent things he does is worth engaging in debate?

How to Resist SJWs in College

A reader I know personally left this comment on the Good Colleges open thread. I know where he was educated, and can verify what he says. Emphases below are mine:

My undergraduate degrees are from an institution that could hold its own among any in the nation in terms of its student body’s liberal bona fides–it is a group of true-believing SJWs. A great deal of what is now making headlines was nascent, if not flourishing, on campus when I was there. My education in the liberal arts, Deo gratias, had a very very minimal amount of the elements described in the discussion of the medieval English lit prof, though I suspect my fellow students would have welcomed more gladly.

All of this is to make two points that I think are essential in discussing higher education:

1) All it takes is one good professor (all the better if you have a great professor) to inoculate students against the excesses discussed in this post. One professor. That’s it.

Obviously, it would be ideal to have many (or, dare we dream, an entire department) that is not SJW indoctrination. For my part, I could easily name 3 professors who definitely went against the SJW grain (on a very liberal campus, mind you), and their ability to push students of all worldviews to think critically and carefully was extraordinary. I think this is an important point because it shows you cannot judge an entire university tout court. I suspect even Mizzou and Yale have profs who are teaching kids the invaluable skills of critical thinking and reflection–they just go unsung because they’re busy doing their actual damn jobs. Now, this does not mean I would want to send my child to Mizzou or Yale, but we must remember that, even in the worst of circumstances, a mustard seed can still become the greatest of trees. This SJW ideology is an intellectual bubble that is as impermanent as an economic bubble: at some point, it will burst. It’s not if, but when. And one professor (or even one homework reading) can be enough to pop it if the student’s mind and soul are well-disposed to receive it.

2) I am highly grateful for my time in a SJW environment. I grew up in a relatively conservative subset of a very liberal city, and to have my beliefs challenged so forcefully made me, in my mind, far more solid in both intellect and faith than friends who went to more conservative colleges. I have seen the moderate Left, the far Left, the far far left, and the Left who think President Obama is a neocon, and I daresay I know as well as anyone what is coming in the next generation. We have to be ready, and my friends who went to have dwelt in more intellectually conservative or moderate environs have absolutely no appreciation of it. None. When there are students (far-left) actually arguing the moral permissibility of sexual relations between adults and pre-pubescent children, you know you have long since hit the diabolical. And I am very grateful I know it’s there.

I certainly am not advocating anyone with teenage children to just throw their kids in the SJW deep end and hope they swim. But at some point they are going to have to face this world on their own and make their own choices. Delaying that for some of them for a four-year period may very well be best for their souls–I presume that is a decision based made by the kids themselves in conjunction with their parents. But there are benefits to seeing such things firsthand. Ultimately, I suspect that many of the people who lead the pushback against this intellectual bubble will be disenchanted graduates of these SJW colleges. The Baylors of the world will have their part, but they are not in the trenches.

And, to repeat my earlier point, all it takes is one good prof in the midst of such foolishness to inoculate one against it forever.

Thank you, reader. That is very helpful — so much so I decided to give it its own post.

The Persistence of the Plinth

Three cheers for Brown University professor Glenn Loury, who is black and politically liberal, and who stands up to the black militants trying to intimidate his college’s administrators. From his Facebook post:

Finally, over the course of 10 years of teaching at Brown, I have influenced many graduate students of all colors and from every continent on the planet (excepting Antarctica!) I have found the university to be an extremely warm, welcoming, supportive and open environment to undertake my work. I know well the people who run this institution, and the notion that they are racially insensitive is a shameful slander with no basis in fact. My colleagues, in the economics department and elsewhere at Brown, have shown themselves to be open-minded, decent and on the whole politically progressive scholars. The administration has lavished resources on me, and has enthusiastically supported any number of initiatives that contribute to promoting a just and decent society, both within the United States and throughout the world.

The notion that Brown needs a revolutionary reshaping in order to become hospitable to “students of color”, that idea that “anti-black pedagogy” at Brown needs to be countered with some mandatory indoctrination of faculty, the proposal that external student committees should review purportedly “racist” departmental appointment processes, the initiative of creating “specialty positions” in academic departments to ensure their openness to hiring “faculty of color” — these are all mischievous intrusions on the academic prerogatives of a distinguished faculty which no self-respecting scholar of any color should welcome. They are a step onto a slippery slope that slides down into intellectual mediocrity, and I will have nothing to do with them.

Is that clear and explicit enough…?

Now he’s going to be denounced as an Uncle Tom, you watch.

It’s fascinating and unspeakably sad to watch this kind of thing happen in South Africa. Take a look at this incredible story from The Guardian, about how the “bornfrees,” black South Africans born after apartheid, are turning on their parents’ generation.  Protests there began with a black university student, Chumani Maxwele, who had been raised in a black settlement, in great poverty, and, with the loosening of laws and social restrictions after apartheid’s fall, was able to move more freely in South Africa — including going to Africa’s best university on scholarship. He was better able to appreciate how apartheid crippled his prospects:

The apartheid past, Maxwele realised, was still shaping his life. The realisation made him feel more and more angry, because it had not been what he had been taught growing up. His generation had been told they were the “born frees”: an exceptional generation in South African history, the first one raised with almost no direct memory of apartheid’s terrors. “They’re like nothing that’s ever been!” bleated a promo segment for Bornfrees, a reality TV show that began airing in South Africa in 2004. In school and at home, their elders often reminded them how different life was for them and how much they had to be grateful for.

On the morning of 9 March, Maxwele travelled by minibus taxi out to Khayelitsha, picked up one of the buckets of sh*t that sat reeking on the kerbside, and brought it back to the campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT), where, in 2011, he had gained a scholarship to study political science. He took it to a bronze statue of the 19th-century British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes that held pride of place on campus, just downhill from the convocation hall. Rhodes had been one of the main architects of South Africa’s segregation. “Where are ourheroes and ancestors?” Maxwele shouted to a gathering, curious crowd.

Then he opened the bucket and hurled its contents into Rhodes’s face.

Thus began a long protest by the university’s black students demanding that the University of Cape Town removed that statue, of 19th century colonialist Cecil Rhodes. The protest, as the Guardian piece explains, became part of a much wider movement in the country among the bornfrees. The Guardian distinguishes these new protests from a previous one, from miners demanding better working conditions:

For the miners on strike in Marikana were mostly middle-aged. They had a right to expect something better from the second, liberated half of their lives. The “born frees” were not supposed to feel that degree of historical pain. As well as protesting the legacy of history, the young South Africans were trying on a historical identity, inhabiting the anger their parents had expressed decades earlier. My older friends found it eerie to watch.

And some of the most prominent people expressing that anger are children who really weren’t supposed to feel it. Many of the most active youth protesters hail from South Africa’s new black middle class and black elite. The young man who was handcuffed and arrested in front of Parliament was Kgotsi Chikane, the son of the Reverend Frank Chikane, the former chief of staff to the country’s second black president, Thabo Mbeki.

More and more, the anger of the young has pointed towards their parents and their black elders. Over the course of the year, the young South Africans moved from throwing stones at statues of dead white men to throwing them at live black ones – President Zuma and South Africa’s education minister Blade Nzimande, who rose to fame as an anti-apartheid activist. At the protest in front of Zuma’s office, young people raised hand-lettered signs that mocked Zuma as well as placards connecting their demonstration with the struggles of South Africa’s past. The story of why these generations are now at odds has deep implications for how a freed people, generation by generation, continues to relate to its history – implications that are relevant everywhere else in the world where the children of the oppressed are coming of age in what are supposed to be better circumstances.

More:

Three days after Maxwele’s poo protest, Chikane found himself leading a huge demonstration against the Rhodes statue. Beforehand, he chained his wrists together, his hands pressed awkwardly into a gesture of supplication. Paradoxically, assuming this pose of entrapment felt like the true liberation. It freed him to inhabit physically the sense of oppression he had only been feeling emotionally. “People started taking pictures,” he recalled. “And then I realised … black students weren’t taking pictures. The white students were taking pictures,” as white people have stared at the entrapped black body for centuries.

It was a common feature of the stories I heard from black student protesters: there had been a series of small experiences that made them aware they were not tabulae rasae, but black people enmeshed in a long history of black deprivation.

Turns out that a surprising number of South African whites are sympathetic to the student protests — but not older blacks:

Chikane said the apparent unwillingness of black leaders to support the students’ awakening baffled him – and greatly amplified his anger. In mid-April, some 50 students broke into a UCT council meeting that Price had called to discuss the prospect of removing the Rhodes statue. The students climbed through a window that had been left open and surrounded the conference table, singing struggle songs.

Most of the members of the largely white council just sat there. But the head of the council, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, a former anti-apartheid activist who was imprisoned with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, stood up and flapped his hands, gesturing for the students to leave. They climbed up on the table and moved towards him. “Who made you the policeman of black rage? As a black man?” one student spat, his eyes filling with tears. “You are disgusting! You are disgusting! Don’t you have your own children?”

After the incident, Chikane wrote a pleading letter to Ndugane, begging him to publicly express that he understood and supported the students’ anger. The young man compared the “obvious, obscene and repugnant acts of racism” in the past to the kind black students currently experienced at UCT. “Ours is worse,” he wrote. “Ours is subliminal. It is the form of racism that makes you ignorant about your subjugation.”

What an astonishing statement. This young black man is going to Africa’s most elite university because of the sacrifices that Archbishop Ndungane, who served prison time with Nelson Mandela, made. And yet, he contends that the racism he experiences is worse than what Mandela and Ndungane suffered!

Where does this come from? An answer:

Jonathan Jansen, the first black vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, described to me the fear that the protests had engendered among older black South Africans – a fear that their hard-won progress over a bitter past was sliding backwards, or that it had never really succeeded to begin with. The student movements, Jansen told me, looked to him like a dangerous return to the very same racial discourses his generation had battled to defeat. “People were dead set against the apartheid narrative of race essentialism,” he said. “We fought very, very hard not to have the state name us [black]. But that is exactly what [the students] are trying to reinforce.”

Sounds a lot like the demand for race essentialism by black protesters on US university campuses, doesn’t it?

The protests succeeded in convincing the university to remove the Rhodes statue. Now, there’s nothing there but a plinth. But it has not satisfied the students. Maxwele predicts, “This place will blow up again.”

Read the whole thing; it’s worth it.

I find that image of the empty plinth still tormenting those students to be haunting. It’s like a phantom limb. It reveals that their minds are still conquered by Rhodes and what he represents. What’s going on here?

This is, as the Guardian piece notes, about identity. The lines between good and evil were clear during apartheid. Black South Africans found identity in their suffering, and in maintaining their dignity under the cruelty and injustices of apartheid. But when apartheid ended, and a black majority government came to power, the lines became blurred. The Guardian writes about how Mandela and his generation offered forgiveness as a strategic move; they knew that they had to reconcile with whites or white capital would flee, and the country would be impoverished. Forgiveness of this sort required a deliberate historic forgetting, which was deemed necessary by black leaders to make the transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy.

There is no way to undo in a single generation the legacy of white supremacy. It is not within the realm of possibility. This is something that has to be accepted, and worked through. Progress takes time, and sacrifice. Look at the people raised under Soviet-style communism. You cannot have an entire culture, an entire people, deformed like that, and expect them to bounce back instantly. Healing that deep wound will require time.

It seems to me somehow psychologically important for the bornfrees to deny that there has been any progress made on the racial front. It’s why I found Ta-Nehisi Coates’s (National Book Award-winning) volume so frustrating: he denies that there has been real progress in race relations in this country, and closes the door to the possibility of progress and reconciliation, and justice. It demands what it denies is possible.

Life At Deathworks University

Staying on the college topic, reader Richao writes about the coddling culture on campus (the editorial comments are his/her own):

As my child is in the midst of college application season, we’ve been discussing this issue on an almost-daily basis, and we are already basically where Haidt expects an increasing number of parents to be in the coming years: With one or two exceptions, we are not encouraging our kid to apply to any top-tier colleges, notwithstanding the kid’s stellar credentials.

But I was reminded this morning of my deeper concern, which is the decline of the humanities in the contemporary academy by this blog post, about a brewing controversy at Cambridge. I’m not particularly interested in the controversy itself, but rather in what this professor of medieval literature has to say about how she teaches her field:

In my lectures, I don’t talk as much about racism as I wish I could [poor dear! -ed]. I do lecture a course on Middle English romance, and in that course, I talk about the ways these popular medieval fictions generate and perpetuate bigoted stereotypes – misogynistic, racist, disablist, xenophobic and Islamophobic, amongst other things [no, please, not other things, too! -ed]– in forms that have endured to the present day. I find this course hard to teach [no doubt. -ed]. The first time I delivered it, last year, I limited by topic to misogyny: there, I felt on firm enough ground to discuss these texts from a personal perspective, to bring in what had always been left out in my own experience of Cambridge English Literature, to open up space to recognise rape myths and victim-blaming, to identify the tropes of the Bad Mother and the deviant sexualised woman. But I also found that, more and more, I was looking at the ways these texts dealt with race [the most original minds invariably have PhDs in English lit. -ed]. And, while I’m a white woman who has little business lecturing anyone about racism [privilege check, well done! -ed], I found I couldn’t ignore it. I had students in my lectures who were frowning or nodding, asking questions or emailing me, trying to get a grip on what this literature they were reading was telling them about the way European and British culture has represented men and women who looked like them.

I’m curious to get the views of our resident academics (Eamus Catuli and others) on this excerpt. As an educated layperson with a literary bent, I read this and think: The humanities cannot come crashing down fast enough. Of all the things one could teach students in a class like this, you focus on the anachronistic obsessions of 21st-century Britain? Rather than making a contribution to the academic community that only a class on medieval literature could make, you hit the very notes that every other department plays (and that many other departments play much more convincingly)? In a class you could leverage to teach your students about literary technique, medieval folkways, the reception of scholastic theology, rhetoric, and on and on and on, you focus instead on two obsessions that will give them neither the ability to engage closely with texts nor the tools to make creations of their own?

In fact, the cynic in me reads this and thinks – after I’ve savored the thought of the collapse of every humanities department in the land – that what she’s doing is diabolical, in the sense that it’s merely destructive. She is introducing these texts to her students only to teach them that the texts are worthless, that their only value is in helping us understand why we’re so f—-d up, that they’re not worth engaging (notwithstanding their flaws) for enjoyment, for lessons on style and technique, for a fuller understanding of how past generations thought and felt and lived. In other words, to the cynic in me, she seems to be giving her students only the tools to keep these texts forever at a distance, easy and glib bases for never needing to take them seriously. She teaches to destroy: To destroy the texts themselves, if she can; barring that, to destroy her students’ ability and desire to truly inquire into the texts.

But then I read on and realize that I am no cynic. In fact, her objective is a world where these texts are expunged from our literary tradition and are rendered unread (and, if she has her way, I’d wager unreadable):

I felt that I had to talk about the gaps in the course they study, about the biases that keep us looking at literature that smooths over Britain’s history of racism, and Europe’s medieval culture of racism, which leaves a legacy right up to 2015. I had to show that the same tired old images of blackness and Judaism, the same images of foreign ‘Others’ and violent invaders and benefit-grabbing immigrants, have been the stuff of popular fiction for centuries.

I’d say that the only consolation is that once she’s achieved her goal, she’ll be unemployed, but the world is too perverse to hold out that hope.

You ought to read that entire blog post, by “Jeanne de Montbaston,” the nom de blog of teaching assistant Lucy Allen, who sounds like a perfect feminist pill. She’s spluttering about a promotional video Cambridge University made featuring the well-known Tudor historian David Starkey, a graduate of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. I would like to have seen that video, but it was taken down by the university after faculty and student protests:

Dillon’s letter stated that: “It has come to my attention that a significant number of colleagues, students and alumni have been deeply offended by the choice of historian David Starkey to front the campaign video, a man who has a well-documented and undeniable history of racism and sexism.”

Following the 2011 London riots, Starkey gained criticism for commenting on Newsnight that “the problem is the whites have become black … a particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion”.

Speaking to The Cambridge Student on the video, Starkey commented: “I did not put myself forward. I was asked to contribute by the University, which I love, and to which I owe a profound debt.”

A spokesman for the University’s Development and Alumni Relations said: “We are already re-editing the film for different launch events in different parts of the world, as we intended. The film has already been replaced online with another campaign film … We appreciate that [Starkey] is an academic who has made controversial statements in the past. However, in the video, he was representing his affection for the University and its values (the positive impact of learning and research on people’s lives)”.

David Starkey is rude as hell, and thoroughly English. He is openly gay — a campaigner for gay rights, even — militantly secular, and a Tory. This past summer, he sniped at the monarch for being, in his judgment, forgettable, and was denounced as “a venomous old queen.”  Which he may well be; he is certainly an old-school sort who doesn’t suffer fools gladly — and he seems to think most everybody is a fool. Certainly he scorns some of the beliefs that I hold sacred.

But so what? He is also a fascinating man who emerged from a working-class background, conquered physical disability, and went on to make terrific documentaries about the monarchy and other subjects in British history. God save us from these horrible academics who would suppress the voice of a David Starkey. Whatever his personal faults may or may not be, the man can make history come alive like few others (watch his Monarchy series on Netflix if you doubt me). The thing is, Starkey is a thousand million times more interesting and effective a communicator of historical knowledge than the dreary, hyperpoliticized drones like Lucy Allen, who suck the life out of any passion anyone has for history or literature with their skull-crackingly dull ideology. Is it too much to aspire to humanities professors actually showing some signs of being interested in humanity?

I’m with Richao: the academic system that empowers deathworkers like Allen cannot collapse fast enough. What do I mean by “deathworkers”? I take the term from Philip Rieff’s final book, My Life Among The Deathworks. The term is explained in this excerpt from Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s review of it in The New Republic, which, alas, is no longer available online:

For Rieff, a deathwork is ‘an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture.’ Much of today’s cultural expression, in his view, consists of deathworks aimed at destroying not just an older traditional culture, but also the foundation of culture itself. Rieff’s complaints are very large. He believes that, in America, transgression has now replaced creation as a cultural ideal; that creativity in our time has more to do with the urge to destroy.

I know that there are universities in this country where teachers are not ideologized, and where they actually love what they study. I visited some this fall. It is now necessary for we who will one day be sending our children to college to work hard to find the schools where they can find light and intellectual life among the faculty, and not darkness and endless ideological consternation. Humanities teachers like Lucy Allen, the beneficiaries of 2,500 years of Western thought, have sold their birthright for a pot of message.

UPDATE: I was thinking just now that even though I find Richard Dawkins a sneering bigot and ignoramus about religion, I respect him as an eminent scientist, and would not at all object to him being featured in an advertisement for my university.

Anyway, Lucy Allen responds graciously:

Richao, I saw your comment come up in my blog statistics, because you linked to it. I noticed you say:

‘She is introducing these texts to her students only to teach them that the texts are worthless, that their only value is in helping us understand why we’re so f—-d up, that they’re not worth engaging (notwithstanding their flaws) for enjoyment, for lessons on style and technique, for a fuller understanding of how past generations thought and felt and lived.’

I wanted to reassure you this absolutely isn’t the case. I love teaching medieval literature (you can see that from the rest of my blog). I very often do focus on all sorts of different aspects of texts, including their language and imagery, their rhetoric, their theological and philosophical content, and so on. Many of the texts I teach are incredibly beautiful and sophisticated, and very little studied.

In fact, the romances I refer to in the post you discuss are quite rarely taught – there wasn’t a lecture series discussing them before I wrote my course, so I certainly don’t want to stop people reading them. I want to make people feel excited about discussing them.

The same is true of issues of race and gender: I don’t feel a ‘poor dear’ because I don’t get to discuss everything in a single lecture, or even a single lecture series. I feel excited and challenged – and I try to communicate that to my students.

You really don’t need to worry this is some kind of project of censorship, or belittling the literature of the past: it’s not!

And Jones, who is a conservative Muslim, writes sensibly:

“The humanities cannot come crashing down fast enough.”

My first thought is: that’s a deeply irresponsible thing to say. Although it depends on whether you really mean it.

Look, there are many excesses. And English seems like one of the worst fields for this kind of thing. But just as you respect the rights of total right-wingers to present their take, this sort of leftist stuff is not something you can simply rule out of bounds.

But much more importantly, there is still a lot of really important work being done in the humanities broadly. I have to speak from experience here. I went to a small liberal arts college that is known in the public eye only as a garish cartoon of degenerate leftist excess. And, to be honest, it was that.

Yet, at that school, I got a classical liberal education of a quality that is only available at a handful of institutions anywhere in the country. Most of my professors were incredible people. In fact many of them are far on the left. But they were never, ever delinquent in their pedagogical duties. To the contrary, they were the best teachers I have ever had. They were deeply responsible people with a profound appreciation for the humanistic tradition. As a result I have had a humanistic education that is one of my most precious possessions.

I would fiercely and personally resist any attempt to undermine the fragile circumstances that made my education possible.

I would add that knowledge is fragile. The first and most important function of scholars is to keep the tradition alive; to make sure someone knows and understands what exists in those libraries. Without humanities scholars, the living embodiment of our humanistic tradition, those libraries are just filled with meaningless, impenetrable stacks of paper. Therefore, if you want to bring this enterprise “crashing down,” high culture will not magically spring from the ruins. It will just be in ruins.

I could relate other experiences that prove that students are not as prostrate before postmodernist excess as you imagine. Most people in most generations are mostly on the right track.

I think it’s important not to fall victim to a very un-conservative temptation to let social media, viral videos, and outrage culture delude you about the reality of higher education. Yes, there are some people trying to “destroy the foundations of culture.” But the foundations of culture also only exist in those very same departments: my former teachers.

UPDATE.2: Lucy Allen/Jeanne de M. responds further in the comments thread. I will assume that she is being honest about the way she presents her subject in class, despite her personal views on it detailed in her blog post. That being the case, I retract my harsh judgment on her teaching, and apologize. I still think it’s terrible what she and others at Cambridge have done to Starkey, though. Personally, I wouldn’t care how obnoxious her stated personal views were to me, if Lucy/Jeanne were a superb teacher who was fair in the classroom and who made her subject come alive, I would consider her a credit to my university.

(I’m keeping the Starkey clip below the updates for the sake of easier reading of the updates; I’m going to put it below the jump, in fact.)

For your entertainment, I give you this clip from 2012, in which Starkey refuses to take guff from a feminist SJW. It gets good at around the 1:40 part, but watch till nearly the end, where she ends up conceding that he had her dead to rights (but she tries to save herself by painting him as some kind of patriarchal bully for telling the truth about her):

Note well readers that I’m adding updates above the Starkey clip.

‘Johnny, It’s Been An Honor’

My wife sent me this 2009 story from Texas Monthly by Skip Hollandsworth, who is one of the best feature writers in the country. It’s about John McClamrock, a Texas high school football player who was paralyzed from the neck down in a 1973 gridiron accident. But it’s really about the love and devotion of his mother, Ann. Here’s how it starts:

Compared with the glistening two-story mansions that surrounded it, the house looked like something from another time. It was only 2,180 square feet. Its redbrick exterior was crumbling, and its gutters were clogged with leaves. Faded, paint-chipped blinds sagged behind the front windows. Next to the concrete steps leading to the front door, a scraggly banana plant clung to life.

Built in 1950, it was one of the last of the original single-story homes on Northport Drive, in Dallas’s Preston Hollow neighborhood. The newer residents, almost all of them affluent baby boomers, had no idea who lived there. Over the years, they’d see an ambulance pull up to the front of the house, and they’d watch as paramedics carried out someone covered in a blanket. A few days later, they’d see the paramedics return to carry that person back inside. But they’d never learned who it was or what had happened. Some of the local kids were convinced that the house was haunted. They’d ride their bikes by the lot at dusk, daring one another to ring the doorbell or run across the unwatered lawn.

None of the neighbors knew that mailmen once delivered boxes of letters to the front door and that strangers left plates of food or envelopes stuffed with money. They didn’t know that high school kids, whenever they drove past the house, blew their horns, over and over. They didn’t know that a church youth group had stood on that front yard one afternoon, faced the house, and sung a hymn.

In fact, it wasn’t until the spring of last year that they learned that the little house used to be one of Dallas’s most famous residences, known throughout the city as the McClamrock house. It was the home of Ann McClamrock and her son John, the boy who could not move.

Read the whole thing. Trust me, on this. So much of the news is so bad these last weeks, but this story … look, just read it. It is important to remember that people like Ann McClamrock walk the earth.

Good Colleges Open Thread

A reader writes:

Would you be willing to run a thread asking readers to recommend colleges? We have done some basic research (National Review Guide, First Things guide, Colleges That Change Lives, Excellent Sheep) and my daughter has a wish list, but we would love more input. Also, it might cheer people up.

I was encouraged to hear you say good things about Baylor and Villanova. The upper South is of particular interest.

We’re perfectly okay with secular liberalism if it’s fair-minded, as it was in my law school in the waning days of PC 1.0. I just don’t want anyone getting spat on.

In particular, if anyone went to a school with an honor code, did it help?

What a great idea. A candle-in-the-darkness kind of thing. Let’s hear from you, readers. If you were advising parents who want to send their kid to a college that has not been compromised by political correctness or Social Justice Warriors, and where it is possible to get a good traditional, non-ideological education, what would you advise? Which programs are worthwhile? Please be specific, and helpful. I’m not going to post any gripey comments on this thread.

UPDATE: Folks, please, if you’re going to make a suggestion, explain why you are suggesting it. It doesn’t do any good to say “____ University” if you don’t tell us why it’s a good choice. And let’s not let this discussion stray too far from the topic. The reader asks for practical information. I’d like to know the same thing, frankly.

UPDATE.2: A reader adds an important dimension to this debate:

However, and I don’t mean to misdirect the thread, I worry about jobs in these economy and the value of the degrees from some of these programs, economically. Before all the Classical Ed and Liberal Arts true believers attack, I don’t mean to criticize, I have an undergraduate Philosophy degree myself, and I’m glad I do. But maybe we could add to the discussion: where can we find schools that fulfill all of the original discussion goals but also have good job prospects, career placement programs, internship connections and or business/engineering departments?

Our young people are going to struggle to change the culture, live the BenOp, raise families etc. if they are unemployed, or reliant on the State. I say this as a 27-year-old, married, holder of an undergrad Philosophy degree who is finally succeeding financially, but only after long, challenging graduate professional education.

How To Get An Abortion

Doing anything Thursday night in Chapel Hill? This sounds like fun:

 

ABORTION HOW-TO: ENDING A PREGNANCY IN NORTH CAROLINA

Thursday, November 19th

6:00-8:30PM, Hamilton Hall 100

Sponsored by UNControllables, Students United for Reproductive Justice – SURJ, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department.

Free and open to the public. You don’t need to have a uterus to learn about resources for abortion and birth control. You can provide support to your significant other(s), friends, siblings, roommates etc by sharing this information.

The Facebook page for the event gives more details:

Where is the nearest abortion clinic? How much will it cost? What are the legal barriers? Find out in this practical workshop designed to empower you in the event of an unwanted pregnancy and/or unsuredness after unprotected sex.

Learn how to access:

* Plan B, the “morning after pill” (an emergency pregnancy prevention pill)

* Abortion with prescription drugs (mifepristone and misoprostol)

* Surgical abortion

* Options at different stages of pregnancy

* Cost, including health insurance coverage and small grants available from the Carolina Abortion Fund

* What various options feel like, side effects and recovery

* Affirming pre- and post-abortion support options available in the Triangle

* “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” (fake anti-choice clinics). Beware!!

* Legal considerations specific to North Carolina

* And much much more!

Presented in an affirming and gender-inclusive reproductive justice framework. Because bodily autonomy is a human right.

*FREE DINNER PROVIDED FROM Vimala’s Curryblossom Café!!!*

There will be FREE swag including condoms, dental dams, and lube!! We will also have information about semi-permanent birth control (like IUDs) available FREE through UNC Campus Health and the NC Health Department.

Free condoms, dental dams, and lube? Sounds irresistible. How thoughtful of an academic department at UNC-Chapel Hill to sponsor a how-to-exterminate-your-unborn-child teach-in, as well as to make sure attendees leave well-lubricated.

Ghouls, the lot. It’s astonishing that an academic department would be allowed by the university to lend its imprimatur to what amounts to political advocacy.

 

 

The Culture of Coddling

Here’s a good interview with Jonathan Haidt, the NYU social psychologist who co-founded the great Heterodox Academy website to combat bias in higher education. Haidt, as you may know, is a secular liberal, but he objects strongly to the prejudices within the academy against religious believers and conservatives. I found this Haidt comment stunning:

I would not want to lead a conversation on this topic [political correctness] with students here at NYU. Not because NYU is more PC than other top schools—it’s not. But professors are much safer these days speaking at other campuses than on their own because it’s only on your own campus that students are going to file harassment charges and drag you before the Equal Opportunity Commission if you say one word that offends someone. So I must heavily self-censor when I speak on my home campus. I can be more provocative and honest when I’m speaking at other schools.

So one of the best-known professors on the NYU campus cannot speak his mind out of fear that his students will drag him before a federal agency. That is terrifying. More:

If you try to reach students when they get to college it’s already too late. . . . As we say in the essay, childhood changed in 80s and 90s, there was much more protectiveness, there were new zero tolerance policies on bullying, which was fine when bullying was linked to physical aggression and to repeated actions. But bullying has gotten defined down over the last twenty years. There’s no longer a connection to physical violence, it no longer requires repetition, and it no longer requires intent. If someone feels excluded or marginalized by a single event, they have been bullied, and there’s zero tolerance for that. So that’s the way kids are socialized by the time they arrive in college. . .[Emphasis mine — RD]

For years I’ve been saying that this is exactly the strategy that GLSEN, the gay rights group, has pursued in schools: taking the laudable and necessary cause of anti-bullying, and using it as a wedge to silence perspectives contrary to their own — all in the name of “safety.” Because words are like weapons.

One more excerpt from the interview:

Worse. It’s going to get much, much worse over the next couple years and at that point some universities may start changing policies. By that point, many or maybe most American parents won’t want to send their children to the top universities, and there will be an enormous market opportunity for second-level universities that offer a much less coddled campus culture.

I think colleges and universities that market themselves as places where there is no coddling, and where they treat college like college, not a left-liberal Romper Room for aggrieved man-children, are going to find surprising success. After the things we’ve seen in the past few weeks, there’s no way I would send my children to some of these schools, no matter how good their reputation is. I don’t want my kids to be socialized into silence and intellectual incuriosity out of fear of the politically correct, and faculties and administrations who lack the courage and the integrity to stand up to them.

The entire interview is here.

Along those lines, Jane Clark Scharl says that this is very far from a “college kids just being college kids” problem, but has far-reaching consequences — and it derives from a deep crisis about the nature of reality and the human person. Excerpt:

“Safe spaces” attempt to reduce public discourse to self-admiring yes-fests that ban disagreement or critiques that could potentially hurt someone’s feelings. It’s hard to take them seriously because of their obvious ideological discrimination, but take them seriously we must, for what is accepted on the university campus tends to become accepted by society as a whole.

Lest anyone think this is an overly dramatic assessment of the situation, consider the European Union’s Equal Treatment Directive (ETD), which would allow business owners to be sued by anyone who feels discriminated against. Ever worse is that “the burden of proof must shift back to the [accused] when evidence of such discrimination is brought.” The ETD document does not define “discrimination” but implies that having one’s feelings hurt counts. So if a business owner hurts someone’s feelings, he is guilty of discrimination until proven innocent. Essentially the ETD would make the entire EU a “safe space.” It is just one nation’s approval away from being enacted as law in all twenty-eight EU states (Germany has expressed concerns about its economic ramifications).

But why are people so sensitive? Why do college students flee from anything that doesn’t affirm what they already believe, and why does the EU’s proposed discrimination laws start with an assumption of guilt? The problem is more than educational or political—it’s metaphysical. “Safe spaces” reveal a seismic shift in our understanding of the West’s foundational idea: ironically, the dignity of the individual human being.

Read the whole thing to see her case.  I tell you, what this kind of thing does is make it far, far less likely that people will take the risk of befriending, or hiring, someone who is different from themselves. When the Sacred Victim™ has the power to destroy your business or career because of something he feels about you, trust is impossible. Who can afford to be open to diversity when it puts you at risk of personal or professional destruction?

White Privilege in Our Time

The Guardian visits one of America’s poorest towns, Beattyville, Kentucky. Excerpts:

Karen Jennings patted her heavily made up face, put on a sardonic smile and said she thought she looked good after all she’d been through.

“I was an alcoholic first. I got drunk and fell in the creek and broke my back. Then I got hooked on the painkillers,” the 59-year-old grandmother said.

Over the years, Jennings’ back healed but her addiction to powerful opioids remained. After the prescriptions dried up, she was drawn to the underground drug trade that defines eastern Kentucky today as coal, oil and timber once did.

Jennings spoke with startling frankness about her part in a plague gripping the isolated, fading towns dotting this part of Appalachia. Frontier communities steeped in the myth of self-reliance are now blighted by addiction to opioids – “hillbilly heroin” to those who use them. It’s a dependency bound up with economic despair and financed in part by the same welfare system that is staving off economic collapse across much of eastern Kentucky. It’s a crisis that crosses generations.

One of those communities is Beattyville, recorded by a US census survey as the poorest white town – 98% of its 1,700 residents are white – in the country. It was also by one measure – the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2008-2012 of communities of more than 1,000 people, the latest statistics available at the time of reporting – among the four lowest income towns in the country.

Here’s another example of the people of Beattyville enjoying their white privilege:

“Our homeless situation is really different to a big city. It’s couch surfing. You’ve got lower income people, grandparents with their children and spouses living there with the grandchildren. They’re all crammed into this one house. There’s a lot of them.”

Other people on the waiting list for new homes – wooden bungalows or trailers – are what she calls “burn downs”, whose homes were destroyed by fire from candles, kerosene heaters or pot belly stoves. Many of those are in homes disconnected from electricity and other utilities to save money.

“Utility bills are outrageous in a trailer because they lack insulation. I have a little lady I’ve been helping with, Miss Nelly. She’s in her late 70s. Her electric bill in the wintertime here runs about $400 a month. She can’t afford that. Trailers don’t heat good,” she said. “Some people choose not to connect to utilities to save money. A lot of people here, their income is like between $500 and $700 a month. That’s all they get. That’s not a lot, especially if you’ve got kids and the price of gas and car insurance and you’ve got all these things that have to be paid.”

Read the whole thing. Wonder how many white people of Beattyville are going to benefit from the $50 million Yale University is spending on its diversity initiative. While Miss Nelly checks her privilege, Yale and its Ivy League competitors are putting their significant resources to work on behalf of the truly oppressed:

Still, Kong noted that the lower number of minorities in the pool of prospective professors is not an excuse for the lack of faculty diversity on campus, which she attributed largely to the University’s inability to retain faculty of color. In recent months, English and African American Studies professor Elizabeth Alexander ’84, who recited a poem at President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, as well as two other black professors with ties to the African American Studies department, have announced that they will leave Yale at the end of this academic year. Alexander and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies professor Vanessa Agard-Jones will go to Columbia University, which recently committed an additional $33 million to its faculty diversity initiative.

According to the university’s figures, a full professor at Yale makes $200,000 per year. Columbia pays even higher salaries. Vanessa Agard-Jones is only an assistant professor, which means she took in a mere $136,000. But she’s worth it. According to her Yale page, Prof. Agard-Jones is “a political anthropologist doing research on gender, sexuality, and environmental concerns in the Caribbean, [who] is currently writing a book about pesticides, (sexual) politics, and postcoloniality in Martinique.” So there’s that. If Miss Nelly would spray Raid on her private parts and come out as a lesbian, maybe somebody at Yale would study Appalachians like her.

Sorry, this is really unfair, this snark. I know that. A Yale professor is not the same thing as a little old lady living in Appalachia, and I don’t blame any professor for getting the highest salary he or she can. As long as you’re making your money honestly, I see nothing wrong with demanding what the market will bear. It’s not the fault of Ivy League professors that their universities are willing to pay them exorbitant salaries because of their skin color, sex, and so forth.

Still, it chaps my butt to think about those poor people strung out on dope, struggling to pay heating bills, in Appalachia, and to imagine that fat-mouthing Jerelyn Luther at Yale, whose parents live in a $700,000 house in Fairfield, Conn., whining about how oppressed she is at an Ivy League school — and then the people who run Yale falling all over themselves to give brats like her what she wants. The American ruling class lives in another world.

US Sanctuary for Syrians?

I have been highly critical of Angela Merkel and other European leaders for opening the doors wide to refugees from the Middle East, mostly on the grounds that there is no way for Europe to settle and properly integrate that many people in such a short period of time, and that Europe is therefore setting itself up for long-term disaster. But I don’t admire the US governors for trying to slam the door to the relative handful of Syrian refugees (10,000) headed here. 

To be sure, the liberals who are outraged at the governors are grating, for a reason that the liberal commentator Kevin Drum clearly grasps:

Here’s the thing: to the average person, it seems perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of admitting Syrian refugees to the country. We know that ISIS would like to attack the US. We know that ISIS probably has the wherewithal to infiltrate a few of its people into the flood of refugees. And most voters have no idea how easy it is to get past US screening. They probably figure it’s pretty easy.

So it doesn’t seem xenophobic or crazy to call for an end to accepting Syrian refugees. It seems like simple common sense. After all, things changed after Paris.

Mocking Republicans over this—as liberals spent much of yesterday doing on my Twitter stream—seems absurdly out of touch to a lot of people. Not just wingnut tea partiers, either, but plenty of ordinary centrists too. It makes them wonder if Democrats seriously see no problem here. Do they care at all about national security? Are they really that detached from reality?

This is true. Serious caution is absolutely necessary, but this move has about it the air of panicked opportunism. I may be wrong about this, but once the federal government has satisfied the governors’ legitimate concerns about proper security screening of these people, I expect the state leaders to stand up for these refugees. They are so few in number; this is nothing like what Europe is facing.

Besides, do we know how many of these refugees we’re taking in are Christian? A friend of mine, at his Orthodox Christian parish, has a Syrian family that is routinely asked by outsiders how long they have been converted to Christianity. “Uh, since around the time the Gospel was first preached at Antioch,” they say. The ignorance of many Americans about Christianity in the Middle East is astounding.