From the Lefty Profs Use Lefty Buzzwords to Break Strikes Department

Like thousands of students in Quebec, McGill’s Women’s and Sexual Diversity Studies Student’s Association are striking against austerity. They spoke about the strike to the professors at McGill’s Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies. Instead of offering their support or simply remaining neutral, the students write in a letter published by The New Inquiry, the faculty condemned the students for

our organizing, our strategies, our tactics, our politics generally, and our commitment to feminist values. We were told that pickets are violent, that we made the WSSA General Assembly a site of intimidation and bullying, and that our mobilization has no impact because it is poorly thought out. We were told, repeatedly, that our strike mandate and our strategy of targeting austerity by striking was divisive and thus anti-feminist.

Lefty professor using lefty buzzwords (“anti-feminist”; I don’t consider “bullying” or even “intimidation” to be part of the left’s particular — or in the case of “divisive,” preferred — vocabulary) to condemn student strikes: it’s an old story, and it ain’t pretty. Though in this case I wonder if the professors realize they’re taking a position considerably to the right of Hayek. He only said that pickets were a form of coercion and intimidation, but he never went so far as to say they were in and of themselves violence.

Speaking of violence, the students also write:

We ask that those faculty members who have indicated they will call security on us if we picket, reconsider their commitment to resistance against state violence, and critically self-reflect on the violence they would be inviting us to be subject to should they do this.

They’ve got a point.