E-Pluribus | April 5, 2024
Activist professors and free speech; the "I" in "DEI" is hurting women's sports; sometimes the enemy of my enemy is just an enemy.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Jonathan Rieder: Activist Professors at Columbia and Barnard Are Botching Free Speech
What constitutes censorship often seems to be in the ear of the beholder, but Jonathan Rieder writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education says some professors at Barnard College and Columbia University are clearly confusing a refusal to endorse their activism for “silencing.” Others refusing to agree with you doesn’t mean you are being censored.
In the post-October 7 world, many of the fiercest battles in the campus culture wars have taken a strangely Talmudic form: What is antisemitism?
[. . .]
Nowhere have those ritual collisions been more charged than at my own institutions, Barnard College and Columbia University. And nowhere is the power of those battles to illuminate the limitations of the left’s newfound embrace of free expression more evident than in the fight that emerged after the Barnard administration removed the “Statement of Palestinian Solidarity” from the website of the department of women, gender, and sexuality studies (DWGSS) soon after October 7.
That removal provoked criticism from various Barnard and Columbia faculty members. Janet Jakobsen, a former director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, opined, “Our concern at root is whether conditions of academic freedom actually prevail at Barnard College.” Before long, the fracas leapt over the campus gates. The New York Civil Liberties Union charged that Barnard’s actions were “incompatible with a sound understanding of ‘academic freedom.’” The DWGSS has since gone rogue, putting up their own renegade website.
A letter, “Academic Freedom Under Attack at Barnard College,” issued by the Columbia University Faculty Action Committee and signed by well-known anti-Zionists, including Rashid Khalidi, Katherine Franke, and Nadia Abu El-Haj, lambasted what it deemed Barnard’s assaults on academic freedom. The committee claimed that cries of antisemitism were being used to shut down criticism of Israel. Conflating off-campus conservative doxxers with the Barnard administration — tarring the latter with the sins of the former — the letter conjured a surveillance-state hellscape: Barnard’s “movement away from … freedom of speech” on Palestine “subjects all faculty and students critical of the Zionist political project to the increased security, surveillance, and policing currently being implemented by the college.”
The most blistering charge in the letter was that Barnard’s removal of the “Statement of Palestinian Solidarity” from the DWGSS website constituted “censorship.” To grasp what’s wrong with that accusation, we need to take a deeper dive into the granular details of the statement itself and the links to which it guided its readers. They could have been a caricature — or perhaps a confirmation — of the conservative political activist Christopher F. Rufo’s dystopic view of the academy’s capture by far-left social-justice ideologues.
The DWGSS fashioned Israel as a uniquely demonic entity. Blotting out the tragic intricacies and moral dilemmas of Israel-Arab relations, the department replaced the messy ambiguities of Israel’s history and the plight of the Palestinians with counterfeit clarities like colonialism, apartheid, and genocide. In the process, the Manichean binary of oppressor and oppressed obscured the complexity of the current crisis and its multivariate causes. The links that accompanied the statement also invoked verdicts of “ethnic cleansing” and “settler colonialism” to impugn Israel. The “resources” hailed almost entirely from one vividly intersectional left corner of the ideological universe: decolonial feminists, polemical novelists, self-declared Black radicals, poets and organizers, revolutionary socialists, water and land protectors.
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That discounting was clear from the DWGSS’ silence about Hamas: its identity as an antisemitic terror state; its origins as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, with its fateful fusion of Nazism and Islamism in the 1930s and 1940s; and its incorporation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into its founding document. October 7, as the indispensable historian Jeffrey Herf writes, is the “logical outcome of the Jew-hatred that Hamas has openly expressed since 1988, and it rests on a strand of Islamic antisemitism that emerged in the early 20th century and fueled the Arab war of rejection in 1948.”
All of this underscores the problem with departmental political side-taking in the name of academic freedom: The newfound progressive embrace of free expression coincides with the desire to foist an orthodoxy on Barnard students, one which politicizes academic study and makes hash of the liberal-arts ideal of competing viewpoints. That is why academic freedom requires institutional neutrality to flourish.
I absolutely support my colleagues’ right to hold, and to express as individuals, the views contained in the DWGSS statement, misguided though I think they are. But I do not support their right to impose those views on Barnard and Columbia students. Despite the sinister image of jackbooted administrators tearing down a website, the view of the statement’s removal as “censorship” reflects a confusion about the varying speech rules and rights that should attach to speakers in different zones of the academic workplace. Properly understood, the prohibition on doctrinaire departmental statements doesn’t quash academic freedom — it protects it.
Read the whole thing.
Jonathan Kay: The Damage Caused by Trans ‘Inclusion’ In Female Athletics: a Massachusetts Case Study
Some argue that cases of transgender athletes are so rare, relatively speaking, that they’re not worth all the hue and cry. At Quillette, Jonathan Kay argues that the impacts, however, extend far beyond the individual athlete.
One argument that’s commonly invoked in support of male-bodied “inclusion” in female sports categories is that, as Minnesota-based activist group Gender Justice asserts, “trans women are very much underrepresented in sport,” and “professional trans women athletes are extremely rare.” The idea here is that, no matter the obvious advantages that men have over women in athletics, few female athletes will be negatively affected by the handful of trans-identified males who choose to compete in categories that align with their gender identity.
And, to give these activists their due, it is quite true that most elite male athletes, even those afflicted with gender dysphoria, understand that they don’t belong in protected female spaces. It requires either a blinding sense of arrogance, or perhaps social cluelessness, for a man competing as a woman to fail to understand how disdained (and, in some cases, reviled) he will become if he insists on persistently invading female athletics—notwithstanding the forced displays of camaraderie and acceptance that affected women typically feel obligated to put on for the cameras.
So yes, in this narrow arithmetic sense, I will agree with Gender Justice and similarly mandated activist groups that in most sports, the number of biologically male athletes imposing themselves on female spaces is relatively low. One online catalog of “men and boys who have competed in women’s or girls’ sports” names 317 athletes competing in 57 different sports. While Gaines (and I) would argue that’s 317 too many, it’s a small fraction of the total number of the world’s high-level female athletes.
But those numbers don’t tell the whole story—since male athletic advantages are so enormous that just one or two men can destroy the competitive balance in a female league or tournament. At one recent cycling race in Illinois, for instance, men stole both the gold- and silver-medal podium positions from female competitors, turning the whole event into a joke (albeit one that no one is supposed to laugh at).
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Thanks in large part to The Independent Council on Women’s Sport, an American-based advocacy group, almost 9-million people have seen the infamous video clip of Clark injuring a female opponent during a February 8 high-school basketball game. Clark, a student at KIPP Academy in Lynn, MA, also reportedly hurt two other girls during that same game. Following the third injury, the coach of the opposing team, Collegiate Charter of Lowell, MA, chose to forfeit the game rather than risk losing more players.
In light of the (predictably negative) fallout, KIPP Academy then chose to forfeit its own last regular-season game. It also withdrew from its Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA) playoff bracket, despite having already qualified for the post-season.
And so, all in all, approximately 30 female basketball players on two separate teams suffered negative consequences because a single male player wanted to present to the world as a female athlete. And that tally doesn’t include the female players on other teams that KIPP competed against during the regular season.
[. . .]
As female athletes and their parents find their political voice, the tide is beginning to turn on this issue—even in progressive parts of the United States, such as New York City. And spectacles such as that of “a 6’ Tall, Bearded Trans Basketballer” throwing girls around like rag-dolls will only accelerate the process.
Once the ideological movement to undermine the reality of sexual dimorphism has run its course, and it’s (once again) become settled policy across the sporting world that turning “he” into “she” should not be a magic ticket into female leagues (or locker rooms), the question will become: How did we allow this to happen?
Read it all.
Cathy Young: When Hatred of the Left Becomes Love for Putin
That politics can create strange bedfellows is hardly a new concept, but the practical outworkings can still be disturbing. The embrace of Russia’s Vladimir Putin by some on the right is one such case, writes Cathy Young at Persuasion, and for at least some, the reasoning goes beyond simply owning the libs.
[N]ot all Putin-friendly conservatives are the same. For some, their hatred of the American left overrides any feelings they have about Putin. Others are more ideological: they oppose the Western liberal project itself. Untangling these different strains is key to explaining why so many on today’s right embrace views that, until recently, would have gotten them branded Kremlin stooges by other conservatives.
Take former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and his recent Moscow adventure. In February, Carlson, whose content is now streamed on X and on his own website, took his role as a conduit for Kremlin propaganda to a new level with a trip to interview Putin—something that he absurdly claimed no Western journalist had “bothered” to do since the war began.
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Carlson reflects the dominant mode on the Trumpist right: if not actively pro-Putin, then at best anti-anti-Putin. The anti-anti-Putinists may concede that Putin is kinda bad, but only to insist that other things are far worse: Mexican drug cartels, progressive philanthropist George Soros, “the Left,” or America’s “ruling class.” Like the left-wing Soviet apologists of old, they make up faux political prisoners in America to suggest moral equivalency with the dictatorship in the Kremlin.
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It’s hardly news by now that many American right-wingers see Putin’s Russia as the antithesis of Western “wokeness.” This is especially true with regard to sexual and gender norms: I noted the beginnings of this trend in 2013, when several right-wing groups and conservative pundits praised a Russian law censoring “propaganda” of homosexuality. Discussing the phenomenon recently in the context of the GOP’s anti-Ukraine turn, David French pointed to such examples as far-right strategist Steve Bannon’s praise for Putin’s “anti-woke” persona and Russia’s conservative gender politics, or psychologist Jordan Peterson’s suggestion that Russia’s war in Ukraine was partly self-defense against the decadence of “the pathological West.”
The idea of Russia as a bulwark of traditionalism and “anti-woke” resistance is an image the Putin regime deliberately cultivates—not only to appeal to its own population’s biases but to win friends among conservatives in the West. And many are seduced into an affinity that goes well beyond anti-anti-Putinism.
Those right-wingers nod along when Putin declares, while announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, that Russia is fighting for families with “Mom and Dad” rather than “Parent No. 1” and “Parent No. 2,” or when Russia officially classifies feminism and the “LGBT movement” as “extremist.” They love the army recruitment ads that celebrate manly men, rather than “emasculated” American men. They may not have heard about Russian politicians echoing American “trad” bloggers in fretting that too many young women are going to college instead of having babies, but they know they like a cultural climate where such opinions flourish. They also happily give the Putin regime a pass on things for which they castigate the liberal “regime” in America—be it legal abortion, despite recent moves to limit and discourage it, or stringent COVID-19 lockdowns.
Yet distaste for post-1960s social and sexual liberalism doesn’t entirely explain the right’s Putin love. Some right-wing pro-Putin rhetoric indicates a far more radical rejection of liberalism, even in its more classical varieties[.]
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Populist conservatives see [Putin] the way progressives once saw Fidel Castro, as the one person who says he won’t submit to the world that surrounds him. You didn’t have to be a Communist to appreciate the way Castro, whatever his excesses, was carving out a space of autonomy for his country.
If Putin-friendly “populist conservatives” are the equivalent of Castro-friendly, Cold War-era progressives, that’s quite a self-own—and a self-reveal.
Much like pro-Castro leftists of yore, today’s pro-Putin rightists are fundamentally anti-American. They hate American global leadership and power. They hate American foreign policy and national security institutions—hence their eager embrace of Kremlin narratives in which the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, which ousted a pro-Moscow semi-authoritarian regime, was “a CIA-backed coup.” They hate, more fundamentally, 21st century America: an America they see as corrupted by multiculturalism, “Third World” immigration, feminism, gay rights and sexual liberation—and dominated by “elites” that despise conservatives.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter (X)
The New Yorker recently published a story about how race and gender identity issues sometimes throw liberals for a loop, despite the best (?) of intentions. Here are some excerpts:
Here’s Wesley Yang with a howler in a recent District Court of Washington ruling:
And finally, bullies and free speech don’t mix. Click for video.