As part of an out-of-court settlement of a lawsuit, the University of Michigan has agreed to do away with its “Bias Response Teams,” otherwise known as Speech Police (https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=13934). “Speech First” filed the lawsuit 18 months ago; now the university has… well, surrendered.
There may be a catch, though. The Bias Response Teams are to be replaced by “Campus Climate Support” (CCS). Is that the same thing, with a different name? Under the settlement, the Klimate Kops won’t have power to “impose discipline” on students who say The Wrong Thing. Not being totally trusting of the university’s good faith, Speech First has reserved the right to re-activate their lawsuit if the school falls back into its old habits of censorship. You’d have to be pretty dim to trust university officials.
It was necessary to reserve this right because colleges and looniversities have established a pattern, when a lawsuit has been filed against them and they think they’re going to lose, of crying “I’ll be good, I’ll be good”–and then, when the heat’s off, reverting to their normal state of soft fascism.
It’s good to see these academic tyrants reined in, but it’s not enough–nowhere near enough. They’re still teaching twaddle, still indoctrinating minds already made mushy by teachers’ unions in the public schools. It has to stop. It has to stop.
I think that the pushback is beginning to coalesce.
I hope so. We must cease to be used as doormats.
I wish someone would sue my own university, from which I retired (Deo gratias!) in 2009. Today the faculty listserv is clutching its collective pearls about someone having posted homemade “being white is okay” flyers. EEK! Hate speech! “I’m going to incorporate these next week into the segment of my class that deals with fascism!” (This is the English Dept, by the way, not history or political science.) “It’s a trap to get us to say being white isn’t okay and thereby stir up the other white supremacists!” And so on ad nauseam, including gasping references to Tucker Carlson and the “alt-right.” The swooning couches are full and the torches and pitchforks are being readied for the next protest against white supremacy, fascists, the alt-right, Tucker Carlson, and, of course, President Trump.
And just a few minutes ago, the department administrator sent out a reminder that all such intimidating and hate-filled occurrences should be reported to … you guessed it … the university’s Bias Assessment Response Team.
Oh boy, am I glad I don’t teach there any more. I wouldn’t be safe.
And as a side note, I didn’t know saying something is “okay” is the same as saying it’s superior to anything else. “Okay” sounds pretty average to me. Now, “Allahu Akbar” does mean “Allah is GREATER,” meaning greater than anyone else’s god, but try calling that “Islamic supremacy” and see where it gets you. (Hint: re-education camp.)
You’re gonna love Joe Collidge today.
This amoebas don’t even know what “fascism” is. I would love to ask them to define it!
“Higher education” has turned into a very serious threat to our republic, to say nothing of our national sanity.
Jesu defend us.
Yes, one of Tucker Carlson’s crusades is for the people who are profiting off college students tuition and loans be the ones who pay off the loans they helped create. And this white supremacy stuff is bogus. They use this imagery all the time on TV dramas as the most dangerous ubiquitous threat of the 21st century.
All the Left’s great big “threats” are imaginary.
And this just in: Former colleagues in my old department are now circulating a petition against the hiring of an “anti-science activist from Trump’s EPA” to a position at the university. Graduate students actually started the campaign against this “anti-climate science” person, whose appointment is “chilling.”
Of course our graduate students — self-proclaimed experts in race, class, and gender — know little or nothing about science themselves, but then again, they don’t seem to know much about language and literature either. My old English department doesn’t do much any more in the way of what used to be thought of as language and literature studies. (I always considered myself to be a literary historian, by the way. My students got big doses of historical contexts, which usually included religious contexts as well, since I taught mostly 16th and 17th centuries.)
Educating ourselves right out of business…