The Treason of the Intellectuals
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs —“The Treason of the Intellectuals”—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics.
Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.
A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it.
For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory,” and apologists for Islamist extremism.
Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?
Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny.
I cannot stop thinking of the son of a Jewish friend of mine, who is a graduate student at one of the Ivy League colleges. Just this week, he went to the desk assigned to him to find, carefully placed under his computer keyboard, a note with the words “ZIONIST KIKE!!!” in red and green letters.
Just as disturbing as such incidents—and there are too many to recount—has been the dismally confused responses of university leaders.
Testifying before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week, Harvard President Claudine Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill showed that they had been well-briefed by the lawyers their universities retain for such occasions.
They gave technically correct explanations of how First Amendment rules apply on their campuses—if they did apply. Yes, context matters. If all students did was chant “From the river to the sea,” that speech is protected, so long as there was no threat of violence or “discriminatory harassment.”
But the reason Claudine Gay’s carefully phrased answers on Tuesday infuriated her critics is not that they were technically incorrect, but that they were so clearly at odds with her record—specifically her record as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the years 2018–2022, when Harvard was sliding to the very bottom of the rankings for free speech at colleges.
The killing of George Floyd happened when Gay was dean. Six days after Floyd’s death, she published a statement on the subject that suggests she felt personally threatened by events in distant Minneapolis. Floyd’s death, she wrote, illustrated “the brutality of racist violence in this country” and gave her an “acute sense of vulnerability.” She was “reminded, again, how even our [i.e., black Americans’] most mundane activities, like running. . . can carry inordinate risk. At a moment when all I want to do is gather my teenage son into my arms, I am painfully aware of how little shelter that provides.” In nothing that Gay said last Tuesday did she seem aware that Jewish students might have felt the same way after October 7.
In a memorandum to faculty on August 20, 2020, she wrote: “The calls for racial justice heard on our streets also echo on our campus, as we reckon with our individual and institutional shortcomings and with our Faculty’s shared responsibility to bring truth to bear on the pernicious effects of structural inequality.” Gay continued: “This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered. . . . I write today to share my personal commitment to this transformational project and the first steps the FAS will take to advance this important agenda in the coming year.”
As the great German sociologist Max Weber rightly argued in his 1917 essay on “ Science as a Vocation ,” political activism should not be permissible in a lecture hall “because the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform.” This was also the argument of the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report that universities must “maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.”
This separation between scholarship and politics has been entirely disregarded at the major American universities in recent years. Instead, our most elite schools have embraced the kind of “institutional change” that Gay has championed. Look where it has led us.
It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before.
A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the world were in Germany. By comparison with Heidelberg and Tübingen, Harvard and Yale were gentlemen’s clubs, where students paid more attention to football than to physics. More than a quarter of all the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences between 1901 and 1940 were awarded to Germans; only 11 percent went to Americans. Albert Einstein reached the pinnacle of his profession not in 1933, when he moved to Princeton, but from 1914 to 1917, when he was appointed professor at the University of Berlin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, and as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even the finest scientists produced by Cambridge felt obliged to do a tour of duty in Germany...
Today’s progressives engage in racism in the name of diversity. The nationalist academics of interwar Germany were at least overt about their desire for homogeneity and exclusion...
Rudy Koshar’s study of the university town of Marburg in Hesse illustrates the way this culture led German academia toward the Nazis. The mainly Protestant student fraternities already excluded Jews from membership before World War I. In March 1920, in the turbulent aftermath of the revolution that had overthrown the imperial regime and established the Weimar Republic, a student paramilitary group was involved in a murderous attack on Communist workers. In the national elections held four years later, the Völkisch-Sozialer Bloc—of which the early Nazi Party (the NSDAP) was a key part—won 17.7 percent of the Marburg vote.
Lawyers and doctors, all credentialed with university degrees, were substantially overrepresented within the NSDAP, as were university students (then a far narrower section of society than today). To middle-aged lawyers, Hitler was the heir to Bismarck. For their sons, he was the Wagnerian hero Rienzi , the demagogue who unites the people of Rome.
Even a man who considered himself a liberal, as Max Weber surely did, was susceptible to the allure of charismatic leadership when the fledgling democracy seemed so weak. Three years after Weber’s death in 1920, Germany was plunged into disastrous hyperinflation . For many German academics, Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933 was a moment of national salvation.
“Right down to the last, deepest fiber in myself, I belong to the Führer and his wonderful movement,” wrote the Nazi lawyer Hans Frank in his diary after a concert he had attended with Hitler on February 10, 1937. “We are in truth God’s tool for the annihilation of the bad forces of the earth. We fight in God’s name against Jews and their Bolshevism. God protect us!” Such thoughts helped him and many other lawyers to come to terms with the systematic illegality that characterized the regime from the very outset.
German academics acted as Hitler’s think tank, putting policy flesh on the bones of his racist ideology. As early as 1920, the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published their Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life , which sought to extrapolate from the annual cost of maintaining one “idiot” “the massive capital. . . being subtracted from the national product for entirely unproductive purposes.”
There is a clear line of continuity from this kind of analysis to the document found at the Schloss Hartheim asylum in 1945, which calculated that by 1951 the economic benefit of killing 70,273 mental patients—assuming an average daily outlay of 3.50 Reichsmarks and a life expectancy of ten years—would be 885,439,800 Reichsmarks. Many historians were little better, churning out tendentious historical justifications for German territorial claims in Eastern Europe that implied massive population displacement, if not genocide.
A critical factor in the decline and fall of the German universities was precisely that so many senior academics were Jews. For some, Hitler’s antisemitism was therefore—not unlike woke intersectionality in our own time—a career opportunity.
For German academics of Jewish heritage, particularly those who had married gentiles and converted to Christianity, it was disorienting.
The case of Victor Klemperer, a convert to Christianity married to a gentile, is illustrative. A veteran of World War I, Klemperer was appointed Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at Dresden University of Technology in 1920. “I am nothing but a German or German European,” Klemperer wrote in his diary, one of the most illuminating testaments of the German Jewish nightmare. Throughout the 1930s, he maintained that it was the Nazis who were “un-German.” “I. . . feel shame for Germany,” he wrote after Hitler had come to power. “I have truly always felt German.”
Yet the atmosphere at German universities grew steadily more toxic even for the most assimilated of Jews....
Five months later, to add insult to injury, he was barred from the university library reading room “as a non-Aryan.” What followed was a kind of relentless whittling away of his rights as a citizen......
He remained in Dresden after the occupation of eastern Germany. It was not long before he began to notice resemblances between the language of the new Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic and the Third Reich. Like Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, Klemperer understood that the totalitarianism of the right and the totalitarianism of the left had fundamentally similar characteristics. In particular, they loved to impose Newspeak on those they subjugated.
SS Oberführer Konrad Meyer , a professor of agronomy at the University of Berlin, was one of the experts who helped devise Heinrich Himmler’s “General Plan East” ( Generalplan Ost ) which, in the expectation of victory over the Soviet Union, was supposed to extend German settlement as far as Archangel in the north and Astrakhan in the south. Meyer’s version proposed establishing three vast “marcher settlements” with around five million German settlers. The fate of the peoples currently living there would be either annihilation or ethnic cleansing.
In 1940 a graduate student named Victor Scholz submitted a PhD thesis at the University of Breslau with the title “On the Possibilities of Recycling Gold from the Mouths of the Dead.” He had carried out his research under the supervision of Professor Herman Euler, dean of the Breslau Medical Faculty.
At Auschwitz, SS Gruppenführer Carl Clauberg , a professor of gynecology at Königsberg, sought to find the most efficient way to sterilize women. Among the techniques he experimented with was the injection, without anesthesia, of caustic substances into the uteruses of prisoners.
Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich. A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it. The fall from grace of the German universities was personified by the readiness of Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of his generation, to jump on the Nazi bandwagon, a swastika pin in his lapel. He was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 until 1945.
Later, after it was all over, the historian Friedrich Meinecke tried to explain “ the German catastrophe ” by arguing that excessive technical specialization had caused some educated Germans (not him, needless to say) to lose sight of the humanistic values of Goethe and Schiller. As a result, they had been unable to resist Hitler’s “mass Machiavellianism.”
The novelist Thomas Mann—who, unlike Meinecke, chose exile over complicity—was unusual in being able to recognize even at the time that, in “ Brother Hitler ,” the German educated elite possessed a monstrous younger sibling, whose role was to articulate and authorize their darkest aspirations.
The lesson of German history for American academia should by now be clear. In Germany, to use the legalistic language of 2023, “speech crossed into conduct.” The “final solution of the Jewish question” began as speech—to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles. It began in the songs of student fraternities. With extraordinary speed after 1933, however, it crossed into conduct: first, systematic pseudo-legal discrimination and ultimately, a program of technocratic genocide.
The Holocaust remains an exceptional historical crime—distinct from other acts of organized lethal violence directed against other minorities—precisely because it was perpetrated by a highly sophisticated nation-state that had within its borders the world’s finest universities. That is why American universities cannot regard antisemitism as just another expression of “hate,” no different from, say, Islamophobia—a neologism that should not be mentioned in the same breath. That is why Claudine Gay’s double standards—with their implication that African Americans are somehow more deserving of protection than Jews—are so indefensible.
That is why rational minds recoil from her argument that antisemitism on the Harvard campus is tolerable so long as genocide is not being perpetrated.
Well, the backlash against our contemporary treason of the intellectuals has finally arrived.
Donors such as the chief executive of Apollo, Marc Rowan (a Penn graduate), Pershing Square founder Bill Ackman (Harvard), and Stone Ridge founder Ross Stevens (Penn) have each made clear that their support will no longer be forthcoming for institutions run in this fashion.
On Saturday, Penn president Liz Magill stepped down , along with the chair of the Penn board of trustees, Scott Bok. Perhaps others will follow.
Yet it will take a lot more than a few high-profile resignations to reform the culture of America’s elite universities. It is much too entrenched in multiple departments, all dominated by a tenured faculty, to say nothing of the armies of DEI and Title IX officers who seem, at some colleges, now to outnumber the undergraduates.
In La trahison des clercs , Julien Benda accused the intellectuals of his time of dabbling in “the racial passions, class passions, and national passions. . . owing to which men rise up against other men.” Today’s academic leaders would never recognize themselves as the heirs of those Benda condemned, insisting that they are on the left, whereas Benda’s targets were on the right. And yet, as Victor Klemperer came to understand after 1945, totalitarianism comes in two flavors, though the ingredients are the same.
Only if the once-great American universities can reestablish—throughout their fabric—the separation of Wissenschaft from Politik can they be sure of avoiding the fate of Marburg and Königsberg.
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As the great German sociologist Max Weber rightly argued in his 1917 essay on “ Science as a Vocation ,” political activism should not be permissible in a lecture hall “because the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform.” This was also the argument of the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report that universities must “maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.”
And now our leading educational institutions are at the forefront of political activism and political fashion. Except, of course, id asked about committing genocide against Jews, then, suddenly, they discover neutrality. So long as no one violate their speech code by using the wrong pronouns when advocating for race based murder.
rcc victim blaming 101
So the racist bigot antisemite university presidents are somehow victims?
Or were you referring to Hamas and the collaborating Palestinians?
Being anti Netanyahu does not make one an antisemite.
Fuck all far-right wing fascists no matter whether they are jews, muslims or christians.
Or democrats
Democrats aren't fascists you really need to get your terminology straight.
When do you plan on learning to use the terminology correctly?
“We think that the contrast between Democrats and Republicans, as they are now [after the Democratic amplification of the far-right], is so drastic that we have to win.”
This Pelosi quote says a lot about how far to the right the Democratic Party really is. The Democrats believe they can’t be differentiated from Republicans, except by the artificial propping-up of the most extreme Republicans.
The Democratic Party leadership chose to use the threat of fascist violence to coerce their voter base into supporting them, rather than advocate for policies that attract workers. A campaign, for example, backing Medicare for All, could have attracted the working class en masse and resulted in vote victories, without boosting pro-fascist policies by assuring the most extreme Republicans are the candidates.
You mean all the nazi fascists calling for the death of Israel on campuses and in cities are not Democrats? Please supply a link.
Never sounds about right
“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe,”
- Elie Wiesel
What about the treason of the extreme Maga morons ? any thoughts on that today?
What treason are they committing John? Or do you just like to toss inflammatory terms around
They are committing more treason than university professors are.
Like these terms?
You should provide a link to support that claim.
Now it’s inflammatory?
Treason, or better stated as denial of the facts, as stated by far too many whom wish not to acknowledge their ignorance and obvious acceptance of one with who they give daily support and exception, so as his violations are overlooked, while his actions prove daily, that he is immune from doing wrong while confessing to as much, as done in plain sight of their blind eyes.
He will be the dictator he has foreshadowed. for he has shown he believes he is above our laws, and when the Republican Congress failed to convict on impeachment, it just reinforced his bazaaro thinking, and backed his false assertions.
I was actually taken back when watching these heads of “elite” higher education establishments dancing around a pretty clear question, for to me, easy to see the answer was obvious.
I am impressed with the one who did seed this article, but for all the wrong reasons i believe his intentions are, but for those obviously choosing or not, to be aware, of how intellectuals do fare in history and in our upside down reality seen as seen today, for it can puzzle critical thinking people, just as to they, does a Steeple, as to how so many cannot see, what is so visible and clear, to so few around here, for hear they cannot, and due to as much, we are all left in a spot, that our founding Fore Fathers would and did not ever believe, we could possibly be so stupid and ignorant, asz to achieve.
But ,1 need to believe
The racialist poison infecting our universities is much more of a danger to our country long term than a lazy former president who will follow the law and courts just like he did last time.
But your deflection is noted.
You seed an article that specifically equates the "left" at universities to Nazis that committed genocide, so I would question just about everything you say on these topics.
a related argument:
Biological (real or assumed) identity determines one's rights on the modern campus. Accordingly, "death to jews" is permissible speech, because "jews" are oppressors in the left's world view. The same campus administrators who refused to say "death to jews" would violate campus speech policies, would be at the forefront denouncing and punishing students who paraded around yelling "death to blacks" or "death to gays." No worries about the first amendment when the lefts favored groups are discriminated against.
The hypocrisy at play here is mind boggling. Especially from a group that prides itself on bragging up their intellect and knocking others not of like mind.
It's really a wholesale rejection of the concept of individual rights in favor of group rights and is incompatible with a society premised on the equality of every citizen. They do not believe in treating people the same.
Sadly, it's trickling down to primary and secondary education, with schools adopting different grading systems based on the student's color, or ending advanced classes in the name of equity.
All planning by our leftist teacher unions and academia.
The dumbing down of America.
Just look at how many of the 1960's and 70's most rabid radicals became 'notable' college professors and imagine what they were teaching.
With the blessing of academia overall.
Terrorists like Bill Ayers and Angela Davis became respect academics, able to pass their hate on to another generation. Somehow I doubt the left is going to reward the Qanon shaman or a proud boy with tenure at a state university. But participants in the BLM riots will be. That's our educational system.
It must be 'sad' for you that inclusivity is finally a thing. I mean, it seems that UNQUALIFIED people of color are popping up 'everywhere' in the public and becoming a 'distraction' by their sheer presence. Why, on a morning show (definitely not FOX NEWS) I actually can see a black host with a day-job wearing braids :
CBS This Morning Show Anchor Nate Burleson .
A some conservative nightmare! /s
The good news is Fox News is 'there' to keep some conservatives 'hair' on right and 'tight.' :)
and on fire
Helping to prove fox news is inclusive and they hire based on skills and not checking a box.
I said Fox, not MSDNC or CNN.
And you forgot racist
that's standard anymore ...
I guess hairstyle is much more important than what a host talks about.
It's all about the optics!
What he says at 4.1.8.
Thanks "D"!
You would guess. It's a hairstyle. No one needs to be fired over it. But, like your normal routine: You missed the point that the CBS executives 'got'!
Why, yes, yes it is! And apparently a very important one at that!
Has anyone here suggested such a thing, or is this just yet another strawman argument?
What I said in 4.1.9
It is important for MSDNC to include racist in their hires. If they don't stoke the fire of racism their ratings will go down the toilet even worse than they are now.
It's the usual: You pretending to not understand context and continuity of discussion. Always seeking some 'angle' to address rather than staying in the middle of the discussion (where we all belong).
Wild, vague ramblings, replies wholly unrelated to my posts, and speaking in cryptic codes is beyond my understanding.
“The dumbing down of America“
I’d have to say,
“Mission Accomplished !“
Your comment is not hard to decipher: It's not like some conservatives don't write a "million" of the same shit everyday. (Boy with Arms Akimbo.)
Re-read my comment (hint: especially the part in parenthesis).
CBS This Morning Show Anchor Nate Burleson .
Excellent. I would be a very poor communicator if it was too hard to understand.
Sure would be nice if your posts were so easily understood.
No one should be expressing "Death to Jews." This liberal won't stand for such verbiage.
What have you done about it so far?
Tell us what you have done about it. Since you are here: Start there.
Demanding answers while ignoring questions.
Gee, I have never seen THAT before!
/s
it's always advisable to proof read comments before posting them...
Then tickets issued for NOT answering the questions and calling out the idiocy of it.
People have different opinions on every issue. I don’t see how it can be treason to hold an unpopular view. Treason is an action, not a point of view.
What matters is fairness in how we treat people with different opinions.
The thought police are alive and well.
It would be nice to think that all opinions deserve respect, but in an era of tremendous bamboozling , disinformation, and lying, that is simply not true.
There are opinions we see every day that I will never respect , and I respect myself more for not respecting them.
Classic liberal thinking.
All opinions are equal but some opinions are more equal than others.
MOFA ….. make Orwell fiction again …..
Amen to that. Not respecting them and not taking them seriously either.
“All opinions are equal but some opinions are more equal than others.“
i’d have gone with < or >
greater than less than greater , cause i find far too many to be greater than i could have ever thought less than, for less off and more on,
are apparently synonymous
MOFA
well, i have me A
SOFA
Well then, MOFA on your Sofa
This isn't a legal argument. The title is an homage to a book written almost a 100 years criticizing the era's intellectual betrayal of the ideals of intellectualism, truth and justice, in service of political power. The campus leaders hypocrisy on speech is one example of that betrayal.
Treason of the Intellectuals? Hardly.
So, because as an official at a prestigious university she has to uphold the free speech rights of all individuals at her institution and displays a knowledge of the specifics of these rights, she is somehow antisemitic. This is known as a non sequitur and a logical fallacy.
Wash, rinse, and repeat through the whole article. It is almost like someone is putting out propaganda papers of loosely thrown together talking points of conspiratorial minded reactionaries, designed to make pseudo intellectuals feel okay with themselves for fiddling while Rome burned.
Exactly, you never hear of these universities preventing a conservative from speaking on campus.
They play very loose with what constitutes "Hate Speech" which needs to be banned
So, because as an official at a prestigious university she has to uphold the free speech rights of all individuals
No, the opposite in fact, The author portably assumes a baseline knowledge of what’s been going on college campuses this century, which you apparently have missed, but does this also make it explicit:
These universities suppress speech all the time. Just not when it comes to supporting the genocide of Jews. Then they remember the first amendment exists. Harvard is the same school that told students at their orientation that "misgendering" violates their code of conduct. You can't call for the genocide of Jews, claim whites aren't a part of humanity and be protected. Misgender someone, or claim affirmative action is bad, and these universities will try to silence/fire the speaker.
As it should. It's not that hard to be polite. I would imagine that since they have many different perspectives at the school, certain ground rules must be followed.
You and others on this site have chosen that hill to die on instead of following the simple protocol of calling someone as they wish.
Who did that, specifically?
Once again: Who did that, specifically?
Even the author notes that much attention needs to be paid to the context in which one is speaking, but that seems to not be good enough for some who consider any type of speech that they disagree with to be taboo, context be damned, while at the same time wanting their own speech, however corrosive it is to conversation.
I think we all need to ratchet down the rhetoric and start talking to each other instead of at/past each other.
s it should. It's not that hard to be polite.
So much for free speech, huh? In just one post you go from claiming it's the universities' job to uphold free speech to advocate punishing students who aren't dishonest enough to deny reality in the name of "politeness."
What else needs to be said?
So you advocate bullying? Noted.
I guess not much more can be said for rules. And, by the way, no, I did not go from one to the other side. As always, context counts. If one wants to be an asshole, then by all means, call them whatever. One obviously would not want to start a conversation with these people because one can't summon the basic decency to call a person as they wish to be called, so one is by default talking down to these "others".
Congratulations! You have just been renamed and regendered because I am exercising my free speech rights. Seanna is your new name and she/it are your pronouns.
Don't like it? Hard Cheese. You can join Richard in her purgatory of belittling people who don't fit neat definitions. Oh! Does it make you feel uncomfortable to be not addressed as you wish? Funny how that works, is it not?
Lol. What do you call advocating for the eradication of an entire race of people? Polite small talk?
Only progressives will claim that refusing to call a man a woman is worse than advocating for the murder of millions.
And, by the way, no, I did not go from one to the other sid
Than you don't understand your own argument. You claimed to universities should support free speech, and now defend punishing students for exercising first amendment protected speech.
Does it make you feel uncomfortable to be not addressed as you wish? Funny how that works, is it not?
Lol. But telling people they should die because of their race doesn't cause discomfort?
A fine example of the progressive mind at work..
As we see time and time again, the only rule progressives believe in is one that allows them to restrict the rights of those they don't like while protecting their own.
Males are males, females are females.
Wanting to be something you are not is wishful thinking, not reality.
Who, exactly, advocated for the extermination of a whole race of people?
Who said that?
Where? I believe that I said that context always matters.
Who said that? I surely wouldn't. Now you are just making shit up.
Again, I have never advocated for any person to kill another, but somehow you can pervert my words to mean something that they do not.
What do you think she would have said if a group protested and said Muslims in Gaza should all relocate to Egypt? How about a group protesting and chanting all blacks should go back to Africa? How about a conservative speaker wanting to say anything at all?
Those apparently can all be censored in the name of politeness.
Not using the desired pronoun can also get censored and punished.
Then the Presidents of Harvard and Penn should work harder since they rank 248 and 247 respectively out of 250+ college in “upholding” free speech. Sad.
As such, only fools would tout their record on supporting “free speech” as even adequate.
Another example, the president of Harvard has been caught plagiarizing in her already meager academic work. Harvard doesn’t care. She was hired for her progressive activism and the boxes she checked. Students could be expelled for doing what she did, but rules are for peasants not the progressive elite.
Scholarship, integrity and working to advance human knowledge simply don’t matter at Harvard
Jealous of professors? They want to make a living too-just like MAGA who won't take, "No!" for an answer. Unless. . . .
Jealous of professors?
Because Harvard is protecting a plagiarist for political reasons? That never occurred to me.
Whether or not she is a plagiarist being "protected" by Harvard is not of any consequence to this discussion, because she OVERCAME the accusation/charge and got the job anyway.
You can bitch and moan about the "Whys" and "How comes" but is it really any difference to how anybody ELSE in this country 'lands' a job under the circumstances? I'll answer that: "No."
After all our current president was accused of something similar and don't get me started on why you are a MAGA promoter of Trump with his 'ton' of spiritual, emotional, legal, and political baggage!
I am willing to bet this is all because she is a liberal. And I am left to wonder if you would be here typing today about her if she was a "dues paying" MAGA conservative!
She should consider screen the 46-minute video that Israel compiled from Hamas cameras and other sources at Harvard. Then the students and faculty could have informed debate about proportional response to graphic sadism.
Of course it is. It's literally the point, plagiarism is treason to the ideal of an intellectual. Instead of exposing it and treating it like the students it expels for plagiarism, Harvard protected her for political reasons and provided yet more evidence it that's more interested in power and politics as an institution than knowledge and justice.
, because she OVERCAME the accusation/charge and got the job anyway.
The accusations didn't come until after she was hired. Again, she was hired for political reasons, the boxes she checked and her commitment to extreme left wing causes, not her meagre academic work.
why you are a MAGA promoter of Trump with his 'ton' of spiritual, emotional, legal, and political baggage!
Lol . I don't promote Trump and have never voted for him. It's sad how quickly progressives retreat into comforting stereotypes every time their hypocrisy is exposed. Easier than looking in the mirror and realize how compromised they are by their willingness to defend anything on behalf of the movement, I guess.
I am willing to bet this is all because she is a liberal.
Yes, that's why she was hired and is being protected. That's the point. Her political beliefs are what matters at institution supposedly dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge.
It appears that the NT standard is:
If you ain't screeching about Trump at the top of your lungs 24/7, then to many that means you support Trump.
It is simply ridiculous nonsense, of course, but that never stopped them before, and I don't expect any differently in the future.
Maybe. However, I am not at all clear on how that squares with what Sean wrote about her.
That's talking shit for shit sake. And, by the way, keep your bitter bile about "leftist" away from me. I don't want a contagion.
I wouldn't worry about it if I were you. For which matter, I don't follow MAGAs around on NT remarking about every Biden criticism MAGAs MANUFACTURE on a daily basis. It would be a job all its own! For MAGA only allows itself to see 'brokenness' in democrats for which they will push out each and every time!
Great!
I don't worry about what a bunch of some liberals do, it would be nice for once to have a conversation without some liberals focusing on Trump no matter what the topic is.
You worry a lot about what liberals do. You even promote articles that discount, diminish, and misrepresent liberals. Tell the truth.
That's because I care about America.
If some liberals can't handle hearing the truth, that is not my problem. But since you seem bound and determined to push this crap, why not QUOTE me ?
Never mind, we both know why you won't/can't.
To quote Jack Nicholson:
"You can't handle the truth!"
Get back to the topic, Texan.
Uh, heed your own advice.
Every word in my post was in direct reply to something you wrote.
We seem to see that a lot in the progressive realm.
Tell us. . .why a man like Trump has your support in the GOP sphere for president again.
Tell us...why you drag Trump everywhere no matter the ACTUAL topic of conversation?
2 questions for you:
Now, do you have anything to say about the comment you replied to or are you just trolling for attention?
Because he is the leading MAGA GOP candidate for president, period. If you can get him not to run for president. . . I won't comment on him and you won't have to futilely attempt to distract from what Trump is doing to this country even out of office!
Do you support Trump or not?
So that means you must drag him along with you everywhere you go?
For real? Are you freaking serious right now? I have as much control over him as YOU do. Take your own precious advice and do it yourself instead of asking others to do for you.
I will 'drag' on Trump as long as I please and even more so quit your bitching and moaning over somebody who means nothing to you.
I am under no illusion that you will stop.
I did not solicit your advice, so kindly keep it to yourself.
Gotcha! So Trump does mean something important to you! I've known it all along.
You have written a veritable mountain of stuff about Trump. Me, not so much.
“It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”
― Ronald Reagan
Whatever you say. /s
Exactly!
MAGA never admits to 'anything' substantial. It's like vaporous wisp of smoke which comes out of MAGA supporters. Nothing to grasp hold to or sink into one's teeth. But, of course, you wont' understand anything I just wrote-just because.
Why would anyone "admit" to whatever some liberals "think" conservatives stand for?
MAGAs are not that hard to figure out. Though, it must be. . .interesting to MAGAs to think that they are beyond comprehension if they just stay silent about their beliefs and ideology. (HINT: The thing gives itself away with each accumulating rendering of commenting.)
And yet, you seem to still really struggle.
After all the posts from you regarding MAGA and conservatives, I was hoping you would have at least a rudimentary understanding about what they want instead of wild imaginations
Why don't you answer my questions?
is that possible?
Just showing the commitment to DEI no matter the consequences!
What is wrong with diversity, equity/equality, and inclusion. . . tell us why you find distasteful the promotion of "the fair treatment and full participation of all people", particularly groups "who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination" on the basis of identity or disability. -Wikipedia: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Nothing inherently wrong with it.
Just this is NOT the way to be inclusive OR diverse.
I don't see how it is equality to exclude solely based on race.
I know if the situation were reversed, and there was a whites-only party, you would NOT be fine with it.
Is it safe to say that you won't be criticizing diversity, inclusion, and equity/equality on other articles where people in underrepresented or who are subject to discrimination are seeking fair treatment and full participation of all people. Great!
If the circumstances are similar, sure I will criticize it.
Thanks for asking.
If you want "those who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination" then they need to be actually QUALLIFIED for a position. Regardless of what you may think:
The DEI thing started with good intent, to be sure, but it has been a grift for a long, long time. My favorite flavor?
1. Shame a company for their DEI stats on social media,
2. shake that same company down for your consulting services on how to fix it,
3. Get paid speaking fees to come in and “teach” the company how to be more inclusive.
4. If the company pays you, publicly laud them as an ally that “gets it”
Rinse and repeat
i would disagree with the “good intent” part of the DEI business first above. It’s just an updated version of the shakedown Jesse Jackson perfected decades ago,famously with Budweiser. He used operation PUSH to obtain a distributor ship from Budweiser that made his family millions.
Will you be endorsing governmental discrimination on behalf of the next generation of white kids in twenty years, because their parents were historically discriminated against?
Using Race discrimination by the government to fix past race discrimination is a never ending cycle. The only way to stop it is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Poor discussion. You are promoting your own straw-man argument. Just because you can't 'judge' the EDUCATOR as worthy of her pay. . . may explain why you are not on any administrator selection board! From your comments, MAGAs have never seen a qualified liberal 'anybody.'
Does a person who plagiarized really need to be head of a school that kicks students out for plagiarism?
Just insult your way through MAGA life. . . see how it works for you. Of course you disagree with the "good intent part" - MAGA does not value anybody who does not bow down and lick its sewer-water laden boots.
But, we won't wait time insulting MAGA. Dealing with MAGA is another matter altogether!
Just insult your way through MAGA life
followed by this..
MAGA does not value anybody who does not bow down and lick its sewer-water laden boots.
Perfect
Well, take 'em off and start really talking. Nobody needs lecturing to about the 'good news' of conservatism-except conservatives. WE are NOT conservatives and we don't want to be! Stop wasting quality time spent here trashing the place. But, MAGAs do not take advice readily nor steadily so I expect nothing to change even in the new year. Just more time wasted chatting up nonsense for its own sake. It's a living, eh?
Oh, and yes, two things can be true at the same time. So just MAGA is down and dirty with its labeling and insults. . . if MAGAs don't like how they come across to the public: Change the brand, strategies, and tactics.
Well. . . apparently HR department thought so. Not only did she come 'recommended': she landed the job. Furthermore, despite the conservative bitching and moaning so far she is holding on to it. But, I am sure MAGA will do its best to get a black woman fired because that is what MAGA does! Political warfare is what MAGA is all about doing.
You understand the plagiarism was found after they hired her, right? How many times do you need to be told that, before you stop making false claims?
o far she is holding on to it.
That's the point. Her plagiarism was discovered and she still held her job. The school that expels kids for plagiarism rewards the powerful who do it. I know progressives believe rules only apply to little people, but you can hopefully see how that bothers some of us who believe rules should be applied equally.
e MAGA will do its best to get a black woman fired because that is what MAGA does
Confronted with proof of plagiarism, you defend it with misinformation (that they hired her knowing she was plagiarist) and playing the race card. Not sure how being black allows you to steal other people's work, but go ahead and explain that. But then you type this, immediately after engaging in bottom of the barrel gutter politics:
"Political warfare is what MAGA is all about doing"
Physician, heal thyself.
So what? Your little tempest in a tea-pot has not escaped to the wider world yet? I am sure MAGA won't stop bitchin and whinin until she is begging for crumbs on the dirty, dingy, sidewalks of this country-penniless and broken. Because black people don't deserve to work or have interesting lives. As for your other BS. It's opportunist at best and I didn't even bother to ingest it to let it make sense!
The outrage at these three Univ Presidents was much broader than MAGA.
Stop addressing me. You have no validity with me anymore. It's all BS all the time. MAGAs gives a shit about the outrages they cause the country; so don't give a shit about her "outrages" either.
oh yes it is always about some black man or woman's job we are taking
Persecution complexes are so easy to spot.
And BS is easy to spot too. Oh. . . Lookit: BS on the 'horizon.'
Easy?
Even with the blinders on?
Sorry, but I don’t respond to your directives.
I’m not a MAGA and don’t give a shit either.
Stop with the shallow chit-chat, and I won't have to get you confused with MAGAs. But until you do. . . it is what it is.
What is it?
It is what it is. (HINT: It's a 'fun' expression. It's okay; you can borrow it if you wish. I'm a sharer.)
Is that like it could be like it might be?
It is like: It is what it is. Self-explanatory, too.
Oh. So it is like it is what it isn't isnt.
You're correct. Everything you presented is, in fact poor discussion. I said nothing about her as an educator. But somehow you think I did.
The only thing worse than an intellectual is a pseudo intellectual.
i am on the side of pseudo, so shall i commit to pseudo side, or will it wind up killing me,
softly with love, or in your case, the hate…? The haters of intellectuals….almost sounds like , they might be the lovers of stupidity, and easy to c when and Y, asz constantly on display R displays of displaced players working to become the Intellectual and simultaneously, the intellectual haters, cause who doesn’t hate the intellectual , B sides , are better than A Sides…