A caveat: I listened to the presentation last night. I do not have a transcript and I'm not going to listen to it again. So while I will make every effort to accurately recount the presenters' opinions (albeit in my own words), it may be that my memory deceives me. I apologize in advance.
The program consisted of three parts. First came an introduction from college president Don Christian, whose office funded the speaker series. (The president's office is in turn funded by students and taxpayers, whose contributions were not acknowledged.) Mr. Christian, to his credit, reiterated the College's commitment to the First Amendment, arguing that a state college has to follow the law of the land. He then hedged, pointing out that some people may be offended by other's speech, that this was problematic, and that the campus will be sensitive to people's feelings.
The second speaker (beginning at 5:59) was Jessica Pabon, an assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies. She served as the host and organizer for the event, and her introductory remarks are a summary of recent events on campus, where supposedly "marginalized groups" pushed back against "white males" basking in their privileged free speech. The current speaker series was initiated as a response, and with no sense of irony she mentions that it was generously funded and ostentatiously blessed by the (white male) president of the college.
Nobody on campus opposes Ms. Pabon's free speech, and indeed they're bending over backwards to provide her and her ilk with a forum. I think this is to their credit. Nevertheless, in Ms. Pabon's view, "white male" complaints about lack of free speech on campus, far from being an assertion of first amendment rights, are instead an act of bullying and harassment against "people of color", "women", and "LGBTQ" adherents.
I think she opposes the first amendment, believes that speech should be regulated by some sort of racial/gender quota system, and that people like her should decide who gets to say what.
Then (at 13:30) Ms. Cloud takes the stage. Her credential for this talk is not some academic paper, but rather her experience (which she describes here) as the recipient of hateful and vile e-mail.
I myself was targeted in June after I tweeted for reinforcements at a demonstration against anti-Muslim activists, writing that if more people came out, we could “finish them off.” Of course, as a nonviolent and longtime activist, I did not intend to take or incite actual violence. The statement was taken out of context and circulated via social media across major right-wing outlets including the right-wing front Campus Reform and by Ann Coulter. [link to campus reform here--ed]Certainly she has every right to be upset (though honestly, she should be more careful about her tweets), but nothing here is about the first amendment. Harassment and threats are not protected speech. Instead she was victimized by petty criminals--likely dysfunctional teenage boys trolling from their mothers' basements.
But the thrust of her talk didn't concern speech at all, but rather about a grand conspiracy theory to discredit "critical faculty" at America's universities. Such persecution (and here I have carefully checked the quote) "becomes part of a larger, globalist, neoliberal agenda. By attacking critical and activist faculty, the minions of the right are doing the work of global capitalism."
So who are these "critical faculty" who have been so relentlessly attacked? I didn't catch every name, but two stood out: George Ciccariello-Maher and Saida Grundy.
George, a former professor at Drexel University, out-did Ms. Cloud in intemperate tweeting by a mile. He wrote "All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide." After which he claimed he was taken out of context. Now maybe Mizzes Cloud and Pabon think that constitutes "critical thinking", but the rest of us see crackpot apeshit.
Drexel University, like any other organization in the world, is a brand. It can't allow completely kooky (and possibly dangerous) insults of its students and faculty to go unchecked. Of course they had to fire George. If nothing else he lost his job for pure stupidity.
The less egregious Saida Grundy (who I believe still has her job at Boston University) is similarly insulting of her employers' customers. According to CNN,
Her personal Twitter account has since been made private, but the Boston Globe reported some of the tweets: "why is white america so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?" and "every MLK week i commit myself to not spending a dime in white-owned businesses. and every year i find it nearly impossible."That "problem population" is paying her salary (tuition: $52K), and even if there is a (slight) scholarly point behind what she says, some courteous discretion is in order. (For example, I live in a majority Black community. Out of respect for my neighbors--who treat me very kindly--I won't be putting a Trump yard sign in front of my house. It would be totally misunderstood, or "taken out of context" as Ms. Cloud puts it.)
Ms. Cloud is especially upset that funding of "critical programs" is being cut. She bemoans the lack of funding for graduate students. Of course she shouldn't be surprised--if you poke your biggest funders in the eye, surely their enthusiasm for giving money will decline. I understand that Mizzes Pabon and Cloud have every first amendment right to hate on me (a white male) as much as they want. But I don't understand why I have to pay them for the privilege of doing so.
No wonder Republicans no longer see higher education as a good investment.
Ms. Cloud sees university faculty as the cream of American society. As I interpret her remarks, they are the only people with the scholarly distance and critical point of view who can legitimately criticize our world. But not all faculty are created equal.
The STEM folks have sold out to the defense department, which discredits them (though to my knowledge nobody at New Paltz has any funding from DoD). The social scientists have sold out to big business by letting their research be used to manipulate the rest of us. So only the "critical" faculty remain--the vanguard party, if you will, who can lead us to the Next American Revolution.
Not really a Marxist perspective, but that notwithstanding Ms. Cloud is a comrade in the International Socialist Organization (ISO). The ISO split from the Socialist Workers Party before my time, over reasons that are no longer relevant to anything (state capitalism in the Soviet Union). Because I have no personal connections with them they are not on my Beat, though I end up covering them anyway. But rest assured, the ISO is as irrelevant a grouplet as any of the others, their academic pretensions notwithstanding.
It's hard to estimate from the video, but the audience for this talk looks to be about 50 people. They were enthusiastic, polite and engaged. There were no hecklers, and nobody tried to disrupt the meeting. During Q&A the questions weren't just softball--they were marshmallows, at least insofar as they were coherent. Apparently anybody with any critical thinking skills decided to stay home (pun intended).
The ISO is not representative of American opinion, and despite the campus-wide, aggressive advertising for this event it drew only a limited audience. Probably an audience comparable in size to what a neo-Nazi speaker would have gotten (leaving out all the counter-protesters). Neither of these groups believes in American democracy, individual liberty, or economic freedom. The best response is to just ignore them.
Further Reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment