The dancing bears of Dartmouth
Recently David Horowitz gave a talk at Dartmouth. He has written the college’s president this note about his experience:
Leading the pack of Dartmouth character assassins who mobilized to combat my presence was Professor Annelise Oreleck, an out-of-control Gender Studies professor who tweeted: “Long-time hater, Islamophobe and anti-intellectual David Horowitz is speaking today in Rocky 3 at 6pm. He is a hater of the first order. If you’re so inclined, support students who are organizing a protest – Bring signs. Turn your back. Stage a walkout.” What justification can there be to have such an angry, close-minded individual teaching Dartmouth students?
Professor Oreleck’s protest instructions happened to be – and surely this was no coincidence – exactly what the Dartmouth Socialists were planning to obstruct my lecture – namely to turn an academic talk into a circus so that no one would pay serious attention to anything that was said. They came in force to play loud porn videos, put on headphones to block out my words, unfurl distracting banners with slogans like “Trans Rights Are Human Rights” and “ICE is the Gestapo,” and to periodically walk out of the room throwing jibes in my direction as further distractions before they left…
All the disrespectful antics of the protesters were in fact disturbing – not least because they were displays of Ivy League students wasting what could have been a valuable educational opportunity, and demonstrations of their total lack of interest in what someone who disagreed with them, and was far more educated, might be saying. When I was a college radical, as I told them to no effect, I always wanted to hear what our opponents were saying because I thought it would make me a better radical. Apparently, today’s radicals are so dedicated to self-righteous know-nothingism that they couldn’t care less what they are fighting against.
There’s more in that vein, including a request that the president of Dartmouth apologize to Hororwitz (fat chance, as Horowitz probably is quite aware) and a suggestion that the school hire some conservative administrators (likewise).
Back in the 1980s when Allan Bloom wrote his magnum opus The Closing of the American Mind, there were conflicts between radical students and professors and administrators who were at least somewhat more conservative. In this previous post I quoted Bloom’s description of one of the seminal events of the appeasement of student radicals by professors and administrators [see *NOTE below]:
Students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.
Well, now that the universities have been purged of just about all remaining conservative professors and administrators, campus activists don’t have to listen to all that blather about academic freedom. Or if they do, it’s all about freedom for the left, freedom to threaten anyone and everyone who disagrees with them.
Nor do they really have to give professors and/or administrators shoves anymore, neither little shoves nor big ones. With few exceptions, the professors and administrators are dancing to the same tune as the leftist students.
[*NOTE: Bloom was describing this event, which he discusses at length in his book.]
There seems to be little hope of any effective fight against the Democratic two-fold strategy of importing masses of immigrants who are destined to vote for them, whether legally in the future or illegally now, along with turning all schooling, K-12 and especially higher education, into the means for indoctrinating masses of young people who, even if they fail to vote, will often become activists and propagandists for hard-left causes.
“An out-of-control Gender Studies professor.” Is there any other kind?
Funny, how the people spewing hatred call Horowitz the hater.
One of the reasons the Left disrupts Conservative Speakers on a College Campus, or some other public forums is their precepts, principles and ideas will not stand up under even minor scrutiny. Most of their arguments just cannot hold water. Other views can not be allowed to even be presented.
December 12, the day of my last class. I’m so glad to retire from the greater college environment. The physics dept and it’s students are great, but step outside that bubble and it’s a literal insane asylum.
There are now a considerable number of people who react to any disagreement with their beliefs by Feeling UNSAFE, and sometimes responding with violence. Much like someone’s reaction to a physical threat.
It is the reaction I imagine you might have gotten from some medieval Christians had you suggested that there was maybe no God, and that you would definitely get from many fundamentalist Muslims today, should you suggest that Muhammed was not in fact the Prophet.
The question is, why has this attitude spread so rapidly in our society? I suspect it has something to do with the excesses of ‘self-esteem building.’
I was at Dartmouth 1994-95 taking a Master’s in health policy. I had retired from Surgery and thought I would learn something about measuring quality in healthcare. Jack Wennberg and Dartmouth were about the only ones doing a reasonable attempt.
This was through the medical school but I got a good dose of the college atmosphere. That year, The Bell Curve came out and I had a copy that I was reading. Several friends asked if they could borrow it when I finished as they did not want to be seen buying a copy at the Dartmouth Bookstore.
” With few exceptions, the professors and administrators are dancing to the same tune as the leftist students.”
It’s way past time to cut all funding and shut them down. Since that won’t happen, less peaceful methods will eventually emerge.
Sedition and treason must have lawful consequence or lawless consequence will eventually manifest.
David Foster:
I believe a much greater influence is actually post-modernism coupled with the mainstreaming of pop psychology. The two have combined to tell students and others that the most important things are not facts, and certainly not the discussion of different facts, but how we feel about them. It’s all subjective, a constructed narrative. Therefore, words are nearly on the same level as actions, and words that make us feel bad are violent and can be met with protests, violence, and demands that those words be retracted and those who spoke them punished.
I went back to the university in 1990 to get my master’s, and I noticed at the time that this change had already happened during the time I’d been away. See this post of mine (as well as some discussion I had with commenters in the thread) to see the story of what I encountered.
Today, the problem is establishment of the Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, and politically congruent, religious/moral philosophy, that noticeably indulges in diversity (i.e. color judgments), normalizes selective-child (a.k.a wicked solution), observes a social policy of selective exclusion (“=”), and pedals other dogma including the progress of a distinctly color-based anti-nativism globally.
Furthermore, the problem is so-called “seculars”, who conflate logical domains, and cling to a belief that science has uniform accuracy outside of a limited frame of reference, forward, backward, and all around. In Stork They Trust.
When I applied for a “National Defense Student Loan” in 1960, I was turned down because my proposed major, premed, was not approved. The loan officer told me that most premeds never got into medical school and it was not deemed a worthy major.
Why are Gender Studies, et all, considered majors worthy of loans?
Neo has the right of it. The takeover within the humanities of the postmodern ideology is what started this whole decline. It has now spread like a virulent virus throughout the academy.
has anyone here read allan bloom’s closing of the american mind?
i actually don’t agree that a great books education is necessary, college should be for careers.
Are we not decades beyon# don’t expecting acacademia to believe in free speech and mutual open, peaceful expression of ideas of oponinons. That was long ago. Sow the wind, reap thr whirlwind.
Redpill:
I certainly have read it. It’s a really good book, particularly the part about Cornell in 1969.
I bought it, primaraly on the reccomendation of Neo, and some of her commentators. A book well worth reading.
Bloom’s book was a sensation then (1987), and is a, if not The, classic work on the subject, now.
perhaps this deserves a separate blog but
have you ever blogged on the closing of the american mind?
i actually learned about it at church. allan bloom was about the truth, and jesus christ is truth. at the time allan bloom was promoted like cs lewis and lee strobel the case for christ.
but um, allan bloom was an atheist
I think Bloom’s book is instructive with regard to his observations of discrete phenomena within academe. His architectonic thesis was (if I’m remembering it correctly) derived from intellectual genealogies. I doubt that’s a valid diagnosis of what ails academe. For that, I’d look at Alvin Gouldner, Thomas Sowell, Robert Bork, and Jonathan Haidt.
A great deal of the conservative critique of higher education ca. 1987 (seconded by dissident liberals like Martin Peretz) seemed to derive their model of what higher education is and should be by abstracting from the experience of selective private research universities, or, more parochially, Harvard. The excess use of teaching assistants was a bugbear. That’s only an issue with research universities and not universal. I attended a couple of such universities and in neither case was the excess use of teaching assistants a problem. In one institution, the engineering school was not above assigning classes to graduate students who spoke little English and in another a prominent faculty member blew off his office hours (which I was told by a different faculty member could get you fired if the provost got wind of it, because it was a precise and discrete breach of contract). These are problems in particular departments and with particular faculty, not systemic problems except to the extent that employee discipline in re faculty is weak.
Another complaint of the time concerned the core curriculum. Bloom had one observation very seldom offered in this country: absent a serious core curriculum, there is no justification for holding students for four years. ‘Except for the hardest of hard sciences’, two years of study of a discrete subject suffices. Bloom noted that quite a number of his students seemed to be taking courses at random to fill their credit allotment. I think abolishing distribution requirements is a fine idea. What Bloom and others wanted was a serious core, not distribution requirements or synthetic courses. But then the attention of conservative critics was sidetracked into compiling lists of Great Books. A Great Books option is fine, but St. Johns College is a niche product. They weren’t all that concerned AFAIK with devising a menu of courses. (That’s something that has to be done by the trustees and imposed on the faculty, because faculty themselves are disciplinary partisans and will insist on their piece of the swag.) I don’t think it’s that difficult to come up with a list of courses , but you do so and people pick it apart and want to change it every year. (IMO, the list for a 1 year core curriculum would be courses in logic, epistemology, aesthetics, statistics and research methods, and a set of history survey courses; students who needed preparation to handle the statistics could schedule tutoring sessions in mathematics at a campus center devoted to that task).
A big promoter of core curricula was the late Peter Diamandopolous, who was the president of Adelphi University at the time. Liberal faculty are commonly self-centered, puerile, and dishonest and they’ll attack anyone any good in charge of an institution. Diamandopolous and the board turned over the keys to the ammo dump to these people. Some of Diamandopolous’ abuses were replicated by George Roche during his tenure at Hillsdale College. Just don’t need that.
And after the dancing bears, let’s watch the Penn State clown car:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/conservative-professor-mulls-defamation-suit-against-penn-for-saying-she-made-up-black-student-stats/
Related:
Interview with Camille Paglia (H/T Instapundit)…
Enjoy….
https://quillette.com/2018/11/10/camille-paglia-its-time-for-a-new-map-of-the-gender-world/
Barry – thanks.
Paglia is the only liberal I can stand to read, as she is, first, a classical liberal; second, a classical academic; and third, a classically unique personality.