The House hearing, the three university presidents, and the rot of post-American higher education on full display

 I've waited to weigh in on this, because there was assuredly going to be a first wave of reaction to the disgusting way presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT conducted themselves as they appeared before the House Education and Workforce Committee last Tuesday. And there was, from columnists, radio talk show hosts, cable-TV personalities and ordinary post-Americans conversing among themselves.

I probably don't have anything startlingly original to add to the discussion, but I know where on the landscape I want to position myself.

Let's start with the after-the-fact apology phenomenon. We see this a lot these days. The social climate in our country is such that there's not much regard for internal filters that might make someone think twice about taking a stance that allows one to indulge in self-congratulation, but that has a lot of opposition among people of influence. If President Gay's cocksure depends-on-the-context response to Representative Stefaniak's questioning about exhortations of Jewish genocide was one hundred percent sincere, then her walk-back has to be seen as full of ka-ka, does it not? 

Or is the reverse the case? There's at least a theoretical case to be made for that. After all, she was still dealing with the mid-November letter she received from 100 faculty members who did not at all care for the "Combating  Antisemitism" statement she issued in response to donors and alums speaking up about campus Jew-hatred. 

Either way, the only conclusion to be reached is that she's a phony.

And if these university presidents want to talk about context, we can gladly revisit the whole leftward drift of higher education over the past umpteen decades. We can trace the role of the Gramscian long march through the institutions by which 1960s radicals became tenured professors. We can point out the fact that William F. Buckley launched his career as an author with the 1952 tome God and Man at Yale, which examined his alma mater's complete secularization. Timothy Dwight, call your office.

I am also not the first to note that Gay, Magill and Kornbluth would have come down on similar calls for extermination of just about any demographic group other than Jews.

The "just about" qualifier was not thrown into the previous sentence idly. We all know which group would not incur their ire. 

And that's what this really comes down to, isn't it? A key component of the above-mentioned leftward drift is the assumption that there is something fundamentally problematic about being white. 

And there's a global dimension to this. Russia's Putin and China's Xi  are licking their chops at the prospect of a BRICS expansion that would bring its role as a voice for the "global south" into sharper focus. What an exquisitely effective way to nudge the West, and the United States in particular, out of their role as guarantor of the rules-based post-World War II international order.

So the ramifications of the way these three ladies conducted themselves last Tuesday are numerous.

It was one more confirmation that we've moved past the peak of human advancement and are descending back into the grim way human beings have treated each other for most of our species' history. 

How a fragmented America reacts to the Israel-Hamas war

 Former Harvard president is completely disgusted with that university:

Former Harvard president Larry Summers said Monday he has never been as "disillusioned and alienated" toward the institution as he is now after student organizations purported that Israel is "entirely responsible" for the country's war against Hamas terrorists.

Summers, who was a Harvard professor before serving as university president from 2001 to 2006, posted a thread on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday saying he is "sickened" by the student groups' statement and "cannot fathom" the Harvard administration's "failure to disassociate the University and condemn this statement."

How egregious was the source of his nausea?

Following the attack, Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups released a statement signed by 27 organizations that said, "We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence." The groups that signed onto the statement included the Harvard Islamic Society, the Harvard Jews for Liberation, the Society of Arab Students and the Harvard Divinity School Muslim Association.

"Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum," the statement continued. "For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence."

Summers has had it with the administration's lack of a moral compass:

"In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today," Summers wrote. "The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups' statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards(sic) acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel."

On the other side of the post-American spectrum, the supreme leader of the cult of drool-besotted leg-humpers let loose with this:

Former US president Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared to mock Israel for failing to anticipate the weekend Hamas onslaught and for not going on the offensive against Hezbollah amid several deadly clashes along its northern border. He also launched personal attacks against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he accused of “letting him down,” and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, whom he called a “jerk.”

 . . .  Turning to Gallant in Israel, Trump said, “They have a national defense minister or somebody saying, ‘I hope Hezbollah doesn’t attack us from the north.’ So the following morning, they attacked… If you listen to this jerk, you would attack from the north because he said, ‘That’s our weak spot.’”

. . . Trump made the comments while recalling his administration’s 2020 assassination of Qassem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force.

Trump reiterated his claim that Netanyahu backed out at the last minute from actively taking part in the killing.

“I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. That was a very terrible thing. We were very disappointed, but we did the job ourselves, and it was absolute precision, magnificent, beautiful job,” he said. “Then Bibi tried to take credit for it. That didn’t make me feel too good. But that’s all right.”

I have no affection for the Biden administration, but, for the moment, it's behaving in a grown-up manner regarding this war.

Most other places you look, it's being used as an instrument to further rub raw everything in our country that can be rubbed raw.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday roundup

 Mona Charen at The Bulwark looks at the dismaying descent of Utah Senator Mike Lee from Constitutional scholar and principled conservative into Trumpism, as evidenced by his CPAC speech last week.

Two essays about how identity politics militancy has found a way to poison the most objective science of all - mathematics - merit your attention.

John McWhorter's focus is on a document currently garnering buzz called "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction." 

It's a doozy:

the thrust of this pamphlet is that:

1. a focus on getting the “right” answer is “perfectionism” or “either/or thinking;”

2. the idea that teachers are teachers and students are learners is wrong;

3. to think of it as a problem that the expectations you have of students are not met is racist;

4. to teach math in a linear fashion with skills taught in sequence is racist;

5. to value “procedural fluency” – i.e. knowing how to do the fractions, long division … -- over “conceptual knowledge” is racist. That is, black kids are brilliant to know what math is trying to do, to know “what it’s all about,” rather than to actually do the math, just as many of us read about what physics or astrophysics accomplishes without ever intending to master the math that led to the conclusions;

6. to require students to “show their work” is racist;

7. requiring students to raise their hand before speaking “can reinforce paternalism and powerhoarding, in addition to breaking the process of thinking, learning, and communicating.”

He cuts off arguments that it's really not of much significants at the pass:

I am not cherry-picking especially ripe-seeming quotes from an otherwise perfectly normal document. I am referring to its principal tenets, often restated several times within it.

Another response will be that I am exaggerating the proposal’s impact – that almost nobody is using it for real and that really it’s “just a proposal.” To which the proper response is “Thank God,” – but we also recall that the people saying this would be dancing jigs if every state in the Union adopted the whole pamphlet wholesale. 

Bari Weiss turns over the current edition of her Substack newsletter, after an introduction, to a Princeton math professor named Sergiu Klainerman. He likewise takes that document (which was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) on and provides the perspective of a refugee from Ceausescu-era Romania.

The UMC moves a little closer to its inevitable split:

Conservative leaders within the United Methodist Church unveiled plans Monday to form a new denomination, the Global Methodist Church, with a doctrine that does not recognize same-sex marriage.

The move could hasten the long-expected breakup of the UMC, America’s largest mainline Protestant denomination, over differing approaches to LGBTQ inclusion.

The operative term is "a little closer." It's not like next week is in the cards or anything:

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the UMC’s General Conference — at which the schism would be debated — has been postponed for two consecutive years, and is now scheduled to take place in Minneapolis starting in late August of 2022.

The Rev. Keith Boyette, a Methodist elder from Virginia who chairs the Global Methodist initiative, said he and his allies do not want to wait that long to formally leave the UMC. They have asked that the topic of schism be added to the tightly limited agenda of a special one-day General Conference to be conducted online May 8.

“The church is basically stalemated right now,” Boyette said. “We don’t believe an additional year is going to be helpful for anybody.”

However, Louisiana-based Bishop Cynthia Fierro Harvey, who heads the UMC’s Council of Bishops, said debate over a schism would involve “delicate deliberations” and attempting to conduct them online in May “does not seem wise or ethical.”

If the issue is not addressed on May 8, Boyette said he and his allies would be willing to delay until the 2022 General Conference, but only if UMC centrists and progressives remain committed to previous agreements about a breakup. Any lessening of those commitments might prompt the conservatives to bring the new church into existence, Boyette said.

Departure from sound doctrine on the matter of human sexuality is not just happening in the UMC. This development is pretty significant:

One of the country’s largest adoption and foster care agencies, Bethany Christian Services, announced on Monday that it would begin providing services to L.G.B.T.Q. parents nationwide effective immediately, a major inflection point in the fraught battle over many faith-based agencies’ longstanding opposition to working with same-sex couples.

 

Bethany, a Michigan-based evangelical organization, announced the change in an email to about 1,500 staff members that was signed by Chris Palusky, the organization’s president and chief executive. “We will now offer services with the love and compassion of Jesus to the many types of families who exist in our world today,” Mr. Palusky wrote. “We’re taking an ‘all hands on deck’ approach where all are welcome.”

 

The announcement is a significant departure for the 77-year-old organization, which is the largest Protestant adoption and foster agency in the United States. Bethany facilitated 3,406 foster placements and 1,123 adoptions in 2019, and has offices in 32 states. (The organization also works in refugee placement, and offers other services related to child and family welfare.) Previously, openly gay prospective foster and adoptive parents in most states were referred to other agencies.

 

The decision comes amid a high-stakes cultural and legal battle that features questions about sexuality, religious freedom, parenthood, family structure and theology.

Along these lines, I highly recommend this piece at The Gospel Coalition that addresses several frequently asked questions about the Equality Act.

At The American Conservative, Rod Dreher recounts a sequence of events beginning with his writing a letter to the editor of the Baton Rouge Advocate. The letter explains why he endorses Senator Bill Cassidy's vote to convict Donald Trump in the second impeachment trial. Dreher makes clear that he did not come to his position out of some longstanding strident Never-Trump sentiment:

As a conservative voter, I have never been a Never-Trumper and though I have also never been a Donald Trump fan, I recognize he brought a much-needed shake-up to the GOP.

But Trump’s grotesque post-election behavior made me realize that the Never-Trumpers were more correct than I previously thought. Trump’s words and actions regarding the Jan. 6 atrocity merited impeachment and conviction. It gives me no pleasure to conclude this, but had a Democratic president done the same things, I would feel the same way.

I am also proud of Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, for his vote to convict Trump. It was a brave call.

He lost a friend of 40 years over having penned the letter:

I didn’t realize the letter was going to run at all, much less today. Until I woke up this morning and received the following e-mail from a friend of 40 years:

I’d like to just let this pass, but I can’t. Support for Trump and his policies is the last straw. I can’t see a way for us to stay friends. You have broken my heart.

Well, that letter makes me sad, but mostly it makes me angry and depressed about the country. Notice that my liberal friend ended our friendship — of four decades! — because in a letter to the editor supporting Trump’s impeachment, I did not express perfect hatred of the man, and everything he did.

I’m still stunned by the fanaticism here. I wrote a letter to the editor supporting the Republican US senator who voted to impeach Trump, and my old liberal friend’s response to that is to end our friendship. Sen. Cassidy told Walter Isaacson the other day that he has lost some friends over his vote, but he was talking about Republican friends. I, however, lost a liberal friend because I didn’t support Cassidy’s impeachment vote in exactly the right way.

Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner responds to Bill Kristol's recent floating of the idea that, for the time being, anti-Trumpist conservatives ought to consider finding a temporary home among the Democrats:

William Kristol has done more for conservatism and country than most of his carping critics combined, but his latest column is so off base that it requires a friendly rebuke.

Sorry, Bill, but conservatives and Republicans have no business allying themselves with President Biden.

Kristol addressed his column to longtime Republicans now disaffected by the party’s slavish obeisance to former President Donald Trump’s every whim, no matter how mendacious or malicious. Seeing them, us, lost in a new political wilderness, he says the “pretty obvious alternative” is to join forces with the (supposedly) “moderate” group who (supposedly) make up “the Biden wing of the Democratic party.”

The whole scenario is based on a fantasy that Kristol is far too intelligent actually to believe. The fantasy is that Biden is a political “moderate” by any reasonable standard, much less that his “wing” of the party rules the roost. Everywhere one looks, one sees Biden pushing not just liberal but very liberal nominees to high positions. Everywhere one looks, one sees Biden pushing very liberal policies and signing very liberal executive orders.

And at no time, not once so far in his brief presidency, has Biden reached out to the center-Right to find or build on common ground. Killing the Keystone XL pipeline isn’t "moderate." Pushing an anti-nun bully such as Xavier Becerra to run Health and Human Services or a race-obsessed radical such as Kristen Clarke to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division isn’t "moderate." Letting Communist China get its hands on the U.S. electric grid isn’t "moderate." Trying to stop all deportations of illegal immigrants certainly isn’t "moderate."

I've written many times about the rot within the humanities. Efforts to pinpoint how and why it happened abound, and how reversal might be commenced, and some are quite worthwhile. 

The crisis is compounded by the fact that higher education is inextricably linked in most people's minds with preparing a student for the world of work.

At Breaking Ground, Joseph M. Keegin revisits these developments and asserts that we have not yet forthrightly identified the real, core reason for them  and the first order of business in finding a way to address the situation.

First, his summary of what has happened:

Higher education is in bad shape. This has been the case for decades, of course: by the time Allan Bloom published his bestselling polemic against the state of the academy in 1987, a handful of other, arguably more prescient critiques had preceded it: Illich, Barzun, Carne-Ross. The critiques point to a common hollowing: the American academy churns out degreed technicians who have had the love of humane learning drummed out of them, or who had never been given a taste for it at all. Even William James had recognized the drift of education toward credentialism all the way back in 1903: “The Doctor-Monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an American custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason. As it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to childish motives exclusively. In reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges.”

And (surprise) things are worse now. Colleges and universities have ignored these Cassandras and charged headlong into all of the trends that contribute to its degradation: obsessive credentialization, tuition inflation, a fondness for gratuitous abstraction, “publish or perish” prioritizing of dubious research over teaching, elitism. As I wrote last October in The Point, the academy that once served as a “serious house” (in Larkin’s phrasing) for the cultivation of intellectual and moral excellence has become a training center for bureaucrats—contemplatives and the curious need not apply.

A bit later, he zeroes in on the missing element in even the most well-meaning attempts to seek alternatives to the university as it's currently structured:

notably absent is any reference to one of the few institutions of the old American civil society that still enjoys some popularity: the church. Though those universities originally founded as Christian institutions have left their commitment to that Light behind, many Christian traditions have long understood the educative potential of the local house of worship. Along with the operation of parochial schools and programs for children, parishes have long been home to Bible studies, book groups, panel discussions, guest lectures, and other opportunities for moral, spiritual, and intellectual development. My parish in Louisville had an adult forum that had offered lectures by guests and parishioners for years; my new parish in Chicago invited me and several other younger adults to give talks as part of a Lenten program series last spring. And there is a thriving Christian classical education movement, inspired by Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1947 essay “The Lost Tools of Learning,” which has revitalized traditions of humanistic learning based on the classical trivium. Schools and homeschool groups, some linked to specific churches, some nondenominational, are preparing at least some students for serious humanistic study in universities that may or may not themselves be prepared to give these students the food for which they’ve been given a taste.

Keegin goes on to demonstrate that he's well aware that an order of business that must precede the reliance on the church in this undertaking is, as is my point in including pertinent links above, healing the church itself of its own demons. 

Finally, there's my latest at Precipice. I discuss how this year's CPAC makes it more likely than ever that actual conservatives will have to abandon the Republican Party to the Trumpists and begin the daunting task of building something new from scratch. 

 

The Girl Scouts and Princeton University find it hard to back away from their garbage moves

 These stories are rich indeed.

First, the Girl Scouts.

The organization sent out a tweet congratulating Amy Coney Barrett for being the fifth female Supreme Court Justice in the nation's history, and it did not go over well with the hard left:

Many pointed specifically to the threat that the justice represents toward women’s reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights and the nation’s response to climate change; some even threatened to boycott the organization. Within hours, the organization’s initial tweet was deleted and replaced with an explanation.

One gal said that "as a queer, disabled lifelong Girl Scout, this bums me out hard." Another prattled about how girls "grow up and need a full range of health care." One need not be an expert in code language to know that this refers to the extermination of fetal Americans.

But the thing that really strikes me is how these leftists think federal courts operate. They think entirely in terms of protecting their pet "rights." They envision SCOTUS originalists salivating to "oppress" supposedly beleaguered demographics in our society.

The Supreme Court merely gets cases that come before it, some having to do with inflammatory social issues, but most of a more arcane and benign nature. The originalists then refer to the Constitution - its actual text and the intent of those who crafted it (including amendments) -  in coming to a decision on the matter they're considering. If there are any justices that have an agenda, it's the living-Constitution types. But basically, as Chief Justice John Roberts says, it's a panel of nine serious grownups who aren't up there to shill for any political party or passing ideological fad.'

Now, Princeton.

I thought this was great:

This summer, Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, admitted that the institution he has run for years is plagued by “systemic racism.” He also admitted that racist assumptions “remain embedded in structures of the University itself.” 

U.S. law bars colleges and universities that receive federal money from subjecting students to discrimination on the basis of race. Princeton receives lots of federal money. 

Accordingly, the U.S. Department of Education, which is charged with enforcing the federal ban on discrimination by colleges and universities, commenced an investigation of Princeton. As the saying goes, Eisgruber had stepped in it.

Is there a way to square Eisgruber’s admission of systemic racism at Princeton with the federal ban on race discrimination? I discussed some possible ways to attempt that reconciliation here and here. They don’t work.

Nonetheless, Eisgruber is determined to squirm his way out of the problem he created. The Daily Princetonian reports:

Pushing back against the [Department of Education’s] investigation’s premise, President Eisgruber said, “It is very surprising to me, frankly, that the Department of Education thinks that because Princeton has stated that we want to address systemic racism that we are somehow admitting … there is something wrong in our community that requires intervention from the federal government.”

Eisgruber said he is not aware of any civil rights violations that the University had committed.

“I am not aware of instances where the University has discriminated unlawfully against individuals, and we will explain that to the government,” Eisgruber said.

But here is what Eisgruber admitted before he realized Princeton might be investigated for discrimination:

Racism and the damage it does to people of color. . .persist at Princeton.

Thus, Eisgruber wasn’t being honest at the town hall. Princeton (Eisgruber) has said more than that it “want[s] to address systemic racism.” It has admitted that such racism exists at Princeton and that it damages “people of color” at Princeton. 

And clearly, this state of affairs means that “there is something wrong in [the Princeton] community.” Or does Eisgruber want to tell Princeton’s black students that there is nothing wrong with systemic racism at the University they attend?

This dust-up would not have occurred had he not felt compelled to puke all over himself in a fit of white guilt:

 

The only honest way for Eisgruber to escape his pickle is to admit that he was blowing smoke when he copped to persistent systemic racism at Princeton. But the consequences of such an admission would be waves of protest, loss of credibility, and presumably the end of Eisgruber’s time as president. 

Thus, Eisgruber will continue with his double talk in the expectation that Joe Biden will be elected president and that Biden’s administration will bail Eisgruber out by ending the federal investigation of racism at Princeton.

This is why the political fallout from next week's election is only of limited importance. The cultural rot will proceed apace wherever the fault lines of government power run.  Yes, if Democrats get the White House and both chambers of Congress, they'll feel empowered to use government to accelerate the rot, but there will be a wild swing to the right in the midterms - and maybe some Trumpist-ish populist unrest in the meantime. And if Trump is re-elected, he'll continue to give lip service to traditional values, but it will continue to ring hollow because he lacks conviction and it's obvious to all. 

But, anyway, these are a couple of delicious stories for the "you'll never be woke enough" file. 

Notre Dame drifts further away from its raison d'être

Look who is joining the faculty:

The University of Notre Dame has announced that Pete Buttigieg, failed presidential candidate and former mayor of South Bend, Ind., will be taking a post at the university for the coming academic year.

Buttigieg will be a 2020-21 faculty fellow at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS), taking part in a cohort that is set to focus on the “nature of trust.” In October, the former mayor will release a book on just that subject, called Trust: America’s Best Chance, “interweaving history, political philosophy, and affecting passages of memoir [to explore] the strong relationship between measures of prosperity and levels of social trust.”

I concur with Alexandra DeSanctis's take:

Notre Dame’s choice to employ Buttigieg is yet another example of university leadership seeking worldly prestige at the expense of the school’s Catholic mission. While there is some merit to opposing views on this subject, my own opinion is that the individuals any school chooses to hire — whether for administrative or faculty positions — are necessarily a core component of advancing the school’s identity and mission.

There’s much to be said for diversity of thought and ecumenism, but those values should never be taken so far as to excuse the employment of public figures such as Buttigieg who, aside from having little to offer in the way of intellectual rigor or genuine expertise, have repeatedly and in the most public way possible contradicted and flouted Catholic doctrine on key, non-negotiable issues such as abortion and the nature of marriage.

Buttigieg clearly was offered this position not because of any academic work he’s conducted but because of his political career, a career during which he’s routinely espoused positions that undermine the most fundamental parts of the Catholic Church’s view of human nature, sin, and social justice. On the subject of trust, the matter on which the university claims he’s expert, the former mayor hasn’t much to offer aside from a new book and more meaningless pablum about bipartisanship, an overrated virtue that he did little to practice during both his mayorship and his presidential campaign.

Then again, what institution is staying true to its core identity and mission these days? 

 

Thursday roundup

This first item actually goes back to mid-March, but I recently came across it, and it makes a great deal of sense to me. Plus, the two participants in the conversation bring up From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun, one of my favorite books. Barzun's tome is a look at the 500 year period from 1500 to 2000, through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the Romantic period and the Industrial Revolution to - well, our present time of decadence.

It comes up in the course of this podcast interview by Richard Reinsch of Law & Liberty of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, which also is presented in print form. They're discussing Douthat's new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success.

Douthat's central point is that American inventiveness has slowed down, a resulting ennui has settled in, and, well, you know what they say about idle hands.

A taste:

Ross Douthat:
So the Decadent Society is an attempt to, in a certain way, put a name on the weird anxiety that pervades the developed world, the Western world and the United States of America, where we have this combination of tremendous wealth and technological proficiency, which makes some people argue that these are the best times in the history of the world, but at the same time a lot of discontent, anxiety and ennui, which gets manifested in everything from the sort of populist and socialist rebellions in our politics, to rising rate of depression and suicide, and deaths of despair as they get called and so on. And so the argument I make in the book, is basically that we have entered a very particular kind of civilizational state that I’m calling “decadence” and I’m using that term to mean not chocolate dipped strawberries and weekends in Vegas, though those might be part of it, but a kind of stagnation, repetition, and decay at a high level of civilizational development.

Richard Reinsch:
One of the definitions, to talk about the definition of decadence you give in the book, you build on Jacques Barzun’s book, From Dawn to Decadence, which I think came out in 2000. I remember reading it in 2001 and that book has stuck with me. It’s one of the reasons why I really enjoyed reading your book because building on Barzun’s definition of decadence, Barzun talks about moving in fits and starts, but not really getting anywhere. The Decadent Society sees no path forward and it’s institutions function painfully. Maybe talk more about that because you also dismiss a definition of decadence that on my worst days, I find myself sort of glomming onto which is weak, sort of hedonistic luxuriating, weak and unable to defend ourselves. Unwilling to see the purpose in defending ourselves and so we’ll go into the good night, but maybe talk about that.

Ross Douthat:
Right. So yeah, I am very directly borrowing from Barzun and you could see this book, in part, as a sequel both to his book and in certain ways to Francis Fukuyama’s famous book, The End of History, which came out 10 years earlier. And the combination of those two arguments basically makes the case that Fukuyama was right, in a sense, not permanently and forever, but right that Western civilization has sort of passed beyond some of its great ideological debates and entered into a period of stability, that was also in danger of becoming a period of boredom and disappointment and sterility. And then Barzun, in a somewhat similar way, made the case that this is something that happens generally to civilizations at a certain point.

That they enter into periods where their once vigorous institutions become sclerotic, where their ambitious explorations hit frontiers that they can’t necessarily explore. And for us, I think that’s the most obvious in the demise of the space age basically, that we went from a period where people imagined that the frontier was going to open further into space. And now that’s sort of left to Silicon Valley billionaires to pursue and maybe they’re getting somewhere. But there’s no cultural imagination around space travel the way there was in the 1960s. So frontiers are closed. Institutions don’t work that well anymore. There’s sort of a loss of both pride in the past and confidence in the future and it doesn’t go all the way to the definition that you suggest only because I think that people sometimes underestimate how long a decadence period can last. So there’s an assumption that because you have institutions that don’t work as well anymore because you have a loss of civilizational confidence, there must be a kind of iron logic to history where the barbarians are waiting at the frontier and they’re going to come in and put the palaces to the torch.

And of course sometimes that happens. But you can also have empires and cultures go on a long time in periods that are essentially stagnant. The Roman empire goes 400 years from its Caligulan stage to the actual demise of the empire in the West. And in our case, we’re in this sort of unusual, not sort of, this entirely unusual position of being the first true world civilization, even more so than ancient Rome. And we also have a situation where a lot of empires and countries and cultures that might be seen as our rivals maybe are actually converging with us in decadence in different ways. That they aren’t poised to leap past us. And if that’s the case, then you could imagine what I call sustainable decadence as something that lasts if not centuries, at least some generations past our present moment where I’m writing.

Sheesh. Just about the time I consider that maybe alarm bells about mainstream media leftism are overblown, I run across something like this:

During a wildly offensive segment on Friday’s CBS This Morning, both the hosts and their left-wing guests repeatedly accused all white people of being born with racial “privilege” and taught to be racist as children. The discussion then turned to demanding white people “stop denying their racism” and admit to practicing discrimination.

The conversation occurred late in the 8:00 a.m. ET hour as part of CBS’s one-hour special, Race for Justice, examining race relations in the United States. It was particularly astonishing to watch wealthy co-host Gayle King – Oprah Winfrey’s best friend who once vacationed with the Obamas on a yacht – lead a segment lecturing others about their “privilege.”

“Nationwide protests against inequality are encouraging more people to have discussions not only about race but also white privilege,” King proclaimed. She then eagerly introduced two far-left authors to rant on the topic: “Robin DiAngelo is a sociologist and she’s author of this book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. I love this title. She joins us with the author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, CBS News contributor Ibram X. Kendi.”

“I would like you to explain what white privilege is exactly and why white people have such a hard time seeing it. Because it’s so clear to most black people I know,” King scolded. DiAngelo not only delivered the predictable left-wing talking points on the subject, she made sure to declare that dissent would not be tolerated:

White privilege is the automatic taken-for-granted advantage bestowed upon white people as a result of living in a society based on the premise of white as the human ideal, and that from its founding, established white advantage as a matter of law and today as a matter of policy and practice. And it doesn’t matter if you agree with it, if you want it, if you even are aware of it, it’s 24/7/365. And one of the reasons why it’s so hard for white people to see it – well, there are many reasons – but one is that it serves us not to see it. We come to feel entitled to that advantage. We’re told that we deserve it and that we earned it. And we take great umbrage when that is challenged.

King followed up by matter-of-factly citing an outrageous claim in DiAngelo’s book: “You write, too, Robin, in the book, that kids from the age between 3 and 4 are intuitively taught that being white is better, that you are superior. I thought that that was an interesting thing.” The supposed “journalist” didn’t even question the disgusting claim.

On Monday, the broadcast turned to radical “experts” to insist that white Americans have been “taught” to have “contempt for black life.”Later in the discussion, fellow co-host Anthony Mason turned to Kendi and fretted: “Ibram, you’ve said that to get – to end white privilege you have to deal with racism first, right?” Kendi – who has excused the anti-Semitism of Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and argued that common phrases like “blackmail” were racist – launched into a tirade convicting every white person in America of racism:

And I mean, as Robin, you know, talked about, it is critical for white people, for people in general, to stop denying their racist ideas, to stop denying the ways in which policies have benefited them, to stop denying their racism, and to realize that actually the heartbeat of racism itself is denial, and the sound of that heartbeat is “I’m not racist.” 

David Thornton at The Resurgent on how an agenda is driving the pronouncements of some public-heath officials:

There is a rumor going around on social media that the pandemic is over. That isn’t the case, but you’d never know it from public health officials around the country who seem to have tossed social distancing restrictions out in favor of the right to protest.

“A case in point is a recent article in Slate that details an open letter from infectious disease experts at the University of Washington, who write that “protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.” The letter has been signed by more than 1,000 medical experts from around the country.

Wait. Isn’t there a pandemic on?

Former NFL player and current Congressional candidate Burgess Owens has written a compelling piece at Newsweek entitled "Drew Brees Was Right The First Time."

Another piece from a while back (2018) that is quite relevant at the moment. David French at National Review on why qualified immunity should be ended.

The snowflake/jackboots score another one: a UCLA professor is suspended for refusing to grant some kind of special leniency to black students on their final exams, because George Floyd. 

Three stories for the death-rattle-of-Western-civilization file

It's still a few minutes before 7 AM and I've just begun my perusal of news stories and analysis pieces. But in that short time I've already come across these stories:

• A lady - I guess she must be white, given the situation she's encountering - wrote a novel about a Mexican bookstore owner who comes north to the US after her family is killed by a drug cartel. The author's motives seem to lean more toward proselytizing than creating timeless art; according to her publisher, "the intent [was] to shine a spotlight on tragedies facing immigrants." Oprah made it this month's pick for her book club. Too late. The identity jackboots have already raised such a stink - saying it presents a "stereotypical and opportunistic narrative" -  that the author's promotional tour has been replace with "'townhall meetings' which will bring together Cummins [the book's author] and those who've raised objections to the book for discussion."
• Yale University is cancelling a longstanding and popular class entitled "Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present" because the artists and works it discusses are all white males. When students caught wind of this development, 400 signed up for the 300 seats available for the spring semester's final run of it. It's going to be replaced by several classes, including The Silk Road, Art & Politics, and Global Crafts.
• Cory Booker has introduced a bill in the Senate that would make it illegal for employers to take a pass on job applicants with corn rows, dreadlocks and Bantu knots. 

In a time when the nation's focus is on how the impeachment process is going to conclude, and what a good economy means for this year's political twists and turns, it's important to remember that identity-politics jackbootery has not gone away. Those who would passively-aggressively assume the victim pose are still ruining the rollout of works of fiction - and serving notice to Oprah that she better examine her wokeness level, and quick - as well as further destroying the university's role as the transmitter of the works and ideas that make Western civilization a unique blessing to humankind, and creating an environment in which federal legislators are seriously deliberating whether proprietors of privately owned organizations can set their own standards for appearance.

They're able to do this without really getting very physical about it. No roving gangs a la Mao's Cultural Revolution, no reeducation camps al a Pol Pot's Khner Rouge regime, no firing squads a la Che Guevara's way of handling "diversity" in the early days of Cuba's revolutionary regime.

No, the bedrock institutions of American life are now so peopled with cowards that a little diversity-and-inclusion-speak on social media, at board meetings and faculty meetings and on the Senate floor is sufficient to intimidate them into complete acquiescence. And contrition. "Thank you for pointing out our blindness. We'll now take time for some soul-searching."

I want to close on this note, though: Trumpism is inadequate to address this. Not because Trump or his slavish devotees are racist - they're not - but because they actually elevate ignorance of history and the West's defining ideas to a virtue. They lack the core set of principles that would make it possible to mount a real resistance. You can't "own the libs" on social media and make this go away. The Left has rotted our culture beyond recognition, and there doesn't seem to be a bridge back to terrain on which it would be recognizable.

It is so very late in the day.

Civilizational rot on two of post-America's most distinguished university campuses

At Harvard, journalism gets compromised so illegal aliens don't get nervous:

Harvard's student government, the Undergraduate Council, has voted to support Act on a Dream, an activist student group calling for a boycott of The Harvard Crimson.

The council's statement does not specifically endorse the boycott. But it does express solidarity with Act on a Dream, whose members want the student newspaper to apologize for seeking comment from representatives of U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement in articles.

As I noted in my previous coverage of this kerfuffle, seeking comment from relevant parties is standard journalistic practice and ought to be commended. Instead, the activists have somehow convinced themselves that when The Crimson talks to ICE, it makes the campus less safe for undocumented immigrants.

"In this political climate, a request for comment is virtually the same as tipping [ICE] off, regardless of how they are contacted," the activist group's leaders wrote in their petition.

This concern is silly, and none of the activists have offered any evidence it is legitimate.

And yet yesterday the council voted 15–13–4 to pass a statement in support of this unfounded fear.

"It is necessary for the Undergraduate Council to acknowledge the concerns raised by numerous groups and students on campus over the past few weeks and to recognize the validity of their expressed fear and feelings of unsafety," the statement said.

The Crimson's own coverage of the vote points out that several campus groups, including both Act on a Dream and Harvard's chapter of the College Democrats, are refusing to speak to the paper until it bows to the demands. Time and time again,sources of institutional authority at Harvard have not simply failed to rebuke unreasonable demands from the campus's progressive sect but have actively sided with them.

And at the University of Virginia, students can't be expected to put two and two together and concluded, "Oh, I'll bet that's the 21-gun salute, since it's Veteran's Day":

The University of Virginia announced it would be eliminating the 21-gun salute from its Veterans Day ceremony because they did not want to cause any trauma to students who might hear the gunshots. 

"One is that it would be disruptive to classes and two unfortunately with gun violence in the U.S., there was some concern that we would cause a panic if someone heard gunshots on grounds," Jim Ryan, the college's president, told NBC29. 

The decision was made by the provost's office along with UVA's ROTC program. The Veterans Day program at UVA has included a 21-gun salute for over a decade. 

Veteran Jay Levine, who was in UVA's ROTC program, said he was unhappy with the decision and planned to recruit other veterans to protest the school's decision. "I am very disillusioned, very upset, and very surprised that they would make such a decision," Levine said. 

UVA's Veterans Day ceremony is held for 24-hours from Monday at 4 p.m. until Tuesday. The 21-gun salute typically follows the conclusion of the event.

I know the argument is made that institutions such as these are still the envy of the world, that students clamor to get to them to study in fields that are genuinely still contributing to human advancement, but with every instance such as these, that stature diminishes. And then there's the example it sets for the rest of not only higher education, but education overall. It's very late in the day.

UPDATE: While Northwestern is nowhere near as old as UV or Harvard, it's well-established as a school that catalyzes instant impulses to accord it respect. Forget that. Read this puke-inducing op-ed in the Daily Northwestern and you'll see that your inclination to venerate is way out of place:

Last week, The Daily was not the paper that Northwestern students deserve. 

On Nov. 5, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke on campus at a Northwestern University College Republicans event. The Daily sent a reporter to cover that talk and another to cover the students protesting his invitation to campus, along with a photographer. We recognize that we contributed to the harm students experienced, and we wanted to apologize for and address the mistakes that we made that night — along with how we plan to move forward.

One area of our reporting that harmed many students was our photo coverage of the event. Some protesters found photos posted to reporters’ Twitter accounts retraumatizing and invasive. Those photos have since been taken down. On one hand, as the paper of record for Northwestern, we want to ensure students, administrators and alumni understand the gravity of the events that took place Tuesday night. However, we decided to prioritize the trust and safety of students who were photographed. We feel that covering traumatic events requires a different response than many other stories. While our goal is to document history and spread information, nothing is more important than ensuring that our fellow students feel safe — and in situations like this, that they are benefitting from our coverage rather than being actively harmed by it. We failed to do that last week, and we could not be more sorry.

Some students also voiced concern about the methods that Daily staffers used to reach out to them. Some of our staff members who were covering the event used Northwestern’s directory to obtain phone numbers for students beforehand and texted them to ask if they’d be willing to be interviewed. We recognize being contacted like this is an invasion of privacy, and we’ve spoken with those reporters — along with our entire staff — about the correct way to reach out to students for stories. 

We also wanted to explain our choice to remove the name of a protester initially quoted in our article on the protest. Any information The Daily provides about the protest can be used against the participating students — while some universities grant amnesty to student protesters, Northwestern does not. We did not want to play a role in any disciplinary action that could be taken by the University. Some students have also faced threats for being sources in articles published by other outlets. When the source in our article requested their name be removed, we chose to respect the student’s concerns for their privacy and safety. As a campus newspaper covering a student body that can be very easily and directly hurt by the University, we must operate differently than a professional publication in these circumstances. 

Ultimately, The Daily failed to consider our impact in our reporting surrounding Jeff Sessions. We know we hurt students that night, especially those who identify with marginalized groups. According to the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, “Ethical journalism treats sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect.” 

Going forward, we are working on setting guidelines for source outreach, social media and covering marginalized groups. As students at Northwestern, we are also grappling with the impact of Tuesday’s events, and as a student organization, we are figuring out how we can support each other and our communities through distressing experiences that arise on campus. We will also work to balance the need for information and the potential harm our news coverage may cause. We met as a staff Sunday to discuss where our reporting and empathy fell short last week, and we are actively re-examining how we’ll address similar situations in the future and how to best move forward. 

We hope we can rebuild trust that we weakened or lost last week. We understand that this will not be easy, but we are ready to undertake the reform and reflection necessary to become a better paper. We also welcome any feedback you have about our reporting — that night or otherwise. The feedback that we have already received either directly or via social media has been incredibly helpful for us, and we are working to implement it immediately. 

Through our coverage, we know Northwestern students to be passionate, thoughtful and just. Every day, we strive to encapsulate all that you are and all that you deserve. 

Troy Closson, Editor in Chief
Catherine Henderson, Print Managing Editor
Kristina Karisch, Print Managing Editor
Peter Warren, Print Managing Editor
Elizabeth Byrne, Digital Managing Editor
Christopher Vazquez, Digital Managing Editor and Diversity and Inclusion Chair
Sneha Dey, Diversity and Inclusion Chair and Web Editor
Evan Robinson-Johnson, Photo Editor
Amy Li, Campus Editor

All you signatories to this chunk of dog vomit need to go away - as in to some other continent or planet. You smug little preeners, you will not attain your final victory in your attempt to extinguish our culture's understanding of history, constitutional theory and basic human decency.