As for “We, few”’s gross misreading of my work, it showed that reading skills are in as short supply at the Claremont colleges as writing skills. My entire argument about the necessity of lawful, proactive policing is based on the value of black lives. I have decried the loss of black life to drive-by shootings and other forms of street violence. I have argued that the fact that blacks die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined is a civil rights abomination. Black children should be able to walk to school with as little risk of a gang attack as white children face.
The ungrammatical list of attributes that “We, few of the Black students” say disqualify me from speaking—“Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live”—unsurprisingly displayed the ignorance already familiar from the rest of their letter, since I was an early and documented opponent of the Iraq War and all such efforts at regime change. The other epithets are not worth responding to.
* * *
My campus experience has become an all-too-familiar one over the last several years.
The anti–Milo Yiannopoulos episode at Berkeley was a particularly resounding echo of a darker political era. A flamboyantly provocative Donald Trump supporter who revels in violating politically correct taboos, Yiannopoulos had been scheduled to give a talk on campus in February 2017. Both Berkeley campus and city police were woefully understaffed in preparation for his speech—undoubtedly due to the prevailing law-enforcement philosophy of not looking “confrontational.” Bay Area activists had complained during the 2014 “F—k the Police” protests, as such anticop riots are locally known, that seeing police in riot gear made them feel anxious, and the police since then had been reluctant to use traditional crowd control tactics. But serious conflict at the Milo event was a certainty, and the appearance of dozens of so-called black bloc anarchists should not have been a surprise; these lawless assailants have been a regular feature of Bay Area protests since the early 2000s.
When flaming rockets started flying at the student union where Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak, the University of California campus police retreated to the inside of the building and didn’t reemerge until well after the event. The event was canceled after black-masked anarchists beat and pepper-sprayed supposed attendees and hurled explosive devices at police officers. When the rioters fanned out to city streets, police commanders had neither the tactical tools nor the manpower to crack down on the chaos. The vandals ransacked and torched banks and retail businesses, breaking windows, lighting fires, and annihilating ATMs. The police made only one arrest the entire night: an arrest for failing to disperse. The rioters most certainly took notice of their unimpeded reign. The violence continued the next day, with physical assaults against Berkeley College Republicans, both on and off campus.
The next week, the Berkeley student newspaper invited several current and former columnists to justify the anti-Milo violence. It was an easy assignment. The writers needed merely to recycle the melodramatic rhetoric that university administrators and faculty had fed them for years.
One of the proviolence columnists wrote that he would “fight tooth and nail for the right to exist.” (And fight he did, by his own proud confession.) Allowing Yiannopoulos to speak “could have endangered campus students … over their identities,” he said.5 Another columnist opined that the black bloc’s attacks were “not acts of violence. They were acts of self-defense.”6 Such thinking accords with the hundred-plus faculty who sought to close down the speech on the ground that Yiannopoulos “actually harm[s] students through defamatory and harassing actions.”7
Several Berkeley professors circulated emails downplaying the significance of the violence. Déborah Blocker, associate professor of French, reported to her fellow profs about the anarchy on campus: “Mostly this was typical Black Bloc action, in a few waves—very well-organized and very efficient. They attacked property but they attacked it very sparingly, destroying just enough University property to obtain the cancellation order for the MY event and making sure no one in the crowd got hurt” [emphasis in original]. (In fact, a woman was pepper-sprayed while giving an interview and her husband was beaten so badly that several ribs were broken, among other assaults on campus.) Katrin Wehrheim, associate professor of mathematics, reported on the rioters’ progress downtown: “yes, some Bloc members did attack large corporation buildings.” But hey! Thanks to everyone “for coming out—in person or spirit!” to what was “a mostly cheerful and peaceful crowd.”
College graduates have been told for years that the United States is systemically racist and unjust. The rioters’ nauseating sense of entitlement to destroy other people’s property and to sucker punch ideological foes is a natural extension of this profound delegitimation of the American polity.
* * *
In autumn 2015, the pathological narcissism of American college students found a potentially devastating new source of power in the sports-industrial complex. University of Missouri president Timothy Wolfe resigned in the face of a threatened boycott by black football players of an upcoming game. Wolfe’s alleged sin was an insufficient appreciation for the “systematic oppression” experienced by students of color at the university. A graduate student announced a hunger strike, claiming that he had been assaulted by white students and that the N-word had been painted on his door. The administration had allowed these attacks, he said.
The university’s board of overseers convened in emergency session to discuss the football boycott; Wolfe resigned before meeting with them, issuing the standard mea culpa: “I take full responsibility for this frustration, and I take full responsibility for the inaction that has occurred.” According to The New York Times, the university could have lost more than $1 million had it forfeited its football game with Brigham Young University. A group called “Concerned Faculty” had walked off the job in solidarity with the student activists and was calling on other faculty to join them.
There is no evidence that the University of Missouri denies equal opportunity to its black students. Those black students—like every other student on campus—are surrounded by lavish educational resources, which are available to them for the asking on a color-blind basis. Nor is there any evidence of the attacks alleged by the graduate student; he reported none of them to the university or to city law enforcement. The university’s faculty and administrators are surely among the most prejudice-free, well-meaning group of adults on the planet. Thousands of Chinese students would undoubtedly do anything for the chance to be “systemically oppressed” by the University of Missouri’s stupendous laboratories and research funding.
But Missouri’s political class has embraced the patent delusion that the university is rife with racism. Governor Jay Nixon called on college officials to “ensure the University of Missouri is a place where all students can pursue their dreams in an environment of respect, tolerance and inclusion.” In truth, the only barrier to such pursuit is a student’s own lack of academic preparedness, as will be discussed in chapters 2 and 3. Mayor Bob McDavid of Columbia, Missouri—where the university’s main campus is located—told CNN after Wolfe’s resignation that he congratulated the “students on achieving their goal.” McDavid insisted that we need to “deal with the pain of minorities” and that we will be “done” only “when every student has the freedom to fulfill his dream unimpeded by racial epithets.”
The precedent set here was monumental. Any student protester who can persuade his college’s football or basketball team to threaten a strike will be able to bring administrators to their knees even more quickly than usual. Administrative cupidity and alumni fanaticism have turned the collegiate sports-industrial complex into the most powerful force on campus. If that behemoth can be reliably persuaded to support the latest racial agitation—and there will often be a critical mass of black athletes to
appeal to—then an already supine leadership class will discard the reality principle once and for all.
Even without the sports-boycott tool, however, the takeover of the college campus by racial hysteria appears all but complete. A notorious video of a black female student at Yale screaming and cursing at her college master in November 2015 is a chilling portrait of self-engrossed, bathos-filled entitlement that has never been corrected by truth, much less restrained by manners: “Be quiet!” she shrieks at the frozen administrator. “Why the fuck did you accept the [master] position, who the fuck hired you?!” she continues at full, self-righteous cry. “You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting!”8
The master’s wife, child psychologist Erika Christakis, had recently suggested in an email that the Yale multiculturalism bureaucracy did not need to oversee Halloween costumes. Her email prompted an open letter signed by nearly a thousand faculty, deans, and students accusing her of racism and white supremacy and calling for her and her husband’s immediate removal from their jobs and campus home. A hundred or so mostly minority students then mobbed her husband, Nicholas Christakis, a renowned physician and sociologist, for an hours-long abuse session in the college quad that included the “Be quiet!” shriek, among equally horrifying displays of rudeness. “You are disgusting!” screamed another student. “I want your job to be taken from you. Look at me in my face first of all and understand that you are such a disappointment to this university, to your students, to yourself; you are the disgusting male you were twenty seconds ago, a day ago, and a month ago.” Time magazine had named Nicholas Christakis one of the hundred most influential people in the world in 2009, but the students knew better. When Christakis meekly tells the students that he was trying to understand their predicament, a tall male strides up to him and, inches from his face, issues the usual demand that Christakis look at him (which Christakis was already doing). Christakis later hugs the student, Abdul-Razak Mohammed Zachariah, in a conciliatory gesture, but Zachariah orders Christakis to understand that the “situation right now doesn’t require you to smile.” Another female student, Alexandra Zina Barlowe, cries that Christakis’s invocation of free speech creates “a space to allow for violence to happen on this campus.” Christakis responds: “That I disagree with.” Barlowe shouts at him: “It doesn’t matter whether you agree or not.… It’s not a debate.”9
No administrator ever reprimanded these students for their insubordination.
Instead, Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, issued the usual fawning declarations of sorrow for the tribulations experienced by Yale’s minority students. “Their concerns and cries for help made clear that some students find life on our campus profoundly difficult,” he wrote in November 2015, following up ten days later with further empathy: “In my thirty-five years on this campus, I have never been as simultaneously moved, challenged, and encouraged by our community—and all the promise it embodies—as in the past two weeks. You have offered me the opportunity to listen to and learn from you.”10
And in case anyone misunderstood where the administration’s sympathies lay, Yale conferred on Alexandra Zina Barlowe and Abdul-Razak Mohammed Zachariah its graduation prize for accomplishment in the “service of race and ethnic relations.” Yale lauded Barlowe for her “womanist, feminist, anti-racist work” and for teaching her peers, faculty, and administration about “inclusive leadership.” That inclusive leadership does not require a respect for debate, apparently.
Erika and Nicholas Christakis’s careers have been devoted to social-justice concerns. Nevertheless, Erika Christakis resigned from teaching at Yale and Nicholas Christakis canceled his spring 2016 courses, after students marched on their home and chalked hostile messages outside their bedroom window. They resigned from their roles as college master in May 2016 after some students refused to accept their diplomas from Nicholas Christakis. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was hardly more efficient.
* * *
A similar capitulation—minus the expletives—took place at Emory University, when several dozen Emory students barged into the school’s administration building to demand protection from “Trump 2016” slogans that had been written in chalk on campus walkways. Acting out a by-now standardized psychodrama of oppression and vulnerability, the students claimed that seeing Trump’s name on the sidewalk confirmed that, as minorities, they were “unsafe” at Emory. College sophomore Jonathan Peraza led the allegedly traumatized students in a chant: “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!”
As the Emory protesters entered the administration building, they drew on The Communist Manifesto (probably the only political theory they have even heard of) to express their plight: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”11
The order of the day was feelings. “What are we feeling?” protest leader Peraza asked his fellow sufferers, consistent with the neo-Victorian sentimentalism currently dominant on campuses. “Frustration” and “fear” were the answers. “I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here],” a student told an Emory Wheel reporter. “I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school.”
Emory protesters leveraged their Trump-induced “pain” and “unsafety” into the all-too-familiar demand for more diversity hires. The Emory students also picked up on an exculpatory meme to explain why affirmative action admits are not competitive scholastically: because they are so burdened by the need to create safe spaces for themselves. An Emory student told President James Wagner that “people of color are struggling academically because they are so focused on trying to have a safe community.”
Put aside for a moment the students’ demand for protection from political speech. (“Trump 2016” chalked on a sidewalk cannot be classed as a provocation.) Their self-image as immiserated proletarians, huddled together for safety and support, is pure fantasy. In fact, they are supremely fortunate, enjoying unfettered access to intellectual, scientific, and social resources that would have been the envy of every monarch in the age of absolutism. And any administrator who wants to prepare students for an objective relationship to reality would seek to convey that truth. By contrast, rewarding students’ delusional self-pity only increases the likelihood that they will fail to take advantage of the enormous intellectual riches at their fingertips and go through life with self-defeating chips on their shoulders. But President Wagner followed obsequiously in the footsteps of virtually every other college president confronted by student claims of “unsafety”—he rolled over completely.
After initially declining, to his credit, to send a campus email decrying support for the “fascist, racist” Trump, Wagner nevertheless penned a missive that validated every aspect of the students’ self-pity. He told the “Emory Community” that the students “voiced their genuine concern and pain in the face of this perceived intimidation” from the Trump chalkings, and that he “cannot dismiss their expression of feelings and concern as motivated only by political preference or over-sensitivity.”
Therefore, he was announcing a four-point plan to “recognize, listen to, and honor the concerns of these students.” That plan included “a formal process to institutionalize identification, review, and addressing [sic] of social justice opportunities and issues.” An annual Racial Justice Retreat and better procedures for reporting and responding to bias was promised. The university would be reviewing security videotape to identify the chalkers and submit them to the “conduct violation process,” according to the Wheel, for possible violations of regulations requiring preapproval for chalkings. Would the same policies and procedures have been enforced if the chalking had read “Clinton 2016”?
Wagner paid lip service to free speech—only to qualify it with “safe spaces” jargon: “As an academic community, we must value and encourage the expression of ideas, vigorous debate, speech, dissent and protest. At the same time, our commitment to respect, civility, and inclusion calls us to prov
ide a safe environment that inspires and supports courageous inquiry.”12 Why does “courageous inquiry” require a “safe environment”? If inquiry is “courageous,” presumably it can withstand the pampered, hothouse climate of a college campus.
Any college president who adopts the rhetoric of “safe spaces” is already lost. Such rhetoric implies that there is somewhere on his campus that is not “safe”—a complete fiction. Wagner is an engineer by training, suggesting that a science background, with its grounding in the empirical method, does not inoculate a college president against cowardice when facing student neurasthenia.
Wagner wrapped up his campus-wide message with an echo from Yale: a paean to the protesters for teaching him so much. “I learn from every conversation like the one that took place yesterday and know that further conversations are necessary,” Wagner wrote, recalling Salovey’s even more revolting love letter to disruptive students.
Obviously, the Emory students need some basic civics lessons in political debate. They are likely to encounter more names of candidates they deplore over the course of their lives. They will not have a campus bureaucracy to run to for protection, in what has become the reflex reaction of students today to any behavior they don’t like. The mature response to political speech that you disagree with is argument.
But the Emory students need something even more fundamental than an understanding of free speech and democratic persuasion. They need to stop feeling sorry for themselves and gain some perspective on their own privilege as members of a great university.
* * *
What’s behind this soft totalitarianism? It is routinely misdiagnosed as primarily a psychological disorder. Young “snowflakes,” the thinking goes, have been overprotected by helicopter parents, and now are unprepared for the trivial conflicts of ordinary life.
“The Coddling of the American Mind,” a 2015 article in The Atlantic (now expanded into a book), has been the most influential treatment of the psychological explanation. The movement to penalize certain ideas is “largely about emotional well-being,” argues Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Jonathan Haidt of New York University. The authors take activists’ claims of psychological injury at face value and propose that freshmen orientations teach students cognitive behavioral therapy so as to preserve their mental health in the face of differing opinions.
The Diversity Delusion Page 3