Tag: academic fascism

Court reduces Oberlin total judgment by smallest amount

11:14 am

The court in Ohio has reduced the total jury award in the Oberlin slander case against Gibson’s Bakery to $25 million total, but by what looks like the smallest amount possible based on its interpretation of the law.

The jury originally returned a total compensatory verdict of $11 million and punitive verdict of $33 million. In these posts we detailed the arguments of the parties as to how to Ohio’s tort reform caps applied to the calculation:

The key disputes as to how to apply Ohio tort reform caps on noneconomic compensatory damages centered on whether each claim for each plaintiff was separately subject to the cap, or did the cap apply to all claims of each plaintiff. The court appears to have ruled, as plaintiffs argued, that the cap was per claim.

More significantly, the tort reform law limits punitive damages to 2X compensatory, but the issue was whether that applied to pre-cap compensatory damages or post-cap compensatory damages. That was about a $10 million swing. The court appears to have agreed with the plaintiffs argument that under the plain reading of the statute, the 2X cap applied to pre-cap compensatory damages.

Another way to put it is the court has awarded Gibson’s the maximum award possible based on its legal interpretation. To me, this suggests that the court is as offended as everyone else by Oberlin’s refusal to accept the decision while spreading falsehoods about the case and maligning the jury.

They will have a hearing on how much Oberlin will have to pay for Gibson’s attorney’s fees on July 10.

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Anarchists threaten to dox any new student for joining conservative groups at Texas university

9:24 am

They’re coming for you next: An anarchist organization with many ties within the University of Texas at Austin has now publicly threatened to reveal the personal contact information of any new student who dares join several different conservative organizations.

“Do you wanna be famous? If you join YCT or Turning Point USA, you just might be. Your name and more could end up on an article like one of these,” the tweet said, linking to previous doxxing posts of conservative students at the school. “So be sure to make smart choices at #UTOrientation.”

Last year the network released extensive personal information of pro-Brett Kavanaugh demonstrators at UT Austin, including their names, photos and contact information. It went so far as to post some of the phone numbers of the employers of students and encouraged its adherents to call them to get them fired.

Composed mostly of students at UT Austin, the group also actively encourages the harassment of conservative students, having praised the destruction of signs and tactics of physical intimidation during the pro-Kavanaugh demonstrations.

The article notes that though the university claims it is acting to punish such doxing behavior by its students, it does not appear that anything has really been done. This group did it last year, and seems unafraid to do it again now.

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Oberlin hit with maximum punitive damages in slander case

1:20 pm

The jury today hit Oberlin College with the maximum punitive damages allowed, $33 million (to be reduced to $22 million by law) for its slanderous attacks on a local bakery.

I suspect that the college can afford this hit, despite its pleading poverty to the jury during final deliberations. It also made clear in those deliberations its continuing lack of remorse for its slanderous behavior.

The second fact should inform every parent and high school nationwide: Oberlin is not a decent place to get a college education. If everyone makes that decision and enrollments dry up, the first fact above will become irrelevant, as the school will quite properly no longer exist.

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Progressive group harasses, demands firing of professor, because of his religion and his political beliefs

10:47 pm

They’re coming for you next: An administrator and teacher at Kingsborough Community College in New York now requires full time security to protect him from harassment by a leftist group that wants him fired, because he is Jewish, conservative, and is a supporter of Israel.

As he wrote at the link:

The vandals defaced a photo of my father with anti-Semitic graffiti, including the words “F–k Trump Goldstein, Kill the Zionist Entity.” I later learned the incident came one day after Kingsborough Professor Katia Perea apparently told an administrator who refused her request to fire me, “I guess I will have to handle this myself.”

Perea, whom I have never met or spoken to, is a member of the Progressive Faculty Caucus, a radical faculty group at Kingsborough.

…In May, more than 1,000 flyers were distributed around campus calling for my firing and attributing vile, false allegations of racism, sexism and anti-Muslim sentiments to me.

I’ve never promoted any of my private or religious opinions in the classroom — or anywhere else on campus. Nor have I held any of the hateful views the flyers attached to me. In her earlier attempt to get me fired, Perea went from office to office showing staff my private Facebook photos as her “evidence” that I’m racist and sexist. The PFC’s efforts then escalated into what the flyers described as an imperative to “build a movement” against me.

And that’s exactly what it has been — an orchestrated, aggressive movement to destroy me. May’s flyers included a picture of my 13-year-old daughter. I’ve chaired a food committee at Kingsborough for eight years, and suddenly, a PFC member new to the committee began investigating my activity. [emphasis mine]

Up until now, it was perfectly legal and proper in this once free nation for a person to be Jewish, conservative, and a supporter of Israel. Now such individuals apparently must be hunted down and destroyed, by any means necessary. Worse, this 2-minute hate now includes his children.

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30+ students doxxed by leftists simply for attending conservative events

11:23 pm

They’re coming for you next: More than thirty University of Texas students have had their personal data published on the web by a leftist antifa organization, simply because those students joined a conservative club or attended a lecture by a conservative.

The doxxers — calling themselves Austin Autonomous Media (AAM) — are a small collective of UT students. Since fall 2018, AAM members have snuck into conservative club meetings, taken photos of attendees, and posted students’ names and emails online. The AAM also typically posts students’ phone numbers and employers. For example, one young woman was doxxed for the crime of attending a pro-Kavanaugh rally. “Call [employer redacted] to get her fired: (512) XXX-XXX” the post said.

Saurabh Sharma, 21, is the president of the UT chapter of Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT). Many of Sharma’s cabinet members have been doxxed, and he says the fallout has been immense. (PJ Media is not linking to the doxxing posts to protect students’ privacy). “It hasn’t impacted all our members… but it has discouraged many from staying involved,” Sharma told PJ Media on Monday. Sharma himself was one of the first students to be doxxed, and says the experience has him rattled. His contact information is still online.

“It makes me nervous, walking around campus. I never walk around outside with my phone out. One thing people like to do in Texas is to run up to people and snag their phone,” he said.

In another case, a student’s employer had received “numerous harassing phone calls” after her private contact information was published.

We have only just begun. These fascist thugs are now realizing that they can do this with impunity. As is typical in today’s society, the laws of harassment will not be applied to them, being on the left. They will thus feel emboldened to do worse.

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Portland State University moves to punish professor for uncovering bad scholarship

6:16 pm

They’re coming for you next: Portland State University has moved to punish one of its professor who participated in a project to uncover bad and corrupt leftwing scholarship in the social sciences by writing fake papers and getting them published.

Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University in Oregon, led a trio of scholars last year who submitted what they called “intentionally broken” papers to leading publications on gender, race and sexuality. Several of the absurd pieces were published.

Now, Portland State has initiated disciplinary action against Mr. Boghossian for an alleged breach of the institution’s ethical guidelines.

…The punishment Portland State may impose on Mr. Boghossian was unclear Monday morning, and the university did not immediately respond to questions posed about its process.

It must be emphasized that the three academics who participated in this project loudly considered themselves leftwing and liberal. No matter. They did something that revealed the hollowness and dishonesty of the entire “race, gender, and sex” academic community. That must not be allowed.

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How a monolithic leftist academia poisons America

3:51 pm

The coming dark age: To understand how dominant and monolithic the left’s control over America’s modern academic community, one need only to take a scan at this series of research articles being assembled regularly by the website Campus Reform:

Except for SMU, every single one of these colleges is a public institution, funded in great part by tax dollars. Yet, instead of being a vehicle for educating the young about the principles of western civilization which has made them and our wealthy society possible, they have become propaganda machines for the Democratic Party and the leftist socialist/communist utopia dreams that have always led to bankruptcy, poverty, starvation, and societal collapse.

So, have any of the legislatures from the states where these colleges are located done anything about this? Obviously, leftist states like Oregon are likely to applaud the fact that leftist teachers control their colleges, but what about Texas, Georgia, Missouri, Florida? The simple fact is that while we might sometimes have had conservative state legislatures, none of them have had the courage for the past five decades to demand better from these colleges.

Worse, Campus Reform only began this series about two weeks ago. I expect in the coming months they will find that almost every college nationwide is dominated in the same way.

The result is that we have bankrupt intellectual community in the United States. It sees only one right answer to all our problems (government and socialism), and it cannot think deeply about any subject since it has never been challenged to do so. And when it is challenged with alternative ideas or even facts, it acts like a four-year-old having a temper tantrum, running to Twitter to issue short, emotional, insulting attacks at those who dare disagree with its rigid beliefs. Smear tactics become standard operating procedures, and civilized discourse impossible.

And in that atmosphere thugs end up getting elected to office, wielding power for all the wrong reasons.

Unless some effort is made to change this, the political and intellectual culture of the United States is only going to decline further. Unfortunately, I do not see such a major effort happening. For one, there are not very many people in power who wish to do it. Second, it will take great courage and fortitude to stand up to the future temper tantrums that such an effort will produce. In my entire life, I have never seen anyone willing to do it.

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More fake papers accepted by sociology/gender/racism journals

10:59 am

In what has become almost a regular event, several honest academics (who call by the way identify themselves as “leftwing”) have once again successfully gotten published seven bogus papers in journals centered on gender, feminist, race, and ethnic studies.

Once they had a grasp on what was already being published, they quickly wrote 20 bogus papers. Seven of those were accepted for publication by various journals and several others were pending rewrites and probably would have been accepted if the authors hadn’t been forced to call off the experiment early. For comparison purposes, seven papers is the average number you would need to publish over seven years in order to secure tenure at most universities. The authors estimate at least 10 of the 20 would have been accepted given more time. And they could have kept churning these out and had one or two new papers accepted for publication every month, for as long as they wanted to continue.

They key point here is that the papers themselves were written not as an attempt to expand knowledge but as pure sophistry. Each one started with an absurd premise and then used the contours of social justice thought, what the authors call “grievance studies,” to make the premise seem plausible.

It is worth reading their full report. To show how corrupt these fields have become, one of those accepted papers simply took a chapter of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and reshaped it slightly using feminist jargon. As the project’s authors found. the point of these publications has nothing to do with knowledge,

This is the primary point of the project: What we just described is not knowledge production; it’s sophistry. That is, it’s a forgery of knowledge that should not be mistaken for the real thing. The biggest difference between us and the scholarship we are studying by emulation is that we know we made things up. [emphasis in original]

Below the fold is a short video the three scholars produced to explain their work, what it accomplished, and their own conclusions, which strongly condemn the entire field of ethnic, race, and gender studies.

The real problem however is not what these scholars learned and demonstrated. That these fields are corrupt and infused with leftist political ideology that makes all worthwhile research impossible has been proven for decades. In 1996 physicist Alan Sokol did exactly the same thing, getting a top sociology journal to publish a fake paper purposely filled with the obtuse leftist jargon that these journals prize.

The real problem is that nothing changes. These journals continue to publish this crap and the departments and fake professors who produce it continue to be funded. In fact, since Sokal’s hoax in 1996 their funding and power has grown, not shrunk, despite repeated similar stories in the past two decades demonstrating their willingness to publish fake papers, as long as those papers advocate political leftist garbage that works to destroy the search for truth that is the hallmark of western civilization.

The journals that accepted the seven papers above should all be shut down, today. The schools that fund the departments that publish in those journals should be closed, today. The professors who teach in those departments should be fired, today. None of them contribute anything worthwhile to our society or to academic scholarship, and in fact they are fueling the racial hatred and intolerance that is now pervading American intellectual society.

Unfortunately, I have no faith that any of that will happen. Instead, I expect their corrupt bigoted leftist effort to continue to grow, permeating more aspects of modern intellectual life, with the resulting hate they engender causing a growth in violence and oppression.
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Some victories against modern leftist oppression

2:15 pm

Increasingly, the overbearing and sometimes violent effort by the left to squelch dissenting views is being met by legal action, and increasingly it appears that legal action is producing positive results. In just the last few days, we have just a few examples:

The last story is especially interesting. The city councillors of Charlottesville are being sued for their decision to remove two Confederate statues. The judge ruled that these councillors could be personally liable should they lose the case, especially because their action appears to directly violate a state law.

In the nine-page letter, Moore says that he thinks the council “was acting beyond its authority” and that it was not a “legitimate” legislative activity when the council voted to remove the statues, in contravention with a state law that prohibits the disturbance or removal of war memorials.

The left has for decades been able to violate laws like this with impunity. All of the cases above are examples of that kind of nonchalance to the law and to the truth. In the past no one would challenge them on their acts, and they would get away with it. It appears now that the right is beginning to finally push back, and with some success.

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UCLA students file criminal complaints against violent meeting disruptors

11:20 am

After seeing no action by UCLA for weeks after protesters disrupted and shutdown a pro-Israel meeting at the university, the students have now begun filing criminal complaints directly with the police.

After the media disclosure [that UCLA had done nothing], numerous students stepped forward to file complaints. The first was Justin Feldman, president of the SSI chapter at Santa Monica College, enrolled at UCLA for the fall semester. Feldman stated he feared for his personal safety during the incident. On June 11, Feldman, who had previously completed a StandWithUs [SWU] high school training program, appeared at the UCLA police department accompanied by Yael Lerman, SWU legal director, to formally file his complaint.

More than a few of the students harassed during the May 17 event were trepidatious about filing a police report. But, according to Lerman, the police made the whole process “comfortable,” acting “helpful and respectful.” After a short wait at the station, officers Robert Chavez and Lowell Rose escorted Feldman into a small room where his report was taken during an hour-long interview in what Lerman described as an “unrushed” session.

Lerman credited Feldman for his actions. “What Justin did in filing was critical in moving the process forward. The [UCLA] administration has known about this for weeks and has chosen not to move this forward. So now the students have to.”

There is video of the protest at the link. It shows a man tearing down one flag and appearing to physically threaten one of the speakers. A mob, following him into the room, then begins chanting (using bullhorns) and blowing whistles. (The main chant, “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea,” invokes for me many previous bigoted and hateful proclamations by the Arabs that they intent to drive all the Jews “into the sea” to get rid of them.) The police finally arrive, but appear somewhat uninterested in stopping the disruption or allowing the event to continue. Eventually the brownshirts move out into the hall, but continue to chant and make noises, including banging on the door of the classroom where the event was being held. The police continue to do nothing.

This might be a significant development. The article cites several specific California laws that were violated by these protesters. If conservative event organizers and participants begin filing formal criminal complaints every time their event gets shut down by these violent thugs, they might finally force some action by the government and university to stop this misbehavior.

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Texas law school capitulates to leftist racist dogma

1:58 pm

The coming dark age: Because someone complained about a test question that required law students to write an essay arguing in defense of segregation (in connection with the defenses used prior to the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954), the University of Texas law school capitulated and allowed any students offended by the question to avoid dealing with the details of this legal issue.

In other words, law students at the University of Texas can now get a degree despite never learning how to understand the opposing point of view. And the ones who will follow this policy are also the most fascistic, desiring to impose their will on all others.

Anyone who is donating to this university should contact its administrators now and tell them donations will cease unless they go back to becoming a real university. And the Texas legislature should reconsider its funding to the fake school.

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UC-San Diego requires new faculty to stand for “diversity”

3:35 pm

Fascist California: UC-San Diego now requires anyone applying for a teaching job to submit a statement demonstrating their commitment to “diversity,” including proving that their research, in whatever field, “highlights inequalities.”

“All candidates applying for faculty appointments at UC San Diego are required to submit a personal statement on their contributions to diversity. The purpose of the statement is to identify candidates who have the professional skills, experience, and/or willingness to engage in activities that will advance our campus diversity and equity goals.

“In accordance with APM 210-1-d, ‘these contributions to diversity and equal opportunity can take a variety of forms including efforts to advance equitable access to education, public service that addresses the needs of California’s diverse population, or research in a scholar’s area of expertise that highlights inequalities.’”

In other words, the university will police the research of all faculty, and require them to only do research that serves the university’s leftist political ends. And I say that confidently, because I have no doubt that these rules have nothing to do with equal justice before the law or with preventing racial prejudice or discrimination. No, these requirements are there to guarantee that the only people UC-San Diego hires are leftist ideologues.

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More hatred and bigotry from the left

1:24 pm

It has become quite depressing to repeatedly document the numerous daily examples of leftist hatred and bigotry that now populate American intellectual and political culture. It must be done, however, so below are a few more recent examples from the past month, categorized appropriately. A quick scan of the stories will illustrate to anyone how bankrupt our modern intellectual and political culture has become. Worse, it appears with time that the levels of emotional hate and bigotry are only growing.

First the bigotry:

I could list more, but these are enough. They illustrate the bigoted focus of the left. To them, everything is race or ethnicity. You cannot accomplish anything as an individual if you are a minority, and all your failures can be blamed on the evils of the white race. More important, it is their right to oppress whites, merely because they perceive that some white cultures in the past were oppressive. Under this mentality, we shall soon see the return of segregation (as indicated by at least two stories above) and racial discrimination. And it won’t matter that this time it will be whites who are oppressed instead of blacks. It will still be evil, because it will be based not on the content of each individual’s character but on the color of their skin.

Next the hate:
» Read more

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“If you have wrongthink, you will not be allowed.”

1:34 pm

The fascist, intolerant, and oppressive nature of today’s leftist culture has now gotten so bad that The Atlantic, a liberal publication long considered a reasonable intellectual voice from the left, can no longer tolerate for more than two weeks the hiring of a conservative, even though that conservative, Kevin Williamson, was also a vehement opponent of Donald Trump.

The quote that forms the title of this essay however comes not from the above Williamson story, but from a cogent essay by Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist about that intolerant leftist culture. As he says,

This story [Williamson’s firing] is a predictable continuation of the left’s ownership not just of media but indeed of all institutions. It is depressing. It is predictable. And it is where we are as a country now. It is not confined to the realm of ideas. Eich, Damore, Williamson and others are subject to blacklists and HR reports and firing in every arena of industry and culture. If you have wrongthink, you will not be allowed for long to make your living within any space the left has determined they own – first the academy, then the media, then corporate America, and now the public square. You will bake the cake, you will use the proper pronoun, and you will never say that what Planned Parenthood does is murder for hire, and should be punished as such under the law.

As Domenech notes, Williamson’s firing is only one example of a legion of similar stories. There is the fascist intolerance of modern academia for example. Or we can talk about the hateful scapegoating of innocent NRA members, blaming them for a murderer’s violence merely because they wish to defend their Constitutional rights as specifically outlined in the Bill of Rights.

Or maybe we should mention the hate and violence committed against children and students, merely because they either wear a “Make America Great Again” t-shirt or carry signs supporting Trump.

I wish these were only isolated examples. They are not. For most of the second half of last year I was able to post weekly updates listing anywhere from six to several dozen new stories describing this hateful leftist culture. Here are just a few more that I gathered in mid-March but found too depressing to report at the time:
» Read more

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Leftist fascism at the start of 2018

10:09 am

Beginning in October 2017, I began to do weekly posts listing the free speech atrocities that were occurring on American campuses. I finished the year with a summary which listed all the colleges where such tyranny appeared to be supported and encouraged. As I noted,

[A]lmost every college shown marks a moment when leftist members of an administration, facility, or student body acted to squelch the free speech rights of a conservative. Nor do I think this is because of bias on my part. From the beginning I have recognized the possibility that I might unfairly only report oppressive incidents committed by the left, and have tried to avoid that. Unfortunately, despite my sincere effort to report incidents where conservatives tried to silence liberals, during the whole year I only came across one event where a conservative college acted to shut down a dissenting liberal speaker. I admit that I might have missed a few, but even if I did I do not think this would change the overall pattern. 2017 was a year in which the left decided that it was acceptable to act like fascist thugs and do whatever they could to shut down the free speech of opposing points of view.

I have been lax posting these weekly reports since the beginning of 2018, and this post is my attempt to catch up. Interesting, I got inspired to do this by a story that isn’t directly related to academic fascism at all: Christian Bridal Shop Closes Down Over Fear of LGBT Law After Facing Death Threats.

The local government there is about to pass an ordinance that will make it illegal for these dressmakers to both practice their religion while also making wedding dresses. Rather than violate their conscience, they are shutting down. Worse however was the level of hate directed at them simply because they do not support same-sex marriage:

Because of the store’s refusal to sell dresses for same-sex weddings, Boucher and her family have faced a variety of different threats through social media, email and telephone since 2014. People have not only threatened to burn down their place of business but have also threatened to shoot them in the head. Last summer, the shop closed down temporarily to the public and was only accepting appointments because the harassment got so bad.

Much like the early days of Christianity in the Roman empire, faithful Christians are now finding that they must go underground to practice their faith in America.

It is for this reason that the title of this post uses the term “leftist fascism,” not “academic fascism.” Even though most of the events where jack-booted thugs have attacked innocent people, merely for expressing their freedom of speech, have occurred on college campuses, I realize that this problem has spread beyond the campus. We are now faced with a fascist movement in the U.S., linked to the Democratic Party, that is filled with hate for anyone who disagrees with it, and whose goal is to destroy all dissenters.

If you doubt me, then I dare you to read some of the following stories:
» Read more

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Evergreen State College expects 20% drop in enrollment

12:43 am

The president of Evergreen State College is predicting that the university will see a drop in enrollment in the coming year just below 20%.

President George Bridges has told the campus community that the school’s 3,800 student population is predicted to hover at about 3,100 when the 2018-19 school year begins. This 700-student loss represents an 18.5 percent decrease.

This estimate sent shock waves among faculty, and some speculate it spurred an anonymous call for Bridges’ resignation by way of flyers recently inserted into faculty mailboxes declaring “Please Resign,” among other disparaging comments.

The Olympia, Washington-based school already was hit with a 5 percent enrollment decrease when it started this current 2017-18 school year.

I am surprised and somewhat disappointed that the drop wasn’t more. After the attacks on free speech last year, I wonder why anyone would want to attend this college, especially since it appears the college’s administration continues to refuse to do anything to really change things there.

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Academic fascism in 2017

2:42 pm

Rather than publish another weekly update on the fascist culture that presently dominates many American campuses, I thought I would look back on the year and compile a list of all the colleges I reported where acts of oppression or the silencing of free speech were carried out by the administration, facility, or student body.

There were many ways I could have compiled this list. In the end, I decided to list the colleges alphabetically by state, and then sort the states into three groups, based on how those states voted in the past two presidential elections. States that voted Democratic or Republican both times are grouped together as either Democratic- or Republican-dominated. States that flipped from one party to the other (all flipping Republican, by the way) were listed as battleground states. If a college had more than oppressive incident during the year the number of incidents is indicated in parenthesis.

Because the list is so long, I have placed it, as well my analysis of it, below the fold. Before you read on, make sure you scan down take a look at the list of colleges itself.
» Read more

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This week in fascist academia

2:47 pm

Time for another depressing update on the fascist and childish culture that unfortunately seems to presently dominate the college campuses of modern America. (To read my earlier updates, posted almost weekly since October, go here.)

To begin, below are some stories illustrating the fascist and intolerant nature of many college administrations:

In every case above, we either have the college administrations taking actions to suppress speech they did not like, or college facility announcing to the world that they haven’t the faintest understanding of freedom of speech or its fundamental basis for the establishment of western civilization.

The last story describes a recent Columbia Journalism Review report about how a number of universities have become very hostile to working journalists, and have even taken actions to have journalists arrested. The universities mentioned including the University of Colorado-Boulder, Keene State College, and two New York state colleges, Bronx Community College and Kingsborough Community College.

However, as I have noted in earlier updates, the fascist culture at academia is unfortunately not limited to the administrators and teachers. Many students advocate intolerance as well.
» Read more

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Today in fascist academia

9:06 am

As I noted last week, it has gotten tiresome, depressing, and repetitive to post numerous individual links of stories each day that highlight the oppressive culture that apparently permeates much of today’s academic community. I found that by doing these posts individually, I would not post every important story.

To solve this, I have decided to periodically post the stories in a bunch, and have so far found that I still have had to do it twice a week. Below is today’s list. Check each out. The pattern that disturbs me most is that while much of the intolerance is coming from the students, the administrations and faculty of most of these schools appear quite content to either appease, or support, that intolerance.

And then there is this story from the journal Science: Analysis of China’s one-child policy sparks uproar

A new study of China’s one-child policy is roiling demography, sparking calls for the field’s leading journal to withdraw the paper. The controversy has ignited a debate over scholarly values in a discipline that some say often prioritizes reducing population growth above all else.

It is definitely worthwhile reading this story. While I have serious doubts about the scientific rigorousness of the paper in question, I find it remarkable and disturbing that the first instinct of the scientists in this field who question the paper is to demand its retraction. In other words, rather than argue their doubts and questions publicly and let the chips fall where they may, they prefer to grind their boots into the author’s face, silencing him entirely.

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Suppression of academic freedom a global crisis

10:35 pm

A new report the charity Scholars at Risk (SAR) reveals that the attacks on academic freedom and free speech are part of a growing global crisis.

SAR’s report Free to Think 2017 summarises a year of data collected by SAR’s monitoring project; it includes 257 reported attacks in 35 countries. ‘Attacks’ include killings, violence and disappearances; wrongful prosecution and imprisonment; loss of position and expulsion from study; improper travel restrictions; and other severe or systemic issues including, for example, university closures or military occupation of a campus.

There is a growing trend that, in societies experiencing armed conflict or extremism, higher education communities are perceived as symbols of state authority or sources of potential opposition to radical ideologies. Attacks are generally intended to punish or deter inquiry, or even expression, on unpopular topics. During the past year, SAR found evidence of large-scale violent attacks on campuses in Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria, while targeted killings of individuals were reported in Pakistan, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

Thousands of people in the higher education sector have been targeted in Turkey where state and university authorities continue to take sweeping measures in retaliation for alleged political links or content of research, publications or teaching. Punitive actions by the Turkish state have included imprisonment and prosecution; dismissal and expulsion of scholars and students; and restrictions on travel and institutional autonomy.

Incidents of violence against organised student expression were reported in increasing numbers this year. In Venezuela, South Africa, Niger, Cameroon, Turkey and India, state authorities responded to nonviolent student protests with force, including with rubber bullets, tear gas and stun grenades. In some cases, however, students engaged in violent or coercive conduct, including incidents in South Africa, where campus facilities were damaged, and in the US, where physical force was used to intimidate and disrupt certain speakers on campus.

It is shameful that American campuses, once the world’s shining beacon of freedom of speech, have now become part of this oppressive trend.

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Today in fascist academia

10:10 am

Here’s today’s new collection of articles illustrating the fascist movement that is growing and supported by college administrators nationwide.

The last story is a little complicated, but essentially a conservative group wanted to hold a debate on illegal immigration, and because some students complained (creating a petition opposing the debate) the dean of the law school sent out an email withdrawing school sponsorship of the event, expressing sympathy and support to those opposed to the event, and offering alternative events to go to. She didn’t cancel it, but she made it clear that she would do whatever she could to squelch its success.

Note too that in the first two stories above, the administrations have shown no interest in disciplining anyone for these acts of theft and public misbehavior.

The worst part of these stories is the amount of support for censorship and these disruptions by the students themselves. For example, the Princeton op-ed was written by a student. If this is what the next generation truly believes, the United States will not remain a free nation much longer.

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UC-Berkeley’s chancellor orders removal of posters, starts investigation

8:24 am

Fascist Berkeley: Following the cancellation of “Free Speech Week” at the University of Berkeley, the university’s chancellor ordered the removal of posters detailing the terrorist connections of certain students and teachers, calling them “hate speech” and starting an investigation into the conservative organization that posted them.

The posters in question name Kumars Salehi, Judith Butler, and Hatem Bazian and nine other individuals as supporters of terrorism on the consciousness-raising posters that UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ ordered torn down.

According to the Canary Mission website, Salehi is a graduate student in German literature and culture at Berkeley. Salehi supports the dissolution of the State of Israel and is a member of the terrorist front group Students for Justice in Palestine and the BDS movement. He agrees with the absurd claim of Columbia University professor Joseph Massad that “Zionism and white nationalist anti-Semitism have historically been allies.”

Butler is the Maxine Elliott Professor of Comparative Literature at Berkeley, a BDS movement leader, and a member of the anti-Israel Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) advisory committee. Butler has charactered Muslim terrorist groups as legitimate political players, saying she sees “Hamas [and] Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left [that are] very important.”

Bazian co-founded Students for Justice in Palestine to wage a campus war against Israel on behalf of Hamas. Bazian is chairman of the board of the Hamas organization “American Muslims for Palestine,” and is on record calling for the destruction of the Jewish state and its Jews in so many words. The founding charter of Hamas, by the way, speaks of “the Nazism of the Jews” and asserts that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” It claims that peace initiatives “are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement”; that “there is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad”; and that “war for the sake of Allah” is a noble enterprise that requires the faithful to “assault and kill” on a massive scale. [emphasis mine]

You can’t support freedom of speech if you tear down posters and investigate the people who post them. Such actions are that of tyrants, and we now know that Chancellor Christ’s claims that she supported free speech were lies.

Note that the posters were put up as part of the “Free Speech Week” event that Milo Yiannopoulos attempt to put on there, which ended up getting cancelled. Note also that they were written and posted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative organization focused on supporting freedom and opposing oppression.

Update: Leftist protesters at Berkeley this week also acted to block reporters from reporting on their protest.

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UC-Berkeley student group backs out of free speech event

9:42 pm

Academic fascism: The student group at the University of California-Berkeley that was sponsoring the “Free Speech Week” event that was scheduled to begin this coming week has withdrawn their sponsorship.

The student organizers of the “Free Speech Week” at the University of California, Berkeley have announced that they will no longer be hosting the event due to pressure from school administrators. Milo Yiannopoulos, however, insisted during a Saturday press conference that the event would begin as planned on Sunday, though he said Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon would have to be rescheduled.

It is presently unclear exactly what happened. The university denies that it was pressuring the student group to cancel the event, and is instead claiming that they were doing all that they could to make the event happen. Meanwhile, this story paints a bad picture of Milo Yiannopoulos’s methods for organizing the event.

My inclination now is to believe the student organizers, based on Berkeley’s recent track record supporting censorship and violence against conservatives. However, it is also possible the organizers were not very organized, as suggested by the university and the last link above. Either way, the real source of the problem here is the fascist intolerant culture of Berkeley itself, which encourages violence against conservatives or anyone else who happens to dissent from leftwing orthodoxy. That thuggish culture has made it very difficult to schedule any conservative speaker, since everyone knows that these speakers will require a fortune in security to protect them.

Yiannopoulos meanwhile says he still plans on speaking there, regardless. We shall see.

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Enrollment at University of Missouri continues to drop

2:36 pm

This is good news: The enrollment at the University of Missouri continues to fall since the violent demonstrations in 2015 instigated by race hustlers and leftwing radicals that shut the campus.

Now, The Dothan Eagle reports that the university is facing the lowest levels of enrollment since 2008, with official numbers showing that enrollment is down 12.9 percent. Additionally, the Eagle notes that, with the exception of the senior class, every incoming class is smaller than last year’s, and even international enrollment fell by 12.1 percent.

Meanwhile, the madness at Evergreen State College continues.

Until there is a significant change in administrations and facility at both these institutions, they deserve nothing better than bankruptcy.

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Mob at Howard University attempts to silence Comey lecture

10:23 am

The new fascists: A group of about twenty students screamed and yelled and prevented former FBI director James Comey from speaking during a lecture at Howard University.

It doesn’t matter whether you think Comey is corrupt, this new college tradition of students shouting down every speaker is the antithesis of civilization and freedom of speech. The trouble is that it appears that no one in authority, at either the college or the local governments, seems willing to do the things necessary (expulsion, arrests) to stop it.

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UC-Berkeley comes out for free speech

10:34 am

Progress in Berkeley: The University of California-Berkeley has created a website that unapologetically defends the traditional view of the first amendment and freedom of speech.

A statement by the university’s new Chancellor Carol Christ also says this:

We all desire safe space, where we can be ourselves and find support for our identities. You have the right at Berkeley to expect the university to keep you physically safe. But we would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous. We must show that we can choose what to listen to, that we can cultivate our own arguments and that we can develop inner resilience, which is the surest form of safe space. These are not easy tasks, and we will offer support services for those who desire them.

This September, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos have both been invited by student groups to speak at Berkeley. The university has the responsibility to provide safety and security for its community and guests, and we will invest the necessary resources to achieve that goal. If you choose to protest, do so peacefully. That is your right, and we will defend it with vigor. We will not tolerate violence, and we will hold anyone accountable who engages in it.

This sounds good. Let us hope she stands by her words. If you want to explore the full site, go here.

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Academic response to radical paper: fire him!

9:04 am

Fascist academia: A professor writes a paper suggesting that colonialism wasn’t all bad, and the academic world responds by calling for censorship, a boycott of the journal for publishing it, and demands that the professor be fired and blacklisted.

It appears from the academic responses to the paper, very carefully documented in the article, that none of the protesters bothered to read it. From their perspective, the professor dared say something that is simply not permitted, and therefore must be silenced and destroyed.

But then, how do you have an open marketplace of ideas if some ideas are “simply not permitted?” You don’t. This article illustrates the fascist culture that now permeates many academic fields, totally counter to the concepts of open debate, freedom, and individual liberty that western civilization is founded on.

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Middlebury College endorses heckler’s veto

10:12 pm

Another college no one should attend: Middlebury College, which saw violent protests when author Charles Murray gave a speech there, has established a new policy that will have them cancel any speaker “in cases of imminent and credible threat to the community that cannot be mitigated by revisions to the event plan.”

In other words, threaten violence against a speaker you disagree with, and you will successfully silence that speaker.

If this college believed in free speech, it would instead announce that it will immediately expel any student that threatens violence against anyone, and that it will do whatever is necessary to defend all speakers from violence. But the administration here doesn’t believe in free speech, so instead it invites violence against any unpopular speaker.

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Evergreen settles lawsuit with banned professors

9:10 am

Evergreen State College has settled the lawsuit filed by two professors who, despite being threatened with physical harm by leftist protesters, were given no support or protection by the university.

Evergreen State College has settled a tort claim against it from embattled Professor Bret Weinstein and his wife, Professor Heather Heying, for $500,000, according to an email sent to faculty Friday evening.

“They have resigned from their faculty positions at Evergreen, effective today. The college will pay them a total of $450,000 and contribute an additional $50,000 toward their attorney fees,” according to the email, sent by John Carmichael, chief of staff and secretary to the board of trustees. “In making this agreement, the college admits no liability, and rejects the allegations made in the tort claim,” Carmichael wrote.

This settlement allows the university to deny that it looked the other way while thugs were making blatant threats of violence against these teachers, but the article provides ample evidence that the university continues to lie about its behavior, and is still unwilling to change.

[Carmichael’s] memo does not address how Weinstein was cornered in May in a campus building and blocked from leaving by rowdy student protesters furious he did not support the Day of Absence, videos of the incident show. Nor does it mention how Evergreen’s then-chief of police subsequently told Weinstein his safety on campus could not be guaranteed, and that it appeared student agitators were looking for him, forcing Weinstein to hold his class in a park.

According to the tort claim, at a campus meeting to address the racial unrest, Weinstein was also scared for his personal safety, that the meeting “became heated and threatening at times. There was only one exit, and it was completely blocked by protesters.” Campus officials had also instructed university police to attend the meeting unarmed, according to the claim. “Meanwhile, protest organizers announced that chairs and food in the room were for ‘people of color only.’ When they noticed there were sufficient chairs, organizers announced that white people had to sit in the back of the room. Administrators, including President Bridges, did nothing to prevent this,” the claim added.

There’s more, all of which demonstrates that no sane parent or high school student should consider Evergreen a college option.

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Enrollment plunges at Oberlin College

11:58 am

Good news: Enrollment has plunged this year at Oberlin College due to a series of radical leftwing incidents that mark its campus as a place unfriendly to dissenting points of view.

The article also discusses enrollment drops at other radical colleges, such as the University of Missouri and Evergreen State College. Oberlin’s troubles however are new. They are not a surprise, however, when you read the article and the list of out-of-control leftist race hate that the administration there has supported.

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