Friday, August 12, 2022
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: The closing of the university mind
Melanie Phillips: The closing of the university mind
It takes a brave academic to call out what’s going on. One such is Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at Kent university. On his Substack blog today, he produces startling evidence to illustrate the extent of the problem. He writes:Bad news for the Jews: How six US and UK media moguls aided the nascent Nazi regime
Since the 1960s, the ratio of left-wing to right-wing academics has jumped from three to one to eight to one today…[Other studies] similarly find that fewer than 20% of academics today vote for right-leaning parties while 75% vote for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, or the Greens. Last year, in my own work, I found that 76% of my colleagues in the world’s most elite institutions identify on the left while 21% of that group identify as ‘far left’. Just 11% put themselves on the right. And in my own area of political science, a recent study at Harvard found that 72% lean to the left with 14% describing themselves as far left. In America, where this ideological bias is especially pronounced, it is simply no longer unusual to find some departments with not a single registered Republican. Is this healthy for our students? Is this conducive to developing well-rounded, critical thinkers?…
One study finds a third of staff would avoid hiring a known Brexit voter while many openly say they would feel uncomfortable mingling with a colleague who holds gender-critical views. Between one third and one half of left-leaning scholars would consciously mark a bid for a research grant lower if it adopted a right-wing perspective, which really matters because the ability of academics to generate funding has a major impact on their career trajectory. My own survey of academics in the world’s most elite universities similarly found that while two-thirds feel positively about left-wing voters, only one in ten feel the same way about right-wing voters…
Increasingly, in Britain and America, large numbers of academics, around six in ten, support requiring job and research grant applicants to submit ‘diversity statements’ before a decision is made. You don’t have to oppose or question diversity to find the use of these statements deeply problematic. Many influential voices consider them ‘litmus tests’ which are designed to weed out applicants who do not subscribe to the dominant orthodoxy…
One study finds less than half of left-leaning academics think academic freedom should always be put first, even if it violates social justice ideology; another finds that about one-quarter of academics would support some kind of campaign to oust a dissenting academic from their job. Recently, this has been symbolised by prominent cases of academics or honorary academics being harassed, investigated or experiencing negative consequences as a direct result of their beliefs or counter-cultural research, such as Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix, Tony Sewell, Selina Todd, Rosa Freedman, Michele Moore, among others. These are not exactly right-wing culture warriors.
This hijack of education has been building up for decades. Back in the sixties and seventies, a mindset became the progressive orthodoxy that the west was fundamentally corrupt — colonialist, imperialist, exploitative, racist and dominated by the “patriarchy” — ie, white heterosexual western men were to blame for all the ills of the world. Western society therefore had to be reconfigured, and the way to achieve this was by the “long march through the institutions” — of which the universities were key — to turn western values inside out.
This has now been achieved to the letter.
The corruption of the universities is at the core of most of our society’s ills. Knowledge and rationality have been replaced by ideological propaganda. Instead of teaching young people how to think, the universities have been instructing them what to think. The identity politics which they have enforced upon so many and turned into unchallengeable dogma has meant that increasingly people have been employed or promoted not on the basis of their intellectual achievement (which has been becoming progressively devalued) but their skin colour or sexual identity. All of which helps explain why, across the board in institutions, professions, businesses, politics and the civil service, so many are so incompetent, know so little and can’t even think straight.
The universities, supposedly the crucible of knowledge, rational thought and the free exchange of ideas, are now responsible instead for the closing of the national mind.
In ‘The Newspaper Axis,’ historian Kathryn S. Olmsted details how prior to WWII, press barons including William Randolph Hearst worked to sway the public toward Hitler’s lineThe Sanctification of George Soros
In January 1934, Lord Harold Rothermere, the owner of Britain’s Daily Mail, filed a story from Munich praising Adolf Hitler. The article was published when Jews were being ousted from public life in Germany and the Nazi party had already established a large network of concentration camps across the country.
Rothermere assured his readers that stories of these atrocities were wildly exaggerated. The restaurants and hotels in Munich were bustling with German Jews during the festive season, and none “showed [any] symptoms of insecurity or suffering,” the British newspaper proprietor wrote. This was typical of the pro-Nazi line Britain’s Daily Mail continued to promote that year.
The Nazis needed to control the “alien elements and Israelites of international attachments who were insinuating themselves into the German state,” as Rothermere put it in another article he personally penned in July 1934. The Daily Mail also cheered on the British Union of Fascists — a party led by Sir Oswald Mosley in Britain that was notorious for its support of Hitler and for its anti-Semitic propaganda. “Hurrah for the Blackshirts,” read one infamous Daily Mail headline from January 1934.
California-based historian Kathryn S. Olmsted’s new book, “The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler,” profiles Rothermere and five other powerful media moguls in the Anglophile world on both sides of the Atlantic between 1933 and 1945, all of whom took a pro-Nazi editorial line.
“Lord Rothermere was a pro-fascist who had a deep sympathy for Adolf Hitler,” Olmsted tells The Times of Israel from her office at the University of California, Davis, where she chairs the history department.
As she writes in the introduction to her new book, “For years, Rothermere and his fellow press barons in both Britain and the United States pressured their nations’ leaders to ignore the menace of fascism.”
Olmsted dedicates a chapter to exploring how Britain’s Daily Mail, led by Rothermere, championed Hitler’s Germany throughout the mid- to late-1930s. The paper described Germany under Hitler “as one of the best-governed nations in Europe” and continued to boost Hitler’s popularity, even as the Nazis used terrorist tactics against their political enemies.
All well and good. America is a free country, and Soros has every right to spend his vast fortune however he wants within the boundaries of the law, as well as to justify that spending in the public square. The same applies to those of us inhabiting lower tax brackets, who have no less a right to criticize Soros for how he’s trying to influence American public life—which, to repeat, he is very much, and by his own admission, trying to do. That extremely rich people with grand ideological designs should not be immune to criticism—indeed, that they should be subject to even more of it than the rest of us—is a pretty widely accepted view in America, especially on the political left, where the maxim “behind every great fortune lies a great crime” has long been a guiding principle. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that this lack of deference to the wealthy and the titled is one of our major distinguishing national characteristics.
Or used to be. A week after Soros published his piece in the Journal under his own name, proudly and defiantly justifying his expenditure of vast sums aimed at sparking a revolution in the administration of municipal criminal justice, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio introduced an amendment to the $750 billion climate and tax bill aimed at stymying this agenda by providing funds for local law enforcement to keep violent criminals behind bars. The measure had no chance of passing, and when the Democrat-led Senate predictably rejected it, Rubio took to Twitter. “The democrats just blocked my effort to try & force Soros backed prosecutors to put dangerous criminals in jail,” he tweeted in complaint.
What followed was the sort of Pavlovian response one has come to expect from progressive politicians, activists, journalists, and other social media impact influencers whenever the name of their benefactor is invoked.
Soros, in case you couldn’t tell, happens to be Jewish, a fact that has absolutely nothing to do with his ideas about criminal justice reform, or with Rubio’s opposition to them. Yet it was this utterly irrelevant detail of Soros’ birth that the progressive hive mind seized upon, spurring its minions to attack an unsubstantiated presumption about Rubio’s motives to the exclusion of his substantive arguments. The rebuke from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was particularly rich in light of her response to parents upset about their children being denied in-person schooling during the pandemic. “American Jews,” she said in April 2021, “are now part of the ownership class.”
Put aside the merits of the criminal justice policies Soros is trying to advance with his humongous largesse. Also put aside the fact that, while he was alive, the right-wing Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was routinely denounced by progressives in terms that, by their own lights, are no less “antisemitic” than what they accuse Rubio of fomenting. The question before us today is whether, in the course of criticizing activities that the country’s biggest progressive donor has undertaken “transparently” (his word), it is possible to even utter his name without being accused of bigotry.
The argument that the mere mention of the name “Soros” is tantamount to antisemitism, which is effectively the position of the progressive political, media, and activist elite, is made entirely in bad faith. Stating the plain and observable fact that some prosecutors are “Soros-backed” is no more of an attack on Jews than the broadcaster Soledad O’Brien’s warning to “full-time Florida residents,” an antisemitic dog whistle about God’s waiting room. If the mind of a Soros supporter, upon hearing his name, races immediately to an image of a “Jew,” and one who serves as a stand-in for “the Jews,” it’s probably not the motives of the critic that need questioning. The impulse to connect “Soros” with Judaism and Jewishness is not unlike the bigotry that associates the term “monkeypox” with Black people. It’s a form of essentialism that expects us to agree with the antisemites that “being Jewish” is somehow relevant to what Americans like Soros (or right-wing Jewish billionaires, for that matter) do with their time and money.
Those engaging in this rhetorical tactic are certainly not pursuing the “thoughtful discussion” that Soros says we “desperately need,” but rather the “demagoguery and divisive partisan attacks” he denounces. Worse, they’re minimizing the threat posed by actual antisemitism by cheapening the accusation.
Chattanooga, August 11 - A man who campaigns for the recognition of indigenous status for the descendants of the tribes who inhabited the Americas before Europeans colonized the land acknowledged today his ambivalence about his efforts, because those efforts conflict with two key axioms of his worldview, namely that Palestinians were there first and that their claims take priority among all progressive causes.
