This is an attempt not just to scare students away from my course, but to scare students away from speaking their minds, and to create a faculty and student purity test.
I have received numerous emails from students telling me I have a lot of “quiet” support at the law school, but that students are afraid to speak out for fear of career-ending false accusations of racism....
This toxic atmosphere didn’t need to take place. At a time when the law school desperately needs an adult in the room, so to speak, we have faculty and a Dean who denounce me.
June 17, 2020
"With the slogan 'Silence is Violence' being used at the law school, there will be enormous pressure for student groups to go along. Not to do so would be deemed an act of 'violence.'"
Writes Professor William Jacobson about an effort by some students at Cornell Law School to get student groups to sign a letter that seems — I don't have access to the letter — to be accusing Jacobson of racism and urging students to boycott his classes.
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So my tactic of telling these petty tyrants "Fuck off" isn't violence, at least.
We have to be very careful how we speak. I hope we speak loudly in the voting booth.
You can bet your bippy Democrats will try to figure out a scheme where we lose the secret ballot.
I'm afraid the reality here is that we have reached the point where one must choose between a commitment to truth and a faculty position at a major university. One can't have both, it's that simple.
Crazy hysterical groupuscules of students are not new.
Crazy hysterical, and cowardly, potential employers of all graduates of said institutions - that is 2020, or really 2014, dating from the case of Brendan Eich. Everything has just intensified and bro0adened. That is the hammer over everyone's heads.
As I have often said, you are toast if you don't go extra legal, or post-legal, and burn the whole mess down. You aren't getting out of this whole, no matter how it goes.
I have the great advantage of being elsewhere. I am more free than you.
At Weber State University in Utah, a criminal justice professor made some comments on Twitter about the riots--from the "Good! Let the cops smash them!" point of view.
Oh, the screeching and wailing and demands to fire this guy. He resigned the same day.
But, in an odd turn, he took advantage of the statutory 5 day grace period and unresigned as of today. Oh, the shrieking is tremendous now. How dare anyone not say what the left demands. I hope Jacobsin sticks to his guns. And also the Weber State Guy.
Anything that reduces the supply of lawyers is OK with me. Especially young nasty ones.
"It can't happen here."
He's too much of a crybaby, which is a rhetorical mistake.
Pull out the mockery instead. They're a huge target.
American law schools seem to be 88% mindless social justice warriors and 11% milquetoast nominal conservatives who fear to upset the mindless SJWs. In summary, 99% idiots and pussies.
I think the trouble is that nobody has praised the left for not rioting when it wasn't rioting. Think of it as a dog training problem.
Coyne has a post on "Jon Chait on Left-wing illiberalism, and why it needs to be called out" about people getting canned and/or ostracized for not not exactly parroting The Narrative, e.g.
"By not acting, we are perpetuating the racism and sexism we know exists on this list and in our community at large. As such, we have removed David Shor from Progressphiles."
Shor had the audacity to mention someone else's research which showed that riots decrease Dem support while non-violent protests increased it.
Almost forgot - these "some students at Cornell Law School" are mostly affirmative action admits, as in the post mentioned above.
Paul Simon wrote a song about this. He agreed that silence was not a good thing. I am not sure that he agreed that forced speech is better.
Thinly veiled racism is like a nightgown.
All this crap goes on because the College President and the people with the power approve of it. Is that because they are carrying out the wishes of the Big Donors? I doubt it. But make no mistake, its the people at the top setting the agenda, the students are just pawns. Dummies, who act out of fear, or conformity. Like all young people.
During the Stalinist purges, everyone one believed that "if only Stalin knew". Even several ex-members of the Politburo were convinced that their final plea, made directly to Stalin, would save them from the Gulag or execution. But of course, it was Stalin orchestrating the whole thing from start to finish.
At Weber State University in Utah
Freaking Utah! How many states are. Controlled by the Republicans? 25-30?
How many states have investigated these state schools for violation of civil rights? How many schools have had the funding cut in protest?
These feckless Republicans are the reason the far left is running riot in this country.
The other problem is that conservatives don't want to fight. Their first instinct is to hope they get eaten last or run away. When I lived in California, I don't know how many times some character would talk about the latest D outrage, and then exclaim he was going to move out of the state tomorrow - so there. As if that isn't what the California D's wanted! They're now happy as clams all the center-right types ran away, it means they have total control of the State.
10-1 Jacobson ends up taking some sort of settlement and leaving Cornell by Christmas or I should say "Winter Break".
So Ann, which argument do you understand and which do you applaud?
... but that students are afraid to speak out for fear of career-ending false accusations of racism
In these times censure for a false accusation seems an impossibility. To speak of it feels like a diversion operation.
This guy really thought no one would boycott his courses? Seems like a smart guy.
From an Althouse 1/8/17 blogpost under the Jacobson tag:
"That's something that was likable about the left. The Student Coalition for Progress may think the way to win support for their ideas is to suppress other ideas.
That's not going to work, and they shouldn't want it to work. I predict that as long as they keep trying to make that work, they will fail to win much serious support from other people, even if they succeed in eliciting some genuflection when they bullshit about "hate.""
The "other people" don't seem to have made much of a stand in that last 3-and-a-half years.
It is good to see Althouse's last three posts on Jacobson's situation to show where we are now; I do wish she had more to say on the matter than 1/13's minor textual addition over whether "antipathy" was the right word for the statement "It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education."
Although "antipathy" seems to describe the current attitude of 2017's "other people" pretty well. At last those that aren't just keeping their heads low in fear.
I am Laslo.
These people do not want to talk or dialogue, but even if they did, I don't know what language they speak. It's certainly not English. Bizarro English, possibly.
His Legal Insurrection Blog is one I frequently read. And this makes me sad. We have to push back against this garbage. It’s mob rule. Old Testament-like, mob rule.
Say the “wrong” thing and you’re exiled, banished, out of the tribe. Sentenced to walk the desert, alone, as a nomad.
It’s not new tho. They were using the “if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem” BS when I was in law school more than 30 years ago.
Needs to be stomped out again.
Mob rule may work great for you when you think exactly as the mob thinks. Can’t imagine most of these people ever felt they were in that category before, and likely won’t ever be again.
Vote Trump for jobs.
Vote Biden for mobs.
He's right that, ultimately, this is not the failure of the radical students, it is the failure of school administrations that refuse to provide the adult guidance they are handsomely paid to provide. The administrations are stealing from the public and betraying the students.
Honestly, the best course at this point is let many institutions wither and die and replace them, with new ones. It will be a two-for because lots of them needed to be updated regardless of authoritarian lefty orthodoxy that has been festering and spreading.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/mao-little-general-horror-cultural-revolution
Other memories are more painful. As the summer of 1966 progressed, and a period of so-called “red terror” began, the thrill of having been let out of class and let loose on the Chinese capital faded and was replaced by an atmosphere of fear. Red Guards marauded across the city, ransacking and looting homes and staging public “struggle sessions” in which victims were savagely beaten, tortured and sometimes killed. At least 1,772 people are known to have been murdered in Beijing alone. Some targets committed suicide to escape the relentless persecution.
========
By all means connect the dots.
The left: Silence is Violence!
Also the left: Shut the fuck up racist!
"The other problem is that conservatives don't want to fight."
It takes a long time for decent people to shed their inhibitions, break ties with family and friends.
Professor - when all the gross infringements emanate from one side, how do you justify "waiting until November" to decide which side to vote for?
If it's just to keep the conversation going and provide a rationale for highlighting anything Biden (or, if someone somehow replaces him, then "anything whoever replaces Biden") might do or say that is compelling between now and November - well, as we always say, it's your blog. It's your blog, regardless. But surely your commitment to the law, the Constitution, due process, and civil rights must provide clear guidance for you this year, no matter how odious you might find Trump as a man.
As Heinlein said, you may not feel strongly about whom to vote for, but you'll certainly know whom to vote against.
steve uhr said...
This guy really thought no one would boycott his courses? Seems like a smart guy.
He is a smart guy and the complaining students are the ones that will flunk the Bar. Like Hillary did.
I prefer it in the original Italian:
"Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, niente contro lo Stato."
--Benito
Harvard graduates are trying to deplatform Larry Tribe because he said things about Senator Willie Brown's Side Piece that they don't like.
You will be made to care!
This go-around I am rooting for the Mensheviks.
Cornell failed in the 60s, failing again so far.
Some nuggets from Alan Bloom, The Closing:
"When the black students at Cornell became aware that they could intimidate the university and that they were not just students but negotiating partners in the process of determining what an education is, they demanded . . . "You don't have to intimidate us," said the famous professor of philosophy in April 1969, to ten thousand triumphant students supporting a group of black students who had just persuaded "us," the faculty of Cornell University, to do their will by threatening the use of firearms as
well as threatening the lives of individual professors . . . A few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears . . . These students discerned that their teachers did not really believe that freedom of thought was necessarily a good and useful thing . . . The American professors were not aware of what they no longer believed, and they took ever so seriously the movements they were entangled with . . . The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble . . . At the same time the
provost thought he was engaged in a great moral work, righting the historic injustice done to blacks. He could justify to himself the humiliation he was undergoing as a necessary sacrifice."
Silence is not violence.
When you start with a lie, you don't end up with the truth.
They are playing with fire. Professor Jacobson has done done litigation in support of his blog recently...
They are playing with fire.
Our university system is rotten to the core excluding the hard sciences.Clean it out.
steve uhr: "This guy really thought no one would boycott his courses? Seems like a smart guy."
Jacobson may indeed have underestimated the stupidity of the leftists.
Jacobson should have been advised to review the postings of lefties like Steve Uhr to better appreciate and familiarize himself with that degree of idiocy.
This is an excerpt from that Coyne guy's piece defending Chait from the SJW mob--a Chait quote:
". . .The most concerning thing about the Cotton episode is the logic that was given to pull the column in the first place: “Running this puts Black people, including Black @nytimes staff, in danger,” a phrase repeated thousands of times on social media.
The line of reasoning here is perfectly coherent. We can easily imagine a world where Cotton’s op-ed persuades Trump to deploy troops, who then kill protesters and reporters, many of them black. But we could envision a similar sequence resulting from any number of op-eds. Suppose the Times had given an op-ed to an advocate of repealing Obamacare at the crucial moment, persuading John McCain to supply the deciding vote to eliminate it. Millions of people would have lost insurance, and as a direct result, tens of thousands of them would have died.
Many other policy debates have life-and-death consequences: the environment, unemployment, and so on. On nearly all these issues, the brunt of policy failure falls disproportionately on black Americans, who are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus, losing their insurance, being harmed by pollution, and other threats."
These people are officially batshit nuts. Even the "good" ones. Yikes!
“ Vote Trump for jobs.
Vote Biden for mobs.”
How do you think America would vote, if the election were today?
Diversity (e.g. racism) breeds adversity. #SilenceIsViolence #BabyLivesMatter
My lips are sealed.
@Ken B, if the election was held today Trump would carry more states than in 2016, though California would count illegal votes from illegal voters who are illegal aliens and pretend that Biden won the popular vote.
Chatty is batty.
You can bet your bippy Democrats will try to figure out a scheme where we lose the secret ballot.
they've Already got this:
it's called 'Card Check' or, as the government calls it 'absentee voting'
There's a knock at your door, you open it to find 2 large men and a vile looking 'woman'
They say to you:
"We're here to pick up your absentee ballot"
"in Fact, we brought one with. All you have to do is sign, and WE'LL take care of the rest"
vote harvesting... It's the New Way
Lewis Wetzel (7:49pm):
You're absolutely right, "Silence is not violence".
Then again, perhaps they're thinking of 'silence' as a transitive verb. Silencing Prof. Jacobson certainly looks like it could very easily shade into doing violence to ('violencing'?) Prof. Jacobson - and anyone who supports him.
Claim: Silence is violence
But: Violence is not Silence
Therefore: Silence = violence equals Not Violence = Violence.
Trump for mobs,
Biden for mobs,
Harris for Snobs,
Pence for Corn Cobs.
I see the moderators have taken the rest of the day off, as usual.
The wild card is what election theft schemes Soros, et. al. have cooked up for November. Vote by mail opens a whole new vista.
Professor Jacobson has claimed no expertise nor any specialized training on matters of race and racial justice, rendering any future discussions on the matter entirely unproductive.
This has become the standard. They will only dignify a discussion so long as it is with others who have saturated themselves in white privilege studies. Similarly, a scientist, no matter how prominent, critiquing some climate science drivel published in a climate science drivel journal is irrelevant unless credentialed as a AGW warrior.
Gotta be in the club or you’re a racist bastard or a denier.
- Krumhorn
How bout, Miss Ann, we send the Woke students to your house to school you on your "cruel neutrality"?
Would you like that?
"I see the moderators have taken the rest of the day off, as usual.
6/17/20, 10:13 PM"
This commentator is oblivious to how he comes across. Unseemly bitching year after year.
GO !
It can't be explained simply to you: yes the troll(s) won.
GO start something that is worth attacking and your ignorant bullshit comments year after year about Althouse's administration will stop here. You haven't been attacked and can't comprehend it, so you post ignorant comments time after time. The younger you would be embarrassed.
Answer Althouses call for a better system given the parameters she has explained over and over or CREATE YOUR OWN FOR PROFIT UTOPIC COMMENT SYSTEM AND BECOME BILLIONAIRE.
"Don't bitch" is way over your head, surgeon.
Fact check: Kente cloths have ties to West African slave trade
Although kente cloth does have ties to slavery, it is more widely recognized as a modern symbol of pride in African American culture and pride in cultural ties to West Africa.
Interesting. 1/2 Americans of African descent take pride in their ancestral slave trade. I suppose rather than tear down the symbols of their shame, they embrace them with pride and gay satisfaction with their Democrat counterparts. The double-edged scalpel of virtue signalling.
Black widows cannibalize their male companions.
Black holes reconstitute information.
Black whores... h/t NAACP
Oh, the bigotry of progressive concern. Privacy is a civil right, or is it rite, right?
#BabyLivesMatter
We have devolved into Soviet Russia so quickly that my head is spinning. Well done comrade democrats. People wondered how the German people could have sat quietly while the government committed atrocities, well, you are finding out now.
Attempts to break silence could be met with actual violence. The lesson would be worthwhile for many of the Maoists.
"...students are afraid to speak out for fear of career-ending false accusations of racism....
Translation: won't get laid.
The bullies need to be punched in the mouth. Literally.
Then maybe we can have some honest silence.
Michael K said...
Anything that reduces the supply of lawyers is OK with me. Especially young nasty ones.
spoken like a surgeon... :)
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