June 13, 2020

"Jonathan Turley rips Cornell Law faculty letter against me: 'It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education.'"

A new post by William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, linking to "Cornell Professors Declare 'Informed Commentary' Criticizing The Protests As Racism" by Jonathan Turley.

An excerpt from Turley: "What is most striking for me is the inclusion of Professors Mark H. Jackson and Cortelyou Kenney, who teach in the Cornell First Amendment Clinic. They are in fact the Director and Associate Director of the First Amendment Clinic, which is presumably committed to the value of free speech even at private institutions. So these professors teach free speech and just signed a letter that people who question the BLM movement or denounce the looting are per se or at least presumptive racists. It is reflection of how free speech is being redefined to exclude protections with those who hold opposing views."

From Jacobson: "The law school, as an institution, picked sides and declared in a Dean’s Statement that my writings 'do not reflect the values of Cornell Law School ….' I vigorously disagree with that, but was not given a chance to be heard on it, much less some process to contest it.... [T]he Dean’s statement on behalf of the institution... should have been something along the lines of: 'Though I vigorously disagree with Professor Jacobson’s views, those views are protected by academic freedom and no disciplinary action will be taken.' Period."

ADDED: "'It is the antipathy..." — Doesn't he mean "It is the antithesis..."?

In context:
Not a word about academic freedom or free of speech [sic]; not a suggestion that critics of these protests could have anything other than racist motivations. It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education. Rather than address the merits of arguments, you attack those with opposing views personally and viciously. That has become a standard approach to critics on our campuses. Unless you agree with the actions of the movement, you are per se racist. It is a mantra that is all too familiar historically: if you are not part of the resistance, you are reactionary.

51 comments:

gspencer said...



Yet again we see it. In The Coming of the Third Reich, historian Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, Stormtroopers (Brownshirts) “organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers [and] staged mass disruptions of their lectures.” To express dissent from Nazi positions became a matter of taking one’s life into one’s hands. The idea of people of opposing viewpoints airing their disagreements in a civil and mutually respectful manner was gone. One was a Nazi, or one was silent (and fearful).

Today’s fascists call themselves “anti-fascists,” and this BLM is just a variant. Just like the Nazis, they are totalitarian: they are determined not to allow their opponents to murmur the slightest whisper of dissent. Forcibly suppressing the speech of someone with whom one disagrees is a quintessentially fascist act.

These fascists will target you for destruction if you oppose any aspect of their plans for destruction of what is generally called Western Civilization. Such plans include for example Islam’s ongoing worldwide jihad against Jews and Christians; the all-out push to socialism/communism onto America of which BLM is simply a recently invented weapon to achieve that end.

Francisco D said...

Jonathon Turley is what liberalism used to be about.

Sebastian said...

"Not a word about academic freedom or free of speech"

Why should there be? Liberal knee-jerks don't matter to progs.

"not a suggestion that critics of these protests could have anything other than racist motivations."

Well, critics deviate from the party line, ergo: racist.

"It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education. Rather than address the merits of arguments, you attack those with opposing views personally and viciously."

Should be antithesis. Turley is writing a bit too much, too fast, but fighting the good fight.

But like Althouse he has yet to see what he is observing: that these are not liberals gone astray, that these are not lamentable faults to be corrected, that the vicious attack is the point: the point of a political movement aiming to destroy the culture and transform the American system, taking no prisoners along the way.

Big Mike said...

@Althouse, weren’t you regarded as a “conservative” professor? Considering that the opinions I infer from your post are left of center, it says a lot about your own law school faculty.

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...

Leftwing fascists will destroy everything. The democrat party are fine with it. they have money to make.

wendybar said...

Democrat Jonathan Turley is trying to warn them, yet they can't see what they are doing to America. It is not going to end well, but at least I'm on the side with people who know how to use guns.

robother said...

The "antipathy" is attributed to Turley, but I don't see it in any Turley quotes in the blog. Autofill mistake by the blogger Jacobson? We all miss our layers of editors and fact-checkers from time to time.

Temujin said...

Ann- Don't you wake up daily and thank your stars that you are now retired and not mired in a classroom where you are subject to the judgments of those you used to think you were teaching? The students are now not there to learn from you. They're there to make sure you're using the right words, coming from GoodThoughts. You got out just in the nick of time.

Michael K said...

"If only Comrade Stalin knew about this..."

Wince said...

"It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education."

Althouse said...
'It is the antipathy...' — Doesn't he mean 'It is the antithesis...'?



Did Althouse have to ask because antipathy has become an 'intellectual foundation for higher education'?

madAsHell said...

Antipathy!

I'm still trying to get my head around anti-intellectualism......which seems to have no meaning at all!!

Michael said...

He has antipathy for the antithesis.

GatorNavy said...

Turley is now the next reporter to airbrushed out of the picture by the Stalinists

hombre said...

It’s basically one insane scenario after another, isn’t it? Starting with Joe Biden as the presumptive Democrat nominee and moving to Cornell, Minneapolis, then to the ISIS enclave in Seattle.

The culture war is over. Our Founders, dead soldiers, veterans, Biblical Christians, the Republic and sane, moral citizens have lost. Trump has laid bare the corruption of the media, universities, the Deep State and the Democrats and our fellow citizens have stepped forward in droves to embrace it.

It turns out Kurt Schlichter is a prophet as well as an author.

n.n said...

Diversity breeds adversity. It's a Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic religious movement.

narciso said...


remember when:

https://babalublog.com/2020/06/12/june-12-1987-mr-gorbachev-tear-down-this-wall/#comments

Jersey Fled said...

GWU must be a lot more liberal than Cornell.

n.n said...

An abuse has crept in upon the employment of the word Antipathy. ... Strictly it does not mean hate,--not the feelings of one man set against the person of another,--but that, in two natures, there is an opposition of feeling. With respect to the same object they feel oppositely. ["Janus, or The Edinburgh Literary Almanack," 1826],
-- etymonline.com

A form of cognitive dissonance that arises from diversity and exclusion, of semantic games, of aborting the baby and having her, too.

Krumhorn said...

Damned auto text!!

- Krumhorn

n.n said...

Jonathon Turley is what liberalism used to be about.

Classical, maybe. Certainly, a generation before, after, and away from modern.

Yancey Ward said...

Robother,

It was Turley's own writing from his blog.

Yes, it should have been antithesis, and was probably just a typo of a special kind that I often make and made even as a much younger person when I learned to type. Two words you know well have the same beginning, in this case a-n-t-i, and the mental shortcuts a typist develops finishes off the wrong one as you type. For me, the most common error is typing "there" for "their" (specifically, that one, not the reverse, oddly).

Ann Althouse said...

"The "antipathy" is attributed to Turley, but I don't see it in any Turley quotes in the blog. Autofill mistake by the blogger Jacobson? We all miss our layers of editors and fact-checkers from time to time."

All you have to do is go to the Turley link and search the page for "antipathy" (or, if he's corrected it, to the passage I quoted at length to give you the context).

Ken B said...

Perhaps antipathy to. Turley has lots of little errors like that in his posts. Or a missing word.

Ann Althouse said...

My post title is just Jacobson's post title. He chose that line out of Turley's post, which is strange, considering the prominent error. I double checked at Turley's to make sure the error was not introduced by Jacobson, which was unlikely, since presumably it was cut and pasted.

Yancey Ward said...

The telling thing is that in pretty much all these situations, there is no one in the institutions themselves doing what Turley just did. You know there have to be people in Jacobson's own institution who know what is being done to Jacobson is wrong, but none have taken a public position in support.

Gahrie said...

It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education.?

'It is the antipathy..." — Doesn't he mean "It is the antithesis..."?

My dictionary defines antipathy as: "a deep-seated feeling of dislike; aversion."
It defines antithesis as: "a person or thing that is the direct opposite of someone or something else."

I would say the modern Left, the Progressives, and their BLM allies, are the antithesis of intellectual foundations because of their antipathy for intellectual foundations.

Kevin said...

The Constitution doesn’t apply because racism.

Also, everything is racism.

rcocean said...

The Cornell Professors of "The First Amendment" favor free speech for the Left but not the Right. That's pretty much of the ACLU position. Of course, the Left has always used "Free Speech" as a weapon, while believing in it. Nobody loved "Free Speech" more than Trotsky and Lenin - before they took power.

Or as Sontag, once put it, "They don't need free speech in the USSR - they have Socialism".

rehajm said...

Whatever he meant if it wasn't that this is completely consistent with higher education he's just flat wrong.

If you support BLM 5 percent of your support goes to the Democrats. Don't act blue...

pchuck1966 said...

Are you now or have you ever been a member ofthe Communist Party?

Bushman of the Kohlrabi said...

Out of all the questions Althouse could be asking about this incident, one about a word definition is the least interesting.

Gahrie said...

You know there have to be people in Jacobson's own institution who know what is being done to Jacobson is wrong, but none have taken a public position in support.

When they came for the Jews, I said nothing because I wasn't Jewish...

gilbar said...

It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education.

i have a STRONG antipathy for the University of Iowa (HodgeGuys), does that count?

Narayanan said...

It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education.
----------===========

it is the /antipathy for/ the intellectual foundations that allows the \antithesis of\ the intellectual foundations

tim maguire said...

I can see why some people would prefer antithesis, but antipathy works just fine to.

Ann Althouse said...

Read Turley's 2 sentences together:

"Not a word about academic freedom or free [sic] of speech; not a suggestion that critics of these protests could have anything other than racist motivations. It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education. Rathe"

Sentence 1 has academic freedom and freedom of speech and these are what is meant by " the intellectual foundations for higher education."

"It" is the behavior of the letter writers. What they are doing is the antithesis of the intellectual foundations for higher education.

Pretty clear mistake. I'm also seeing now that he wrote "free of speech" instead of "freedom of speech."

WK said...

'It is the antipathy..." — Doesn't he mean "It is the antithesis..."?

Maybe the word he was looking for was “apathy”.

narciso said...

https://thenationalpulse.com/editor/baden-powell-slavery-kente-cloth/

Gahrie said...

Out of all the questions Althouse could be asking about this incident, one about a word definition is the least interesting.

But if you've been here long enough (and you have) entirely predictable.

chickelit said...

Thesis + antithesis make a nice synthesis. I think Althouse has added to Turley's thesis by "correcting" him.

"It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education is actually not bad as a malapropism; surely the Left's position against Jacobson is based on feelings rather than reason.

chickelit said...

Go back to the original Greek θέση and πάθος for the clearest meanings.

pchuck1966 said...

Bushman - Yep. It isn't rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, it is picking a new China pattern on the Titanic.

Narayanan said...

speaking of words and phrases : I need help me learn to detect antipathy and antithesis

insurrection >>>> somebody explain to me what is different between legal v. illegal

from www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insurrection

Examples of insurrection in a Sentence
the famous insurrection of the slaves in ancient Rome under Spartacus

Choose the Right Synonym - rebellion, revolution, uprising, revolt, insurrection, mutiny mean an outbreak against authority.

rebellion implies an open formidable resistance that is often unsuccessful. open rebellion against the officers

revolution applies to a successful rebellion resulting in a major change (as in government). a political revolution that toppled the monarchy

uprising implies a brief, limited, and often immediately ineffective rebellion. quickly put down the uprising

revolt and insurrection imply an armed uprising that quickly fails or succeeds. a revolt by the Young Turks that surprised party leaders an insurrection of oppressed laborers

mutiny applies to group insubordination or insurrection especially against naval authority. a mutiny led by the ship's cook

MadisonMan said...

Consider that the First Amendment Clinic at Cornell is actually there so people can study ways around that freedom. That is: How to prevent people from speaking freely.

Krumhorn said...

Out of all the questions Althouse could be asking about this incident, one about a word definition is the least interesting.

I disagree. There are multiple opportunities to raise "interesting" questions including other posts on this blog on the same subject. But our hostess frequently examines the folds and recesses of words used by others and frequently quotes from the unlinkable OED while diving deeply into the muck the rest of us slalom past.

Usually, by examining the words, she reveals remarkable insights that illuminate the scene that are often embarrassing to have missed. This is one of the reasons why her blog is unique.

- Krumhorn

Richard Dolan said...

Prof Jacobson should be awarded the first Amy Wax Medal for conspicuous courage by a law school academic in speaking out against mob-enforced insanity.

Jupiter said...

""What is most striking for me is the inclusion of Professors Mark H. Jackson and Cortelyou Kenney, who teach in the Cornell First Amendment Clinic."

First, we'll kill all the law profs.

Jim at said...

But wait. I've been told repeatedly the smearing of Prof. Jacobson is exactly the same thing as Jonah Goldberg still having a job at National Review.

Aggie said...

It could be read either way, as you note, but I believe the use of 'antipathy' was the intended wording. It doesn't flow quite as easily, but as an idea, it's more accurate; he should have written 'antipathy...towards'. The intellectual foundations really do have malign intentions toward the institutions of higher education. There are no feelings of protective tenderness toward the young in their pursuit of individual growth, idealism, or scholarship. The intended corruption of education purpose is a means to an end.

The Godfather said...

Freedom of speech has been a "liberal" value in the US since our founding, and in England even before that. But it has not always been a "Left" value here. See Wilson, W. and Roosevelt, F. In my lifetime (b. 1943), the US Left embraced freedom of expression, starting in the late 1940's, when anti-communist zealots criticized and sought to suppress Leftist speech. This was particularly true in colleges and universities, where freedom of communist speech was defended by academics and university leaders, many of whom did NOT support the substance of the speech. Those defenders of free speech should be honored.

But today, the academy has been captured by the Far Left. For university administrations and faculties today, to defend free speech would mean defending the right of faculty or students to express views with which the leaders of the institutions disagree. They won't do it. If I were enough of a cynic, I would argue that the best way to restore support for free speech in our universities would be to launch a McCarthyite attack on them.

DeepRunner said...

Libs are all for the tolerance of free speech until it's speech they don't tolerate. "Racist" is a brick they are all too happy to use.

So a long time ago, after getting my Master's Degree at a top-level J-school, I thought about going after a faculty position somewhere or perhaps my Doctorate. As it happens, life happened. Ended up going a different direction and feel, all told, I made the right decision. No need to stifle my thoughts from people who would stifle my expression.