"Do hawks and falcons look so fantastic rising and falling because they have the sky as background or would they look equally good flying through mud or a piece of corduroy."

Writes Anne Carson — who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature — in "Lecture on the History of Skywriting" (a chapter of the collection called "Wrong Norma" (commission earned)).

A Paris Review interviewer asked her, "Tell me about the 'wrongness' in the title of Wrong Norma." She answered: 

"Language and Linguistics for Decolonization and Liberation and for Peace and Community Building — From the River to the Sea in Palestine and Israel to the Mountaintops of Haiti and Beyond."

That's the name of the class discussed in "The Controversial Class That M.I.T. Is Paying a Professor Not to Teach/Michel DeGraff, a vocal pro-Palestinian activist, can’t be easily fired because he has tenure. But he has been kicked out of his department" (NYT).

"An M.I.T. panel rejected the course over questions about whether Dr. DeGraff, a Haitian scholar and expert in the study of Creole languages, had the expertise to teach it. That was supposed to finish the matter.... He disagreed that he lacked the ability to teach the course.... 'M.I.T. should not be repressing my teaching in this way,' Dr. DeGraff said in an interview. He called the decision a 'violation of my professional rights.'..."

"Washington professor who parodied university 'land acknowledgment' wins $600K settlement."

FIRE reports.

It has become increasingly common in academia to encourage statements that formally recognize indigenous ties to the land. In December 2021, Reges criticized land acknowledgment statements in an email to faculty, and the next month he parodied UW’s model statement in his syllabus: “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.” Reges’s statement was a nod to John Locke’s philosophical theory that property rights are established by labor, and a response to the Computer Science department’s recommendation that professors include the UW’s model statement in their syllabi. Reges objected to the political nature of the UW’s model statement and sought to demonstrate that there are competing views on the value of land acknowledgments.

That was retaliation and viewpoint discrimination [by the University] according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

"Ms. Prabhakar... said the point of assigning 'Bettering Myself' was to challenge students in her introductory reading and writing course."

"As part of the assignment, students had to read first-person stories told by other unlikable narrators — like 'Cathedral' by Raymond Carver — to contrast narrative voice, perspective, vocabulary and style, according to the lawsuit. In colleges, such materials 'take students out of their comfort zone, expose them to new ideas and provide opportunities for growth and intellectual maturation,' the suit said...."

From "Florida Professor Fired for Assigning a Profane Story, Lawsuit Says/South Florida State College fired an English professor after she assigned a story about a teacher who talks about sex with her students. Now the professor is suing" (NYT gift link).

That article links to a review of the story collection, "In Ottessa Moshfegh’s Stories, Fringe Figures Make Feckless Attempts at Connection" (NYT gift link):

"Benjamin Robinson, an Indiana University professor, is one of those under the new microscope. In his class on the history of German thought..."

"... he touches on Kant, Hegel, Arendt and Nietzsche, connecting the thinkers’ big insights — 'the aha moments' — to real-life experiences and contemporary politics. In late 2024, a student anonymously complained, saying that Dr. Robinson — who has been vocal about his pro-Palestinian views — had spoken negatively about Israel, mentioned personal experiences like being arrested at a protest at the Israeli consulate in Chicago and 'repeatedly spoke against Indiana University' during his classes. The university found in favor of the student and reprimanded the professor, citing a recent state law meant to improve 'intellectual diversity' and prevent students from being subjected to political views unrelated to the course...."

From "Professors Are Being Watched: 'We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance'/Scrutiny of university classrooms is being formalized, with new laws requiring professors to post syllabuses and tip lines for students to complain" (NYT).

"Dr. Robinson, who is Jewish, acknowledged that he referred to Israel’s conduct as a genocide in class but he insisted that he never asked students to agree with him. He said he brought up his personal experiences of activism during a discussion of Kant and the philosopher’s distinction between private and public stances. 'If I can’t appeal to people’s intuitions, what it’s like to publicly use reason versus to have a private feeling of conscience,' he said, 'if I can’t evoke what that feels like, I can’t possibly teach Kant.'"

"Larry David had one of the stupidest op-eds in today's New York Times in which he compares Bill Maher having dinner with Donald Trump with having dinner with Adolf Hitler."

"Um, you know, Larry David, that's a form of Holocaust denial. Comparing Trump to Hitler is a form of Holocaust denial because Trump didn't have gas chambers, he didn't have shooting squads, he didn't take babies, and throw them into ovens, and if you're making a comparison what you're saying is Hitler didn't have any of those things either. So shame — shame — on you Larry David. You know, we used to be friends, boy. No more. And the one thing: about Larry David he stopped being funny, I don't laugh at his jokes anymore because I know they're not jokes. That's who he really is, so they're not jokes...."

Said Alan Dershowitz, trashing Larry David's trashing of Bill Maher's dining with Trump.

Here's David's NYT op-ed "My Dinner With Adolf" — free-access link — which begins:

Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side....

Read the whole thing. I gave you the free link. Now, I do think what Larry wrote there is funny. It just violates a rule of taste: You shouldn't compare anything to the Holocaust. 

We can talk about why that rule fell out of fashion. But whether Larry David is violating a strict and important rule or just going with the flow of the current taste within his hyper-elite stratum of society is a separate question from whether it's funny.

"For several years, many university leaders have failed to act as their students and faculty have shown ever greater readiness to block an expanding range of views that they deem wrong or beyond the pale."

"Some scholars report that this has had a chilling effect on their work, making them less willing to participate in the academy or in the wider world of public discourse. The price of pushing boundaries, particularly with more conservative ideas, has become higher and higher. Schools ought to be teaching their students that there is as much courage in listening as there is in speaking up.... [M]any of those who are now demanding the right to protest have previously sought to curtail the speech of those whom they declared hateful. Establishing a culture of openness and free expression is crucial to the mission of educational institutions. That includes clear guardrails on conduct and enforcement of those guardrails, regardless of the speaker or the topic...."

Writes The Editorial Board of the New York Times in "A Way Back from Campus Chaos."  

Did the case of Claudine Gay give new energy to the conservative campaign against left-wing academia?

I'm reading "How a Proxy Fight Over Campus Politics Brought Down Harvard’s President/Amid plagiarism allegations and a backlash to campus antisemitism, Claudine Gay became an avatar for broader criticisms of academia" by Nicholas Confessore, in The New York Times.

Dr. Gay’s defenders... warn[ed] that her resignation would encourage conservative interference in universities and imperil academic freedom. (Though some experts have rated Harvard itself poorly on campus free speech during Dr. Gay’s tenure in leadership.)...

What a delicious parenthetical!

That link on "poorly" goes to the FIRE website, where you have to do a search to see where Harvard ranks. I did the search (and you can too). We're told the "speech climate" is "abysmal."

But of course, this article, outside of its parentheses, portrays conservative critics of academia as the threat to freedom.

"The lawsuit compares the DEI-statement requirement to Red Scare–era loyalty oaths that asked people to affirm that they were not members of the Communist Party."

I'm reading "The Hypocrisy of Mandatory Diversity Statements Demanding that everyone embrace the same values will inevitably narrow the pool of applicants who work and get hired in higher education" by Conor Friedersdorf (The Atlantic).

"What was unique about the Cornell situation is they rapidly turned in a response that was a 'hard no.'"

"There was no level of kowtowing. It was a very firm defense of what it means to get an education."

Said Alex Morey, the director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, quoted in "Should College Come With Trigger Warnings? At Cornell, It’s a ‘Hard No.’ When the student assembly voted to require faculty to alert students to upsetting educational materials, administrators pushed back" (NYT). 

The student assembly voted unanimously that it "implores all instructors to provide content warnings on the syllabus for any traumatic content that may be discussed," and the university president Martha E. Pollack, vetoed the resolution, the first use of this veto in more than 20 years.

The students' use of the word" implores" makes it sound like a mere request, but there was also the resolution that "students who choose to opt-out of exposure to triggering content will not be penalized, contingent on their responsibility to make up any missed content."

"It was never our intent to suggest that academic freedom is of lower concern or value than our students — care does not 'supersede' academic freedom, the two coexist."

Said a statement from Ellen Watters, the chair of the Hamline University’s board of trustees, and Fayneese S. Miller, the university's president.

"Like all organizations, sometimes we misstep. In the interest of hearing from and supporting our Muslim students, language was used that does not reflect our sentiments on academic freedom. Based on all that we have learned, we have determined that our usage of the term ‘Islamophobic’ was therefore flawed."

Quoted in "After Lecturer Sues, Hamline University Walks Back Its ‘Islamophobic’ Comments/In an about-face, the school said that using the term was 'flawed' and that respect for Muslim students should not have superseded academic freedom" (NYT).

"It honestly seems like it was written by a teenage Tumblr user who, having come into contact with some new and exciting ideas about social justice, seeks to impose them widely and lecture perceived wrongdoers gleefully."

Writes Jill Filipovic, in "Hamline University’s Controversial Firing Is a Warning/Insistence that others follow one’s strict religion is authoritarian and illiberal no matter what the religion is" (Slate). She's talking about a statement written by Hamlin University President Dr. Fayneese S. Miller. 

Filipovic continues:

"There is a major controversy brewing over free speech and censorship at Emory Law Journal this month after the student editors refused to publish an essay by San Diego’s Warren Distinguished Professor of Law Larry Alexander."

Writes Jonathan Turley, explaining in some detail what Alexander wrote that the law review editors, after inviting him to participate in a special issue, felt they should not publish. You can read Alexander's essay here.

From the editor's statement:

We take issue with your conversation on systemic racism, finding your words hurtful and unnecessarily divisive. Additionally, there are various instances of insensitive language use throughout the essay (e.g., widespread use of the objectifying term “blacks” and “the blacks” (pages 2, 3, 6, 8, etc.); the discussions on criminality and heredity (pages 11 and 14), the uncited statement that thankfully racism is not an issue today (page 18)). And, crucially, the discussion on racism is not strongly connected to your commentary on Professor Perry’s work, which is the focus of the Issue and the purpose behind the publication opportunity offered.

The pagination in the version I linked to isn't the same, but I think the "page 18" material is this:

"The backlash has led to police telling her she should stay off campus for now and teach classes online."

"Officers have become so concerned about her safety that she has been given a direct hotline to call.... One social media user shared a picture of a man with a gun and the invitation 'Kathleen Stock rest your weary head.' Another post described her as 'on the wrong side of history' and said she would die alone. The academic, who is a lesbian, broke down in tears as she told of a 'culture of fear' taking over university campuses.... For the past three years she and a group of like-minded feminists have argued that men cannot become women by surgery and that it is important to protect women-only spaces in institutions such as prisons and refuges.... The campaigns against Stock date back to 2018 when a consultation was launched over the Gender Recognition Act and whether people should be able to decide for themselves which gender they wanted to identify as, without the need for a medical opinion. Stock spoke out against it. There were death threats at the time and a spy hole was set up in her office door for her safety."

From "Kathleen Stock, the Sussex University professor in trans row, urged to get bodyguards/A philosophy don has been advised by police to stay off campus to avoid the students who accuse her of transphobia" (London Times).

Here's Stock's book: "Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism."

"As historians, we the undersigned condemn Prof. Peter Singers’ [sic] abhorrent views that some humans have less value than others."

"We object to inviting him to Rhodes College to speak as part of a 'Pandemics Ethics' panel. Positioning him as an expert on ethics only legitimizes his reprehensible beliefs that deny the very humanity of people with disabilities. Hypothetical philosophies on morality cause real violence. We historians are all too familiar with ideas that justify labeling marginalized, vulnerable, and minority populations as 'life unworthy of life,' and the murderous consequences for those deemed 'unfit' to live. Adhering to the College’s own IDEAS Framework that seeks to foster 'a sense of belonging' and embrace 'the full range of psychological, physical, and social difference,' we historians assert that Prof. Peter Singers’ blatant inhumanity has no place in serious academic exchange here at Rhodes."

From a letter by the History faculty and the Anthropology/Sociology/African Studies Program at Rhodes, quoted at Brian Leiter's blog. Leiter's point is that the Philosophy faculty invited Singer, and it's a matter of their academic freedom. 

"The faculty letter gives the impression that many Princeton professors believe their institution is rife with anti-Black racism and that the university must risk abandoning long-standing core values..."

"... to be anti-racist. But most signatories who responded to my queries hold neither of those beliefs.... Outside observers should be sophisticated enough to understand that universities are socially and politically complex communities where faculty members don’t always say what they mean, especially when asked to sign on to a group letter with hundreds of their colleagues in a moment of national crisis. 'Much as I’m averse to aspects of any letters signed by more than one person—chiefly that they represent a form of mostly benign and well-intentioned thuggery—I’m convinced we live in a moment where we have to be seen as being part of a solution to what is clearly a problem,' [humanities professor and poet Paul] Muldoon told me... in his thoughtful email. 'That means that, as in the case of the Princeton letter, some ideas may need to be overstated to be stated at all.' ... I am concerned that some faculty members are unwilling to publicly criticize a demand that they scoff at privately. Can they really be counted on to protect academic freedom in a faculty vote? And I wish more faculty members would say whatever they actually think with clarity and precision, rather than indulging in hyperbole that does more to muddy and polarize than to clarify."

Writes Conor Friedersdorf in "The Princeton Faculty’s Anti-Free-Speech Demands/Some of the signers of a controversial open letter don’t stand behind its most alarming demand" (The Atlantic).

"Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color... If, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then..."

"... the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.” Regardless, the students behind the petition want her banned from holding speaking events or selling books on campus. In their telling, her ideas 'are not merely "controversial," they are dangerous.'"

From a student petition at he University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where Camille Paglia has taught for decades, quoted in "Camille Paglia Can’t Say That/Art students are trying to get the social critic fired from a job she has held for three decades" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic. Friedersdorf is very supportive of Paglia and critical of the students. Excerpt:

Th[e] argument—a speaker is responsible for harms that are theoretical, indirect, and so diffuse as to encompass actions of strangers who put themselves on the same side of a controversy — is untenable. Suppressing speech because it might indirectly cause danger depending on how people other than the speaker may react is an authoritarian move. And this approach to speech, applied consistently, would of course impede the actions of the anti-Paglia protesters as well.

"Wisconsin Supreme Court sides with Marquette professor John McAdams in free speech case, orders university to reinstate him."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

"The undisputed facts show that the University breached its contract with Dr. McAdams when it suspended him for engaging in activity protected by the contract's guarantee of academic freedom," said the opinion written by Justice Daniel Kelly....

Justice Ann Bradley [joined by Justice Shirley Abrahamson] wrote a dissenting opinion, saying the court majority erred "in conducting only half of the academic freedom analysis. It fails to recognize, much less analyze, the academic freedom of Marquette as a private, Catholic, Jesuit university," Bradley wrote. "As a result, it dilutes a private educational institution's autonomy to make its own academic decisions in fulfillment of its unique mission.... Apparently, the majority thinks it is in a better position to address concerns of academic freedom than a group of tenured faculty members who live the doctrine every day."...

Marquette issued a statement continuing to defend its actions. "At Marquette University, we are proud that we have taken a stand for our students, our values and our Catholic, Jesuit mission," it said.

I don't know what Marquette intends to do in the future, but it does have to give McAdams his job back, with back pay.

"Associating hate with [Sam] Harris is bizarre. I’ve grown fond of his preternaturally composed, hyper-rational style..."

"... on the Waking Up podcast. But when he talks about [Ezra] Klein, he is not quite himself. He can’t disguise his bewilderment. He sounds like Spock discovering his shorts are on fire. 'Captain, I have detected . . . flames and singed flesh . . . in the vicinity of . . . my perineum.'"

I'm trying to read "Ezra Klein’s Intellectual Demagoguery" by Kyle Smith at The National Review, but I've run into an atrocious men-in-shorts/Star Trek smash up and my heart cries out I don't belong here.

And I've got to say, if you wanted to be a racist — or any kind of evil devil in this world — the best approach would be to adopt a demeanor that is preternaturally composed and hyper-rational.

But I've started this post, so let me soldier on. I've avoided the Sam Harris/Ezra Klein discord for quite a while, but something made me feel that I could catch up by reading Kyle Smith:

[Harris's] tone remains steady...

Ugh... tone...

... but the words are uncharacteristically pointed. During the debate, as Klein keeps delivering lectures to Harris on the history of racist injustice and repeatedly accuses him of having a “blind spot,” you can hear Harris sighing. Does Harris — does any intelligent person — really need to be told that blacks have been victimized by racism? Of course they have been. It’s a different conversation from the one about what we do and don’t know about IQ scores.

Harris, who has to his credit a philosophy degree from Stanford, a Ph.D. from UCLA in cognitive neuroscience, and several well-reviewed books, has described himself as on the left on virtually every issue. How disorienting it must have been to find himself reclassified as a neo-Mengele and besieged by the social-media mob because he spoke with ["Bell Curve" author Charles] Murray....

If Harris is as educated and sophisticated as all that, he shouldn't have been "disorient[ed]." He should have been prepared for Klein's utterly predictable attack. Was Harris so lost in self-love — thinking he's one of the good people — that he didn't see how mean his seeming friends would be if he questioned one of the Good People's Articles of Faith?

The Wisconsin Supreme Court heard oral argument on the case of the Marquette polisci prof who was suspended for something he wrote on his blog.

WPR reports:

Marquette suspended [John] McAdams after he wrote a blog attacking Cheryl Abbate, a graduate student and philosophy instructor, for telling students that everybody agrees with gay rights, and there was no reason to discuss it.

Abbate was confronted after class by a student who disagreed, and in a conversation he recorded, Abbate said the student didn't have a right to make homophobic comments in her class. The student then shared the recording with McAdams, who blogged about the exchange.

McAdams included a clickable link to her contact information and personal website, and Abbate began receiving negative, threatening emails. She has since left the university.

"This is not a case about free speech, it's about safety," Marquette attorney Ralph Weber told reporters after arguments. "You don't paint a target on the back of a student — put her out in front of a hostile audience so that she can receive vile and horrific threats — and claim that that is somehow consistent with your obligations as a professional."

McAdams was represented by Rick Esenberg, of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty President, who based his argument on academic freedom: "If academic freedom means anything at all, it has to mean that he can't be fired for writing that blog post." McAdams told what was apparently an accurate story and did not threaten Abbate. You can see that Marquette's lawyer is forced to talk about how the blog post could inspire others to threaten Abbate.

After the argument, McAdams said: "Well, three justices completely savaged Marquette's lawyer... However, I need more than three votes." And McAdams says he wants to return to teaching at Marquette: "Because while I have essentially zero respect for the people who are running the place, the students are pretty good." he said.

Marquette's attorney noted that McAdams was suspended by a unanimous vote of seven of his peers on the Marquette faculty. McAdams said a process like that would always work against conservatives like him because most professors are liberal.