February 6, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
FEMINISM and ANTI-RACISM in Academia…the End of America?
Friends,
I pass on two items this morning.
The first is a news article detailing an incredible—almost unbelievable—epic
“troll” of fashionable, politically-correct academia and supposedly prestigious
academic journals by three serious academics who revealed the unseriousness,
the ideologically-driven and fanatical nature of what passes for scholarship
these days…and the hysterical reaction to their spoofing by those same outraged
minions of modern “higher education” when they found out what had happened to
them.
What Dr. Peter Boghossian, Professor of Philosophy at
Portland State University (Oregon) and two fellow professors, did was create a
number of scholarly-sounding essays, replete with detailed notes, all written
in the prolix and mind-bending pseudo-language that characterizes so much of
what passes for scholarship in our society. The difference was that Boghossian’s
essays—his “scholarship”—were totally bogus, made up, and, on the face of it,
totally ridiculous. Yet, since his topics were all centered on “racial
oppression” and “historic toxic masculinity,” they were quickly lapped up by
some of the more significant academic journals who supposedly offer educated commentary
and analysis of the problems in our society—and the horrible burden we carry as inheritors of that hateful and oppressive Western culture.
When those journals, and Dr. Boghossian’s university, found
out about what had happened, they howled like wounded coyotes caught in a
rancher’s barbed wire fence. They had eagerly accepted fraud because it favored
their ideological objectives and because it was written in such a way that
literally no one down in eastern North Carolina’s rural Johnston County could
understand a word of it.
Indeed, maybe one should find a clever attorney to see if
charges of “language abuse” couldn’t be launched against those who spew out
such gobbledegook.
The second article was written by a friend of mine, Dr.
Bella d’Abrera, an Australian scholar who holds a doctorate from the University
of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr. d’Abrera has done superb work in the history of
Tudor English history (her trilogy on Henry VIII and Queen Mary stands out) and
in investigating the Spanish 15th century. She recounts her experiences in defending
what is termed “Western Christian civilization,” the extremely negative
reactions she has received, and the undeniable fact that the near-entirety of
academia now does its damnedest to attack, misinterpret, and undermine that
tradition.
I have written previously about the utter decadence in
higher education and its perversion, and my major argument has been that
although we complain about the state of our culture and our politics, and
although we know and admit that education—in particular, college education—is a
critical battlefield, mostly all we do is talk.
Presently, for example, the University of North Carolina (UNC)
at Chapel Hill flagrantly ignores North Carolina’s Monuments Protection Law of
2015, with its just terminated Chancellor Carol Folt unilaterally ordering the
removal of the base of a century’s old monument to veterans from that
university who volunteered during the War Between the States. In August 2018 a
mob of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Communist Workers’ World Party radicals
tore the statue down—Folt and her administration not only refused to enforce
the state law and the laws against the destruction of public property, they
directed campus law enforcement not to interfere with the lawlessness.
At present a timorous and cowardly UNC Board of Governors—composed
almost entirely of Republicans—looks for a way to placate the radicals and somehow
skate by the state statute, hoping no one will look too closely.
The actions of UNC at Chapel Hill—a public university supported by the taxpayers of North Carolina—are
representative of a mindset, an ideological template, that most college
administrators exhibit. It mirrors their belief that they no longer depend on
the citizens who pay their salaries and foot their bills, but rather they must
jump when the most radical, most vocal and most fanatical members of the “university
community,” whether students or faculty, demand it. The only question they
have, essentially, is: “How high?”
All the election victories, all the superb scribbling, even
the construction of effective walls along the southern border—all of that will
be to no avail to save our country if major and drastic steps aren’t taken to reform, and reform
drastically, our educational system.
My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Clyde Wilson, perhaps the
South’s pre-eminent historian and a holder of a PhD from UNC, has suggested
that the only solution would be, as he states it somewhat sardonically, “to napalm”
UNC and the other public universities. In
a way, I do find the idea attractive! But realistically, I would prefer
legislative action and more involvement by our elected lawmakers—restructuring academic
programs, insistence on and supervision over real “diversity” in hiring, and the
creation of and support for outlying and semi-independent “institutes” that
could counter the ideological and post-Marxist poison that now is drowning the
hallowed halls of once great and admired institutions of learning.
Without that, without strong reform, no matter the Wall on
the border, our culture—our civilization—is lost. At present the fanatical
ideological maniacs control academia and most of our education, from grammar
school to grad school. If that authoritarian hold isn’t broken, the future is
lost.
Professor Tricks Academic Journals Into Publishing Joke Papers
Satire has become
impossible
As
political correctness continues its meteoric rise and career-lynchings
increase, a university professor now faces firing after his spoof academic
papers were published, fooling (then embarrassing) leftists.
Portland State University philosophy professor Peter
Boghossian recently attempted to expose how ludicrous political correctness has
become. Unfortunately for him, his attempt succeeded all too well—and now he
may be out of a job.
Over the course of a few years, Boghossian and two
academics produced 20 hoax essays, collectively called “the Grievance Studies”
experiment, that were written to be as ridiculous as possible and designed to
appeal to small special interest groups made up of mostly far-left scholars.
Seven of Boghossian’s bogus studies were accepted for
publication by social science journals, including a feminist rewrite of
Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The journal Gender, Place, and Culture bit on a
piece claiming to study “canine rape culture.”
In that study, Boghossian and his colleagues charged
that, “dog parks are rape-condoning spaces and a place of rampant canine rape
culture and systemic oppression against ‘the oppressed dog’ through which human
attitudes to both problems can be measured.” Boghossian’s team even claimed to
have “tactfully inspected the genitals of slightly fewer than 10,000 dogs
whilst interrogating owners as to their sexuality.”
In another eagerly accepted article, the hoaxers
demanded that the world of bodybuilding recognize “fat bodybuilding, as a
fat-inclusive politicized performance.”
For his efforts, which once brought to light should
have caused academia to engage in some self-analysis, Portland State University
moved to fire Boghossian.
“I truly hope the administration puts its
institutional weight behind the pursuit of truth, but I’ve been given no
indication that’s what they intend to do,” Boghossian said.
All of the journals involved are part of the dubious
field of “grievance studies.” Some in the mainstream media attempted to
rationalize and defend academia’s attachment to the most extreme, and in these
cases totally fabricated, areas of identity politics that focus on gender and
race.
A group of 11 Portland State professors and one
graduate student published an anonymous letter in the student newspaper Vanguard,
which featured a menacing image of Boghossian equipped with a Pinocchio nose.
They charged Boghossian’s team with repeated “fraudulent behavior violating
acceptable norms of research in any discipline” and castigated the beleaguered
professor for inviting James Damore, who was fired by Google for exercising his
right to free speech, to an event at the university.
“Boghossian has not only indicated his
less-than-collegial attitude through his hoaxes,” they charged, “but has
actively targeted faculty at other institutions. None of us wish to contend
with threats of death and assault from online trolls.”
Some in the academic world displayed a degree of
rationality. Yascha Mounk, a Harvard lecturer in government, condemned what he
viewed as unfair attempts to undermine the hoaxers.
“Even if all of the charges laid at the feet of
Boghossian [and the two other authors] were true, they would have demonstrated
a very worrying fact,” Mounk wrote. “Some of the leading journals in areas like
gender studies have failed to distinguish between real scholarship and
intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling [expletive deleted].”
In a recent YouTube video, Boghossian read out an
email from Portland State, which threatened an investigation and sanctions
against him.
“I think that they will do everything and anything in
their power to get me out,” he stated. “And I think this is the first shot in
that.”
Boghossian’s case is merely the latest example of
political correctness run amok on college campuses across the country. Earlier
this month, it was widely reported that Washington, D.C.’s American University
would be hosting a multisession seminar aimed at getting faculty to combat “white language supremacy.” The
seminar will also propose “alternative”
methods of assessing writing other than quality, such as “labor-based grading
contracts.”
While even the most unthreatening and lukewarm
“conservative” voices have been denied the opportunity to speak at various
universities, some astonishingly anti-white figures have been welcomed.
Christian evangelical Wheaton College, not a typical
leftist institution, permitted Emory University philosophy professor George
Yancy to speak there in 2017, in the esteemed Billy Graham Center on campus.
His speech was filled with expletives and hateful declarations like, “To be
white is to be racist.” Stephens College, a women’s college in Columbia, Mo.,
recently announced that it will “admit and enroll students who were not born
female, but who identify and live as women.” All-women Mount Holyoke College
canceled plans to change its logo due to protests that it could be perceived as
not being inclusive to transgender students.
Boghossian merely demonstrated what is obvious: In
today’s America, satire is impossible while a frighteningly authoritarian
political correctness rules the day.
Source: American Free Press
=============================
QUILLETTE
Western
Civilisation “Not Welcome Here”
In
2017, following the wishes of the late Paul Ramsay, a businessman and
philanthropist who made his fortune in the healthcare industry, the Ramsay
Centre for Western Civilisation was set up in Australia. Paul Ramsay was
deeply concerned that Australians are not being taught about Western
Civilisation either at school or university. So he left part of his $3.4
billion fortune so that something would be done about it. As the Director of
the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program at the Institute of Public
Affairs, I have been keeping a close watch on developments.
The
Ramsay Centre has devised a Bachelor of Arts in Western Civilisation based on
great books and works of art, to be taught in partnership with universities.
Since its launch however, the Ramsay Centre has encountered almost nothing but
open hostility and resentment from potential university partners.
At
the University of Sydney, staff some months ago launched a ‘Keep Ramsay out of
USYD’ petition. The same staff are currently having conniptions because their
Vice–Chancellor has now announced that he’ll consider taking the Centre’s $64
million grant if it gives the university complete control over the curriculum,
the reading list, and the academic appointments involved with the Bachelor of
Western Civilisation.
If you're opposed to Sydney University joining up with
the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, please sign and share the petition
here on our new campaign page. A petition signed by lots of people –
staff,… https://t.co/ypZvKayjSX
Prior to this, the Australian
National University pulled out of negotiations at the 11thhour when its Vice-Chancellor
cited concerns about academic autonomy following a very public and acrimonious
pushback against the program from several ANU academics and the Tertiary
Education Union.
* * *
A few weeks ago, I was
invited to attend a University of St Andrews alumni drinks in Melbourne. The
evening began promisingly enough. A smart bar hotel bar, eight individuals of
various ages and occupations, gathered together with the prospect of a pleasant
evening of reminiscing ahead. Amid the usual exchange of pleasantries, I
discovered that my one of my fellow attendees was a senior university
administrator. When he learnt that I am currently the Director of the
Foundations of Western Civilisation at the Institute of Public Affairs, I
detected a slight look of discomfort. Any bonhomie that might have existed
at the commencement of the evening vanished as soon as he asked me what I
thought about the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation.
The
rejection of a Bachelor of Arts in Western Civilisation is predicated on the
absurd notion that anyone who wants to talk about or study Western Civilisation
must be a white supremacist. In some academic circles, Western Civilisation is
held responsible for all evils in the world, past, present and future.
“I think it is probably a sensible decision of ANU not to
pursue negotiation in this regard because there's always going to be a
much-slanted history that's about the superiority of the white race and not the
devastation of the black race.” Dr Hannah McGlade @CurtinMedia #TheDrumpic.twitter.com/FqVAPcJ5oN
Earlier this year, the Dean
of Arts at Newcastle University wrote a piece for The Conversation in which she stated
that Western Civilisation is past its used-by date and that it’s too ‘white’ to
teach in multi-cultural classrooms. The University of Sydney academics leading
the charge, claim that the BA will “pedal racism disguised as appreciation for ‘Western Culture.’” At a National Tertiary
Education Union forum, former University of Sydney chair, sociologist and
gender theorist Raewyn Connell, told her audience that the curriculum “has
racism embedded in its agenda.”
When
I articulated to my fellow alumnus that I had not been surprised at the
response from Australian universities—given the antipathy displayed towards
Western Civilisation by many academics—he did not think this hostility to be a
bad thing. When I added that I thought all students studying an undergraduate
degree in history, or any humanities degree for that matter, should be required
to do a foundation course in Western Civilisation, he was shocked and
horrified. From his point of view, knowing about what happened during the
Scientific Revolution or the Enlightenment is an irrelevancy and a waste of students’
time. For him, history is about ‘issues,’ not knowledge.
It
was at this point that I realised that just how far universities, especially
the humanities departments, have strayed from their original purpose. From the
Renaissance until the 1960s, the humanities, derived from the expression
‘studia humanitatis’ or the study of humanity, made it their purpose to make
sense of and understand the world through the great traditions of art, culture
and philosophy. There appeared in the 1970s and 1980s however, a range of ‘new
humanities’ subjects which rejected this tradition. The new humanities were
underpinned by a range of radical post-structuralism and post-modernist
theories which had been conjured up in the previous decade by a predominantly
French group of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Michel
Foucault, as well as the psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan.
The
new humanities maintain that for the last 500 years, Western Civilisation has
got it wrong when it comes to knowledge, truth and science. These fields tend
to claim that both knowledge and truth are not absolute, but are relative. For
example, there is no objective truth and truth is dependent on who is speaking
it and in what context. Insofar as science is concerned, they claim that
scientific theories don’t really provide us with what we could call knowledge
but are actually “invented” rather than discovered.
History
as a discipline best exemplifies the influence of the postmodernists and their
ilk on the humanities. Many historians have enthusiastically embraced the idea
that truth is no longer within the historian’s grasp and that it’s impossible
to use history to add to knowledge about humankind. This is the kind of
thing which would normally signal the death knell for any discipline, but
historians have risen from the ashes and have forged for themselves a new
purpose—the attainment of social justice.
This
is not social justice in the Enlightenment sense, which meant equality before
the law and equal rights, but social justice in the activist sense, where the
ultimate goal is to achieve perfect equality by destroying ‘oppressive’
institutions and rearranging society. The historians’ new role is to tell the
inequality narrative of the oppressed and the oppressor through the lens of class,
gender, and race. Matthew A. Sears, associate professor of classics and ancient
history at the University of New Brunswick believes that ancient Greek
sculptures epitomise racism and white supremacy, and that history is “about
politics,” it’s main purpose being to “better understand the human condition
and shed light on questions of contemporary relevance.”
Partisans assail historians for judging the past by
today’s standards. Here’s why they’re wrong—Even by the standards of their day,
many heroes of Western civilization engaged in immoral acts, by @matthewasears and
via @washingtonpost @madebyhistory https://t.co/WJoRYMhG6J
This
approach has its origins in the nineteenth century, when Georg Hegel
constructed his worldview of history into a narrative about stages of human
freedom. His was the view that history was simply the process of moving towards
the realisation of such freedom. Later that century, Karl Marx’s built on
Hegel’s new paradigm with his theory of historical materialism, proposing that
society’s productive capacity and social relations of production determined
both its organisation and development.
Both
Hegel and Marx essentially denied the role of individual human agency, treating
the past as the product of inexorable forces and trends which were primarily of
a material and economic nature. “Society” wrote Marx, “does not consist of
individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within
which these individuals stand.’’
Karl Marx essentially created
the template of identity politics for the study of history with his notion that
human society is in a constant state of struggle and a zero-sum contest for
power. In the 1960s, his model was adopted by British historian Eric Hobsbawm
who deliberately re-wrote the history of the “long 19thcentury” as being a century
of class struggle. Hobsbawm successfully transformed history as an academic
discipline into a vehicle for social policy.
Since
the 1970s, historians have embraced Marx’s template and applied it to their own
particular historical fields, re-writing the past from the point of view of
class, gender, and race. These new histories have gradually replaced the
traditional canon of historical subjects which once upon a time formed the
basis of an undergraduate degree in history in Australia.
In 2017, a study of all 746 history subjects taught in Australian
universities revealed that 244 of those subjects were devoted entirely to
class, gender, and race. Many were a pastiche of identity politics in which the
stunning complexity of the past is increasingly reduced to a very limited range
of themes. Students at Melbourne University can take ‘A History of Sexualities’
in which they discuss “how the gendered body and sex have been simultaneously
linked to social liberation and control.” At the Australian National
University, students can consider “the concept of ‘race’ within the contexts of
the development of scientific knowledge in ‘Human Variations and Racism in
Western Culture, c. 1450-1950.” A keyword search of all the history
subject descriptions taught in 2017 reveals that there were more instances of
the words gender and race than there are Enlightenment or Reformation.
What
is more, a perusal of the University of Sydney’s history faculty staff profiles
reveals that 20 of the 32 staff have variously identified gender and sexuality,
racial thought, women’s history and power as their current historical
fixations. The left-wing leitmotifs of class, race, and gender have replaced
the essential core subjects which explain the political, intellectual, social
and material basis of the history of Western Civilisation.
This
approach is not only boring and repetitive, it is fundamentally
anti-intellectual. Students in Australia are not being given a “positive
formation” by their universities, which is exactly what the Ramsay Centre is
attempting to rectify. Instead, they are being taught a narrow, one-dimensional
view of the world seen through the prism of identity, over a curious and
inquiring three-dimensional view of the world which opens the mind.
Students
studying the humanities are not only finishing their degrees with a distorted
view of the world in which the past is viewed as a contest between the
oppressors and the oppressed, but they are imposing this particular worldview
on society as they find employment in schools, government, and the corporate
world. These days, for example, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to work
out where gender departments finish and governmental departments or the
corporate world begin, so blurred are the lines between them.
Since
the 1960s, universities have been leading their students fairly and squarely
down a path of un-education, unlearning and enlightenment, and they should be
called to account. Now these students, filled with an ideological fervor and
driven by social justice, are leading the rest of society down the same path,
whether society wants it or not.
Dr Bella d’Abrera is the Director, Foundations of Western
Civilisation Program at the Institute of Public Affairs, Australia.
