Taylor on the State of the Academy

My colleague Stuart Taylor, in this week’s National Journal:

“A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. ‘The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists.’”

Such stuff has long been a staple of the totalitarian “diversity” obsessives who pollute -- and often dominate -- political discourse at almost all of our universities, from coast to coast. The University of Delaware recently got a step ahead of its peers by including the all-whites-are-racists dogma in training those who administered a systematic thought-reform program for incoming (and other) students.

The quoted language appears in an August 2007 “diversity facilitation training” program for resident assistants. The RAs were, in turn, assigned to use far-left propaganda such as this in what university documents called the mandatory “treatment” of freshmen and the rest of the 7,000 students in university residence halls . . .

Another hyperbolic, conservative rant about liberals in academia? Perhaps I should confess my biases. I do dislike extremism of the Left and of the Right. But I have never been conservative enough to vote for a Republican presidential nominee. And the academics whose growing power and abuses of power concern me are far to the left of almost all congressional Democrats . . . But although especially egregious, the Delaware program is hardly an isolated example.

“In a nation whose future depends upon an education in freedom, colleges and universities are teaching the values of censorship, self-censorship, and self-righteous abuse of power,” FIRE founders Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate asserted, with copious documentation, in their 1998 book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses.

They went on: “Our students are being educated in ... double standards to redress partisan definitions of historical wrongs.... [The norm is] intolerance of dissent from regnant political orthodoxy [and] the belief that universities not only may but should suspend the rights of some in order to transform students, the culture, and the nation according to their ideological vision and desire.” . . .

An organizer and representative member of the Duke 88, Wahneema Lubiano, has labeled herself a “post-structuralist teacher-critic-leftist.” Her meager scholarly output includes railing against “Western rationality’s hegemony” while making the inconsistent (and racist) claim that “many whites might not ever be persuaded by appeals to reason.”

Another 88er, literature professor Grant Farred, has produced such “scholarship” as a monograph styling Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, a native of China, as “the most profound threat to American empire.” In the fall of 2006, Farred accused hundreds of Duke students of “secret racism” against “black female bodies” because they had registered to vote! The students were trying to defeat rogue Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was courting the black vote by pressing rape charges against three white lacrosse players in the face of overwhelming public evidence of innocence.

At no point during or since the rape hoax has Duke President Richard Brodhead or board Chairman Robert Steel even hinted at rebuking Lubiano, Farred, or the other unrepentant faculty persecutors of lacrosse players.

Only in American academia could still another elite university -- Cornell -- proudly hire away and tenure a character such as Farred after he had proved himself a malicious buffoon. “We are very enthusiastic about Professor Farred, whose work everyone in this department has long admired,” remarked Cornell English Department Chairwoman Molly Hite.

In academia today, a professor who falsely smears his university’s students as racists is a hot commodity. And hate means never having to say you’re sorry.

Read the entire column here.