[CHE] A New Group Promises to Protect Campus Free Speech

here is the source of the original quote and the entire quote below:

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/amy-wax-redux?s=r

Response from Amy Wax
I have great respect for George Lee and his efforts to preserve the admissions requirements for exam high schools in New York City, and I have joined him in this cause. But I think he is too optimistic about the influence of Asians and Asian immigrants on our polity and culture. Although Lee is right that Asians vary in their political views, as do all groups, the important and often overlooked question is “how many?” Enoch Powell asked that question about third-world immigration to Britain decades ago and was excoriated and ostracized for it, but the importance and wisdom of the question prove themselves over and over.

Numbers matter, a lot! In the case of Asians in the U.S., the overwhelming majority vote Democratic. In my opinion, the Democratic Party is a pernicious influence and force in our country today. It advocates for “wokeness,” demands equal outcomes despite clear individual and group differences in talent, ability, and drive, mindlessly valorizes blacks (the group most responsible for anti-Asian violence) regardless of behavior or self-inflicted wounds, sneers at traditional family forms, undermines and disparages the advantages of personal responsibility, hard work, and accountability, and attacks the meritocracy.

I confess I find Asian support for these policies mystifying, as I fail to see how they are in Asians’ interest. We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, mindless social engineering, etc.

Maybe it’s just that Democrats love open borders, and Asians want more Asians here. Perhaps they (and especially their distaff element) are just mesmerized by the feel-good cult of “diversity.” I don’t know the answer. But as long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration. There needs to be more focus on people who are already here, and especially the core (and neglected) “legacy” population, and a push to return to traditional concepts and institutions and Charles Murray’s “American Creed.”
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It may also help to read the letter she is responding to (by George Lee)

 

here is the letter from George Lee that she is responding to:

Response from George Lee
Dear Glenn,

I viewed your recent interview with Amy Wax, and it set me thinking. A lot!

I usually agree with Amy, but her views on immigration (which she had stated earlier elsewhere) disturbed me. She is definitely onto something, but I also think something is off.

It goes without saying that I oppose illegal immigration. I also affirm that, as a sovereign state, America has the absolute and unconditional right to keep anyone out, with or without stated reason; immigration is not an entitlement.

I further agree with Amy (and you) that culture matters, and it is a bad thing for America to bring in immigrants who oppose America's basic values. But, as you pointed out, race and national origin are very poor proxies for cultural values that should be kept out of America.

As you pointed out, many Jews in the last century were socialists, Marxists, or anarchists, including Emma Goldman, Herbert Marcuse and other leading members of the Frankfurt School, Saul Alinsky, George Soros, and, yes, Albert Einstein. Even if we could agree to keep them out—we didn't—what about the other Jews? Again, no one is entitled to immigration. But do we want to do without, to give a dramatic example, key contributors to the Manhattan Project, like Edward Teller and John von Neumann, when, as it turned out, German physicist Werner Heisenberg was just one calculation error away from a Nazi atomic bomb? Amy herself did come from an immigrant Jewish family.

Similarly, while Asians like Mari Matsuda, Pramila Jayapal, and Saikat Chakrabarti begin to appear in the ranks of the Woke, as Amy warned, Asians also include the Asians of New York City, Northern Virginia, Washington State, and California, who pounded the pavement and hit the airwaves to help stem the tides of racial essentialism and collective judgment in proposed legislation, ballot initiatives, and elections. By many accounts, Asians were key marginal contributors to some of these successes. And as you also pointed out, Asians do contribute to America's scholarly, technological, and economic competitiveness, whose benefits we all share.

Let's also not forget that earlier, the Irish and Italians were thought by many to be a danger to America, because America was meant to be Protestant. As late as 1900, NYC public school textbooks still referred to Catholics as evil. This brings out the second problem with Amy's suggestion, which is that we may not be good at deciding which values will turn out to be harmful to America. The forces that bind us together or tear us apart as a viable culture—and the technologies that enable such forces either way—are dynamic over time. Aspects of Catholic immigration may very well have been real threats to the America of the late 1800s (it is all too easy for the ahistorical to judge condescendingly of the past). Looking forward, I can't think of a way for collective racial judgment to ever become consistent with our Bill of Rights, but I also accept the limitations of my wisdom; perhaps in the future, some resolution between the two may turn up that is orthogonal to my plane of thought. Deciding which cultural values are beneficial and harmful to America is harder than it appears at first, not to mention designing an adaptive implementation that makes optimal trade-offs over time!

Of course we always have the right to say, “In view of all these complications, let's just ban all immigration.” But we've seen that there are costs to that. In fact, America is in a reverse race against the rest of the advanced world heading into population collapse. Thanks to our ability to attract immigrants—with substantial human capital to boot—we are doing better relative to other nations, especially compared to our adversary, China.

I agree wholeheartedly with Amy that we should address the problems that may be forcing us to make otherwise suboptimal trade-offs for immigration: our awful schools that fail our kids in both STEM and humanities, our low fertility rates (which is not just a matter of money; the poor both-parents-working immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York can have more kids than the wealthy occasionally-working-mom family in Darien, Connecticut), our culture war against pervasive anti-American critical theory narratives, our political-social complex that normalizes multi-generational neediness and helplessness, etc. We need to confront these important challenges head on rather than bump against them tangentially through the poor proxy of immigration policy.

I agree that our current immigration system is a sorry mess. The lowest hanging fruit is to stop illegal immigration! And then there are other things to fix in our legal immigration system before we get to the complex, possibly intractable question of connecting immigration with Americanness in policy.

I am thankful, however, for your conversation with Amy. It was thoughtful, courageous, and provocative. Immigration should not be a scared cow.

Thank you, and a Happy New Year to you and your family!

George Lee​

 

simple syllogism:

P1 Asians tend to vote Democratic
P2 Democrats are a threat to the republic
C the U.S. would be better off with fewer Asians

Simple logic. Not necessarily racist, especially if you grant the premises for the sake of argument.

 

okay. So what exactly about what follows here is so troubling to you that it convinces you 100% that "Amy Wax is a racist"? serious question.

"So if you go into medical schools, you'll see that Indians, South Asians are now rising stars in medicine. They're sort of the new Jews, I guess you could say. But these diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which are poisoning the scientific establishment and the medical establishment now—and I really think they are—who are the people in the front lines? South Asian women doctors. They are there at the barricades saying, “Oh, America is a racist society. It's an awful, terrible society.” Of course, they chose to come here from India. Nobody ever asked them, like, why are you here? “It's a terrible, awful racist, irredeemable, evil society. And we need to revolutionize and reform it.” Why are South Asian women saying that? Why are they on the forefront of accusing us and of mimicking anti-American sentiment?"

"Let's go back to the South Asians, who just love to bash America and be part of the whole DEI push. What is it about them that they are kind of scrambling all over each other to be at the forefront of this? You know, I think there is a certain conformity and instrumentalism to the way they see rising in a society, which is, you know, forget the principles, forget about whether it's true or not, forget about whether America is a good place, a bad place, or a middling place. We see that this is the trend, and we want to get on the bandwagon and be important and powerful and prominent, so we're going be a part of this.

"And it's mindless. I mean, why should someone who emigrated from India—no, let me finish—and has taken advantage of everything our society has to offer, who is leading the good life, who is part of the elite—why shouldn't that person be abjectly grateful and recognize overtly all the wonderful things about our country? Why should they be at the ramparts bashing our country? To me it makes no sense."​

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/will-asian-immigration-change-american?s=r

 

I don't think there's anything obvious about it. Philosophers and law professors argue for all kinds of positions all the time.

 

I think you miss the point again that much of what she says is about her. She concludes with "To me it makes no sense." I think she is describing phenomena that are real and easily confirmable; then she expresses her thoughts/speculations about what those phenomena mean and/or signify. That's what academics do. If you deny her that freedom you deny the very foundations of scholarship.

You may disagree with her--that's fine, that's as it should be, and you should make every effort to remonstrate with her (and her kind) and reason with her and try to persuade her whatever it is you would wish to persuade her of.

But to argue that she should be fired--lose her job--be terminated--because of her views? That's going beyond what I think you can legitimately argue.

 

the professor who "holds openly racist views" may be misunderstood and misinterpreted. The mere fact that students are offended by a professor is not a reason to fire that professor. One could just as easily make the argument that those students should toughen up and stop being (in the vernacular) snowflakes.

This is pretty much what Netflix told its woke employees recently. If you're offended, maybe you shouldn't work for us.

perhaps a law professor who genuinely and sincerely believes "blacks are inferior" will work twice or three times as hard EDUCATING those students whom he/she believes are inferior.

But the hypothetical is just that--hypothetical. I have a hard time imagining the actuality of that scenario.

again, maybe not so obvious. But your point is well-taken. If you have a professor who gets caught on twitter or Facebook being recorded saying outrageous things (and these are again cases my wife has actually run across and worked on), then that may affect that person's employment. in Wax's case, they removed her from teaching the first year course (which by itself is of course no proof of her racism but rather an institutional response to a politically sensitive situation). In the case of faculty who have been found guilty of sexual harassment of students, those faculty may lose their teaching responsibilities and only be allowed to conduct the research component of their jobs. Every case is different.

well, part of being woke TODAY is that we are all racists. Ibram X. Kendi and others have taught us that. So I'm not sure how you're going to conduct the ideological purity anti-racism test that can prove anyone's "non-racism."

Spoiler

https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/ibram-x-kendi-the-very-heartbeat-of-racism-is-denial-470332/



also, on Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility"
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/

 

well, at this point we can agree to disagree about Amy Wax (at least in the context of the two examples here). I do not believe what she has said or written in these contexts are evidence of her being "racist" or "white supremacist." Your mileage may vary.

 

slightly different topic, FIRE is rebranding from a narrow focus on education to a broader focus



citing

Free-speech group will spend millions to promote First Amendment cases
Some backers see FIRE moving to take on fights ceded by ACLU.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/06/free-speech-group-first-amendment-00037320

 

Times coverage of the Shapiro situation

A Conservative Quits Georgetown’s Law School Amid Free Speech Fight
Ilya Shapiro, who tweeted that a “lesser Black woman” would get a Supreme Court nod, was cleared by a school investigation. He decided to leave anyway.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/...k&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=US News

 

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/3542647-culture-wars-cover-up-economic-realities-on-campus/

Culture wars cover up economic realities on campus
by Sasha Breger Bush, Opinion Contributor
06/30/22 11:30 AM ET

"Culture" is often the reason given for campus conflicts over issues such as free speech. But they aren’t really cultural issues; they’re economic ones.

As the bad economic news keeps rolling in for U.S. colleges and universities (from the Big Quit and inflationary pressures to the demographic cliff), it’s important to keep in mind that economic realities, not cultural ones, largely underpin volatile campus political dynamics.

Take, for instance, the matter of free speech and academic freedom on campus, a political issue often chalked up to “cancel culture.” I don’t mean to be evasive here. Sure, I know what people are talking about when they reference “cancel culture” and have experienced some of it first-hand. It’s just as ugly as critics claim, if not worse. But the root of the problem is economic, not cultural.

The vast majority of university faculty in the U.S. are “contingent” faculty, meaning they are full-time and part-time workers without tenure. Over the past 40 years, the proportion of academics holding full-time tenured positions has declined 26 percent. The proportion holding full-time tenure-track positions (i.e. eligible for tenure) has declined 50 percent.

Today, close to 75 percent of faculty are contingent faculty. Tenure for faculty is similar to lifetime appointments to the bench for judges. It’s a mechanism for ensuring that we can build knowledge and seek truth independently, that we can teach, research and make public commentaries without external political interference. The Government Accountability Office estimates that part-time contingent faculty make, on average, 75 percent less than full-time tenured and tenure track faculty. Full-time contingent faculty make, on average, 45 percent less than their full-time tenured and tenure-track colleagues.

In 2015, taxpayers paid almost half a billion dollars in support of public assistance for families of part-time faculty. This is the so-called “Walmart model,” in which taxpayers subsidize low wages paid by employers, permitting exploitative labor relationships to continue over time. The impact of this labor hierarchy and the economic insecurity it creates on the capacity of faculty to take risks, including risks regarding political speech, is difficult to overstate.

Contingent faculty generally understand very well that, if they are perceived as stepping out of line in any way, there is a high likelihood of not being rehired. It is pretty rare that faculty who engage in “wrongspeak” are fired flat out like some high-profile professors have been. It is much more common for contingent faculty to just not be rehired for the next semester or the next year. Contracts won’t be renewed. Courses will be given to someone else to teach. And even if the reason was politically motivated, there’s little leverage for faculty in such situations. It’s hard to prove that you weren’t rehired because of your social media posts as opposed to low enrollments. And lawyers are expensive.

And it’s not like there are many other jobs out there waiting for you if you lose the one you have. The academic job market has been tight and highly competitive for a long time. Faculty jobs, even the contingent kind, are hard to find these days, especially if your expertise is in the humanities or social sciences.

Further, academics are a tight-knit, competitive and ego-rich group with a strong proclivity for gossip, meaning that bad news about you may travel well beyond your own campus, poisoning your ability to get work elsewhere. So, every time you decide to take a risk at work, for example by standing up for your own beliefs or for a colleague, you face the knowledge that this may be your last academic job. Full stop. It’s a powerful deterrent and a super effective mechanism for worker discipline.

It is all the more so because most of us love our work, love working with our students and don’t want to give it up (and also because many faculty are themselves student debtors). So, if faculty generally seem too silent on critical issues like this one, it’s not because we don’t care. It’s not because we all creepily agree with one another like the Borg from Star Trek. It’s because we’re afraid that we won’t be able to work, earn an income, feed our families or provide them with health insurance. Political freedom requires economic security.

Sasha Breger Bush is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver and the author of “Derivatives and Development: A Political Economy of Global Finance, Farming, and Poverty” and “Global Politics: A Toolkit for Learners.” For more of Sasha’s research and writing, visit her Substack and website.
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University of Washington professor sues school, alleging free-speech violation

https://nypost.com/2022/07/14/unive...s-sues-school-alleging-free-speech-violation/

same case:
“Performative Acts of Conformity”: Professor Sues University of Washington Over Land Acknowledgment Statement
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/07/...ashington-over-land-acknowledgment-statement/