If you are a university donor, this is a key moment. You're seeing the bad fruit of 2 related things:
1. Years of faculty searches that have been explicitly ideological & partisan, prizing & hiring for the illiberal radicalism on display in the Kendi debacle & Hamas-praise alike.





What you see from faculty exhilarated by murder or who require all teaching be antiracist & decolonial is a feature not a bug. It's the fruit of hiring in ideological fields that normalize & prize radicalism. They're outliers, but they're doing just what they've been paid to do.

If your only ethics are Foucault & Fanon, you’re wholly unequipped to make the distinctions necessary to recognize justice & uphold dignity in relation to political violence.
Just war theory, an ancient tradition of ethical inquiry, offers a better way. It is relevant just now.🧵 In its classic formulation, the theory claims that certain acts of killing are neither ‘necessary evils’ nor merely permissible but, under certain constraints, just & right. The theory sets criteria for *when* war is just (jus ad bellum) & *how* it must be fought (jus in bello).

We are seeing the utter ethical degeneracy of an ideology in which all that matters is finding the single most oppressed identity & then worshipping it, claiming anything done by it & on its behalf in the name of liberation, no matter how horrendous, is actually righteous & just.





For this ideology, the alleged liberative end justifies *any means whatsoever, no matter how evil.* Bearers of the oppressed identity can deploy evil & unjust means & are accountable to no one but themselves.
The job of the ally is to cheerlead, silence critique, & even join in.

The BU Center for Antiracist Research debacle is about far more than Kendi. It's about a university, caught in cultural hysteria, subordinating every norm of oversight, inquiry, & excellence to ideology. It was entirely predictable.

I said as much to BU's President in fall 2020.



In June, BU had hired Kendi, created the Center, & cancelled classes & work for a quasi-religious "Day of Collective Engagement" where Kendi & his now critics were treated like sages.

I was newly tenured, a member of BU Faculty Council, & Chair of the Academic Freedom Committee.

I’ve been off this platform almost entirely.

That’s because three months ago, I almost died.

I’ve wrestled with what to say or whether to say anything at all. But what happened has so profoundly impacted my family & me that silence would be false. In May, I went for a routine four mile run. A mile & a half in, I paused to stretch. Suddenly, I felt extremely lightheaded.

The next thing I knew I was waking up, flat on the sidewalk, with a woman kneeling over me.

Scholars have long created artificial silos with their own journals, conferences, book series, etc, where they simply publish one another’s work in total isolation from due scrutiny & criticism by other qualified scholars. Peer review stays within the group & is close to a sham. The group shares a set of unquestionable premises & commitments that they’re *unwilling & unable to defend.*
If challenged, they just appeal to their own authority. If someone tries to engage ‘their’ topic but questions or rejects their premises, they circle the wagons & attack.

Eliminating required DEI statements helps but the issue goes far deeper.

Such statements matter insofar as they institutionalize & lend cover to already serious viewpoint discrimination or constitute an initial foothold within otherwise healthy disciplines, as with much of STEM. But statements aside, I’ve seen DEI used in searches to eliminate outstanding candidates. It is *extremely* easy for a single member of a committee to eliminate an otherwise excellent candidate by acting as an ideologue & activist rather than as a scholar in a fiduciary capacity.

I strongly support Ukraine’s fight against Russia. But one criterion of just war is that of proportionality. Even with right authority, just cause, & just intention, which Ukraine has, you must also attend to an overall cost/benefit analysis, which @TimothyDSnyder here discards. It has to be asked, continuously, even given the just cause, does ongoing fighting actually conduce to the long term benefit & common good of Ukraine or is seeking settlement now better, even if some territory is lost. Failure to attend to that can make a just war become unjust.

To silence others in an academic context by heckling is to subordinate reason to power & truth to ideology.

It is to position yourself as lord and master over your fellow students & everyone else. *You* decide what *other* get to argue, consider, think, & hear.

https://twitter.com/aaronsibarium/status/1635633773143371779

Repeatedly heckled by the proslavery majority to prevent him from speaking, abolitionist Theodore Weld would say, “I thought I was speaking to FREE PEOPLE. Are these hecklers your masters?”

These Stanford students take themselves to be masters, deciding what adults get to hear.

The situation in Florida represents a special temptation for those who’ve been raising the alarm regarding rampant & systemic DEI-driven violations of academic freedom, a stance which is typically met with denial & ad hominem allegations of various pernicious -isms, new & old.

https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1633545583205158912

For some, the temptation is to downplay or ignore the particular policies that do violate academic freedom. The pseudo-leftist violations of academic freedom are so pervasive, systemic, & institutionalized that any effective corrective can seem welcome, even if it goes too far.

On this MLK day, don’t let anyone tell you that King didn’t really mean it when he said he dreamed of a day when his kids & our nation's people wouldn’t be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character.
That was indeed his dream & he gave his life for it. There's much more to the story, of course. King wanted to eradicate poverty & militarism. He was sharply critical of capitalism. But such things were entirely of a piece with & inseparable from his dream of a world where character, not race, shaped a person's life & experience.

This is an essential article. The university's raison d'être is to create & teach knowledge. That's its sole claim to public support. These policies subordinate that mission to an ethically & intellectually bankrupt ideology & social-engineering program. tinyurl.com/yueeyx5v These policies are now deeply embedded in many universities. From top down, an army of admins is highly paid to push greater extremes & conformity. From bottom up, some faculty build their careers on the ideology & on demanding their university & discipline to enforce it.

How should we think about how to use Twitter?
My own thinking has been deeply shaped by @HSJSpeaks’s argument in ‘Why it’s OK to speak your mind.’
His basic claim is that we have an ethical duty to share our arguments, evidence, & views *the more there is social pressure not to.* Our views on reality & what’s true are deeply shaped by the views of those around us. We inevitably rely on others, commonly accessible knowledge, & experts for much of what we take as true. The health of our own views is bound up with the health of others’ & the broader public’s

It is absolutely & utterly insane that Yoel Roth held the role he did at twitter: leading decisions about censorship, moderation, disinformation, etc. We are talking about someone whose lack of commitment to core principles free speech seems matched only by his ignorance of them.

https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601024006819180546

You write a dissertation on Grindr, *a primary research prong of which is using your personal Grindr account daily from 2009-2013,* and a few years later you are making policy decisions about what constitutes ‘harm’ & ‘disinformation’ for many millions of people? How can this be?

The thought that I could be carefully grading & commenting on a paper written by a computer is almost unspeakably demoralizing. It goes beyond the idea that it’s merely an utterly futile waste of time to something much deeper that I can’t yet put in words. It has to do with the way it violates & betrays the humanness & vulnerability involved in teaching & learning. The student/teacher relation, formal & informal, is a basic human relation. Learning is core to what makes us human & constitutes happiness. It makes a mockery of that.

Sophie Lewis’s “Abolish the Family” was published last month & garnered massive attention. Here Lewis attacks leftists who would downplay Kate Millett’s principles or her significance. Lewis says Millett is central to her whole project.
Since 2021 alone, Millett has 2K citations.

https://twitter.com/prof_katie/status/1597468948752400384

Kate Millett was an unapologetic & explicit defender of adult/child sex & incest. In her 2022 book, Sophie Lewis celebrates Millett’s desire to “abolish generational distinctions.”

Eliminating versions of this category that are universally human - especially motherhood & fatherhood - is the aim of many “abolitionists.” They say these are inherently dominating, reducible to capitalist violence, & must be replaced by group homes & boundaryless neo-families.

https://twitter.com/lan_dao_/status/1595236215581642752

A deep irony of this life-destroying ideology is that it’s animated by a vision of freedom that’s distinctively hyper-liberal & capitalist. Freedom here is unconstrained absolute choice. Any unchosen relation or constraint is necessarily unfree. Consent alone constitutes freedom.

If you don't understand domination, you can't understand cancel culture.
Domination involves reasonable fear of what *might* happen to you, which leads you to self-censor & constrain your action. If a CEO fires *your boss* for questioning him, you certainly won't question him! 1/

https://twitter.com/NGrossman81/status/1586710581096194049

If you see *super powerful people* face serious social punishment & barely avoid economic loss *solely for voicing view X,* plus even a few regular people get fired for doing so, you will self-censor, reasonably concluding that voicing X is far too risky for someone like you. 2/

Even minimal historical knowledge suffices for someone to know that in the 20th century doctors & hospitals advanced practices, ideas, & treatments we now regard as barbaric & even horrendous. We look back & ask ‘How could this possibly have happened? Who thought this was ok?’ 1/ We think this not only of horrendous medical abuse in Nazi Germany or the Tuskegee experiment or of those MDs who made bank on cigarette advertising, but also of doctors who *thought* they were showing mercy & doing justice by sterilizing the ‘unfit’ & lobotomizing ‘hysterics.’2/

Copypasta evangelism destroying public safety; every crime is due to historic oppression, so abolish the police:

Deranged man attacks woman & dog with urine & beats dog to death, but “400 years of racism has prevented black people from generating wealth through home ownership.” NYU bioethicist Matt Liao says ‘It’s a conflict of values between wanting security & social justice.’ But this is profoundly wrong. Social justice without security is empty & worthless. Security without justice is oppressive & usually discriminatory.
tinyurl.com/2p9beurw

As a professor, advocate for academic freedom, & native Tennessean, I'm dismayed to see @UTKnoxville institute policies that not only facially violate academic freedom but also violate both the 1st Amendment & federal anti-discrimination law. @GovBillLee, @randyboyd 1/

https://twitter.com/JohnDSailer/status/1559605619857956864

For example, it is profoundly unethical & obviously illegal to compensate employees differently solely on the basis of their race.
But that is exactly what @UTCCI, the College of Communication @UTKnoxville, says it will do, @GovBillLee & @UT_President @randyboyd 2/