University of Chicago loyalty oaths? Newsweek

[little bongo]

"Oh, yes. I'm terribly smart. Wouldn't it have been nice... to be intelligent?" --William Inge, Bus Stop

I can understand despair. One goes to a "higher education community" and might expect something a notch or two above the comments that follow a YouTube posting of a cat scratching someone's crotch. But if you've followed the old fora, or the old CHE comments section, well... I mean, the vocabulary is usually a little more advanced than the aforementioned YouTube folks, but the ideas are pretty much the same.

Out of my going-on 57 years, I've probably been bullied off and on for a good 51 of them by somebody or other, directly or indirectly, in person or electronically, or however they see fit. That perspective has allowed me to see that education, even at the highest levels, doesn't usually change some fundamental aspects about people. And for a while, that led me to believe that "good people trying to do what they can" were pretty much beating their heads against a wall, whether the issue was racism, drugs, bullying, or what have you. I'm changing my mind about that, though. I've come to believe, as I've noted earlier, that trying really is better than not trying. Maybe it's having my own kids, maybe it's early-onset dementia, but I think it's worth it to say and do decent things when you can. Something about lighting a candle instead of cursing the whatever, I guess.

Edited to add: the quote about Justice Ginsburg has been reported to mods. There are some things up with which we should not put.

[marshwiggle]

I don't know if people are being willfully obtuse, or unwillingly obtuse. Unfortunately it seems to be the latter, in the guise of the former. I despair that people can be so smart and yet so lacking in wisdom.

Are you referring to me? Specifically:

If higher arrest and incarceration rates in black communities are evidence of systemic racism, are higher abotion rates in those same communities also evidence of systemic racism, and is the remedy to put more legal restrictions on both?

To elaborate, if a white police officer arresting a black suspect can be automatically examined for racial animus, even when the alleged crimes mostly victimize other black people, then if a white doctor aborts black babies, why is that assumed to be only based on noble sentiments since it apparently benefits black *women?

In one case, a person is guilty until proven innocent, and in the other, innocent until proven guilty, but the assessment is entirely driven by ideology rather than any empirically objective factors.

*Remember that thalidomide was prescribed to help women by mitigating morning sickness. No-one would ever have intended the consequences that transpired, so the terrible outcomes were not the result of any ill-will. But they were devastating.

[Wahoo Redux]

I know he's revered, and the standards in the comparison class are low, but Buckley isn't exactly what I'd call an intellectual heavyweight. He's closer to David Duke than John Locke.

Give me a break.  If Buckley was close to David Duke, where was Ruth "******" Ginsburg?

Some people simply cannot make a comment without exaggerating or outright lying.  Writingprof, being a conservative zealot, has nothing real to say.

Just why? Not only is this offensive and disrespectful, and serves no purpose in the discussion.

[Wahoo Redux]

"Oh, yes. I'm terribly smart. Wouldn't it have been nice... to be intelligent?" --William Inge, Bus Stop

I can understand despair. One goes to a "higher education community" and might expect something a notch or two above the comments that follow a YouTube posting of a cat scratching someone's crotch.  I'm changing my mind about that, though. I've come to believe, as I've noted earlier, that trying really is better than not trying.

You know, though, in so many ways things are getting better.  I suppose we all expect a thunderclap and the hand of God to descend to fix things---it's the way humans think---and I always remember the "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" when M.L. King explains how difficult it is to wait when your child is crying because of discrimination, but no change happens fast, particularly when people are involved.

[Parasaurolophus]

But I guess you're saying this English department could still award tenure to say for instance a Glenn Loury (he's an economist, I know)  who thinks that BLM is more mistake than valiant effort and 'antiracism' is a group mania that attempts revising history to fit their political agenda. Which would mean the statement is not sincere, it's status-buying. Because why does an English department need a statement as strong and signaling long lasting positive change, as University of Chicago thinks they do, unless every professor down to the last body is on board? Why should we not assume they are a diverse group with an assortment of views?

Not quite. I just don't think I understand what it is that you're calling "the college's moral mission", so I'm not clear on what to say in response. I guess you're referring to the sentiment expresssed by the English department? If that's what it was, then yes, I can see how department-level statements might be thought to impinge upon academic freedom (I'm not sure they do, but I can at least imagine cases where they might). But I also don't have a problem with departments issuing group-level statements, provided they follow proper internal procedures to do so. (I understand that that's not supposed to be a thing at the University of Chicago, however.)

Thanks for keeping me on point.


And now, because I sent us off topic but feel I need to clarify a little:

Well. Buckley might have preferred to be compared with Edmund Burke.

And man, closer to David Duke? That is rough stuff. To quote Randy Newman:

"College men from LSU, went in dumb come out dumb too"

Give me a break.  If Buckley was close to David Duke, where was Ruth [Bader] Ginsburg?

I say he's closer to the Duke end of the spectrum than Locke, because much of his energy went to nicely dressing up and excusing bigotry, just as Duke did with the KKK. Locke, by contrast, invested in the slave trade and helped craft the constitution of Carolina, served on a number of boards and things related to plantation slavery, and provided excuses for stealing Indigenous land--but he also made actual, durable, important contributions to political theory, economics, our understanding of the notion of the 'self', religious toleration, etc. (He ultimately repudiated slavery and aristocracy in his major works, but that conversion is actually beside the point here. The point is that he did things--including bad things!--and did them with intellectual rigour. Quite apart from thinking he was wrong, I can respect the intellectual work that went into it.) Here's Buckley, by contrast:

The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

There are 500,000 people on relief in New York today... what do they contribute materially to New York? It costs a minimum of $700 to furnish public school education for a child in New York. It costs about $500 per year per person for those on relief; and that much again for public housing. What is the residual benefit to New Yorkers of the sacrifices they endure in order to attract to this city men, women, and children who, in this city—as distinguished from elsewhere—are unemployable, and become structural welfarists?... [H]aving got their vote, the politicians let them institutionalize themselves as social derelicts, at liberty to breed children who, suffering from inherited disadvantages, alternatively seek surcease in hyperstimulation—in crime and narcotics—and in indolence—as school dropouts or as poolhall conscientious objectors to work...

What to do posthumously about Martin Luther King is becoming a Cause...Mrs. Martin Luther King, who clearly learned from her husband the uses of the press, is omnipresent; saying, some useful things, saying, other times, most unfortunate things. But she has now said she has abandoned the negotiations, on the grounds that has detected an "indifferent attitude" toward black and poor people... [One] can imagine what Mr. Nixon and his lieutenants and the leaders of Congress are saying privately about Mrs. King's intemperance, it isn't good. The notion that "racist attitudes" motivate Nixon is paradoxically correct. Because Mr. Nixon would never have paused to negotiate with Mrs. King concerning a national memorial to her husband except for the fact that Dr. King was a Negro... If he had been white, the suggestion of raising a monument to him would have been presumptively ridiculous, not because a white man carrying the message of Dr. King on into martyrdom would be less than an object of national honor, but because there is a long line of men who are deemed to have been national benefactors who have not yet been memorialized in concrete, and some of them have been dead (Andrew Jackson, say) for more than 100 Years.... [King] was the spokesman for a point of view on citizenship which in the opinion of some—e.g., me—is mortal to civil society... Above all, Mrs. King should be counseled to stop the racist talk. Because more of that, and she will antagonize those whom there is no purpose in antagonizing. It is time to mute the memory of one Martin Luther King, the advocate of civil disbedience who once likened America's foreign policy to Nazi Germany's and stress instead the qualities that made him admirable—his courage, his moral strength, his great eloquence. That is not accomplished by attributing racism to the Nixon administration.

Dr. King's flouting of the law does not justify  the flouting by others of the law, but it is a terrifying thought that, most likely, the cretin who leveled the rifle at the head of Martin Luther King, may have absorbed the talk, so freely available, about the supremacy of the individual conscience, such talk as Martin Luther King, God rest his troubled soul, had so widely, and so indiscriminately, engaged in.

[W]are not permitted to talk about the use of tactical nuclear weapons... The time to introduce the use of tactical nuclear arms was a long time ago.. The use of limited atomic bombs for purely military operations is many times easier to defend on the morality scale than one slit throat of a civilian for terrorism's sake; and yet, incredibly, the Vietcong seem to win all the propaganda victories, and the moralizers' inveighing is against us, not against them.

The twenty-year-old who, under the press of circumstances, can easily murder, after only a few months in uniform, is most likely a twenty-year-old whose ethical equilibrium was unbalanced well before he came to Vietnam. Unbalanced by a society which in quite other contexts we all have been criticizing over the years. A society deprived of the strength of religious sanctions, a society hugely devoted to hedonism, to permissive egalitarianism, to irresponsibility, to an indifference to authority and the law. Such a society as-dare we say it?—produced the kids who are attracted to the iconoclast of the day. I would contend that a better explanation for what happened, according to this analysis, is—not Vietnam but, to reach for a symbol—Berkeley.

To begin with, I see the issue primarily as one of freedom or non-freedom. To the extent that a fraction of the individual's time, which we will for convenience equate with his earnings, is a priori mortgaged to the government and against his will, then he is to that same extent not free. Since there is no money except the individual's money, and since his money represents his labor or his savings or the product of his tools, the assessment of that money by the State represents a direct levy on that individual's freedom. If it is true, as the liberals would have it, that the Republican Party could not evoke any support for a program that calls for extracting from the individual only that money necessary to carry on the minimum functions of government loosely, defense, courts, and conservation, then it must follow that the American people no longer value maximum individual freedom.

And, if you want more, here he is engaging with Chomsky, and with Gore Vidal.

This isn't what I think of as intellectual rigour. The arguments aren't especially good, nuanced, or backed by evidence; they're talking points, regurgitated with a better-than-average vocabulary. At best, he was a pundit who knew fancy words. But that doesn't make him an intellectual heavyweight. He was no John Locke, David Hume, or, as jimbogumbo suggested, Edmund Burke. I'll take him over Charles Krauthammer any day, but that's hardly a compliment.

[little bongo]

"Oh, yes. I'm terribly smart. Wouldn't it have been nice... to be intelligent?" --William Inge, Bus Stop

I can understand despair. One goes to a "higher education community" and might expect something a notch or two above the comments that follow a YouTube posting of a cat scratching someone's crotch.  I'm changing my mind about that, though. I've come to believe, as I've noted earlier, that trying really is better than not trying.

You know, though, in so many ways things are getting better.  I suppose we all expect a thunderclap and the hand of God to descend to fix things---it's the way humans think---and I always remember the "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" when M.L. King explains how difficult it is to wait when your child is crying because of discrimination, but no change happens fast, particularly when people are involved.

Fair enough, Wahoo Redux--I'll not only say I hope you're right, but i think we have to behave and act in ways that make you right. Because the alternative...

[marshwiggle]

"Oh, yes. I'm terribly smart. Wouldn't it have been nice... to be intelligent?" --William Inge, Bus Stop

I can understand despair. One goes to a "higher education community" and might expect something a notch or two above the comments that follow a YouTube posting of a cat scratching someone's crotch.  I'm changing my mind about that, though. I've come to believe, as I've noted earlier, that trying really is better than not trying.

You know, though, in so many ways things are getting better.  I suppose we all expect a thunderclap and the hand of God to descend to fix things---it's the way humans think---and I always remember the "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" when M.L. King explains how difficult it is to wait when your child is crying because of discrimination, but no change happens fast, particularly when people are involved.

Fair enough, Wahoo Redux--I'll not only say I hope you're right, but i think we have to behave and act in ways that make you right. Because the alternative...

And realize the distinct possibility that your actions, however well-intentioned, will be viewed at some point in the future as, at best, naive, and at worst, evil.

[Wahoo Redux]

but i think we have to behave and act in ways that make you right. Because the alternative...

Well, I think people ARE behaving and acting in ways that would make things right.  But not everyone.  We should not expect everyone to behave in ways that make things right.  Some people want to fight and to hate and to oppress.  I think the "deep roots" theory (pop-culture definition, I know) of human aggression seems real to me. 

Or, other people have a different idea of what would make things right.  40% of the country has steadfastly supported Trump because they think (for whatever reason) that he is doing what needs to be done to make America great again.

Or, other people have a specific, exact, somewhat militant idea for how we should make things right and resent even allies who do not agree hand-in-hand with them.  I know I have been off-putting to some posters here because I am not in absolute agreement with their very well-meaning but problematic solutions to social evils.

Human beings always perceive things as getting worse.  We don't necessarily perceive the changes because they are so gradual.  And we can always blame the media.

[pigou]

If higher arrest and incarceration rates in black communities are evidence of systemic racism, are higher abotion rates in those same communities also evidence of systemic racism, and is the remedy to put more legal restrictions on both?

Planned Parenthood was founded by someone who believed in eugenics and improving the human race by providing abortions to Black women... so maybe? Of course abortions are largely the result of failures of other forms of birth control, which may in part be an issue of having access to them. So the remedy there wouldn't be outlawing abortion as much as promoting other forms of birth control, which I suspect white women are more likely to use. (And, relatedly, perhaps someone can explain to me why the pill is still the most commonly prescribed form of birth control. Less effective than an implant or IUD given imperfect compliance and requires way more effort.)

[jimbogumbo]

He was no John Locke, David Hume, or, as jimbogumbo suggested, Edmund Burke.

To be fair to me, I said Buckley might have preferred being compared to Burke rather than Locke.

A poor attempt at a philosophy joke on my part. I am proud that I remembered the David Duke-connection so I could toss in the Randy Newman lyric.

[Parasaurolophus]

Oh! I did get (most of) that, actually!

I just figured it was worth clarifying where I was coming from with my cheap shot, and your post seemed like an invitation to do so, along with the other I quoted. Quoting that way does distort what you were saying, however, and for that, my apologies.

[jimbogumbo]

Oh! I did get (most of) that, actually!

I just figured it was worth clarifying where I was coming from with my cheap shot, and your post seemed like an invitation to do so, along with the other I quoted. Quoting that way does distort what you were saying, however, and for that, my apologies.

I definitely don't need an apology. You are a great source of information, and logical discussion.

As a Math guy I was frankly thrilled I remembered Edmund Burke enough to make joke.