Good luck, Professor Abrams
Samuel Abrams is a Sarah Lawrence professor who has had the audacity to write about the lack of intellectual diversity among faculty and administrators on today’s college campuses, and of course the SJWs don’t like it and think he should leave:
Professor Samuel Abrams is a conservative-leaning tenured professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College. He is active in Heterodox Academy, a group of almost 2000 academics devoted to intellectual diversity on campus.
Prof. Abrams recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about the lack of ideological diversity among administrators at his school and elsewhere. The column, titled Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators, brought together research Prof. Abrams had done on left-leaning bias among college professors and administrators, and how it stifles open debate.
Predictably, some people on campus reacted in this manner:
After penning an op-ed for The New York Times decrying the ideological homogeneity of his campus administration, a conservative-leaning professor at Sarah Lawrence College discovered intimidating messages—including demands that he quit his job—on the door of his office. The perpetrators had torn down the door’s decorations, which had included pictures of the professor’s family.
In the two weeks since the incident, Samuel Abrams, a tenured professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence, has repeatedly asked the college’s president, Cristle Collins Judd, to condemn the perpetrators’ actions and reiterate her support for free speech. But after sending a tepid campus-wide email that mentioned the importance of free expression, but mostly stressed her “commitment to diversity and inclusive excellence,” Judd spoke with Abrams over the phone; according to him, she accused him of “attacking” members of the community.
“She said I had created a hostile work environment,” Abrams said in an interview with Reason. “If [the op-ed] constitutes hate speech, then this is not a world that I want to be a part of.”
What’s more, when the two met in person, Judd implied that Abrams was on the market for a new job, he said.
“I am not on the job market,” he said. “I am tenured, I live in New York. Why would I go on the job market?”
I have to say that my first reaction to the story was surprise—not at the reaction of some students and of Judd, but at the fact that Abrams had ever been hired by Sarah Lawrence in the first place. Even back in the Stone Age when I was in college, Sarah Lawrence was known as an artsy-fartsy college with no required courses, and written evaluations instead of grades. What on earth is Abrams doing there, of all places?
Another thing of which I was almost certain, even before I looked it up, was that Judd was not the person who hired Abrams. And that turns out to be correct. Judd became the college’s president in August of 2017, and Abrams was hired eight years ago.
That last link is to an article about him in the college magazine. Here’s an excerpt:
n the heat of a presidential campaign that divided the nation into two camps barely able to communicate with each other, Sam Abrams (politics) took students from his course “Presidential Leadership and Decision Making” on a field trip deep into what most of them regarded as enemy territory: a Donald Trump rally on Long Island…
Abrams wanted to give his undergrads something he believes most college students these days aren’t getting—what he likes to call “viewpoint diversity.” He wanted them to see “what the world looks like that’s not pro–Bernie Sanders.”
When he came to Sarah Lawrence eight years ago, Abrams says, he was viewed as “the token raging conservative, but the reality is I’m not even close to that.” In a 2016 New York Times op-ed, he described himself this way: “In most places I’d be considered a moderate, but in the campus context I might as well have been Ted Cruz.”
In the article (I can’t find a date on it, but obviously it’s at least 2016 and perhaps later), Abrams makes it clear that he’s not a Trump supporter. My guess is he’s more or less in the Romney mold, politically. But he is correct that at Sarah Lawrence—and at most campuses today—that makes him Ted Cruz. And not just Cruz, but a Nazi.
I wish him well—he’s a brave man. He’s chosen to thrust himself into the spotlight for a worthy cause, that of intellectual diversity on campus. And he has made an important point in his most recent op-ed, which is that campus administrators are, if anything, more doctrinaire and rigidly leftist than professors.
Judd probably made the same point.
I am so sad that the world of academic scholarship, a world to which I aspired, has become such an ideological Gehenna. I read stories like this and have no regrets about having resigned my tenured position 30 years ago.
Jason Hill, a very bright tenured professor of philosophy at DePaul in Chicago, has written in his fascinating new book We Have Overcome that our universities are destroying the country, and he firmly believes in defunding academic engines of indoctrination. He is particularly annoying to SJWs since he has a rather high position on the intersectional totem pole, being a black and gay immigrant from Jamaica.
I can’t reach the NYT piece (paywall), but the prof’s point about administrators is on the face of it valid and important and I think not widely known outside higher ed. In particular it’s the offices that are known by names such as Student Life, Student Affairs, and the like that for some reason seem on many campuses to be the most active in pushing lefty causes, especially the pseudo-diversity stuff and most especially sex-related stuff. This is the branch of the administration that’s responsible for everything extra-academic–dorms, social live, event programming, health. Well, everything except athletics, depending on the campus.
In my young and naive days I thought the name “Sarah Lawrence” meant very high academic standards. Then I met one of their grads. That was in the mid-’70s. I doubt things have improved.
In my young and naive days I thought the name “Sarah Lawrence” meant very high academic standards. Then I met one of their grads.
What was Lesley Gore like when she wasn’t performing?
Now that is some impressive trivia knowledge.
And “diversity” means, of course, “uniformity to the exclusion of all diversity.”
They are sowing the seeds from which they shall reap the whirlwind.
“She said I had created a hostile work environment,” Abrams said in an interview with Reason. “If [the op-ed] constitutes hate speech, then this is not a world that I want to be a part of.”
* * *
Cue a quote different from our usual “cut down all the laws” but just as relevant.
Maybe time to put “Man for All Seasons” back on stage in contemporary clothes and topical dialogue?
“I do none harm, I say none harm, I think none harm. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live.”
Only of course, the SJWs believe that saying anything they don’t like IS thinking-saying-doing harm.
The world is official crazy — this can’t keep going.
Mac & others: the link in the Reason post got me past the NYT paywall; maybe there is some special sauce if a reader comes via particular origination points.
Related post from Reason:
https://reason.com/blog/2018/10/24/trump-students-election-trauma-study-fak
“The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency caused a quarter of surveyed college students to report systems of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to The Daily Mail’s characterization of a new study on the subject.
The author of that study, Melissa Hagan of San Francisco State University, disputes this framing, however. Having reviewed the study myself, I tend to agree with the author that the media is overemphasizing the degree to which it confirms the triggered snowflake moniker for young people. Some were stressed by Trump’s win, but to call them “traumatized” is to deploy spin.
..
They found that about one in four students “met criteria for clinically significant symptoms.” This was noteworthy because “elevated symptoms of event-related stress are predictive of future distress and subsequent PTSD diagnoses,” according to the study.
It may be concerning that many students were so emotionally ill-equipped to deal with Trump becoming president. But these respondents did not claim to be suffering from trauma or PTSD; rather, the study’s authors placed them in a high risk category based on their responses.”
* * *
1 in 4 may be about right if the students start out with a 2:1 left-leaning ratio, as Abrams found in his study cited in his op-ed.
I have no doubt that the faculty and administration were much more traumatized by Trump’s win.
From some Legal Insurrection commenters (be sure and watch the video also, where Abrams talks about self-censoring especially while untenured).
https://legalinsurrection.com/2018/11/sarah-lawrence-prof-pens-op-ed-about-lack-of-intellectual-diversity-social-justice-warriors-want-him-driven-off-campus/#comment-897524
“Teddy Roosevelt, “to anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.”
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” – Theodore Dalrymple
“Some folks have blamed weak administrators for the disruptive leftist antics on campuses by students. “Weak” administrators have never been the problem, and this article only reinforces the truth. The administrators are the motivating force.”
The only thing that surprises me about this new example of the tediously predictable reactions of the college is that the NYTimes published the op-ed in the first place.
I wondered how Abrams got tenure at SL; as the video at LI makes clear, he did it by keeping undercover until after it was achieved.
He also says his research shows the outnumbered conservatives are actually happier than the leftists, for reasons which will be quite understandable: conservatives are supportive of academic inquiry, and leftists are trying to prove their progressive bona fides.
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Decades ago, Sarah Lawrence and Bennington (VT) Colleges were the two most expensive womens’ colleges in the country.
My sister went to Bennington. She is not stupid, majored in Fine Arts, and then entered the MIT School of Architecture.
We should return to same-sex colleges, but Libs will never let that happen. I would never hire a male graduate of Vassar.
Cicero on November 4, 2018 at 12:26 pm at 12:26 pm said:
..
We should return to same-sex colleges, but Libs will never let that happen. I would never hire a male graduate of Vassar.
* * *
With all the trans-identification and gender-fluidity of today, how could you even tell if a college was same-sex?
Professor Abrams will consider himself a Ted Cruz before too long.