They’re still trying to cancel William Jacobson at Cornell
Professor William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection reports on the latest in the campaign against him:
Earlier this week, the Black Law Students Association circulated an email statement to the Cornell Law School community repeating many of the false and misleading accusations against me that I have covered in earlier posts.
But it went beyond that. They refused my offer to debate their representative and a faculty member of their choice, issued a call to boycott my course, and demand the law school screen faculty hires for ideological purity…
You can read more of the letter at the link. Here’s an excerpt:
…[W]e further urge the administration to critically examine the views of the individuals they intend to employ. Faculty members who challenge students to debate them on the motives of those fighting to preserve Black life are clearly more interested in amplifying their own agendas than engaging in thoughtful and reflective discourse. Professor Jacobson has claimed no expertise nor any specialized training on matters of race and racial justice, rendering any future discussions on the matter entirely unproductive. We are not interested in subjecting ourselves and our community members to dialogue that reinforces the false dichotomy of “right” versus “left” when it comes to our humanity.
And another email, this time from the leftist National Lawyers Guild, called for a boycott of Professor Jacobson’s classes at Cornell.
In his post, Professor Jacobson writes:
With the slogan “Silence is Violence” being used at the law school, there will be enormous pressure for student groups to go along. Not to do so would be deemed an act of “violence.”
This is an attempt not just to scare students away from my course, but to scare students away from speaking their minds, and to create a faculty and student purity test.
I have received numerous emails from students telling me I have a lot of “quiet” support at the law school, but that students are afraid to speak out for fear of career-ending false accusations of racism. I deeply appreciate the expressions of support, and I understand why you cannot speak out. You don’t want to be subjected to the type of smear campaign to which I have been subjected.
This toxic atmosphere didn’t need to take place. At a time when the law school desperately needs an adult in the room, so to speak, we have faculty and a Dean who denounce me.
These elements are all too familiar: the inappropriate labeling of disagreement as racism, the refusal to debate the labeled person (can’t have that person actually defend him/herself in the court of public opinion), and the acquiescence and cooperation of an administration that either agrees or is too frightened to disagree.
Some of these elements were already outlined by Allan Bloom in his book The Closing of the American Mind. It was written in 1987, but a large section of the book discussed events that had taken place in 1969 at – of all places – Cornell.
I’ve written a lot about Bloom and about Cornell, which I consider the template for what’s been happening on campuses ever since, accelerating in the last five years or so. Please read this previous post of mine, which starts out by discussing a program at UCLA from the 60s, but then segues into a discussion of Cornell in 1969. I suggest you read the whole thing, and I strongly suggest you read this City Journal article that goes into some depth on the subject.
But here is Allan Bloom’s description, which I offered in this post (you may be puzzled by Bloom’s mention of Alan Keyes; he was at the time a Cornell student, black, who was being threatened by the militants for not standing with them; much later Keyes was Barack Obama’s hastily appointed opponent in his Senate race after the other Republican nominee was forced out) [emphasis mine]:
The [Cornell] provost was a former natural scientist, and he greeted me with a mournful countenance. He, of course, fully sympathized with the young man’s [Keyes’] plight. However, things were bad, and there was nothing he could do to stop such behavior in the black student association…He added that no university in the country could expel radical black students, or dismiss the faculty members who incited them, presumably because the students at large would not permit it.
…The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble. His president had frequently cited Clark Kerr’s dismissal at the University of California as the great danger…At the same time the provost thought he was engaged in a great moral work, righting the historic injustice done to blacks. He could justify to himself the humiliation he was undergoing as a necessary sacrifice. The case of this particular black student [Keyes] clearly bothered him. But he was both more frightened of the violence-threatening extremists and also more admiring of them. Obvious questions were no longer obvious. Why could not a black student be expelled as a white student would be if he failed his courses or disobeyed the rules that make university community possible? Why could the president not call the police if order was threatened? Any man of weight would have fired the professor who threatened the life of the student [the student was Keyes]. The issue was not complicated. Only the casuistry of weakness and ideology made it so…No one who knew or cared about what a university is would have acquiesced in this travesty. It was no surprise that a few weeks later—immediately after the faculty had voted overwhelmingly under the gun to capitulate to outrageous demands that it had a few days earlier rejected—the leading members of the administration and many well-known faculty members rushed over to congratulate the gathered students and tried to win their approval. I saw exposed before all the world what had long been known, and it was at last possible without impropriety to tell these pseudo-universitarians precisely what one thought of them.
It was also no surprise that many of those professors who had been most eloquent in their sermons about the sanctity of the university, and who had presented themselves as its consciences, were among those who reacted, if not favorably, at least weakly to what was happening. They had made careers out of saying how badly the German professors [during the Nazi era] had reacted to violations of academic freedom. This was all light talk and mock heroics, because they had not measured the potential threats to the university nor assessed the doubtful grounds of academic freedom. Above all, they did not think that it [academic freedom] could be assaulted from the Left or from within the university…These American professors were utterly disarmed, as were many German professors, when the constituency they took for granted, of which they honestly believed they were independent, deserted or turned against them…To fulminate against Bible Belt preachers was one thing. In the world that counted for these professors, this could only bring approval. But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were—that they alone manned the walls protecting civilization. Their collapse was merely pitiful, although their feeble attempts at self-justification frequently turned vicious. In Germany the professors who kept quiet had the very good excuse that they could not do otherwise. Speaking up would have meant imprisonment or death. The law not only did not protect them but was their deadly enemy. At Cornell there was no such danger…There was essentially no risk in defending the integrity of the university, because the danger was entirely within it. All that was lacking was a professorial corps aware of the university’s purpose, and dedicated to it. That is what made the surrender so contemptible.
As I said, that was written in the late 1980s. I think that at present the dangers of standing up for academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the right to disagree are more serious. I also think we continue to have some people of courage, and Professor Jacobson is one of them.
[NOTE: In this article, Steven Hayward of Powerline describes a related recent experience of his at Berkeley.]
I regularly read Jacobson at LI. I have always found his opinions well reasoned and certainly not racist. But now everything can be demonized as racist which means nothing is racist.
The problem is that no one at the university will take a public stand beside him. The world is full of cowards, and increasing in numbers by the day.
Prof Bill is showing WAY more character than the OAN T-shirt football coach or the myriad CEOs of giant corporations who are scrambling to be first to pander.
Bravo.
The problem is that no one at the university will take a public stand beside him.
Oh, there’s probably a few.
I’d wager that Cornell and the state schools it operates under contract have on the payroll about 3,600 people who have some sort of faculty appointment, so even if three dozen faculty signed a petition supporting him, it would be a drop in the bucket.
Professors tend to be other-directed, conformist, and most interested in protecting their prerogatives as faculty members. The vociferous among them will think up all sorts of excuses for impugning Jacobson’s character.
I last observed an academic mobbing of this sort 18 years ago. The target was someone rather more combative than Wm. Jacobson, and he wasn’t fazed by it. (The administration at that particular school was not run by honorable people, but they were conscious of optics. The leader of the mob was one of the college provost’s inner ring, and it’s a passable wager she told him to circumscribe his activities). He received not one explicit defense in a public forum, although there were two faculty who offered mild critiques of the faculty culture at the school.
Neo, again, no one at Cornell will stand up for him even if they agree. What happened to anyone who stood up for the Jews in Germany in the 1930s? In academia such people may not be physically killed, but their careers and their mental health will be. And as most alums are onboard with the pogrom, there will be no financial backlash either. Public universities have some pressure to not go full tilt as they are marginally bound by the Constitution. Private, and semi-private schools like Cornell can go full Marxist, and the process is pretty much complete. We really can’t do anything about it.
On a separate note mentioned in the post: the ideological purity test has been in place for prospective teachers at most Ed. departments for at least 10-15 years. They have hid it under the euphemism of “character disposition”, or some other such piece of BS. It’s what’s given us the poisoning of our children’s minds, and in the last 4 weeks that effort has paid off many times over for them.
“…full of cowards…”
They are even more contemptible than that.
Since they proudly call their cowardice “principle”, “heroism”, “virtue”, “morality”, “JUSTICE”.
…while labeling any perceived adversary a “Fascist” or worse.
It is the “heroism” of the pack. The “virtue” of the mob.
They may even deign to quote Orwell, which chutzpa would no doubt give them a heady frisson of pure liberation from any remaining sense of “bourgeois” decency, as they venture into the realm of unbridled intellectual and moral perversion…no doubt receiving kudos for their audacity and nerve!
But then they are very good at sophistry and rationalization. (They’ve been honing their skills at spewing moral gibberish for a long time in the finest of civilizational slosh pits while doing their best to resurrect the warped world of Michel Foucault, whose children they are as much as Marx, Gramsci and Alinsky.)
We are witnessing the pathetic epitaph of a great intellectual tradition, which if it is lucky may be able to flee to safety far afield (like generations of expats) to places where a sense of respect is still understood and practiced. And tradition valued. And true freedom defended. India? Panama? Singapore? Wyoming? Other, more conservative schools throughout the land?
Or perhaps some adult may finally find a way into the arena and somehow compel these morally impoverished, feral faux-intellectuals, by force of personality or aura of integrity to arouse themselves from their pernicious trance, to recover some last vestige of forgotten shame or to relight within themselves some remaining ember of humanity.
But how to fight the hideousness—in a society which seems to find the fable of the hungry alligator a worthy model of behavior—is becoming increasingly the challenge of the day.
Neo, again, no one at Cornell will stand up for him even if they agree. What happened to anyone who stood up for the Jews in Germany in the 1930s? In academia such people may not be physically killed, but their careers and their mental health will be.
Oh go on. They’ve got tenure and a non-zero share of them have seen their last sabbatical before retirement. They’ll be shunned by other faculty. Well, someone who would cut you off in those circumstance isn’t worth your time. Sell your house, move to Syracuse, and associate with decent people. Decent people aren’t faculty members.
I don’t think it is news to anyone that universities are in some measure refuges for intelligent, sensitive, but morally and physically weak men. Particularly in the humanities.
As long as they could stride around in (figurative, usually) gowns and wearing masks of gravitas, they carried with them the aura of Mt. Olympus.
But, the more of us who attended universities, the more of us knew that that is an image that was on its way out soon after the days of Albert Venn Dicey, and F. William Maitland.
How a man who has expended most of his life energies attempting to burrow into the center of a termite mound, simultaneously imagines that the swarm will respect his individuality if the direction of the wind changes, is a mystery to me, no matter how grand and crellenated are its towers.
Coming to a school near you: You are hearby invited to publicly participate in a program of progressive solidarity and affirmation. As part of this humanizing experience, you will be expected to denounce all past expressions of your privilege, and to renounce any claim to future expressions of asocial and reactionary behavior based on invidious and violence threatening recourses to personal liberty, or to specious claims of some antisocial right to a private conscience.
Frankly, I think you could round up most of the faculty at most American university campuses, using a hundred or so woke activists, herd these scholars into the quads and streets, and then successfully demand they lick the pavement as proof of their progressive sympathies, while you filmed them. What reason has anyone to expect that either the administration, perhaps most especially the administrators, or the average faculty member would do anything once forced into such a personal crisis, but hastily comply … even if they had the means to successfully resist , but it meant possibly losing their academic living?
The tone in most major institutions seems set, if informally, by the most psychologically desperate and yearnimg members of our so-called society, who have at the same time, enough intellectual capital to maneuver their way in, and around them.
Even those who imagined they were interested in fields so far from the political trends of the day as to be untouchable, are finding themselves mistaken. Physics or Medieval History, anyone?
Actually, a certain number of medievalists – or historians at least-
have been tripping over themselves for years in order to attribute any intellectual advance or recovery during the period to the Muslims; to the glorious, humane, liberal, even paradisical Al Andalus; and to those translations of Aristotle from the original Greek, through eventually the Arabic into Latin, which they, the Muslims, and not Christian “Syrians” it is implied, made.
What a bunch of frauds and cowards. I doubt if Jacobsen has more than a handful of equals in each of most first tier American universities.
I’d love to be proved wrong of course. Admiration for the good is more fun than contempt for the bad.
I don’t think it is news to anyone that universities are in some measure refuges for intelligent, sensitive, but morally and physically weak men. Particularly in the humanities.
The victim of the academic mobbing referred to above works in the humanistic side of political science. He had no defenders. The critics of faculty culture were (1) and education professor and (2) a music professor.
See Alan Bloom on the natural science faculties at Cornell in 1969. They were perfectly feckless and expected the other faculties to clean up the mess while they went on about their business after capitulating on every point to campus protestors. Per Bloom, the people who resisted the injury to academic standards were in the social research faculties. The humanities faculties were actively destructive, the natural science faculties did nothing, and the professional schools did nothing.
A subsequent provost at the institution noted above sucked up to the SJW crowd at every turn. His primary appointment was in the physics department. He is now president of a different institution.
Most physicists that I know are moderate, apolitical, or left of center. They certainly are not immune to SJW propaganda. Most are apolitical and just want to do their work, but will respond how the left wants when their silence is considered to be violence. There are a bit more conservative physicists in academia than in other departments, but they are far from the majority. The conservative ones are working in defense labs.
Oh my, academic freedom. How quaint. It’s a dead and stinking corpse. Stop beating the dead horse. Instead point your children/grandchildren to trade schools that are the future. We already have too many idiots in gende fluid, feminist, black lives idiocy.
“It is the “heroism” of the pack. The “virtue” of the mob.” – Barry
I didn’t know you were writing for the Bee!
https://babylonbee.com/news/hero-man-willing-go-internet-say-nazis-bad
“Hero: This Man Was Willing To Go On The Internet And Say That Nazis Are Bad” August 18th, 2017
The most amazing (and very frightening) accomplishment of the Left is the total reversal of the ideological poles, so that the terrorist totalitarians of today have been able to convince the public (LIVs at least) to stick the Nazi label on liberty-loving individualist conservatives. Second place is the reversal of the roles of the Democrat and Republican parties in the American Civil War.
There is a reason they quit teaching history.
If you only watch one video today, it should be this one.
https://billwhittle.com/americas-failed-social-experiment-are-you-on-team-red-or-team-blue/
I’ve read Legal Insurrection for years. The coverage there of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case was incredibly good, to begin with, as was the detailed look at Oberlin vs the bakery. It was perhaps inevitable that Jacobson would be targeted — inevitable but nevertheless sad.
physicsguy, Barry, DNW: my God! I hate this. I so hate the God Damn fascist Left!
There was, still is, a blog, made very topical during the Obama years: “Enjoy The Decline” was either its ironic name or its Tagline. Now it’s a sad, contemptible prophecy being fulfilled.
but will respond how the left wants when their silence is considered to be violence.
And there’s your problem. Physicists have more autonomy than do others in the arts and sciences as (1) they’re surer of what they’re doing and (2) there is work in industry and (3) there is work in government. They’re not using that autonomy to tell the clamoring fools: ‘buzz off, I’m busy’. Every faculty committee with STEM faculty on it should have as a consequence immovable objects in the way of the corruption of institutional missions.
“Every faculty committee with STEM faculty on it should have as a consequence immovable objects in the way of the corruption of institutional missions.”
True, one would hope. I acted as such on the committees I was on and that’s what often brought down the wrath on me. There’s a tendency with the physicists that they don’t want to be viewed as not part of the “cool crowd”. Chemists and CS are somewhere in between, math and biologists are hopelessly left. As a father of 2 daughters I don’t necessarily like to feed into Art’s notion that all ills are the result of women, but as the biologists have become majority female, the profession has moved way left. Engineers, I think, tend to have more balls and are more conservative than scientists/mathematicians.
In engineering if you get it wrong, it doesn’t work, or you can’t make the thing reliably and stay in business, or at worst people die. Engineers work in the real world and face real world consequences IMO. I would say the same for many of the more dangerous blue collar trades (construction, teamsters, fisherman, loggers, oil and gas workers, …).
physicsguy: “As a father of 2 daughters I don’t necessarily like to feed into Art’s notion that all ills are the result of women, but as the biologists have become majority female, the profession has moved way left. Engineers, I think, tend to have more balls and are more conservative than scientists/mathematicians.”
As a father of 3 daughters (LOL) I want to note that it’s true there are plenty of Karens and lefty fems. But, in addition, I find plenty of tough straight-thinking conservative women in the world as well. Blog commenters, writers like Mollie Hemingway and Sharyl Attkisson, leaders like Phyllis Schlafly (RIP) and Sarah Palin, speakers like Kayleigh and Sarah Huckabee … well I’m sure we each have our list … and don’t forget our neo!
I find plenty of tough straight-thinking conservative women in the world as well.
They’re preparing tax returns, selling real estate, and taking care of their kids. You don’t find them on college faculties.
About a dozen years ago, a disgruntled alumni group took a census of the voter registration cards of the faculty and administration of their institution. They discovered about 20 Republicans were employed in salaried positions there, of whom there were three women. One held the title of ‘associate provost’ and had an opaque job description, one was a lab instructor in the computer science department, and one was a school psychologist teaching in the education department. One’s still there in the provost’s office, one (being peripheral faculty) left in the ordinary course of events, and one was denied tenure. (In re the education department, they employed in succession a historian and a school psychologist who got the axe, granted tenure to a multi-culti clown, and hired-to-tenure another multi-culti clown).
Im losing my home over the changes of this (and probably will lose my life)… and stop blaming the men, when the faculty and offices are mostly women now who affirmed their way in… only a few men figureheads and selected for their lack of toxic masculinity or sexual orientation…
Cornell Student Population Stats
Diversity Matters
Cornell University is ranked #18 nationwide.
https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/cornell-university/student-life/diversity/
The faculty are mostly white.. as they show
But its majority female in faculty.. 52.1 vs 47.9
given this and the break down of the male side, they have to be the way they are just to keep positions they have held for decades… or else.
the ladies and their team members would kick them out
or threaten them in so many ways our supreme court justice knows
its quite easy with no real repercussions or danger in that.
This is the world the ladies want and they will get it..
no one else controls these things, whether radical in the 60s or not
The “woke” folk are trying to get rid of Professor Jacobson for his having had the temerity to criticize BLM. Here is a question for the “woke” folk. Opal Temeti, co-founder of BLM, is a supporter of Venezuelan “President” Maduro. She has visited Venezuela, where she tweeted the following.
She has also hosted Maduro in the United States. Given that BLM is against police killing civilians, and BLM co-founder Opal Tometi is a supporter of Maduro, does BLM consider Venezuela’s law enforcement as a model for the US to follow?
Caracas Chronicles: How Brutal Are Venezuelan Police Forces?” In 2017, Venezuelan law enforcement killed 4,998 civilians. That would be the equivalent in the US of 50,000 civilian deaths at the hands of law enforcement. Many time higher than the actual figure, which was around 1,000 in 2017, and much lower in subsequent years.
If BLM is against law enforcement officials killing civilians, then why is BLM co-founder Opal Tometi a supporter of a regime that has a horrendous record of aw enforcement officials killing civilians?
Inquiring minds want to know.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/13/black-lives-matter-founder-an-open-supporter-of-socialist-venezuelan-dictator-maduro/
Art Deco:
I personally am good friends with a “tough straight-thinking conservative woman” who is a tenured professor on a well-known college campus.
There are others, too, such as law prof Amy Wax. I am unaware of her politics in terms of how she votes, but the issues she discusses (and for which there has long been a campaign to get rid of her) certainly make her sound conservative, by today’s standards.
For that matter, there are vanishingly few “tough straight-thinking conservative men” who are professors these days. They exist, but in very small numbers.
Artfl, I know things are grim for you right now, but hang on.