Professor Bruce Gilley is a very brave man
Gilley, a political science professor at Portland State University, is a profile in courage:
“I attribute the ease and suddenness of my latest [book publishing] cancellation to this year’s Black Lives Matter moral panic. It has taken cultural totalitarianism to new levels, challenging the U.S. ethic of freedom,” Gilley wrote…
In 2017, his scholarly article “The Case for Colonialism,” published in the peer-reviewed Third World Quarterly, led to petitions denouncing Gilley and his piece that drew upwards of 16,000 signatures, as well as demands for his firing.
The article was taken down after the journal’s editor received credible death threats. The piece was also likely the impetus for an administrative probe Gilley faced right after the controversy (he has since been cleared).
Gilley forged ahead with his scholarship, offering a class called “Conservative Political Thought” at Portland State. That, too, was cancelled by his peers in 2019…
In an essay for First Things earlier this year, he suggested five ways to take back power in the academy: enforce existing laws that protect free speech and equal opportunity employment; abolish university offices of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’; stop letting professors be the only ones in charge of hiring; abolish grievance studies; and unite the resistance.
“That kind of moral courage is what we need today if we are to release the academy from the death grip of the left and make it useful to society again,” Gilley wrote.
“The corruption of the universities has come about through the use of political power, above all in university hiring committees and diversity offices. The deliverance of the universities will be achieved in the same way.”
Much more at the link. Please read the whole thing. And see also this.
I stand in awe of this man.
The ever-increasing stupidity and madness from the academic world (our system of higher education being so broken as no longer to be capable of being rectified) are unrelenting. The College Fix and Campus Reform are usually the best sources, but Daniel Mahoney has just posted at NRO a disturbing piece about Harvard and Middlebury entitled “Totalitarianism on Campus.” Unless these incubators of “woke insanity” are defunded by the state and by the parents of indoctrinated children, nothing will improve.
He’s so right
“abolish university offices of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion”
In principle and practice it is: diversity, adversity, and exclusion.
The Progressive Church’s diversity dogma is a color judgment that denies individual dignity, individual conscience, intrinsic value, and normalizes color blocs, color quotas, and affirmative discrimination. It forms the foundation of their Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, relativistic, politically congruent (“=”), ostensibly “secular” quasi-religion (“ethics”). Diversity is another myopic, not quite wicked solution. #HateLovesAbortion
University of Oregon President Schill (his real name) yesterday said they would not comply with President Trump’s EO banning Critical Race Theory.
When Trump is reelected stripping Federal funds from such institutions of “higher learning” and Federal civil rights lawsuits should be the consequence of such bigotry and craven servitude to the cult of “wokeness.”
Will Congressional Republicans back a reelected Trump “stripping Federal funds from such institutions of “higher learning” and Federal civil rights lawsuits” or will they hamstring him?
He is certainly a brave and honest man. More power to his elbow.
Anyone who has traveled (and resided here and there, more importantly) much knows that certain races are best *not* left to rule themselves OR should be totally ring fenced and then ignored. There’s no middle ground.
There’s also the matter of societies which are better ruled by *relatively* benign conquerors than the benighted natives – especially when there is more than one ethnic group in play.
Still, none of this matters in Woke World. I wish the Good Professor all the luck he’s going to need.
I like Gilley’s response to the new University process for woke snowflakes to snitch on their colleagues when triggered (it is so easy to parody this nonsense).
Zaphod – I take issue with your blanket stereotypes, as I know many people of many races who are perfectly capable of self-government, if allowed to function without the handicap of their alleged “allies” in the grievance industries.
There are idiots and knaves of all races.
I wouldn’t let white Democrats govern a school playground.
AesopFan:
Re Stereotypes: To turn a song from South Pacific on its head, You Have to be Carefully Taught (to think that Stereotypes Suck). None of our ancestors would have made it off the African Savannah if our brains hadn’t evolved a simple heuristic for reasoning about probability distributions for different creatures (viz. Stereotypes).
Plonk you down in Baltimore and or the South Side, or Lagos, and you’d do better thinking about Stereotypes than giving each individual you bump up against time to demonstrate that he is or is not Thomas Sowell.
There are smart and decent Africans. There are Indians and Pakistanis who wash their hands after defecating and do Quantum Physics (beyond my abilities). But you go to the Dark Continent or the Subcontinent and you’re going to see more filth and degradation than shining spires and space rockets.
Stereotypes. They’re not poetry, they’re not rocket science… but they’ll keep you alive. Which is more than be said for much of ‘How to Be a Good White 101’ we are indoctrinated with daily.
Stereotypes. They’re not poetry, they’re not rocket science… but they’ll keep you alive.
Zaphod: True. Which is why I keep emphasizing that our brains work mostly by brute association for the purpose of survival, not sweet reason in the service of God and truth.
Which is also why I keep emphasizing that Democrats are not evil demons, but common garden-variety humans acting on a tribal, associational basis as humans do. It ain't pretty, but it's not about beauty, but survival.
More succinctly, we live on the Planet of the Apes. Plan accordingly.
huxley:
The leaders of the Democrats are evil in that they may know that the fomenting tribal behavior does not produce anything better than brute force and a lust for power. So they may not be evil demons but they are close enough for mis-government work.
He’s brave, and he’s right about the problem, and partially about the solution of reforming the colleges.
But “diversity” needs to be redefined to explicitly include different political parties as “creeds”.
There’s the Disparate Impact issue (80%)
https://www.thoughtco.com/disparate-impact-discrimination-4582550
which covers
race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;
[I was using this source, not the original … so here’s the original, used correctly
https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964 ]
After this amending of the law, immediately go after all tax-advantaged Universities for their prior and current discrimination against Republicans and pro-life people.
Not get rid of the corrupt “Diversity” department, require them to get diversity of opinion thru hiring more Reps. Or lose Fed Funding.
Congress Reps won’t back too much “ending diversity”, but should be backing “real diversity”.
Colleges NEED to be places where peaceful disagreement, with logic and persuasion being the arguments used. US taxpayer support orgs all need to be such places. “Private” orgs, maybe not so much – but no tax-exempt status nor Fed loans for such places.
See also Mark J Perry of AEI with charts on how much women dominate so many academic studies.
https://www.aei.org/blog/carpe-diem/
His next note was great on Margaret Thatcher’s 95th birthday:
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/today-would-have-been-margaret-thatchers-95th-birthday/
“9. Some socialists seem to believe that people should be numbers in a State computer. We believe they should be individuals. We are all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is like anyone else, however much the socialists may pretend otherwise. We believe that everyone has the right to be unequal but to us every human being is equally important.”
Supporting individualism vs socialism has been losing in the colleges. That needs to change.
The leaders of the Democrats are evil in that they may know that the fomenting tribal behavior does not produce anything better than brute force and a lust for power. So they may not be evil demons but they are close enough for mis-government work.
om: I go back and forth on this.
Clearly someone like Obama, an intelligent, trained, leftist activist, is aware his actions aren’t pouring oil on troubled waters but quite the opposite. However, I tend to believe, lacking the ability to look into Obama’s soul, that Obama is aiming at a leftist utopia and transforming the US thusly is the paramount priority for that utopia.
Or, at the very least, keeping Democrats in power which allows that possibility which would be prevented by Republicans in power. So almost anything goes.
Of course, one can extend that argument to include Hitler who believed he was acting for a better world — once the millions of Jews, gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, useless eaters etc. were eliminated.
Hey,
He teaches where I teach.
“… aiming at a leftist utopia and…”
…to do that there are, first, several countries that must first be either erased or severely weakened, IOW “taught a lesson”.
(Which is THE reason he empowered the Mullahs—birds of a utopian feather—who were no doubt en route to establishing a veritable paradise in the Middle East…or thereabouts. Ditto for his concerted effort to turn the US into a third-world country replete with one-party rule and putting away political enemies. He’s still trying BTW—the utopian habit is, it seems, hard to kick.)
Ah, utopia…
Utopia – can’t get there from here, still. But, dystopia, they know how to do that.
According to Gilley:
“The corruption of the universities has come about through the use of political power, above all in university hiring committees and diversity offices. The deliverance of the universities will be achieved in the same way.”
That deliverance is decades away, if then. Near term, universities must be bypassed in some fashion.
He teaches where I teach.
Mike MacLeod: Don’t leave us hanging!
Do have any inside scoop?
I’m still marveling at how successful this radical inch-at-a-time strategy has worked.
Campus demos -> studies depts -> studies profs -> admin depts -> studies quotas -> university codes suppressing free speech -> and much, much more!
Maybe Ken Kesey called it right in his book/movie, “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1964/1971):
______________________________
Never Give A Inch.
https://www.cinemaclock.com/movies/never-give-a-inch-1971
“….bypassed…”
I assume that some, or even quite a few, universities/colleges will not go down the rabbit hole.
If that is indeed the case, then those universities/colleges will likely be in great demand.