Maoist Bullying

Tuesday, February 16th, 2016

When Jonathan Haidt brought some colleagues together to form the Heterodox Academy, he had no idea that the universities were about to commit suicide:

We had no idea that they were going to blow up just a few weeks after we launched the site. So we launched in September. I wrote a post about our big review paper in social psychology. And we got a lot of attention the first week or two. Then it died down. And then we get the Missouri fiasco, the Yale fiasco, the Amherst fiasco, the Brown fiasco. You get place after place where protesters are making demands of college presidents, and college presidents roll over and give in.

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Look, I graduated from Yale in ’85. Yale is very devoted to social justice. It’s very devoted to affirmative action. Now no place is perfect. But it’s probably among the best places in the country. And to have protesters saying it’s such a thoroughly racist place that it needs a total reformation — they call the protest group ”Next Yale”– they demand “Next Yale”!

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And these were not requests. This was not a discussion. This was framed as an ultimatum given to the president — and they gave him I think six days to respond, or else. And I am just so horrified that the president of Yale, Peter Salovey, responded by the deadline. And when he responded, he did not say, on the one hand, the protesters have good points; on the other hand, we also need to guarantee free speech; and, by the way, it’s not appropriate to scream obscenities at professors.

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The president was supposed to be the grown-up in the room. He was supposed to show some wisdom, some balance, and some strength. And so we’ve seen, basically what can really only be called Maoist moral bullying — am we saw it very clearly at Claremont McKenna. The video is really chilling — the students surrounding this nice woman who was trying to help them, and reducing her to tears. As we’ve seen more and more of this, I’ve begun calling it, “the Yale problem,” referring to the way that left-leaning institutions are now cut off from any moral vocabulary that they could use to resist the forces of illiberalism. As far as I’m concerned, “Next Yale” can go find its own “Next Alumni.” I don’t plan to give to Yale ever again, unless it reverses course.

Comments

  1. Slovenian Guest says:

    I guess it’s phantom racism…

    “Today, it is common knowledge that virtually all amputees experience phantom sensations, painful or not, after limb amputation. Non painful phantom sensations rarely pose a clinical problem. However, in some amputees, the phantom becomes the site of severe pain, which may be exceedingly difficult to treat.”

    via Phantom limb pain

    It’s so absurd because America is the least raciss country in the world, if blacks knew it can only go downhill from here, they would shut up rather quickly.

  2. Dan Kurt says:

    What did you expect? Affirmative action is a fraud, euphemism for quotas, and assures that dramatically less talented students are admitted as the affirmative action students are taken from groups of lower mean IQ. They know that they are at Yale because standards were lowered and don’t belong there. They are having their egos crushed by trying to compete with the true Yalies so they react by destroying Yale and after graduation they will get mainly affirmative action enabled jobs in the Government, NGOs, and academia where they will continue to destroy the USA as well. Just look at POSident Obama, the affirmative action model who keeps his school records hidden and governs to change America fundamentally, as he has stated, demonstrating colossal incompetence as he goes around wrecking everything he touches.

  3. Wilbur Hassenfus says:

    They’re not giving in to these people. They’re using these demands as a pretext to do the insane things they wanted to do anyway.

    Read the press releases. These admins are *thrilled* to receive these lists of insane demands. It’s what everybody’s doing! It’s hip!

    Haidt thinks he’s a leftist, but he’s wrong. He’s a conservative: One of those poor stupid suckers who believes the bullshit the left spews about fairness and integrity and truth. The left IS what the left DOES. If you question it, you’re not on the team.

    He’s just embarrassing himself. He’ll be purged if he makes too much noise.

  4. Lucklucky says:

    Marxists bullying.

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