One of the perversities of the situation is that despite all this, we probably haven’t heard the last about our “woke universities” – as they have for more than a hundred years, the right and centrists who share their contempt for college students will, against all available evidence, continue insisting that American campuses have been ideologically captured by the very people we’ve just witnessed campus administrators go to war against. They will do all they can to obscure it, but it should be plain now that all the shallow representation most visible to pundits – the diversity and equity teams, the minorities in high positions – hasn’t changed the fact that the majority of American universities are largely beholden to donors, trustees and, increasingly, politicians, well to the right of the most progressive voices on campus.
In the current panic, the protesters are described as somehow both terribly fragile and such a threat to public safety that they need to be confronted by police officers in riot gear. To justify the police department’s excessive response at Columbia University, Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry showed Newsmax viewers a large chain and a book with the title “Terrorism” that had been recovered from one site of protest. The former was a common bike chain Columbia sells to students and the latter was part of Oxford University Press’s lovely “Very Short Introductions” series, which covers topics from animal behavior to Rousseau and black holes.
High-profile public figures of all ideological stripes have varyingly called for the students to be kicked out of their institutions, made unemployable or sent to prison. They’ve floated implausible scenarios in which the protests turn deadly. Students brave enough to risk their financial aid and scholarships are derided as childish rather than principled. And though they are educated to participate in civic life, as soon as these students exercise their First Amendment rights, they are told that protecting private property is a more pressing public concern. It’s as though some older adults simply can’t wrap their heads around the idea that college students, who are old enough to marry, have families and risk their lives for their country, are capable of having well thought-out principles.
The University of Minnesota is pausing its search for director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies — days after it offered the job to Israeli historian Raz Segal and two longtime board members resigned in protest.
“In the past several days, additional members of the University community have come forward to express their interest in providing perspective on the hiring. … Because of the community-facing and leadership role the director holds, it is important that these voices are heard,” the university said in a statement Monday. Interim President Jeff Ettinger has paused the selection process, the statement added, “to allow an opportunity to determine next steps.”
Segal is associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies and endowed professor in the study of modern genocide at Stockton University in New Jersey. Among other things, the resigning board members took issue with an article called “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” which he published in Jewish Currents less than a week after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel killed 1,200 Israelis and Israel retaliated.
Read the full article to see a guy who’s written multiple books about the Holocaust get told he doesn’t know anything about anti-Semitism!
She mentions the article I posted in the poor media outlet thread here and places more context around the PEN America thing:
This was the point that I and a number of writers were making when we withdrew from the PEN World Voices Festival, after PEN America failed to call for a cease-fire in Gaza for five months—unlike PEN International, which released a statement in October—and only then after being pressured to do so by hundreds of writers. Several members of the board responded by emphasizing their commitment to free speech and openness, which they claimed we opposed. But we do not: we made our withdrawal public in a letter outlining PEN America’s abdication of its stated purpose to protect writers and culture. It had, we noted, failed to offer support to Palestinian writers and journalists at risk of being killed in Gaza and the West Bank, by contrast with the group’s robust initiatives in Ukraine and other sites of war, conflict, and oppression; and it had condemned the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in clear violation of its own mandate to protect free speech. Free speech includes the freedom not to speak, or publish, or do public events—as when Sally Rooney chose to decline a book deal with an Israeli publisher funded by the Israeli state. It is, in fact, the boycott’s adherents whose speech most urgently needs protection, as legislators in the US, Germany, and elsewhere pass laws that put state and municipal contractors at risk of losing funding if they boycott companies affiliated with Israeli apartheid.
And more broadly on how the focus on & weaponization of language is used to excuse and deflect from real-world violence:
Gascon is in general very progressive, and many Angelenos hate him for that. But he also has been making some very politically expedient decisions like the above lately, and this week he declined to prosecute a USC student who killed a homeless person who was breaking into cars.
This feels like the DA equivalent of pandering to right wingers? Being like “no, guys, I’ll let everyone get away with crimes, including you” isn’t going to make them vote for you!
Unfortunately the group he’s pandering to isn’t right wingers at all. Bring up the topic of homelessness in Los Angeles among a group of typical Biden voters and inside of five minutes somebody will mention putting them in camps.
Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón’s reform-minded outlook on juvenile justice seemed made for someone like Denmonne Lee.
When he was 16, Lee took part in an Antelope Valley gas station robbery that ended in the death of former Marine John Ruh. Lee, who was acquainted with the victim, had planned the 2018 robbery and provided a weapon to his co-defendant, according to court records. Although Lee wasn’t the shooter, he was charged with murder.
But when Gascón took office two years later, as Lee’s case was making its way through the court system, he barred prosecutors from trying juveniles as adults. Lee was convicted and ordered held at the county’s Secure Youth Treatment Facility in Sylmar until he turned 25.
Lee “responded very well” to programs in custody, authorities said. Within a year, probation officials moved him from the high-security Sylmar facility into a rehabilitation-focused setting in Malibu. After being released to a halfway house last June, Lee enrolled in community college and found work at a local nonprofit.
And then, in April, he was arrested and charged with playing a major role in another homicide.
The case has given Gascón’s critics an opportunity to directly link the progressive district attorney’s policies to a violent crime that some argue could have been prevented had Lee faced a stiffer penalty in adult court. Nathan Hochman, Gascón’s opponent as he seeks reelection in November, has spent significant time shouting out high-profile crimes that he contends are symptoms of the incumbent’s policies.
Although I do think that a good bit of the “put them in camps” comes from a place of well-intentioned naivete rather than malice. People just think “Well, if I were homeless and someone gave me food and a stable place to live, even if it wasn’t where I am now, I think that would be a big life improvement.”
I think that’s fair. It is a very complicated topic. For me, “put them in camps” is obviously not OK, but I do reluctantly somewhat support the idea behind CARE Courts, which to some people makes me as bad as the camp-supporters. On one side of the issue you have the “round them up and send them to the desert” people, and on the other you have “people must be allowed to do whatever they want without restriction, including living and shitting on the street, even if they are extremely mentally ill”.
I’m all for progressive reform in the justice system, but man, I don’t know about letting people involved in murders during armed robberies chill in Malibu for a minute then be released. That seems pretty extreme. Maybe the details (paywalled) around this on the first one are really favorable for the kid, but that still seems like a huge risk.
There’s an awful lot of room for leniency towards drug users and low level dealers and shoplifters and so forth before we get to accomplices in a murder facing homicide charges.
From the pieces you can put together from that quote, if the murder was in 2018 and he was let out last year, that’s 5 years? I don’t know that that’s plainly unreasonable for a juvenile.
A 16 year old (guessing no previous criminal record) who robbed a gas station with his buddy, his buddy shoots and kills the clerk, and he gets popped for felony murder? 5 years is definitely on the lower side, but it’s not such an outlier that it’s exactly shocking me. Throw in unknowns such as the strength of the People’s case and whether or not he cooperated (I’m guessing he did), and I could see this being a relatively unshocking disposition in any major metro homicide prosecution.
If this were 10 years I wouldn’t even bat an eye. 5 years is like at most one standard deviation away from the norm.
I don’t know that I can support the idea that if someone’s idea of freedom is shitting in the street we need to let them do that. I don’t know where the line is for the State to detain the mentally ill for their and societies protection, but we don’t seem to be doing these people much good where it is drawn now.
What happened in this individual case is less important than the overall idea of not charging 16 year olds as adults. Like, overall what leads to better outcomes for society: imprisoning a 16 year old in adult prison for 10 or 15 or 20 years and then releasing them, or putting them in a juvenile facility for five years? Keeping in mind that in the juvenile facility they receive many more rehabilitative services than they would in prison, and they aren’t surrounded by more hardened criminals all the time, my instinct is that the five years has better outcomes for all of us, not just the 16 year old.
