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What about academia? Sometimes, the truth is in between partisan perceptions. If you are a a Republican, you are now convinced of just how clueless and out of touch Democrats in elite coastal cities actually are. So, if you are a Democrat, you probably think those wild “alternative facts” Republicans are dizzy with delusions of radicals taking over campus. On average, Democrats believed the skew to be 1.4:1 Republicans 3.3:1. In One Nation, Two Realities, Marietta & Barker (2019) report the results of a survey of 1000 Americans showing they dramatically underestimate the left:right skew of academia. What is the actual distribution of Democrats to Republicans nationwide? Well there are different ways to measure this, but it is about evenly split no matter how the split is done ( Gallup, Pew ). Ok, I made up that 10,000 figure, but it is a reasonable first guesstimate given what is known about self-censorship (for national data, go here for recent peer reviewed review go here see this review of how a handful of firings during the McCarthy era chilled academic speech). Until you remember that that number is for 2021 alone, the same report includes hundreds of cases of faculty threatened with sanctions (or successfully sanctioned) and, most important, for every person threatened with punishment for wrongspeech, 10,000 learn to keep their mouths shut. Of course there are probably over a million faculty of various types, so the number seems infinitesimal. Over 80% of the them were for violating left shibboleths. That database includes 49 faculty who came under fire from within academia in 2021 alone. In a popular rebellion against MIT’s censorious deplatforming decision, thousands of people registered for his talk.Īnecdotes you say? I say “examples.” The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education keeps this database of “scholars under fire” - threatened with punishment for expressing ideas.

The James Madison Program at Princeton invited Dorian to give his canceled MIT talk there. Notes: DEI refers to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” ACTA is the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. Among my sins was to have referred to the mostly peaceful social justice protestors who rioted, looted, and burnt down a police station, ruined downtown Seattle, set the stage for dozens of murders, and upwards of $2billion in property damage, as “thugs.” This term is well-known to progressive academics to be used only as a racist dogwhistle, as can be readily seen by a quick search of photos of the rioters in Seattle and Portland (two of the Whitest major cities in the country) and by mainstream media headlines such as these: 2 I was publicly denounced as a racist on our departmental email listserve as a parting shot by one of the Psych Dept’s recent PhDs as she was out the door, (followed by a mostly-grad student pile-on via email) for sending an insufficiently antiracist statement to my Department after Floyd’s murder. I was part of a slew of academics denounced for participating in the formally non-partisan but right-leaning National Association of Scholars conference on Fixing Science (the charge: unfounded claims that we were enabling climate science denialism). Indeed, I was wrong, its not really a slur its more of an epithet. I was mobbed on Twitter, with academics “reporting” me to my deans 1 to get me fired because I referred to the phrase “White women white womening” as a racist slur. The Flip Side: If You Fail to Conform to Progressive Social Justice Shibboleths in Academia, You Risk Punishment

ARUNA KHILANANI REVIEWS HOW TO

If you really must have peer reviewed scholarship and academic books on pieces of that radicalization, such as abandonment of academic freedom and free speech, go here or here if you want simple-minded dichotomies, intellectual gaslighting, and kafka-traps, just read How to be an Anti-Racist or White Fragility. Of course, there was The Grievance Studies Sting, in which respectable and at least one prestigious peer reviewed academic journal published (or were likely on the way to publishing when the Sting was discovered) articles making claims such as: White students should be chained and never allowed to speak men should (metaphorically of course) be leashed like dogs and my favorite, Our Struggle is My Struggle (Unser Kampf ist Mein Kampf), which was a rewrite of a section from the original Mein Kampf, with “privilege” replacing “Jews.” Nutpicking? Anecdotes? Maybe, but your first reason to doubt that this is nothing but meaningless anecdotes is the universal approval at Yale of Khilalani’s talk by attendees.Īlthough these particular statements are extreme, even in academia, they are not that unusual.

Aruna khilanani reviews