NAS Blog

In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal quotes Mark Zuckerberg, the kid from Harvard who heads the CEO of a company-not-yet-public. (Goldman-Sachs VIP insiders only, please). What disturbed me about the article is not that another company is breaking into the so-called China market after the Google row over censorship. I’m more disturbed by the mealy-mouth rationalization of Zuckerberg, who seems to have breathed in the multicultural fumes of higher education.

Zuckerberg stated:

“I don’t want Facebook to be an American company [God forbid!],” he said. “I don’t want it to be this company that just spreads American values all across the world. …For example, we have this [culturally constructed American] notion of free speech that we really love and support at Facebook, and that’s one of the main things that we’re trying to push with openness. But different countries have their different standards around that. …My view on this is that you want to be really culturally sensitive….”

This is the moral and cultural nihilism that bristles at “American values” and must be “culturally sensitive” and protect the “right not to be offended” lest you face a “hostile environment” charge–or worse. My students spew this because it starts K-12 and many of my colleagues are fond of the “free speech for me but not for thee” quote (Stanley Fish). And, of course, we must “understand The Other” (non-Americans). Or, as Zuckerberg put it: “understand the way that people actually think.”

Now, there is nothing wrong with “understanding the way the people actually think” but there is something wrong when you privilege these “other ways of thinking” at the expense of what you profess to “really love and support at Facebook” (that odd notion of openness and American values).

God help Mr. Zuckerberg, et al. as Iran goes ahead with its foolish autarkic plans to build a new operating system to impose the Islamic ethical code on all computer users in Iran. If or when Zuckerberg sells his out in Iran (and China), he will move one step closer to losing his soul and costing the lives of Others in foreign lands who had hoped that U.S. companies and Americans (of all types) might stand with them as they embrace dissident “American values” (as if they were peculiar to America).

“What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?

Mark 8:36

When I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, the stereotypical bowdlerizers of speech–the people excising “offensive” lyrics and literature–were the uptight blue-nosed sort who feared that “someone, somewhere, was having fun.” (H.L. Mencken).

Now, the “progressive” Left has replaced the Puritanical Right as the great policer of speech. “Progressives” have always policed speech (“you are politically incorrect, comrade!”) so this is really nothing new. Both Left and Right have a long history of searching out words they feel are too sensitive to the ears of minors or thin-skinned individuals. (Apologies in advance for those who suffer from blue noses or thin skin).

Latest example: the Canadian “Standards Council” has banned the Dire Straits song for using the word “faggot” in the classic 1980s tune “Money for Nothing.” I learned this after listening to the song on the Dire Straits’ album “Brothers in Arms.” The song brought back memories of my youth so I searched out the video which was as good as I recalled (classic MTV video of the 1980s). Alas, the video has also been excised so that it is “good for all countries.” Now Canada can join the Religious Right in America and the Muslim bloc (in the United Nations) in bullying or outlawing “hate speech.” Perhaps the result will be some Universalist Code of Speech.

What makes this even more chilling is that they are attacking not only present speech but scouring the past for things that might offend someone if ever read or heard now. Shades of Fahrenheit 451.

The new rule of thumb: don’t say anything that might offend any one one hundred years from now. Looking at the evolving history of speech, good luck guessing what might be on the “hit list” in the year 2111!

Coda: the secondary definitions for “bluenosed: “Canadian.” Kind of appropriate, eh?

Over at the leading libertarian magazine, Reason, writer Shikha Dalmia attacks conservatives for using FOIA laws to invade the privacy of historian William Cronon. At the same time, Dalmia defends Open Records laws while noting that groups may abuse their rights by going after individuals. On that score, the Left comes in for a tongue lashing for politicizing the process (and so much else in academia).

A student, Yosef Sobel, decided to invite David Horowitz to Brooklyn College in response to campus protests. The campus protesters pretended to be Israeli military officers stopping students at checkpoints. I was impressed that Yosef, an undergraduate, found a way to arrange Horowitz’s visit in response. Nevertheless, two different professors normally involved with Middle Eastern and Judaic studies refused to sponsor the event. (The College would not permit an event that at least one faculty member would not sponsor.) I offered to do so.

Horowitz is a dramatic speaker. I hadn’t attended a campus event of this kind before and was disturbed at the overt anger, thinly distinguishable from violence, on the part of the anti-Horowitz protesters in the room. Their intent was to stifle Mr. Horowitz and those who agree with him. At the conclusion of the talk I asked the chief protester to give a response to Mr. Horowitz. Failing to address any of Horowitz’s points, he responded with an inarticulate series of insults. His confederate on the other side of the room screamed at the room filled with yarmulke-clad Jews, “This is a bunch of Nazis.”

The event was a success largely because one of CUNY’s trustees lent his support. He insisted that the university’s chief security officer oversee a concerted security effort that involved a metal detector search of each attendee. Speech on campus is not free, unless one expresses a left wing viewpoint. Without the trustee’s influence, campus security would have failed to provide security, and the protests may have become violent. As faculty sponsor I was able to control the audience to some degree only because of the security, which, in the end, suggests why check points are necessary in Israel.

Excited to receive the shipment from Dan Wyman Books, I ripped open the box only to feel revulsion.  Inside were old books related to a familiar subject:  the Holocaust.  I’ve seen Night and Fog, Memory of the Camps, the Bergen-Belsen bulldozer footage; I am acquainted with the unspeakable.  So why this visceral reaction?

I removed The Human Harvest (1907) by eugenist David Starr Jordan, once president of Stanford; the Report of Robert H. Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials (1945); Harvest of Hate by Leon Poliakov (1954); and The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Holocaust denier Arthur Butz (1976).  I had ordered the books because I make critical thinking students write a paper deciding whether Holocaust deniers should be invited to express their position when classes discuss the Holocaust.  It is a carefully-constructed and devious question, one which draws students into epistemology, skepticism, evidence, memory, perception, history, logic, free speech, academic freedom, Romanticism, and more.  I model intellectual disinterest, explain instead of promote, and must sometimes play devil’s advocate.  My responsibility also includes making typical Holocaust and Holocaust denial materials available for students to evaluate:  films, books, websites, from CODOH and IHR to Nizkor and USHMM.  They view propaganda (Triumph of the Will) as well as documentaries (Holocaust on Trial and Nazi Designers of Death).

But my revulsion at touching, smelling, Jordan’s and Butz’s books, exposes the profound difference between reading about and reading, between scrolling a weightless web “page” and turning a physical page, between viewing and holding in your own hands original, contemporaneous sources of murderous ideas and records of their consequences.

Tomorrow, I add the box to my library reserves.

Related here and here.

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case Keeton v. Anderson-Wiley.

The NAS calls on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the decision of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, refusing to enjoin Augusta State University from expelling counseling student Jennifer Keeton, for expressing her religious views on homosexuality.

After learning that Keeton believes homosexuality is a choice, not a “state of being,” the university ordered her to participate in “remediation activities,” which included “diversity sensitivity” training and a gay pride parade.  When she refused, she was expelled from Augusta State’s counseling program.

Peter Wood has published a new article at the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Innovations Blog, “Racism at Wesleyan?” In it he reviews the recent controversy over an affirmative action bake sale at Wesleyan University, where Ward Connerly will be speaking today at 4:00.

Peter argues against censoring the term “racist” but points out that the word can be abused as a label “to intimidate and to polarize,” as was the case at Wesleyan University. He writes that eliminating racial preferences in college admissions will help diminish racism:

We would as a society be better off if we jettisoned race from our consideration of how public goods such as college admissions are distributed.  Getting rid of race, like getting rid of racism, is far from easy, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take the preliminary steps. One of those is de-institutionalizing racial categories.

His essay comes at a timely moment, when some politicians are making an effort to erase the words “racist” and “socialist” from our vocabulary.

It is always nice to report good news. In the long struggle for sanity on college campuses, occasionally schools “do the right thing.” In this case, the University of Virginia has eliminated all speech codes and earned a “Green Light” from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). For more on the story, click here.

To see where your school stands in FIRE ratings, search here.

Sadly, most schools are Red or Yellow. Take action by keeping an eye on your alma mater or local university. Report to your local NAS affiliate and/or contact FIRE.

Friends in D.C., we hope to see you on Monday, Nov. 1, when FIRE president Greg Lukianoff will address the D.C. chapter of the National Association of Scholars. He will speak on “CLS v. Martinez and the Campus Freedom of Association Crisis.”

To RSVP and for more details, see this flier.

From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:

A new short film by FIRE documents the experience of Penn State student artist Joshua Stulman, whose “Portraits of Terror” art exhibit was censored by the university because it satirized Islamic terrorism. Stulman is just one of numerous college students and faculty members who have been silenced for discussing or criticizing Islamic extremism.