The Same Unneurealism Exists on the Left - Chapter 25, webpage 3, continued...

Chapter 4
Intolerance 101 – Shutting Down Debate

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

- George ORWELL

 In March 2014, a feminist studies associate professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara physically attacked a sixteen-year-old girl who had been handing out anti-abortion literature in a public space on campus. The professor, Dr. Mireille Miller-Young, later told a police officer that she was justified in her attack because the literature and graphic abortion signs displayed by the anti-abortion rights group were "disturbing" and "offensive." She was particularly offended, she said, because she was pregnant and teaches reproductive rights.

The police officer who interviewed Miller-Young asked what crimes she felt the anti-abortion rights group had committed. Miller-Young told the officer that coming to campus and showing "graphic imagery" was insensitive to the community and claimed the "pro-life" group may have violated university policy. In fact, the group staged their demonstration in the campus "free speech area" as university policy dictated. Had they actually violated university policy, that still would not have made their actions criminal, or inviting of physical attack.

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Nonetheless, throughout the police report, Miller-Young is unrepentant. The police report continues, "Miller-Young said that her actions today were in defense of her students and her own safety.. . Miller-Young also suggested that the group had violated her rights." The officer asked Miller-Young what right the group had violated, and she responded, "My personal right to go to work and not be in harm." But there was no harm done to Miller-Young. She just couldn't tolerate the expression of views with which she disagreed. So she attacked a teenage girl.

Miller-Young's behavior, while indefensible, is easily understood if one considers the ideological confines of the illiberal left. Seen through this intolerant and narrow lens, disagreement is violence. Offending them is akin to physical assault. They are so isolated from the marketplace of ideas, that when confronted with a view they don’t like, they feel justified in doing whatever they can to silence that speech.

Campuses across the United States have become ground zero for silencing free speech. Universities founded to encourage diversity of thought and debate have become incubators of intolerance where non-sanctioned views are silenced through bullying, speech codes, "free speech zones," and other illiberal means.

Professor Miller-Young's assault is the headline of the incident, but what led up to the attack is equally alarming. According to Mairead McArdle, then a twenty-year-old student at nearby Thomas Aquinas College, the incident started when she approached Miller-Young and handed her an anti-abortion pamphlet. “As soon as she [saw it] she raised her voice and said, 'Oh so you are the people who use fear tactics to scare women. And is that your sign? Well let's go talk about that,’” McArdle recounted to me. "We then walked over to the sign [that depicted an aborted fetus]. From that point on she did not stop yelling at us. With her it never went back to a reasonable discussion. She was just mad. She said, 'You don't have the right to be here, you don't belong here, you don't go here."'

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So who was the person using "fear tactics" against women here? It seems it was Miller-Young. "She told us, 'You guys don't know what you are talking about," McArdle said. "She was cursing. She called us idiots. She was interrupting us nonstop, we barely got a word in. She threw the pamphlet at me. After a while some of the other students gathered around, some of whom said they were Miller-Young's students. They started yelling at us. One of the girls kept coming up to me and saying, 'Can you please just be a decent human being and take [the sign] away?' And I told her that I understood it was hurtful to some people, but that we had a right to be there, and they could not just tell us to go away.’”

But this wasn't enough for Miller-Young. "The professor was inciting the mob. She was talking to them and walking between them and us. She was saying 'So, should we take away their signs? Should we do it for them? They don't have a right to be here. They are feeding you a bunch of [expletive],'' said McArdle. "She started a chant of 'tear down the sign.' The people in my group looked at each other and it was clear that everyone was scared. We tried to go in and talk to individual people to break up the [mob]. It was fifteen to twenty students. When we did go in to talk to people it worked for a minute or two. As soon as she realized her mob was breaking up she was muscling in between people saying 'No, they are just trying to break us up, we have to stick together.’”

Multiple students who were participating in the anti-abortion demonstration confirmed that when they were able to engage the students one on one, they would listen respectfully and engage. But then Miller-Young would intervene and try to stir them up. This kind of behavior –tyranny by someone holding a minority view in a group - is a theme that often emerges in stories involving the illiberal left's silencing campaign. All it takes is one or two people to claim grievance and start bullying everyone else to fall in line.

Eventually Miller-Young realized she had lost the students and upped the ante. McArdle recalls, "She was yelling and walking towards me and I backed up because I thought she was going to hit me. That's when she

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grabbed the sign. She asked a few students to help her and she carried it off. We were all shaken up. One of the girls was crying. A student with [Miller-Young] said, 'You better guard your other sign or we'll take that one too.’” In a video of the incident, the professor taunts the girls as she is walking away and says, "I may be a thief but you are a terrorist."

Thrin Short, the then-sixteen-year-old sister of one of the organizers of the demonstration, was frightened but realized they needed to retrieve the sign, as it was a focal point of their demonstration. She followed Miller-Young and her students - all the while filming them - and caught up with them at an elevator they had just boarded. Thrin recalled, "I was kind of scared to get in the elevator, but I figured that's what I would do." Miller-Young blocked the doorway and told her she couldn’t get on. In the video, the professor repeatedly shoves Thrin, smirking the whole time. The video becomes blurry as Miller-Young grabs the girl.  According to Thrin, the professor was holding both of her wrists, and scratched her, in an effort to wrest the camera out of her hands. Pictures of her wounds were later posted on her group's website.

The activists were not able to get their sign back. Miller-Young explained to the police officer that she and her students went to her office and destroyed the sign with scissors. She said she had a "moral" right to have acted as she did. Even after the officer explained to her that a crime had occurred, she insisted she had set a good example for her students. She characterized all of her actions as those of a "conscientious objector." She described the sign used by the anti-abortion activists as "hate speech."

When the case went to trial, the jury took a different view of the situation, and Miller-Young was convicted of theft and battery.  Incredibly, she remains a professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara. She was never sanctioned for her behavior, at least not publicly. On the contrary peers and university administrators robustly defended her. At least twelve university professors sent letters to the court attesting to her character and describing her as an open-minded bridge-builder. She was treated as the victim in the case, and letter after letter complained of the critical press  coverage her actions received, as though it was unmerited.

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Dr. Stephanie Batiste, an associate professor in UCSB's Department of Black Studies and English, expressed sympathy with Miller-Young's reaction to the activists, reimagining the bullying that ended in a physical altercation as a simple and understandable outgrowth of Miller-Young's "kindness combined with her commitment to justice." She described Miller-Young as "a giving, sensitive person with a good heart" and said she was "instinctively kind."

Miller-Young is so "kind" that she has never directly apologized to the girl she attacked, or to the students she intimidated and mocked and attempted to silence. Instead, in a naked attempt to gain leniency, Miller-Young provided the court with a written apology. As the mother of the victim noted to the court, the apology "says nothing about her pushing, grabbing and scratching Thrin."  The letter also doesn't explain her lack of contrition with the police officer, or why a week after the incident she re-tweeted a tweet by one of her supporters who said she would stand with Miller-Young "until that whining little bigot eats her accusation with a barbed fork."

But really, whether she is kind or not is beside the point. No one has ever suggested that Miller-Young should be prevented from expressing disagreement, outrage, or even anger at the demonstration. The students were in fact happy to debate the topic with her. That was why they were there. What Miller-Young is not free to do, as a matter of law, is steal property or physically attack other people because she has been exposed to views that upset her. Separate from the law, it's alarming there is not broader agreement that a professor shouldn't abuse her power to intimidate young people in an attempt to silence their views. Even had she stayed on the right side of the law, Miller-Young should not have been considered innocent in the eyes of the university or her peers.

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The academics defending Miller-Young pretend that she was held hostage and forced to look at images that offended her. Miller-Young was in possession of two legs that she quite easily could have used to walk away from the sign that she claims sent her over the edge. In her letter in support of Miller-Young, Erica Lorraine Williams, an assistant professor of anthropology at Spelman College, blasted the media's depictions of Miller-Young as a "crazed feminist studies professor who bullies and taunts young people." But that's exactly what she did. She proudly recounted it to a police officer and there is a video of it.

One can only imagine what would happen if a conservative professor who opposed abortion rights harassed, pushed, and scratched a pro-abortion rights activist and then stole and destroyed her sign. It would have led the evening newscasts under the "War on Women" banner and made the front page of the New York Times. The professor would have been fired within hours of the incident and escorted off the campus.

Yet the university - a publicly funded institution - never condemned or apologized for Miller-Young's behavior. When asked for a comment from the media, a UC Santa Barbara representative said the university didn't discuss personnel issues, but would confirm that the demonstrators were in the campus designated "free speech area" and thus had not been violating any campus rules.

Soon after the incident, Michael D. Young, vice chancellor for Student Affairs, sent a letter to students addressing the fact that "during the past few weeks, UCSB has been visited by various anti-abortion crusaders" and lamented that outsiders were coming on campus to create discord. He labeled them "the most recent generation of true believers, self-proclaimed prophets, and provocateurs." Miller-Young's actions were never mentioned. Instead, the chancellor created an "us-vs-them" paradigm that assumed that every student at this public university shared his pro-abortion rights views. He wrote of how the UCSB community was being "tested" by "outsiders coming into our midst to provoke us, to taunt us and attempt to turn us against one another as they promote personal causes and agendas."  What a strange way to describe the expression of free speech on a university campus. How can someone demonstrating against abortion

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possibly be construed as attempting to “provoke” or turn people against each other? Would the chancellor argue that a pro-abortion rights demonstration on a public campus was a hostile act? Unlikely.

As stated earlier, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” - George ORWELL

Have you ever heard of the “college Professor effect”? It works like this, college professors in the social sciences are in their own liberal bubble, as described in the Miller-Young case above. They are continually interacting with each other in that collegial environment, and in order to appear proficient and possibly even superior to their colleagues, they have to shift further left in their presentations and viewpoints in order to remain or possibly progress within their collegial crowd. They’ve evolved so far Left in that closed environment that they’ve now reached the illiberal left as Powers described here.

I entered a doctorate of education program a few years ago.  I had the exact idea of what study I would like to do for my doctoral thesis, as a teacher in my school I had already done such as a small scale study testing a hypothesis expressed in my earlier publication, The USA, A Social Diagnosis. I ran the idea by my adviser and he said in roundabout terms, that’s a lousy idea, you better think of something else. So I took a few more classes and politely asked for another advisor. Months later I ran the same idea by her, and she more or less said the same thing.  Apparently I was not thinking the way they wanted me to think.  So I withdrew from the program and decided to write this book instead.

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NO OFFENSE

The root of nearly every free speech infringement on campuses across the country is that someone - almost always a liberal - has been offended or has sniffed out a potential offense in the making. Then, the silencing campaign begins. The offender must be punished, not just for justice's sake, but also to send the message to anyone else on campus that should he or she stray off the leftist script, they too might find themselves investigated, harassed, ostracized, or even expelled. If the left can preemptively silence opposing speakers or opposing groups - such as getting a speech or event canceled, or denying campus recognition for a group - even better.

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In a 2014 interview with New York magazine, comedian Chris Rock told journalist Frank Rich that he had stopped playing college campuses because of how easily the audiences were offended. Rock said he realized sometime around 2006 that, "This is not as much fun as it used to be" and noted George Carlin had felt the same way before he died. Rock attributed it to, "Kids raised on a culture of 'We're not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.' Or just ignoring race to a fault. You cant say 'the black kid over there.' No, it's 'the guy with the red shoes.' You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive." Sadly, Rock admitted that the climate of hypersensitivity had forced him and other comedians into self-censorship.  Comedians Larry the Cable Guy and Jerry Seinfeld have made similar observations and comments.

He said, "It is scary, because the thing about comedians is that you're the only ones who practice in front of a crowd. There are a few guys good enough to write a perfect act and get onstage, but everybody else workshops it and workshops it, and it can get real messy. It can get downright offensive. Before everyone had a recording device . . . you'd say something that went too far, and you'd go, 'Oh, I went too far,' and you would just brush it off. But if you think you don’t have room to make mistakes, it’s going to lead to safer, gooier stand-up. You can’t think the thoughts you want to think if you think you're being watched." Isn’t this Newspeak and Big Brother?

This Orwellian climate of intimidation and fear chills free speech and thought. On college campuses it is particularly insidious. Rock’s description of developing comedy isn’t dissimilar to how college students should develop their minds. Higher education should provide an environment to test new ideas, debate theories, encounter challenging information, and figure out what one believes. Campuses should be places where students are able to make mistakes without fear of retribution. If there is no margin for error, it is impossible to receive a meaningful education.

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Many of the conflicts that arise on university campuses involving intolerance of dissent don’t involve constitutional claims. But when they do, they should be open and shut cases. Sadly, they aren’t. The illiberal left act as though it is their job to "balance" the values of free speech and the complaint du jour. Legally, there are rare exceptions as to when the government - which includes state universities - can limit free speech, and those few exceptions unequivocally do not involve the petty grievances of hurt feelings, taking offense, or ideological disagreement. As for private universities, they are not held to the same constitutional requirements as public universities, but they still must reconcile their proclaimed values and mission statements that embrace diversity and freedom of thought with their illiberal crackdowns on free speech. Furthermore, some states have laws requiring private universities to guarantee free speech rights.

But on today's campuses, left-leaning administrators, professors, and students are working overtime in their campaign of silencing dissent, and their unofficial tactics of ostracizing, smearing, and humiliation are highly effective. But what is even more chilling - and more far reaching - is the official power they abuse to ensure the silencing of views they don’t like. They’ve invented a labyrinth of anti-free speech tools that include "speech codes," "free speech zones," censorship, investigations by campus "diversity and tolerance offices," and denial of due process. They craft "anti-harassment policies" and "anti-violence policies" that are speech codes in disguise. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's (FIRE) 2014 report on campus free speech, Spotlight on Speech Codes, close to 60 percent of the four hundred-plus colleges they surveyed, "seriously infringe upon the free speech rights of students." Only sixteen of the schools reviewed had no policies restricting protected speech.  Their 2015 report found that of the 437 schools they surveyed, “more than

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55 percent maintain severely restrictive, 'red light' speech codes - policies that clearly and substantially prohibit protected speech." FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff attributed the slight drop to outside pressure from free speech groups, and lawsuits.

For many Americans the term "speech code" sends shivers up the spine. Yet these noxious and un-American codes have become common-place on college campuses across the United States. They are typically so broad that they could include literally anything and are subject to the interpretation of school administrators, who frequently fail to operate as honest brokers. In the hands of the illiberal left, the speech codes are weapons to silence anyone - professors, students, visiting speakers - who expresses a view that deviates from the left's worldview or ideology (ie neuroreality). Speech that offends them is redefined as "harassment" or "hate speech" both of which are barred by most campus speech codes. At Colorado college, a private liberal arts college, administrators invented a "violence" policy that was used to punish non-violent speech. The consequences of violating a speech code are serious: it can often lead to publicshaming, censoring, firings, suspensions, or expulsions, often with no due process.

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The vaguely worded campus speech codes proliferating across the country turn every person with the ability to exercise his or her vocal chords into an offender in the making. New York University prohibits "insulting, teasing, mocking, degrading or ridiculing another person or group." The College of the Holy Cross prohibits speech "causing emotional injury through careless or reckless behavior."  The University of Connecticut issued a "Policy Statement on Harassment" that bans "actions that intimidate, humiliate, or demean persons or groups, or that undermine their security or self-esteem." Virginia State University's 2012-13 student handbook bars students from "offend[ing] ... a member of the University community." But who decides what's "offensive"? The illiberal left, of course.

The list goes on and on. The University of Wisconsin-Stout at one point had an Information Technology policy prohibiting the distribution of messages that included offensive comments about a list of attributes including hair color.  Fordham University's policy prohibited using e-mail to "insult." It gets worse: Lafayette College - a private university - instituted a "Bias Response Team" which exists to "respond to acts of intolerance." A "bias-related incident" was "any incident in which an action taken by a person or group is perceived to be malicious. . . toward another person or group." Is it really wise to have a policy that depends on the perception of offense by college-aged students? Other schools have bias reporting programs encouraging students to report incidents.

Speech codes create a chilling environment where all it takes is one accusation, true or not, to ruin someone's academic career. The intent or reputation or integrity of the accused is of little import. If someone "perceives" you have said or acted in a racist way, then the bar for guilt has been met. If a person claims you caused them "harm" by saying something that offended them, case closed.

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(HAIR) TRIGGER WARNINGS

College students typically revel in satirical reviews. Not so among the illiberal left, if you choose the wrong target.  University of Michigan

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student Omar Mahmood encountered the humorless speech police after he wrote a satirical column in late 2014 for the independent, student-run publication the Michigan Review. In a funny riff on political correctness on campuses, Mahmood - who describes himself as conservative and libertarian - wrote of his struggles as a man of color, having to face white privilege everywhere, including the "white snowflakes falling thick upon the autumn leaves, burying their colors." He wrote sarcastically of the indignities he faced for being left-handed and how his "humanity was reduced to my handydnyss." Mimicking the language of overwrought victimhood so prevalent among the illiberal left, he complained that, "the University of Michigan does literally nothing to combat the countless instances of violence we encounter every day. Whenever I walk into a classroom, I can hardly find a left-handyd desk to sit in. In big lecture halls, I'm met with countless stares as I walk up the aisle along the left- handyd column. The University cannot claim to be my school while it continues to oppress me."

The column seemed to have hit too close to home. Mahmood, who also wrote for the campus newspaper the Michigan Daily, received a call from an editor there after his Michigan Review column ran. The editor informed Mahmood that his column created a "hostile environment" and that someone on the Daily's editorial staff felt “threatened" by what he wrote. He was told he could only write for one of the two papers and, as a condition of staying on at the Daily - where they suspended his regular column - he would be required to write a letter of apology. Mahmood refused and FIRE intervened on his behalf. As of February 12, 2015, the paper had failed to reply to FIRE's inquiries.

Mahmood's column began with a "trigger warning," a phrase that is likely meaningless to anyone not schooled in the jargon of lefty university groupthink. He was wryly mocking the illiberal left's campaign in favor of "trigger warnings" on university syllabi so that students who might be "triggered" by certain content could opt out of completing assignments or to attending classes that might upset them.

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Oberlin College found itself in the midst of a firestorm in 2014 after telling its professors that they should "avoid unnecessary triggers and provide trigger warnings." They defined a trigger as "something that recalls a traumatic event to an individual." Professors were urged to educate themselves about "racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, able-ism, and other issues of privilege and oppression." The administrators explained, "Anything could be a trigger - a smell, song, scene, phrase, place, person, and so on. Some triggers cannot be anticipated, but many can."

How could any professor be expected to teach in such an environment? More importantly, why should they? Oberlin College administrators asserted that literally any topic could potentially "trigger" a student. The guidance continued, "Sometimes a work is too important to avoid. For example, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is a triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read. However, it may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more." For such books, the university suggested professors issue a "trigger warning" because it would "show students that you care about their safety." Some professors had understandably expressed concern that trigger warnings would give away the plot of the assigned books. The university administrators were unmoved, arguing that "even if a trigger warning does contain a spoiler, experiencing a trigger is always, always worse than experiencing a spoiler."

Under these guidelines, it would be "unsafe" to assign most any book to most any student. Still, the professors were told to, "strongly consider developing a policy to make triggering material optional or offering students an alternative assignment using different materials. When possible, help students avoid having to choose between their academic success and their own wellbeing." These suggestions were met with concern and incredulity by many of the professors. Political science professor Marc Blecher told a reporter, "It would have a very chilling effect on what I say in class and on the syllabus." Meredith Raimondo, an associate dean who oversaw

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the committee told the Associated Press that in response to protests from some faculty, the task force removed the controversial section and "plans to rewrite it with less 'emphaticness.’”

Echoing the concerns of the Oberlin administrators, an editor of George Washington University's student newspaper, Justin Peligri, wrote a 2014 column arguing for trigger warnings on syllabi as a "preventative measure" because the university "offers many politically-charged classes that explore controversial social issues." Yes, that's generally the point of a college education. Over at Rutgers, student Philip Wythe asserted in a 2014 column in the campus newspaper that his university should also employ the use of trigger warnings. Why? Because, he wrote, "literature courses often examine works with grotesque, disturbing and gruesome imagery within their narratives."

What kind of works did Wythe think pose a danger to his fellow students' mental health? He noted that, "F. Scott Fitzgerald's critically acclaimed novel, The Great Gatsby, possesses a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence. Virginia Woolft famous cerebral novel, Mrs. Dalloway, paints a disturbing narrative that examines the suicidal inclinations and post-traumatic experiences of an English war veteran. And Junot Diaz's critically acclaimed work, This is How You Lose Her, observes domestic violence and misogynistic culture in disturbing first-person narrations."

Thus Wythe helpfully suggested that The Great Gatsby might include the trigger warning: "TW: 'suicide,' 'domestic abuse' and 'graphic violence."'

Is that what you think about when you read The Great Gatsby: suicide, domestic abuse, and graphic violence? Or might this classic novel tackle themes much larger than these bizarre "trigger learnings" suggest?

If a college student is going to be traumatized by The Great Gatsby, then they are going to find day-to-day life unbearable once they step outside the child-care programs that are passing for universities today. 

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from some of the greatest works of American or world literature. Under these "trigger warning" rules, how would professors teach Dante or Shakespeare or just about any great book of literature beyond the narrowest politically correct confines?

The University of California-Santa Barbara is blazing the trigger warning trail. In March of 2014 - the same month professor Miller-Young told the police officer that she attacked a student because she felt "triggered" by a demonstration - the student government formally called on the university to mandate that all professors employ trigger warnings. “A Resolution to Mandate Warnings for Triggering Content in Academic Settings" demanded a policy that would require professors to alert students of potential triggering material and "allow... students to miss classes containing such material without losing course points."

"Hypersensitivity to the trauma allegedly inflicted by listening to controversial ideas approaches a strange form of derangement - a disorder whose lethal spread in academia grows by the day," free speech advocate Harvey Silverglate noted in the Wall Street Journal. "What should be the object of derision, a focus for satire, is instead the subject of serious faux academic discussion and precautionary warnings. For this disorder there is no effective quarantine. A whole generation of students soon will have imbibed the warped notions of justice and entitlement now handed down as dogma (neurorealities) in the universities."

Students at Wellesley College employed the "triggering" concept to object to a statue of an underwear-clad man. One student started a Change.org petition insisting the statue be removed because it was "a source of

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apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault."  Sruthi Narayanan, another offended student, posted a complaint that, "Our safe space - the only safe space for some of us - is being heavily compromised."  By a statue. Okay, a ridiculous statue. But if anything it deserved to be laughed at, not cast as a menacing threat. She lamented the "administration's decision to put up such a triggering statue without student consent." Another student, Megan Strait, complained that "not all students consented to this installation" and that due to the location students have no way to "opt out" of seeing the statue.

Do students think that once they graduate they will be able to "opt out" of anything they don’t like? If colleges and universities encourage that attitude, they are not educating students; they are perpetuating their immaturity and fostering intolerance. 

One voice of sanity responding to the petition to ban Wellesley's "Sleepwalker" statue was a student named Fani Ntavelou-Baum. She noted, "Reading this letter and the comments, I find what a student mentioned in one of my classes to be very true: 'In Wellesley you somehow have a position of power if you are the most offended person in the room.’” How’s that for a neuroreality?

We need to abandon the childish and illiberal idea that universities are meant to be emotionally "safe" places where students are never offended, never have to defend their beliefs, or never have to encounter a view or idea or fact they dislike. The goal of a college or university should be developing intellectual rigor that comes from the free clashing of ideas.

 The Same Unneurealism Exists on the Left - Chapter 25, continued...