You agree above in my analysis is that *one* of the reasons you don’t want to criticize the intellectual background out of which atrocities such as U of Delaware occur is that you don’t want to divide the faculty by attacking, e.g., identity politics scholars. You believe that such scholars are especially sensitive to criticism of their fields (not that such sensitivity stops their own fierce criticism of others–as you have admitted to me). But I didn’t criticize good scholarship, Tim.

There is good work done in these fields. But as you yourself said, there’s also a lot of simplistic, third-rate hackery done in those fields. I am asserting that there is an increasingly blatant, aggressive and self-confident institutional-power linkage between that intellectual world and university administration behavior. You see it at U of Delaware. You see it at William and Mary. You see it in the new AAUP guidelines on “indoctrination” and “empassioned teaching.” You saw it at Duke. You write, that IF there is a pattern, it is not very important. Then why do these horrific incidents keep happening over and over again?

You chastized Johnson for generalizing from the Duke 88. But the committee taking anonymous denunciations at William and Mary is made up of similar people And there are faculty at U of Delaware who created and fiercely support the *intellectual premises* of the U of Delaware 1984 indoctrination program. They are intent on *enforcing their dogma* on the university, because the see their work as not merely intellectual but political. If this authoritarianism and thirst for *enforcing the dogma* is rooted in identity studies, that needs to be said, and the field reformed. But you can only offer soft words to the ideologues, in hopes they will reform, or at least not do anything more. That’s your strategy. My point to you is that the increasingly blatant use of institutional power by such ideologues (U of Delaware, William and Mary, AAUP) suggests that this strategy doesn’t seem to be working.

You don’t want to accept *me* on this issue. Okay– How about the noted feminist Wendy Kaminer? On Oct. 31, she wrote the following about the U of Delaware situation, but then she also *generalized* from it. I agree with what she wrote in that generalization, and I think the issue here is that you are very reluctant to do so:

“If I characterized U.D.’s vision of citizenship as un-American, I don’t think I’d be exaggerating. This is supposed to be a free country. U.D. administrators
obviously need a refresher course in civics, (as well as a remedial writing course for bureaucrats; try reading through this document.) The persistent disrespect for individual freedom shown by so many self-styled progressives today, especially on campus – their failure to include freedom in their notion of a virtuous society — has been a confounding political calamity. If some college students regard liberalism as authoritarian, liberals who refrain from promoting freedom (in the belief that it’s a right wing value) should not be surprised.”

Please read the last two sentences of Kaminer. That’s the nub of my argument, my conception of the problem. If it was just Horowitz, or even Horowitz and Johnson, you’d be on more solid ground.

Incidently, this isn’t a one-time statement of Kaminer’s. Here’s what she wrote on Nov. 4:

“I expect that any suspected whistleblowers will be vilified as malcontents, or conservative ideologues, and I wouldn’t be surprised if university officials started an investigation to find out who “leaked” the damning documents describing the resident life program. Restoring and preserving civil liberty at U.D. requires continuing vigilance.”

She points to the same fear of retaliation that I have mentioned, Tim–and to the kind of ideological accusations that will accompany it, which I have also mentioned to you..

If, for example, I wrote scholarly work that in some respect strongly embraced identity politics, and my scholarship had craft and subtlety–and I was also a collegial, moderate presence in my department and institution–what incentive would I have to incorporate a colleague who had a generic, sweeping, unreasoned negative view of all work like mine into any deliberative processes if I could manage to exclude him or her? This kind of dynamic happens a lot in universities, but not in the “political” way that you’re singularly focused on. Academics constantly face choices about building dialogues or connections, and they understandably often refuse to do so when they’re confronted by a colleague who completely and sweepingly denies the legitimacy of a huge corpus of scholarly work without engaging any particular work in that field in any detail. Surely you’ve seen people who do this–the scientist who thinks the humanities are a waste of time, the humanist who regards the sciences as the hegemonic effluvia of capitalism. There are more finely drawn versions of the same in every department: the cultural anthropologist who categorically loathes physical anthropology, the economist who thinks behavioral and experimental economics is useless, and so on. If you’ve got a real, live colleague in front of you, that kind of blanket attack is no longer acceptable (I think it’s bad practice even in the abstract). You need to read that person’s work, judge that person in the context of what they do, get particular, if you want any right to strongly criticize them. If you want that criticism to be a persuasive claim about what the discipline or the academy as a whole ought to be, you’ve got to even work hard to bring the object of your criticism along.

I keep harping on this theme, but that’s what anyone should do if they’re dealing with a problem in culture, habitus or everyday practice. That’s the only thing you can do that doesn’t destroy institutional or civic life at its best. You really need to think about this, AME: do you want to connect with colleagues (even those you disagree with or oppose) or do you just want to complain about them? Do you want to change the things that you object to?

Your problem is that this program did not come out of nowhere. Incidents such as this prove Horowitz and KC Johnson are on to something. I know this idea makes you uncomfortable, and that it takes gumption for you nevertheless to protest these incidents. I greatly respect your actions. But honestly, how can they *not* show that Horowitz and Johnson are on to something?

Tim, you do want to confine a particular discussion to a particular instance–as if it were an unfortunate but eccentric event with little broader significance. You do find these incidents disturbing, but I think you fear that forcefully acknowledging the existence of a larger political pattern here will somehow empower Horowitz and Johnson–and/or unnecessarily deepen divisions within faculty–or else make the problem seem insuperable. But by *abandoning* addressing the larger problem, you leave that field to people you consider irresponsible (such as Horowitz and Johnson), since they are the only ones addressing it. There’s your conundrum at this point, it seems to me.

If the point is to empower sensible people to speak sensibly, then don’t you think it starts with a certain degree of modesty and pragmatism, with a fairly big-tent view of the stakes and the players, with a certain amount of professionalized mutual appreciation? If you put the hypothetical RA who wants to do right by his students in a decent enough way in a situation where he/she perceives the choice to be between “insensitive jerk who doesn’t care at all about someone on the hall who is complaining of discrimination or harassment” or “politically correct ideologue squashing free speech rights”, I think you can expect in short order that most of the people willing to be RAs will be either ideologically rigid one-note libertarians or ideologically rigid one-note identity-politics advocates. Everyone else will quite understandably bury their noses in their textbooks and stick their fingers in their ears. Same for faculty.

So the answer to your questions in part is, “Lower the perceived stakes, dampen the temperature, choose your battles, get a sense of proportion”. Those are all tools that help a person who is feeling uncomfortable about an extreme point of view express that discomfort. I’m not being calm because I’m a calm kind of guy. I’m being that way because it’s the right thing to do in getting us to a better collective situation. There’s only so long that you can tell me that it’s the right thing to do and then turn around and tell me that it’s not the right thing to do before I ignore the former sentiment.

The problem is: how to oppose such things in public, when to object publicly to this, say, Delaware program would have taken much courage, because your objection would almost certainly have led to immediate accusations against you, the vulnerable RA, that you were (somehow) a racist? Don’t think that wouldn’t have been pulled.

Your solution is good in principle, Tim, but now we need ideas to implement it specifically– because the ideologues have already come up with specific ideas to implement *their* programs, have they not? The U of Delaware 1984 Program is one, the William and Mary anonymous denunciation program is another. (Do you still really think these are just scattered haphazard incidents with no broader significance?)

As it is, we are a situation with regard to U of Delaware–we need stronger tools–which is similar to the situation we have with the new AAUP, which now decrees that a professor who “passionately” advocates one position and only one position is *not* engaging in indoctrination so long as *theoretically* an undergraduate student can do all the research to challenge the professor and *theoretically* that student can then have the courage to make the challenge in public, before the class, to a person who will be grading him. Sure. But just how do you empower that undergraduate? How do you empower the RA at Delaware to protest?

(More importantly–*How* do you stop administrations with coming up with this sort of thing and *enforcing* it with all the power of the institution, as happened at Delaware? This is the real problem.)

Supporting FIRE is one answer, I suppose. But FIRE puts out anti-freedom fires that have already started. I’m pointing to an entire academic culture that believes that these programs are *good*. How do you oppose *that*, when as soon as you do you’ll get called (e.g.) a yahoo, a racist, an Islamophobe, or a “Horowitz”?

I hope Margaret Soltan is right, that most faculty are really opposed to such programs. But at the moment the best situation I myself see is something that you’ve indicated a couple of times– that lots of people are principally concerned merely with their own scholarly work (i.e., rather than being in favor or opposed). In addition, such people *fear* open opposition because of the ruthless tactics of personal attack that will be used against them if they *do* openly oppose something. Look what happened to that chem prof Baldwin at Duke when he opposed the 88–HE got called a racist, in the student newspaper, by the Chair of Women’s Studies! Would *you* want to risk this? (I wouldn’t.) This is not a good situation.

Previously, Tim, you’ve indicated that while no, this not good, it’s not a huge problem in academia. Surely the U of Delaware case, the William and Mary Case, the new AAUP guidelines–these should make you sit up and take notice. There’s a pattern here, and it’s not a nice one.

Again, I appreciate your calm and irenic style. This is the tone to take. But the question is: how many more incidents like this will it take before you agree that this is really quite a serious thing that’s going on?

Remember when you jeered at the prevention of Larry Summers from speaking at UC Davis as a “head-slapper”? Good, yes–but it’s also more than an amusing ‘head-slapper”. There’s a quite real *pattern* here. Or so it seems to me.

Tim, you offer a hypothetical reconstruction about how this program got started–maybe some simple-minded student activists pushed it, maybe it was that plus an administrator or two who can only think in dogma. Maybe–and this would be bad enough. But we just don’t know, do we? And wherever it came from, President Hacker (can that really be his name??) signed off on this program, and thus *put the full power of the institution behind it.* THAT is the rub. The *power* and its use. You cannot minimize this.

And that attitude of the President and his honchos, whoever it was who invented, developed and then *enforced* this program, didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of an ideological mindse. If you read the Diversity Facilitating Program was it was taught inon August, 2007 (have they taken it down from the University website yet?), you will see that it is the mindset of the Duke 88. Only at Delaware that mindset was going to be (to repeat) *enforced.”

If Hacker didn’t agree with it, why did he sign off on it? If he was too confused to know what this program meant, then he is an incompetent, and that raises questions too. But even so, the program itself originated with people in the university powerful enough to get this onto the President’s desk and for him to sign off on it. Didn’t anyone consult the university lawyers? If not, why not? If the lawyers were consulted, had they never heard of Barnette v. West Virginia? It is legitimate to ask all these questions about how this came about. Somewhere there was someone institutionally powerful and determined enough to get this program up and running at full blast.

You want to make this program mostly an accidental coming together of eccentric events–or of eccentrics. Maybe. But this program does not stand alone. Look at the anonymous denunciation program established by last month by the President of William and Mary! You may say that these are simply isolated incidents, but it is very easy to see them as part of a pattern.

But in academia, anyone who points out that such a program could *not* have emerged suddenly out of nowhere, that there is an entire culture out of which this comes–you know as well as I do that such a person will be crucified as a yahoo, or even (gasp!) a Horowitzian. ( In the face of programs such as this, enforced with great institutional power, it is hard to argue that Horowitz is following paranoid fantasies, Tim.)

I want to emphasize that this isn’t a matter of a single one-off crazy class, Tim. This is a large-scale University-backed program. BUT… anyone who says we want to find out exactly how it came about will be accused of McCarthyism.

Tim, I honor your eirenic impulses, you are more modulated than me. And you’re on the right side of this, as you are on the right side of many things. But… I think your instinct is to minimize this program, its scale, and its intended impact, to dismiss it as just another academic stupidity. Yet look at the scale of it: ALL RA’s had to drink the koolaid; it was part of the required RA training program. Isn’t that bad enough? But it didn’t stop with one drink: RA’s were then required to *dispense* the Koolaid. These RA’s were under such pressure to bring the freshmen for whom they were responsible into the program that (from eyewitness testimony) innocent freshmen were told in no uncertain terms by RA’s that the program was indeed mandatory if they wanted to live in the dorms.

A final point. I urged Insidehighered.com to do a detailed story on this scandal. They have refused. Why? Can they really think this is less important than the stories they have run in the last three days , on (for instance) peer-to-peer file sharing? They thus leave the University of Delaware scandal to the bloggers. And then they complain that academia is slandered.

Which is exactly, in my opinion, why conservative critics aren’t engaging with the ideas and the scholarship, but are instead using hackery to tarbrush any scholarship with political or even topical sympathies to said hackery: because the subjects themselves make them uncomfortable. Honestly, anyone who dismisses Roediger’s work as piffle, I’m going to assume either hasn’t read it or is made so uncomfortable by discussions of race that they insist on doing the equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting “Lalalalala.”

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