Weekly Roundup
Reading List
Reclaiming Civil Discourse
For FAIR’s Substack, Executive Director Monica Harris writes about addressing the rise of antisemitism on college campuses.
As citizens in a free society, we should—and we must—advocate for truth and social justice. But we must also demand that those educating our children encourage them to advocate in a manner that is respectful and consistent with the Constitutional principles. We must insist that institutions of higher learning, especially elite campuses that groom our future leaders, adhere to their commitments to serve as bastions of balanced and open discourse, not battlegrounds where students fear for their intellectual and physical safety. It is imperative that they reaffirm their understanding of, and commitment to, free speech by distinguishing between peaceful, nonviolent protest and dangerous and violent acts. They must also strictly enforce penalties against those who choose violence as a means of expression.
Investigating the Academy
For Quillette, FAIR Advisor Jonathan Kay writes about a recent speech to University of Toronto scholars, in which a Quillette editor explained why many of his fellow journalists are reluctant to report on administrative scandals at Canadian universities.
And this is one of the main reasons why it’s now more difficult to get reporters to cover stories that don’t align with fashionable ideological postures: Even smart, fair-minded journalists who want to pursue these stories fear that doing so will open them up to accusations that they are political heretics, or, more ominously, that they are “on the wrong side of history.”
Now, when I discuss this kind of issue on social media, as I am sometimes wont to do, I often hear from conservatives who will insist that the solution to this is simply for young journalists to exhibit more “courage.” But life isn’t that simple. We’re not characters in an Ayn Rand novel. Humans are social creatures who crave the approval of their peers. And so I can understand why young journalists self-censor.
DEI Was Supposed to Help People Like Me. It Didn’t
For Quillette, Raquel Rosario Sánchez writes about her experiences with DEI.
It bothers me that well-meaning progressive organisations have become toxic political clubs, whose leaders exploit their authority to badger employees into ideological obedience. In my case, it turned out that I was just a Caribbean face—one that the organisation tokenised, humiliated, and finally discarded when I was at my most physically vulnerable. I won’t get into the tawdry details of how I was ultimately hounded out of my job. I will simply say that I was heartbroken that I never even got to say goodbye to the women I was supporting—women who’d just lost a dedicated front-line worker who deeply cared about them.
To Live and Write in LA
For her Substack, Faction, Fellow Kimi Katiti writes about a recent writer meetup she hosted in LA with editor of Free Black Thought Jake Mackey.
But what I loved most was that despite the diversity of backgrounds, convictions and focus of craft, we simply enjoyed an evening of being people—humans committed to the city of stories. Humans with common pains and joys. Humans who fought past the sprawl of hills and valleys to build IRL community in cutthroat Cali.
The Unreality of Columbia’s ‘Liberated Zone’
For The Atlantic, Michael Powell writes about what happens when genuine sympathy for civilian suffering mixes with a fervor that borders on the oppressive.
This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Late Sunday night, I saw two cars circling on Amsterdam as the men inside rolled down their windows and shouted “Yahud, Yahud”—Arabic for “Jew, Jew”—“fuck you!
Why an Ontario chief librarian was fired for her thought crimes
For The Hub, Mathew Giagnorio writes about how attempts to ban and censor have become mainstream.
What I find most amusing is that instead of responding to Simpson’s article and presenting arguments, he instead chose to smear her. He actually proved her points by claiming in fact that her balanced views proposing library neutrality and the freedom to read, and her association with the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), are horrid “far-right” American talking points.
Now, when you think of far-right folks, do you think about people like Shadi Hamid, a respected professor of Islamic studies and Washington Post columnist? How about respected New York University psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt? What about Daryl Davis who is a musician, author, actor, and lecturer noted for “having interviewed hundreds of KKK members and other white supremacists and influencing many of them to renounce their racist ideology”? Davis is a Black man, by the way.
Biden’s Civil Rights Rollback
For The Free Press, KC Johnson writes about Biden’s Title IX rollback.
Justin Dillon, a D.C. attorney who has represented accused students for a decade, says of the rollback, “You arrive at truth by asking hard questions. But single investigators have no incentive to do that, which is why they are the worst possible model if you want to get to the truth. This is going to lead to more erroneous outcomes, and more lawsuits.”
The new rules damage due process in more ways than one:
Accused students will lose the right to have access to all evidence gathered in the university’s Title IX investigation;
They will lose the right to have a live hearing to adjudicate the claim against them;
They will no longer be able to have an adviser or attorney cross-examine adverse witnesses;
And the Biden administration has voided the basic requirement that any investigation open with a written complaint.
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