When paradise isn't paradise anymore

This essay is a little dated, but for some reason, it has received some attention in December. Have you ever been to Coronado Island? It really can be close to paradise there. Too bad that support for freedom of speech is waning at the University of San Diego School of Law:

I fell in love with the place my first week there. I was a Visiting Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, taking a sabbatical from my home institution, the University of Queensland in Australia. That was back in January of 2013. My wife and I were to spend the first half of that year in San Diego and then, as we are both native-born Canadians, I had a second sabbatical post lined up at a university in Toronto. Of course, I knew back then that USD had some of America's best-known scholars of the theory of constitutional interpretation known as "originalism." I'd been invited to a few of their conferences already, and I had met Professors Larry Alexander, Maimon Schwarzschild, and Steven Smith at symposia and conferences in Australia.

It wasn't just the fact we walked out our door and ten seconds later were walking or jogging on one of the best beaches in America. Nor was it that an old-fashioned, single-speed granny bike, basket and all, could get you anywhere you wanted on Coronado. . .

All those factors were just icing on the cake, however. What really made my sabbatical visit were the academics at the USD law school. They were smart and nice, and very hospitable. Perhaps that is not all that unusual at any law school, but what I had not really expected was the wide range of views I found across the faculty. Say this sotto voce, and outside the earshot of any present-day university administrator, but the USD law school even had a critical mass of what you might classify as "conservative legal thinkers." As someone who had done his law degree in Canada, a Masters at the LSE in London, has taught around the anglosphere, and has seen first-hand the collapse of viewpoint diversity on campuses around the anglosphere, this was wholly unforeseen. In fact, with about a quarter of the then USD law faculty being right-of-centre types in all their various manifestations, I soon learned that the 2013 USD was probably the most conservative law school in the US (with the possible exception of George Mason, though there the iconoclasts are mostly libertarians). But everyone seemed to get along. Each Friday there was a staff seminar, and these crossed the gamut of topics and viewpoints and were excellent.

A quarter of the faculty were right-of-center??? Unheard of!

Things were changing by his second sabbatical in 2019.

When I got there, I learned that what you might describe as the conservative wing of the law school was now largely being kept off key law school committees, most importantly the hiring committee. For me, the 2019 sabbatical was as excellent as the one six years before. But I sensed this island of comparative tolerance for iconoclastic, nonconformist, dissident--save time and call it "conservative"--viewpoints had noticeably shrunk. And if future hires were to be judged through the prism of "diversity and inclusion" and not on straight-up merit, well, you could guess how many conservatives would be hired. The USD law school would slowly become like all the other 200-odd accredited US law schools where Democrat-donating and voting law profs outnumber Republicans by double figures to one. This little sanctuary of open-mindedness would wither and die.

2022:

A few weeks ago, I learned that some of the stalwarts of the USD law school, well-known and long-standing professors of law who certainly could not be described as "progressives," had all put in their notice to take up the three-year retirement option. USD was losing Larry Alexander. Losing Steve Smith. Losing former dean Kevin Cole. Losing Gail Heriot. All of them had endured enough. Yes, there are some nonconformists still there who haven't announced their take-up of the retirement pathway, and will battle on. But we can't kid ourselves. As that unexpected sanctuary for dissident conservative outlooks, USD was in its death throes.

Hiring was now to be done explicitly with an eye to "diversity" (though of course, not the sort that has anything to do with outlook). In the not-too-distant future, this small private law school will be much of a muchness with other like law schools. . . . The capture of law schools by one dominant outlook rolls on to the peripheral outliers, to that wonderful USD law school that gave me two magnificent sabbaticals. And I cannot tell readers how sad this all makes me. I thought of Shakespeare and Much Ado About Nothing.

That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost,
Why, then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
While it was ours.

As our own J.J. Sefton reminded us yesterday in detail, many of our political problems stem from our educational system.

The Woke Cult takes over psychology

Here's another leftist cult story, with some recommendations about how to fight back.

The psychologists are burning another witch. A mob of professors, graduate students, and miscellaneous luftmenschen denounced Klaus Fiedler, the editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, for "racism, general editorial incompetence, and abuse of power." The Board of Directors of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), craven accomplices to the mob, swiftly told Fiedler to resign or be fired. Fiedler resigned.

The occasion? In 2020, one Steven Roberts of Stanford University published the usual farrago of identity-politics activism that passes for professional research among the woke, copy-pasted to apply to psychology. Fiedler, naif, arranged to publish a professional discussion of his article--which, naturally, thoroughly but politely dismantled his argument. Roberts' solicited response included the slanderous accusation that respondent Lee Jussim's citation of a line from Fiddler on the Roof ("Of course, there was the time when he sold him a horse, but delivered a mule.") somehow invoked a long-forgotten derogatory comparison of blacks to mules.

(Gentle reader, is there one living American in a thousand who knows that this comparison ever existed?)

Fiedler, solicitous of Roberts' professional reputation, asked him to withdraw that particular ad hominem. Roberts responded by withdrawing his article and publishing it as an open-access pre-print, publicly denouncing Fiedler and all his critics as proof that "systemic racism exists in science," and sparking the social-media frenzy that led to Fiedler's forced resignation.

And that was not the only demand of the woke mob. Read the whole piece.

Lee Jussim, distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers University, has provided an extensive account of Roberts' writings and of this witch-hunt. More broadly, he has described the general behavior of the identity-politics mobs who seek to destroy psychology.

These mobs seek (in my language, not his) to destroy all the academic disciplines by staffing them with commissars and by forcing them to pursue such euphemistically defined goals as "social justice," "diversity, equity, and inclusion," and so-called "anti-racism." In other words, they seek to impose a radical-left-wing political agenda on every aspect of the university, and to suppress all professional and private expression to oppose, or even question, that agenda.

Jussim and his likeminded peers say, despairingly, that the woke subordination of psychology (and the other disciplines) will encourage all free and intelligent minds to exit the discipline--and will also encourage attempts by Americans outside the academy to defund psychology as politicized nonsense.

The statements above should encourage action. Still, the following is pretty strong. Good.

American policymakers are fully justified in using the powers of the states and the federal government to restore the academy, and in defunding those sections of the academy that have succumbed completely to the woke. Gangrene requires surgery.

I do not wish to enter into the details of how psychology should conduct itself professionally, although I note that John Staddon has published a trenchant critique of psychology in the National Association of Scholars's (NAS) journal Academic Questions, which challenges psychological practice more fundamentally than does Roberts.

These mobs seek (in my language, not his) to destroy all the academic disciplines by staffing them with commissars and by forcing them to pursue such euphemistically defined goals as "social justice," "diversity, equity, and inclusion," and so-called "anti-racism." In other words, they seek to impose a radical-left-wing political agenda on every aspect of the university, and to suppress all professional and private expression to oppose, or even question, that agenda.

Jussim and his likeminded peers say, despairingly, that the woke subordination of psychology (and the other disciplines) will encourage all free and intelligent minds to exit the discipline--and will also encourage attempts by Americans outside the academy to defund psychology as politicized nonsense.

WOW. Are The Woke ready to have psychology defunded?

Jussim and Maranto on the same topic at Real Clear Education. How Woke Critical Theory is Destroying Science

A few comments on Twitter, Trump and Free Speech

As Ace noted yesterday, Part VI of the Twitter Files dropped on Friday Evening again, "So... the media has an easier time ignoring it -- bury news you don't want covered with a Friday evening dump -- and the only people who care about it, conservatives, have to blog about it Friday night."

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, but a Fresno radio station has a podcast up of an interview with Devin Nunes. I feel kind of bad for Nunes. His interviewer starts out by asking him about the Trump trading cards. Not Nunes' thing. Surprise!

Nunes doesn't know if Trump will go back on Twitter, but he doesn't think so. He and Trump support Twitter's moves toward free speech (starting at about 7 minutes into the podcast), but he seems to think that Musk is somewhat unpredictable.

They spend some time talking about TikTok. Worse than the other social media outfits.

This is Bari Weiss with her Thursday story about the Twitter files, on her new platform. She seems to be trying to make it clear that she is not just working for the richest man in the world.

More journalists were invited in by Musk than I knew about at first.

In the days that followed, we--the journalist Matt Taibbi; investigative reporters connected to The Free Press, including Abigail Shrier, Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse; plus Free Press reporters Suzy Weiss, Peter Savodnik, Olivia Reingold, and Isaac Grafstein--camped out in a windowless, fluorescent-lit room at Twitter headquarters and began looking through the company's vast archive of internal communications.

I've seen a piece by Shellenberger on cancelling Trump and by Shrier on real-time doxxing:

"What's the worst thing the activists ever did to you?" The question I've been asked most often is also the one I never answer. Because isn't it obvious? It's the times they managed to reach my children.

Musk is a strange man. A consummate jokester and an undeniable genius. He bought a company for which, by his own estimation, he paid three times what it was worth. "At least," he said, when I and Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss asked him about this.

"I thought this was important to the future of civilization," he said. "I told investors that too.... And I thought this was important to the future of civilization to have a digital Town Square that people thought was fair and a level playing field and that, I don't know, pro civilization essentially." He told us he bought Twitter to protect the "expansion of consciousness."

Music

Caroling is not Southern. In fact, it may get you killed down here.

Don't misunderstand. We love our neighbors, but it never dawns on most folks around here to just show up at someone's front door unannounced and start crooning about lowing cattle or old king whathisface. pic.twitter.com/39LNMl7MLp

— Canon Theologian of the Bible Belt ⚓️ (@NoJesuitTricks) December 13, 2022

Do you have a favorite carol for caroling? With due precautions if you live in the South?

"Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years."

William F. Buckley Jr.

Ludwig van Beethoven born 16th December 1770 pic.twitter.com/YuwukK7LJr

— Mark W. (@DurhamWASP) December 16, 2022

Well, the 16th or 17th, as far as we know.

pic.twitter.com/PTFQ573G4E

— Radieschen 🍻 Radish (@radishthegreat) December 16, 2022

Ode to Joy

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, December Rodeo: Rodeos, identity politics, the NYT strike, magnets and the brain, education vs. think tanks and more.

Update: Remember the Obama Rodeo Clown double standard?

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 11:18 AM

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