By Lance Welton
12/07/2019
I don’t often write about my personal feelings, but I can’t help but be amused by what has happened as a consequence of a November 2 piece I wrote for VDARE.com: Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably. A tweet quoting me by a dissident academic went viral, anti-science colleagues called for him to be fired for “sexism,” his employers declared his tweet (and thus my empirically accurate words) “vile;” when it was found that he couldn’t be fired due to his contract and that unhelpful thing known as the First Amendment, Woke female students and faculty responded with exactly the kind of female-typical behavior that is destroying academia, and the scandal was reported not merely in the Washington Post [University says a professor’s views are racist, sexist and homophobic — but it can’t fire him, ]] and on CNN, but on news sites worldwide, including Britain’s CultMarx newspaper The Guardian. [University decries professor’s 'vile' racism and sexism — but says it can’t fire him, November 22, 2019]
In my piece, which was cross-posted at The Unz Review, I drew on an article by columnist Christopher DeGroot and a video by Dr Edward “The Jolly Heretic” Dutton, both of whom argued, for different reasons, that females destroy academia.
DeGroot claimed that females become upset more easily, making it more difficult to engage in unemotional academic disputations, because their logic is more likely to be overwhelmed. Females are also more conformist than men, which militates against challenging received knowledge and thus discovering new things.
Dutton, in a video entitled "Do Female Academics Reduce Male Per Capita Genius?,” averred that the growing female influence on academia suppresses genius. He argued that you don’t get many female geniuses because geniuses combine outlier high IQ and a moderately anti-social personality. Geniuses are low in altruism, low in empathy (and thus coldly rational) and low in rule-following. Thus, they don’t care about causing offence, which original ideas always do. All these traits are less likely among females.
Dutton maintained that, as women take over universities, they make universities more female — more focused on rule-following, everyone getting along, and not causing offence. This drives geniuses out of universities, meaning females undermine a key element of universities: the unemotional pursuit of truth.
The Unz Review version of my article allowed comments and I couldn’t understand why so many people had commented on it: at the time writing there have been 442 comments, adding up to almost 60, 000 words. It turned out that, on November 8th, a link to the article had been tweeted by Indiana University’s Prof Eric Rasmusen, a professor of business studies, along with a key quotation from it:
Geniuses are overwhelmingly male because they combine outlier high IQ with moderately low Agreeableness and moderately low Conscientiousness.
Despite being retweeted a mere 55 times, Rasmussen’s tweet came to the attention of the Woke Mob because a pretty yet rather aggressive Indiana University student with a Twitter following of 435,000, Michaela Okland, tweeted negatively, about it on November 19th.
Man you guys know I hate leaving names in, but this can’t continue being a thing pic.twitter.com/T4hmcSIpfp
— SheRatesDogs (@SheRatesDogs) November 19, 2019
This amazingly vapid mauve-haired YouTuber, who admits that her ‘brain is very broken," also reported Rasmusen to the university authorities. Her tweet was liked 4,100 times and shared 30,500 times.
Attention was also drawn to earlier tweets of Rasmusen’s which weren’t entirely Woke.
The fact of Rasmusen’s Lance Welton quote tweet — a quote that, as I pointed out in my original article, is backed up by numerous scholarly papers — made the national news on November 22nd. This was because Indiana University’s provost — a somewhat less attractive female called Lauren Robel — had publicly condemned him on November 20th. She wrote, in a statement entitled “On the First Amendment":
Professor Eric Rasmusen has, for many years, used his private social media accounts to disseminate his racist, sexist, and homophobic views. When I label his views in this way, let me note that the labels are not a close call, nor do his posts require careful parsing to reach these conclusions. He has posted, among many other things, the following pernicious and false stereotypes:
- That he believes that women do not belong in the workplace, particularly not in academia, and that he believes most women would prefer to have a boss than be one; he has used slurs in his posts about women;
- That gay men should not be permitted in academia either, because he believes they are promiscuous and unable to avoid abusing students;
- That he believes that black students are generally unqualified for attendance at elite institutions, and are generally inferior academically to white students.
Ordinarily, I would not dignify these bigoted statements with repetition, but we need to confront exactly what we are dealing with in Professor Rasmusen’s posts. His expressed views are stunningly ignorant, more consistent with someone who lived in the 18th century than the 21st.
In this breathtakingly unprofessional and partisan statement, Robel also cast doubt on the genuineness of Rasmusen’s Christian faith:
Rhetorically speaking, Professor Rasmusen has demonstrated no difficulty in casting the first, or the lethal, stone.
But, she continued —
His latest posts slurring women were picked up by a person with a heavily followed Twitter account, and various officials at Indiana University have been inundated in the last few days with demands that he be fired. We cannot, nor would we, fire Professor Rasmusen for his posts as a private citizen, as vile and stupid as they are, because the First Amendment of the United States Constitution forbids us to do so. That is not a close call.
But she then declared that no student would be forced to take any of his classes from now on and a double-blind submission system would be introduced to ensure that Rasmusen couldn’t discriminate against females, gays or minorities in terms of grading papers.
Provost Robel concluded that:
I condemn, in the strongest terms, Professor Rasmusen’s views on race, gender, and sexuality, and I think others should condemn them. But my strong disagreement with his views — indeed, the fact that I find them loathsome — is not a reason for Indiana University to violate the Constitution of the United States.
This is a lesson, unfortunately, that all of us need to take seriously, even as we support our colleagues and classmates in their perfectly reasonable anger and disgust that someone who is a professor at an elite institution would hold, and publicly proclaim, views that our country, and our university, have long rejected as wrong and immoral.
Reading between the lines: “I’d love to fire him for his 18th century views but I can’t due to the First Amendment on free speech which was passed in … erm … the eighteenth century.”
Roblel was promptly criticized for not breaking the law in a letter to the editor of Indiana Daily Student.
The United States Constitution is a document created by men who believed they could force other people into a brutal system of slavery. It’s allowed for untold atrocities to be committed under the rule of law. The Constitution is the starting point of our government, not an immutable divine decree
[Response to Provost Lauren Robel, By Vauhxx Booker, [a local black politician]November 22, 2019].
Remarkably, Rasmusen struck back. He demanded that Robel be fired for professional misconduct [Fire Professor Eric Rasmusen? Or Fire Provost Lauren Robel Instead?, b Eric Rasmusen, Unz Review, November 25, 2019].
He also pointed out that Robel is openly left-wing and has promoted homosexuality in the Huffington Post [IU Pride: Launching a National LGBT Scholarship Campaign, by Lauren Robel, Huffington Post, September 17, 2013].
Additionally, Rasmusen was also condemned by Idie Kesner, the Dean of the Business school where he works.
Kesner claimed that my article “suggests women academics and most women students are harmful to the academy.”
I would say “most women academics” but I imagine Kesner was feeling triggered.
She declared such views “reprehensible” and “abhorrent.” She then summarized the usual “diversity is our strength” dogmas before claiming it was “hurtful” (emotion over logic again) “to see views expressed that are the antithesis of these.” She concluded:
Each of us brings a valuable aspect of diversity that gives our institution strength. I hope we can remember this when we are challenged by others whose minds are closed to this viewpoint.
[Female Indiana business students launch 'Female Genius' hoodie fundraiser for Girls Inc. after university failed to 'take action' against tenured professor’s ’sexist, racist and homophobic' views, by Matthew Wright, Mail Online, November 23, 2019]
Yes, even more amusingly, female business students at Indiana University had launched a fundraiser to produce hoodies emblazoned with the words “Female Genius” on the front and “Support Women in Academia” on the back. This predictably emotional and group solidarity-oriented reaction rather fails to grasp the fact that geniuses, by definition, are very rare, and certainly wouldn’t wear clothing advertising their genius, let alone as part of a hysterical emotional reaction.
In a tweet, reported in Mail Online, Indiana University’s "Women in Business" declared that "Women in Business would like to reject the notion that more females in higher education is a negative."
Apparently, you logically refute such a notion by a producing a hoodie with a cringe-worthy slogan on it.
It is hilarious that neither of these female senior academic bureaucrats, Robel or Kesner, can see that they embody why having too many women in academia is a problem.
Kesner, in particular, not only uses emotional language but actually implies that it a problem that people’s feelings have been hurt because their fervently-held ideas have been challenged. Yet challenging dogmas — and thus hurting feelings — is how you get to truth.
Also, her entire statement involves rallying a group together and proclaiming they’re all, somehow, equal in their contribution to academia: i.e. the female emphasis on empathy and getting along. But if the truth is the goal of academia, there must be a hierarchy, with those better able to reach the truth inherently being more “valuable” than women like Kesner who get overwhelmed by her and other’s totally irrelevant “feelings.”
Robel is similarly emotional rather than logical, using her statement to vent how she “feels."
The response to Prof Rasmusen’s tweeting of my article has done nothing more than prove the points made by Edward Dutton and Christopher DeGroot.
If universities are to remain centered around the pursuit of truth, then there need to be far fewer females involved in them.
Lance Welton is the pen name of a freelance journalist living in New York.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.