09/19/2017
In my September 1st podcast I passed comment on the storm in an academic teacup generated by two law professors promoting bourgeois values in an August 9th Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed.Professor Amy Wax, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, has been the main target of hostile commentary. The other author of the op-ed, Prof. Lawrence Alexander of the University of San Diego, seems to be getting off lightly. Perhaps the west coast is still waiting for the Pony Express to deliver that August 9th edition of the Inquirer.It looks like the Pony Express finally arrived last week. Prof. Alexander is now undergoing a Two Minutes Hate over on the Left Coast. Heather Mac Donald told us the essentials in a Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday.
Ms. Wax’s co-author, Larry Alexander, teaches at the University of San Diego, a Catholic institution. USD seemed to be taking the piece in stride — until last week. The dean of USD’s law school, Stephen Ferruolo, issued a schoolwide memo repudiating Mr. Alexander’s article and pledging new measures to compensate “vulnerable, marginalized” students for the “racial discrimination and cultural subordination” they experience.Funny to recall that until very recently there’s been a general vague assumption — I confess I shared it — that the tech-y, math-y, imaginative, creative, businesslike inhabitants of that other coast were more open-minded, more tolerant of dissident opinions, than the thin-lipped witch-burning zealots and prune-faced old maids of the Puritan East.USD’s response is more significant than Penn’s, because it is more surprising. While USD has embraced a “social justice” mission in recent decades, the law school itself has been less politicized. It has one of the highest proportions of nonleftist professors in the country — about a quarter of the faculty. Mr. Ferruolo, a corporate lawyer with strong ties to the biotech industry, presented himself until recently as mildly conservative. If USD is willing to match Penn’s hysterical response to the Wax-Alexander op-ed, is there any educational institution remaining that will defend its faculty members against false accusations of racism should they dissent from orthodoxy? [Higher Ed’s Latest Taboo Is 'Bourgeois Norms' by Heather Mac Donald; Wall Street Journal, September 18th 2017]
The last justifications for that assumption fell away when Big Tech — Google, Twitter, PayPal, Amazon — came out as officially CultMarx last month.
The SJWs have taken California. Bring on Calexit!
(I note in passing that Ms. Mac Donald, now resident in New York City, was herself originally a California girl. Perhaps she could write a piece from that personal point of view, explaining to the rest of us how Robert A. Heinlein was shoved aside to make room for Cotton Mather.)
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