For decades now, we’ve been force-fed the dogma that American higher-education is the epitome of “woke”–a fully-owned subsidiary of “the Left.” I spent three years working for the National Association of Scholars, an outfit dedicated to manufacturing and marketing propaganda of this kind. I spent twenty-six years in higher education, teaching at a dozen institutions on two continents. I happen to live in a college town, Princeton, have lived here for fifteen years, am walking distance from Princeton University, and spend time on campus just about every day. I happen to work near another college town, New Brunswick, home to Rutgers University, and spend time on campus there about once a week. And I have friends and colleagues in higher education across the United States and Canada. So I’m no stranger to higher education or to controversies about it.
Continue readingCategory Archives: moralism
Notes on Lolita (1)
I’ve been re-reading Nabokov’s Lolita in preparation for a “class” I’m “teaching” on it–more precisely, a seminar I’m leading on it –this October, so you’re periodically going to see some posts here on Lolita amidst the usual cheerful fare on war, ethnic cleansing, and mass deportation. It’s tempting to think that as a “book on pedophilia,” Lolita is continuous with all that, but it is and isn’t. It’s a book about pedophilia, and it isn’t. It serves as a depiction of naked evil (so to speak), and it doesn’t. It’s hard to capture what it is and does except by experiencing it.
Continue readingWho Kidnapped Najam Sethi? And Who Didn’t?
Originally published at the History News Network, March 15, 2004.
The letters section of The New York Review of Books for February 12, 2004 contains a heated exchange between Bernard-Henry Levy, author of Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (2003) and William Dalrymple, who reviewed Levy’s book in the December 4 issue of the NYRB (“Murder in Karachi”). As it happens, I have a document that settles a contentious issue between them. I reproduce it below.
Continue readingBlack Plagiarism Matters
One of the biggest higher ed stories out there right now is the Jason Arday plagiarism case. The New York Times has run two articles on it in the last two days, the Guardian is running with it, the Times of London is pushing it, and then there’s Tech Times, Times Higher Education, The Telegraph and the BBC. From a more ideologically astringent angle, there’s Bari Weiss’s ever-impartial Free Press, some sermonizing at The Wall Street Journal, and some tooth-gnashing at Daily Caller. Obviously, you can count on the white nationalists to have weighed in. This is their chance to shine.
Continue reading“Iran’s Fractured Leadership”
I wrote the post below the line back in April, but got pulled into other things, and never posted it. But I feel pretty vindicated: since late March, the Times’s narrative has turned 180 degrees. In March, they were quoting officials quite sure that Iran’s leadership was too “fractured” to act in a unified way. By July 29, the narrative became: “Trump Encounters a More Determined Iran as War Widens.” By August 1, it was: “In Iran, the U.S. Appears Headed for Strategic Defeat, Allies Fear.”
Good call, NYT, but how the fuck did that happen? How did Iran go from being all fractured and confused to achieving victory over the supposedly unified and all-powerful United States in four months? One possibility is that though “fractured,” Iran had the capacity to heal its “fractures” pretty fast. The other is that Iran was never all that fractured in the first place. In the first case, we’ve gotten no account from the Times of the transition from the one thing to the other; in the other, we’ve gotten no acknowledgement of its false assessment of Iranian dysfunction. Either way, the question arises: how much do these journalistic “experts” really know, anyway? To the extent that they know anything, how much of their knowledge is ultimately neutralized by the desire to generate nationalist propaganda? Continue reading
The Wokeness Threat is a Right-Wing Scam
I did my annual DEI certification at work the other day. It’s the same one I’ve done here since 2022. The training video is produced by a company called KnowBe4, which specializes in workplace risk reduction: “15+ years of behavior data, 70,000 global customers, 12-in-production security awareness agents…1 of 3 full time US workers has been trained by us.” Not a fly-by-night operation, and not unrepresentative of corporate DEI training. Just the reverse. The norm.
The training took all of 15 minutes. What did I learn? Six woke lessons.
Continue readingHolly Schepisi “Responds”
And so do I
Here at long last is Senator Holly Schepisi’s “response” to my earlier post critiquing her claims about the New Jersey Department of Health’s May 28 inspection of Delaney Hall:
Yeah. That’s really fucking stupid.
Continue readingJ’Accuse
Bret Stephens vs. Graham Platner
Graham Platner just won the Maine Democratic primary. I’m glad. To be honest, I can’t say that I was all that invested in Platner’s candidacy. I only really took notice of it a few days ago, and only because it belatedly occurred to me that Platner’s popularity is a slap in the face to centrist liberals, something I greatly enjoy. So I’m feeling good about their misery today.
Ian Austin, Outside Agitator
Scenes from Delaney Hall (4)
Just a postscript to my June 3 post, “Nowhere to Hide,” featuring Ian Austin. I heard last night through the activist grapevine that Austin had been arrested. The arrest is obviously a case of targeting one of the most charismatic ground-level leaders of the migrant defense movement. He’s repeatedly been arrested in just this way across the country, most often to have the charges dropped. The point is not to sustain the charges in court but to intimidate and harass him with the intention of undermining the migrant defense movement.
Tomasi and Flier on “Commencement Neutrality”
I recently attended a webinar on “commencement neutrality” sponsored by Heterodox Academy. In it, the presenters, John Tomasi and Jeffrey Flier, argue that
Students receiving diplomas while a speaker condemns their political values, whether progressive or conservative, are justified in objecting.
The graduation stage is not an op-ed page, a political blog, or a partisan rally, though some wish to make it one.
This claim extends the idea of “institutional neutrality” to commencement speeches, and is elaborated at further length in Flier and Tomasi’s recent Boston Globe piece, “Keep Politics Out of Commencement Speeches” (May 14, paywalled). The basic argument is that commencement speeches have a ceremonial or celebratory function which is incompatible with the discomfort provoked by sharp political commentary.
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Policy of Truth 