Tag Archives: academia

That Time a College President Got Something Right

Posted on by under Art/Literature, slices of life

I rarely have kind words for college administrators, much less college presidents, so when a kind word occurs to me, it probably makes sense to write it down before I forget it. And one just did.

I was in the public library this evening looking at the new releases, when I saw Salman Rushdie’s new-ish book, Knife, published in 2024, about the murder attempt on him at a talk he gave in Chautauqua, New York in 2022. The documentary film adaptation of the book, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, is coming out this month.

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Home Is Where the Bombs Are

Posted on by under activism, Human Shields, moralism, MTSP Discussion: Gerald Gaus's The Tyranny of the Ideal, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, pedagogy, Princeton University, War with Iran

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.

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Whose Whatabouting? Which Controversy?

Posted on by under Uncategorized

More on the Jason Arday Controversy
Whenever I discuss the Jason Arday case, I get accused of “whataboutism.” As I’ve argued at some length, I find this an unimpressive criticism, but there’s a simpler and more obvious way of putting things than I previously did. The fact is that there is no way to avoid whataboutism when discussing the Arday case, and no one is in fact avoiding it. The people accusing people like me of whataboutism are simply blind to their own engagement in it. The issue is not whether to engage in whataboutism, but which whataboutism to engage in. About what should we be whatabout-ing?

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“Whataboutism”

Posted on by under cancel culture

Further Reflections on the Jason Arday Case

My post on the Jason Arday controversy, “Black Plagiarism Matters,” has gotten more-than-usual traffic for posts at this blog, much of it via Roderick Long’s Facebook page (thanks, Roderick), where there’s an extensive discussion of the post, much of it admittedly point-missing and pointless. One common criticism I’ve gotten there is that my bringing up the Martin Stone case (as a contrast to the Jason Arday case) is an instance of “whataboutism.” Like so much Internet slang, “whataboutism” is a package deal concept.  One part of the package captures something real and significant; the other embodies a confusion.  A criticism involving an uninspected package deal ends up committing a fallacy of equivocation, which is my response to all of these criticisms. All of them commit a fallacy of equivocation.

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Aristotle vs. Institutional Neutrality

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Neutrality and Complicity, Princeton University

A bunch of us had a contentious discussion the other day about institutional neutrality, apropos of my then-upcoming talk about it at the Heterodox Academy conference. One topic that came up was how institutional neutrality relates to curricular decisions. Is there an institutionally neutral way of deciding, say, whether a given topic or discipline merits inclusion within the curriculum of a given institution of higher education? Or a neutral way of deciding whether a program, department, division, school, or university itself ought to set aside the resources to make something a formal subject of study? Since not everything can be studied, decisions have to be made about what gets included and what doesn’t. Can those decisions be made “neutrally”? Continue reading →

Black Plagiarism Matters

Posted on by under cancel culture, ethics, moralism

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.

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The Contradictions of Institutional Neutrality

Posted on by under activism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement

Coming Attractions in My Jihad Against Institutional Neutrality

Over the last year or so, I’ve written about two dozen posts here critiquing institutional neutrality, and given maybe a half dozen conference presentations on the subject. But in some ways, the criticisms I’ve made so far are peripheral to the fundamental problem with the doctrine. The fundamental problem is that it’s self-contradictory and self-subversive. This latter problem is so obvious, and so obviously fatal to the doctrine, that stating it threatens to trivialize the whole discussion about institutional neutrality: if the doctrine is self-contradictory, why discuss it? Good question. In any case, I might as well articulate the objection, if only to put it out there. Continue reading →

Institutional Neutrality: Another Day, Another Exception

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, moralism, Neutrality and Complicity

Institutional neutrality is the doctrine that institutions like universities should refrain from issuing public comment on matters of public controversy. As I’ve argued here at PoT (and elsewhere), one canonical exception to neutrality is institutional self-defense: a university is obliged to speak up when the university itself comes under attack. Predictably, we now have yet another exception to add to the list: the Charlie Kirk Exception. This exception asserts that when a famous right-wing loudmouth is shot on a university campus, all institutions hitherto bound by solemn pledges of institutional neutrality are obliged to carve out a special dispensation to condemn the act. Continue reading →