Maverick Philosopher

Abdication of Authority?

Or something worse?

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Abdication of Authority

Time was, when university faculty and administrators stood in loco parentis. Now their posture is supine while the students go loco.

Abdication of Authority by University Admins? Or Something Worse?

Just over the transom by someone  in the trenches of academe:

I wonder if it's true as you say that "the authorities abdicate." When I read things like this -- they seem to come up about once a week now, or once a day -- I don't think there are authorities just abdicating.  No, it looks much more like the authorities are fully on board with whatever new moronic and evil thing the leftists want to do.  They seem to be using their authority to legitimate and promote everything sick and evil, from transgenderist ideology to open violent hatred of white people.  They stop just short of explicitly saying that these things are true and mandatory, because (I assume) they want some veil of plausible deniability.  But I don't think they're abdicating anything.  I think the situation is even worse than you think it is.  If only they were just lazy or incompetent or weak. 

It may well be worse than I think it is. You are closer to the action than I am. 

First the word. Apart from monarchical applications, to abdicate is to fail to fulfill a responsibility or duty.  

My line has been the following. The  university administrators and faculty who tolerate the shouting down of conservative speakers, the rescinding of invitations to speak, attacks on people and property, and the rest of Antifa-type barbarism, are essentially cowards who love their high salaries, perquisites, and privileges. They are mostly unprincipled careerists who bend whichever way the wind blows. They are not, in the main, out to destroy the universities; they simply lack the courage to take a stand in defense of the traditional values of the university and accept the consequences of so doing. They fear being called 'racists' and the rest of the names.  They are squishy liberals who hope the storm passes leaving them well-ensconced in their capacious and well-appointed offices.  They understand that the Left eats its own and that if they make common cause with the destructive elements, they too may be destroyed in good old commie fashion.

To sum up your view: What is going on is not abdication of authority, but misuse of authority.  I am willing to change my view, but I will need some solid evidence. You need to name names. 

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Maverick Philosopher: Warning to University Admins: Abdication of Authority Carries a Cost

Warning to University Admins: Abdication of Authority Carries a Cost

The cardinal virtues are four: temperance, prudence, justice, and courage. Of the four, courage is the most difficult to exercise. So it is no surprise that cowardice is so widespread among university administrators. There is no coward like a university administrator, to cop a line from Dennis Prager.

But the cowardice that issues in abdication of authority and the refusal to stand up for the classical values of the university in the face of barbarians and know-nothings comes with a cost, literally.

The University of Missouri is one of many universities where the administrative pussy-wussies are feeling the pinch:

Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”

As classes begin this week, freshmen enrollment is down 35% since the protests, according to the latest numbers the university has publicly released. Mizzou is beginning the year with the smallest incoming class since 1999. Overall enrollment is down by more than 2,000 students, to 33,200. The campus has taken seven dormitories out of service.

The plummeting support has also cost jobs. In May, Mizzou announced it would lay off as many as 100 people and eliminate 300 more positions through retirement and attrition. Last year the university reduced its library staff and cut 50 cleaning and maintenance jobs.

Mizzou’s 2016 football season drew almost 13,000 fewer attendees than in 2015, local media reported. During basketball games, one-third of the seats in the Mizzou Arena sat empty.

[. . .]

This phenomenon isn’t limited to Mizzou. Private institutions like Yale and Middlebury aren’t covered by public-records laws, so they can conceal the backlash. But when public universities have released emails after giving in to campus radicals, they have consistently shown administrators face the same public outrage.

Virginia Tech received numerous phone calls and more than 100 angry emails last year after it disinvited Jason Riley, a columnist for this newspaper, from speaking on campus. “While we can respond to the people who write to us, we cannot dispel the negative impression created by the media against the president, the university, the dean and the college and the department,” one administrator woefully told his colleagues.

Virginia Tech administrators also noted that news of the debacle reached millions on Twitter, where the reactions were “overwhelmingly negative toward the university and higher education in general.” Once again, a frustrated public vowed to yank support.

Universities have consistently underestimated the power of a furious public. At the same time, they’ve overestimated the power of student activists, who have only as much influence as administrators give them. Far from avoiding controversy, administrators who respond to campus radicals with cowardice and capitulation should expect to pay a steep price for years.

WSJ's Jason Riley, mentioned above, is one seriously black dude.  But he wasn't prevented from speaking because of his race but because he refuses to toe the Party Line: he is a conservative black and therefore, to a leftist shithead, 'a traitor to his race.'

This shows that the overpaid administrative assholes at Mizzou and elsewhere have no clue as to the purposes of a university.  You can't reach them with reasons, but they are very sensitive to emolument.

Were university admins always cowards?  No!

See Three Profiles in Civil Courage Among University Administrators 

Heather Mac

Some Black Lives Don't Matter

Heather Mac Donald is a profile in civil courage in stark contrast to the cowardice of the university administrators who, in abdication of authority, allow leftist thugs to prevent her and other sensible people from speaking.  As I have lately observed, the university is pretty much dead, not everywhere of course, and naturally I except the STEM disciplines.

When the authorities will not maintain order, then eventually others will, and things can turn very ugly very quickly. 

Related: Civil Courage

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Were University Admins Always Cowards?

There is no coward like a university administrator, to cop a line from Dennis Prager.  That is not to say that there have never  been any who have demonstrated civil courage.  But we have to go back a long way to the late '60s and early '70s.

With apologies to that unrepentant commie Pete Seeger who wrote it and to all who have sung it:

Where have all the Silbers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the Silbers gone, long time ago
Where have all the Silbers gone, gone into abdication every one
When will they ever learn, when will they e-v-e-r learn?

See here for three profiles in civil courage among university administrators.

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Dennis Prager:

Ann Coulter was scheduled to speak this week at the University of California, Berkeley. Last week, the university announced it was canceling her speech, providing the usual excuse that it couldn't guarantee her safety, or others'. This excuse is as phony as it is cowardly. Berkeley and other universities know well that there is a way to ensure safety. They can do so in precisely the same way every other institution in a civilized society ensures citizens' safety: by calling in sufficient police to protect the innocent and arrest the violent. But college presidents don't do that sort of thing -- not at Berkeley, or Yale University, or Middlebury College, or just about anywhere else. They don't want to tick off their clients (students), their faculty, leftist activist groups or the liberal media.

That's right: arrest the violent. And if they resist arrest? Use the force necessary to subdue them. They will call you 'fascist.' But they will call you that anyway.  The epithet is without meaning as they use it. Above all, no hand wringing. After all, the miscreants are destructive, hate-America leftist thugs.

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Abdication of Authority in Academe

Heather MacDonald recounts her experiences at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California and at UCLA:

The Rose Institute for State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students to talk about my book, The War on Cops, on April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to “shut down” this “notorious white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald.”

Time was, when university faculty and administrators stood in loco parentis. Now their posture is supine while the students go loco.

Leftist Thuggery and Abdication of Authority

Leftists complain that President Trump is 'authoritarian.' But given the abdication of authority on the part of university administrators who refuse to stand up to leftist thugs and refuse to defend such ideals of the university as free speech and free inquiry, a little 'authoritarianism' looks to be exactly what is needed.  It is the surrender of the university admins to the know-nothing and 'transgressive' rabble that would justify Trump's withholding of federal funds from institutions such as Cal Berkeley and NYU.  In fact, that is exactly what he should do.

'Progressives' have an Orwellian understanding of tolerance.  There is nothing (classically) liberal about them.

Conservatives are the new liberals.

 

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Cultural Suicide

Yet another example.  (HT: Karl White) "University students demand philosophers such as Plato and Kant are removed from syllabus because they are white."  

The Telegraph title isn't even grammatical. The stupid demand is that these greats BE removed.  Has England declined so far that its journalists can no longer write or speak correct English and must take instruction from an American blogger?

Demands refer to future events.  I can demand that you leave my house, but I can't demand that you not have entered it, or that you are leaving it.  I could of course demand that you continue the process of removing your sorry ass from my premises, but that too is a future-oriented demand.

I demand that you are stopping to be a willfully stupid leftist and that you are removed from my presence!

UPDATE (1/10).  Horace Jeffery Hodges comments,

I think the statement is British English:

"University students demand philosophers such as Plato and Kant are removed from syllabus because they are white." 

American English  requires a subjunctive form:

I demand that they be removed . . . 

This is one of the things I dislike about British grammar.

 

I don't know.  I may be wrong, and Jeff may be right.  In any case, it makes no bloody sense to use the present tense to refer to a future event.  It is in the nature of a demand that it point us to the future for its satisfaction or the opposite. There is more to grammar than usage; there is also logic broadly construed.  But then I am something of a prescriptivist.  The distinction between singular and plural, for example, is logical and good grammar respects it.

 

Correct: A polite chess player thanks his opponent for the game, whether he wins or loses.

 

Incorrect: A polite chess player thanks their opponent for the game, whether they win or lose.

 

What about this: A polite chess player thanks her opponent for the game, whether she wins or loses.

 

I argued years ago that if 'his' can be correctly used gender-neutrally, then so can 'her.'  And this despite the fact that in 'standard English usage' (admittedly a tendentious phrase) 'his' but not 'her' can be so used.  Lydia McGrew got her knickers in a knot over this, thinking that I had succumbed to political correctness.  This goes to show that for some conservatives one can never be too conservative.  The least little concession to liberals shows that one has 'sold out.' 

 

But more important than quibbling over language is defeating the Left and the contemptible shitheads who would remove Plato and Kant from the curriculum.

 

What these cranially-feculent morons fail to grasp is that really to understand their own crack-brained POMO ideology, they would have to study Kant.  Kant's defensible constructivism was part of the set-up for their indefensible constructivism.  Besides, you need Kant to understand Hegel, and Hegel Marx, and Marx the Frankfurt School . . . .

The Higher Infantilization and Perpetual Childhood

I coined 'higher infantilization' recently to cover what is going on in so-called institutions of higher learning.  (The STEM disciplines excepted.) The New Criterion provides a good explanation of this infantilization which is also a feminization:

“Perpetual childhood.” Is there a better illustration of this enforced immaturity than the regime of “safe spaces,” “microaggressions,” and “trigger warnings” on campus? Increasingly, today’s students—and their tutelary overseers—are bred without intellectual or moral vertebrae. They exist in an amniotic fluid of shared prejudice that admits no challenging ideas from the world outside. The last few years have provided a series of high-profile and pathetic examples of what happens when these embryonic snowflakes collide with an opposing thought. Wailing. Protests. Excoriation. Disinvitation. Repudiation. The election of Donald Trump was the most serious violation of their safe space yet. There were no trigger warnings, for everyone they encountered assured them it was impossible. This was not a microaggression but a frontal assault. They responded accordingly, and with a unanimity that would make a murmuration of starlings seem haphazard.

Read it all, especially you girly girls, girly men, pajama boys, cry bullies and especially the lowest of the low, the cowardly and supine university administrators who by all appearances did their graduate studies in the  Department of the Abdication of Authority.

University administrators weren't always authority-abdicating cowards.  See Three Profiles in Civil Courage Among University Administrators 

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Abdication of Authority

It began in the universities in the '60s.  And now it is in full 'flower.'  I recall Dennis Prager putting it this way: "There is no coward like a university administrator."  Now hear David French:

Fortunately for the radicals, our universities are populated by the craven and the cowardly. Push a professor, even slightly, and it’s likely he’ll fold. Demand faculty support for your protest, and dozens will rush to join, self-righteously advancing their own false oppression narratives even as they enjoy lives billions of others would covet. There is nothing brave about these people. They are not “elite.” They don’t deserve a single dime of taxpayer money or one cent of student tuition. They dishonor their schools and their country.

Closeted campus conservatives are worse than useless. Indeed, their very timidity contributes to the narrative that there is something shameful about their beliefs. To read anonymous letters from professors who are afraid to “out” themselves in a hostile campus culture is to read the sad dispatches of people too pitiful for their profession. Do something else, anything else, than merely sit and watch while the revolutionaries shred the Constitution, reject our culture, and assert their own will to power.

The true shame is that it doesn’t even require actual courage to defeat the university Left, just a tiny bit of will — a small measure of staying power. No one is shooting at trustees. No one is beheading professors. There’s no guillotine in the quad. Instead, campus “leaders” tremble before hashtags and weep at the notion of losing a football team so inept that it couldn’t score a touchdown through most of the month of October. Let them strike. With an offense that inept, the SEC won’t even notice.

These are the times that try men’s souls? No. These are the times of men without chests. The Left has the will to power. University leaders have no will at all. They have earned nothing but contempt.

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DePaul University Bans "Unborn Lives Matter"

Here:

Reverend Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., the president of DePaul University, prevented a College Republicans poster bearing the phrase “Unborn Lives Matter” from being displayed on campus. According to Holtschneider’s open letter to the DePaul community, the poster constituted “bigotry . . . under the cover of free speech” that “provokes the Black Lives Matter movement.”

This Holtschneider (Woodcutter) must have sawdust for brains.  Where is the 'bigotry' in standing up for the rights of the unborn? How can a Catholic cleric who is the president of a Catholic university grovel in such sickening and supine fashion before the forces of political correctness?  

Black Lives Matter is an anti-law enforcement movement built primarily on well-known lies about the Trayvon Martin case and the Michael Brown case.  

Holtschneider is an all-too-common case of administrative cowardice and abdication of authority.  No sane person ought to be concerned about 'hurting the feelings' of the thugs of BLM by stating the obvious:  ALL lives matter, and therefore,

 

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Abdication of Authority

The refusal of Pope Francis properly to confront and condemn radical Islam is a case of abdication of authority.  While Christians are being slaughtered, and their holy sites pulverized, the foolish Francis commits the No True Muslim Fallacy.  The man is a clown:

We have too many clowns in high places: Bill Clinton, 'Bozo' de Blasio, Obama the POMO prez, 'Pope' Francis, and now the greatest show on earth, Trump the Clown.

What do they all lack?  Gravitas.

Do you think I am being unfair to Francis?  Then see here.

There is too much buffoonery in high places.

It would be nice to be able to expect from popes and presidents a bit of gravitas, a modicum of seriousness, when they are instantiating their institutional roles.  What they do after hours is not our business.  So Pope Francis' clowning around does not inspire respect, any more than President Clinton's answering the question about his underwear.  Remember that one?  Boxers or briefs?  He answered the question!  All he had to do was calmly state, without mounting a high horse, "That is not a question that one asks the president of the United States."   And now we have the Orwellian Prevaricator himself in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, whose latest Orwellian idiocy is that Big Government is the problem, not him, even though he is the poster boy, the standard bearer, like unto no one before him in U. S. history, of Big Government!

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Twilight Time for the Universities?

Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (Norton, 2000), p. 122:

Latin mottoes adorn the crests of many of these schools, boasting of "light" and "truth." [BV interjects: Harvard's crest shows Veritas] The reality, however, is something very different, as thousands of these institutions have literal or de facto open admissions policies in the name of "democracy." The democratization of desire means that virtually anyone can go to college, the purpose being to get a job; and in an educational world now subsumed under business values, students show up -- with administrative blessing -- believing that they are consumers who are buying a product. Within this context, a faculty member who actually attempts to enforce the tradition of the humanities as an uplifting and transformative experience, who challenges his charges to think hard about complex issues, will provoke negative evaluations and soon be told by the dean that he had better look elsewhere for a job. Objecting to a purely utilitarian dimension for education is regarded as quaint, and quickly labelled as "elitist" (horror of horrors!); but the truth is that there an be no genuine liberal education without such an objection.

I agree completely.

You may recall Obama opining that everyone should go to college.*  A preposterous notion.  It is a bit like maintaining that everyone should receive Navy SEAL training.  To profit from such training one must be SEAL 'material.'  It is the same, mutatis mutandis, with college: you must be 'college material.'  The very fact that that phrase is no longer heard speaks volumes.  I heard  my seventh grade teacher apply it to your humble correspondent, but that was in the early 'sixties.

So perhaps we can add to Berman's 'democratization of desire,' 'democratization of potentiality' as if we are all equal in our powers and capacities.

Student teaching evaluations contribute to the consumer mentality to which Berman refers.  Students ought to have a way to register legitimate complaints about faculty, but the use of teaching evaluations in tenure and promotion decisions and in the apportionment of merit pay leads to a further erosion of standards and to abdication of authority.

A confession.  On the eve of tenure, the semester before the decision, I was conducting  a seminar in the library while we were all seated at a big beautiful table.  I observed one of my students carving into its surface.  I said not a word: I needed strong teaching evaluations for my final academic hurdle. Succeed or fail -- for good.  It was a bad market.  Up or out.  I made it easily with a 9 to 3 vote.  But shame on me for not objecting to the defacement of common property.  A clear case of abdication of authority.

The irony is that, for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the increasing political correctness of the university, I resigned my tenured position seven years later.  Psychologically, there is of course a huge difference between being given the boot and leaving of one's own free will.

_________________

*Dennis Monokroussos supplies documentation.  Scroll down to the final three quotations from Obama.

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