Tag: education

Violent anti-speech SJWs attack Charles Murray and Middlebury College professor:

Middlebury College Professor Allison Stanger was injured by protesters Thursday evening as she was escorting a controversial speaker from campus. She was treated at Porter Hospital and released.

Charles Murray, a political scientist who has been criticized for his views on race and intelligence, was invited to speak on campus by a student group. He was greeted late Thursday afternoon outside McCullough Student Center by hundreds of protesters, and inside Wilson Hall, students turned their backs to him when he got up to speak.

College officials led Murray to another location and a closed circuit broadcast showed him being interviewed by Stanger, the Russell J. Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics.

As Stanger, Murray and a college administrator left McCullough Student Center last evening following the event, they were “physically and violently confronted by a group of protestors,” according to Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing

Burger said college public safety officers managed to get Stanger and Murray into the administrator’s car.

“The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and try to prevent it from leaving campus,” he said. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus.

This almost makes me want to do a college speech tour, accompanied by dozens of armed, trained VFM. The Right needs to stop playing victim and start imposing its will. Remember, if they’re not calling you Hitler, you’re not even trying.

Milo ends his campus tour with a bang:

Protesters armed with bricks and fireworks mounted an assault on the building hosting a speech by polarizing Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos Wednesday night, forcing the event’s cancellation.

Several injuries have been reported and at least four banks have been vandalized after demonstrators marched away from the scene of a violent protest at the canceled speaking event by controversial far-right writer and speaker Yiannopoulos on the University of California at Berkeley campus.

UC Berkeley officials said the protest was infiltrated by vandals.

Yiannopoulos was making the last stop of a tour aimed at defying what he calls an epidemic of political correctness on college campuses.

With masked activists joining the already large group of protesters gathered in the area between Sather Gate and the north end of Telegraph Avenue as night fell, campus police were holding their positions near the entrance of the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building hosting the event.

As the gathered crowd got more agitated, masked “black bloc” activists began hurling projectiles including bricks, lit fireworks and rocks at the building and police.

Some used police barriers as battering rams to attack the doors of the venue, breaching at least one of the doors and entering the venue on the first floor.

In addition to fireworks being thrown up onto the second-floor balcony, fires were lit outside the venue, including one that engulfed a gas-powered portable floodlight.

The area on Upper Sproul Plaza grew thick with smoke, and later tear gas, as the protest intensified.

At about 6:20 p.m., UC campus police announced that the event had been cancelled. Officers ordered the crowd to disperse, calling it an unlawful assembly.

Being fully converged, they are no longer fit for their original purpose of educating the sons of the elite.

The prestigious University of Oxford wants students to replace “she” and “he” with the more gender-neutral pronoun “ze.”

The university’s behavior code states that using the wrong pronoun for a transgender person is considered an offense, and a new leaflet distributed by the student union supposedly aims to cut down on hurt feelings and discrimination by encouraging students to use “ze” instead, the Independent reports.oxford

British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell applauded the move.

“It is a positive thing to not always emphasize gender divisions and barriers,” he told the Daily Mail.

“It is good to have gender-neutral pronouns for those who want them but it shouldn’t be compulsory,” Tatchell said. “This issue isn’t about being politically correct or censoring anyone. It’s about acknowledging the fact of changing gender identities and respecting people’s right to not define themselves as male or female.”

“Giving people the ‘ze’ option is a thoughtful, considerate move,” he said.

The change suggested by the Oxford’s student union follows a trend of schools moving toward more “gender inclusive” language to describe students who don’t want to be labeled male or female.

The University of Tennessee’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion issued a list of suggested gender-neutral pronouns for students that included “ze,” as well as other terms like “xe,” “hir,” “zir,” “xem,” and “wyr” to identify transgender students that created a public firestorm, The Tennessean reports.

Officials later removed the guidance from the university’s website amid the backlash, according to EAGnews.

In England, Cambridge University is also moving toward more “inclusive” language, and student welfare officer Sophie Buck told The Sunday Times student union events there “start with a speaker introducing themselves using a gender neutral pronoun.

“It’s part of a drive to make the union intersectional,” she said.

Remember, this is all entirely predictable. It is the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence on display: No institution can effectively serve two different functions. The more an institution converges towards the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice, the less it is able to perform its primary function.

From SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police:


The public schools can no longer educate, so people are turning to homeschooling. The universities can no longer provide liberal arts educations, so people are becoming technology-assisted autodidacts. The banks no longer loan, the state and local governments no longer provide basic public services, the military does not defend the borders, the newspapers no longer provide news, the television networks no longer entertain, and the corporations are increasingly unable to provide employment.


Even as the institutions have been invaded and coopted in the interests of social justice, they have been rendered unable to fulfill their primary functions. This is the great internal contradiction that the SJWs will never be able to positively resolve, just as the Soviet communists were never able to resolve the contradiction of socialist calculation that brought down their economy and their empire 69 years after Ludwig von Mises first pointed it out. One might call it the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence; no man can serve two masters and no institution can effectively serve two different functions. The more an institution converges towards the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice, the less it is able to perform its primary function.


There is no point trying to debate about what the purpose of a university is any longer. The public should stop funding them, their assets should be seized and distributed to the public, and new institutions will rise up to take their place. Nothing of value will be lost in the process, because they’re already not educating anyone anyhow.

It’s fascinating to see how quickly allowing women to attend the elite universities destroyed an institution that was centuries old. One would think someone, somewhere, would eventually notice that the same pattern is playing out again, and again, and again in a wide variety of institutions, from the men’s clubs to the churches.

CORRECTION: Apparently the situation at Oxford is not QUITE as bad as the article makes it look. It’s only the Oxford Student Union that has adopted this policy, not the entire university. So, it’s about 3-5 years less converged than the article describes it.

Jonathan Haidt argues that universities face a choice:

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos” – its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a kife is to cut. The telos of a physician is health or healing. What is the telos of university?
The harvardmost obvious answer is “truth” –- the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict?

As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.

Now that many university presidents have agreed to implement many of the demands, I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable.  Universities will have to choose, and be explicit about their choice, so that potential students and faculty recruits can make an informed choice. Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.

But they don’t, really. The universities are, by and large, going to have to choose social justice. Truth will never serve any institution that depends upon a partnership with government and the banks to prey upon unsuspecting young people in order to mortgage their futures.