Thursday, March 1, 2018

Ex-Communist Professor Sues NYU




By Professor Doom

     Two essays ago I discussed a Leftist professor advocate of white genocide who implied the problem with our campuses is Leftism is being discouraged on our campuses, that voices like his are being silenced.

     Rubbish.

     My memory isn’t the best, but it sure seems like conservative faculty are the ones in the crosshairs, so I thought I’d poke around the net and see if maybe I could find a counterexample, showing that the previous guy was as wrong about Leftists being targeted as he is about genocide being an appropriate Christmas gift.

      Yeah, it took only a few seconds to find yet another example of the reality on campus today:

     I've seen this many times before: a professor dares speak out against the narrative, and then a dogpile of faculty and admin attack. These attacks drive the opposing point of view, far less offensive than genocide, from campus. And here we go again:





     Let’s talk about how this works. The ostracism is easy enough—you simply are made unwelcome at events. The harassment? It comes in many ways. You get called into semi-private meetings and grilled over piffling infractions that are normally ignored (a bogus student complaint, for example, where you have no idea who complained, and the complaint is ridiculous in any event). There are many rules, and you’d be surprised how easy it is to run afoul of…something. Perhaps you went to the bathroom during your office hours? That’s suddenly a problem. Or you responded too slowly to an e-mail. Or you weren’t “collegial,” whatever that word admin thinks it to mean.
     You might also get sent to mandatory re-education camp. Or perhaps you’ll simply be assigned to teach courses in a sub-field you’re known to dislike, or at a silly time, or in a classroom across campus (it could be over a mile walk from your office, since many of our campuses are so overbuilt).
     Maybe you’ll have burned out lightbulbs in your classroom, that never get replaced no matter how many times you politely request it done—yes the students will be paying the price here, but it’s really important to silence anyone questioning the narrative.
     The gentle reader should understand I used no imagination to compile the previous list; the above examples are just a smattering of things I’ve seen, and there are far more other ways to make life unpleasant for a scholar.

John Beckman, New York University’s chief spokesman, brusquely dismissed the allegations. “The suit is without merit,” Beckman stated.

           Well, that’s not surprising. Time and again when the university is challenged, they say something like the above. Sometimes they do win in court, but usually they lose. Most faculty are too impoverished to afford taking campuses to court.
     “The thing that is interesting here is that they were saying that because I don’t think like them, I am sick and mentally ill,” Rectenwald said. “So you have to be crazy to not believe what they do. Now, it may be true that you have to be crazy to say it, because look what happened!”

    The weaponisation of psychiatry was common in Stalin’s regime, and we certainly see it being used against Trump as well. It should be noted that the professor got red-pilled. He used to be a communist in his beliefs, but, being a scholar, he was capable of realizing what he saw on campus was just too much:

“In the fall of 2016,” the NYU professor recounted, “I was noting an increase of this social justice ideology on campuses, and it started to really alarm me. I saw it coming home to roost here at NYU, with the creation of the bias reporting hotline, and with the cancellation of the Milo Yiannopoulos talk because someone might walk past it and hear something which might ‘trigger’ them.”

Rectenwald stated that on Facebook, one former friend of his (a Marxist feminist) bragged that by the end of her course, “every student was now an avowed Marxist feminist.”

     Which should the reader be more worried about? The fact that there are classes on this campus so steeped in indoctrination that you can leave them believing in a hate-filled self-destructive ideology, or that daring to question whether it’s a good idea to have such courses on campus can get you fired?
       Believing the former to be the worst evil, the professor questioned his feminist friend:
“I was the only person that demurred,” he remarked of the post. “I said, ‘I have to beg to differ that this is the objective of any course.’ If you have a teleological model of pedagogy in which you are trying to steer students to a particular end, that is not teaching. That is actually indoctrination. You can do that if you have a political party, but this is absolutely not the role of education, at all. This is absolutely anti-education and anti-intellectual.”

     Note he was the only one to think there might be a problem with such a course, the other dozens of faculty were fine with indoctrination being substituted for education.
      In addition to asking questions, he dared spread news that others were starting to realize how ridiculous the Leftist narrative had become:
…he shared a news article on Facebook.

The article focused on a student from the University of Michigan who, when he was offered the chance to claim any pronoun he wished, chose to be referred to as “His Majesty.” (RELATED: Conservative Student Is Now ‘His Majesty’ After University Of Michigan Lets Everyone Make Up Their Own Pronouns)

     This level of heresy could not be tolerated, and the coordinated attacks ensued.

Rectenwald claimed that mere days after he violated safe space orthodoxy by daring to “come out,” he was accosted in an open letter written by several colleagues from his department in the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group.

--emphasis added.

    The WHAT? This is a completely made-up group, existing for the entire purpose of causing the heretic grief while giving some loud virtue signaling. This group naturally accuses him of the most serious of offense, thoughtcrime:

“But as long as he airs his views with so little appeal to evidence and civility, we must find him guilty of illogic and incivility in a community that predicates its work in great part on rational thought and the civil exchange of ideas. The cause of Professor Rectenwald’s guilt is certainly not, in our view, his identity as a cis, white, straight male. The cause of his guilt is the content and structure of his thinking.”

     Illogic, incivility, and little appeal to evidence? Hey, remember when that engineer for Google presented a long document filled with reasonable arguments backed by evidence? He was accused of literally the same things. I swear these guys really need to get some new material. As near as I can tell, this ideology has simply redefined the words “illogic,” “incivility,” and “nonevidence” as meaning “disagrees with the ideology.”
      That’s a shame, because words really should have more meaning than whatever the people in power think they mean.
     “That letter was official,” he explained. “That was official. That’s, like, ex cathedra right there. In other words, that came from an official committee. … That means the university took a particular position on this issue and also made extremely inaccurate responses to what I said. They accused me of ad hominem remarks, and they must not know the definition of ad hominem. I spoke of no individuals at all. I never mentioned a single person!”

     While this is nothing I’ve haven’t seen with my own eyes (a particular exchange with a Dean and her colleagues about the meaning of ‘ex officio’ comes to mind)…I assure the gentle reader, what’s happening to this professor is common on many campuses.
     Earlier, I proposed a question to the reader over which was worse regarding higher education, the indoctrination, or the punishments for questioning indoctrination.
     I believe the punishment for asking questions, even stupid questions (and the professor’s concerns are hardly stupid), is the greater problem, but reasonable people can disagree.
      Just not on NYU’s campus, or on any campuses which likewise have been taken over by an ideology filled with hate, because disagreeing with The Party on those campuses is heresy.








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