Amia Srinivasan organizing coprophagy

Full Disclosure- I was born in Germany. I lost my mother at Auschwitz. I am still traumatized by that horrible event. My sister, who was a diplomat just as my father had been, texted me that Mum had got lost on their visit there. I texted back saying Mum had probably gotten on the wrong bus or something of that sort but I suffered greatly because of all the Scotch I felt obliged to drink. This explains why I have very strong feelings about issues like Free Speech. Higher Education, however, I can take or leave. Germany had too much of the thing and thus fucked up twice in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Turning to the topic of this post,  Amia Srinivasan, writing for the LRB, says that the provisions of the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act,

 are baffling

though the intention seems clear enough. The law targets 'cancel culture'.  Its provisions are in keeping with this aim. 

... stemming from a conflation – now commonplace – of free speech and academic freedom.

In this case, the latter is a proper subset of the former.  There is no conflation. 

Suppose that a climate change denier wants to speak at, or be employed by, Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment. It is presumably within the rights of Oxford’s geography dons – world experts in ecological change and crisis – to deny him a platform or a job.

That is a justiciable matter. He probably can be employed as an instructor in Statistics or as a lavatory cleaner. 'Platforms' are a separate issue. It may be that a properly registered Student Body can invite whom they like. But, equally, a Professor may wish to invite a 'denier' with an interesting theory or methodology to take part in a Seminar. 

Indeed, that is the whole point about academic freedom: it is the freedom to exercise academic expertise in order to discriminate between good and bad ideas, valid and invalid arguments, sound and hare-brained methods.

A particular Act of Parliament, affecting Higher Education, need not be concerned with the 'point' of academic freedom. It may be solely concerned with curbing a nuisance or a type of activity which leads to a widespread public demand to reduce funding for Higher Education.

Why be baffled that a particular law does not pander to some bee in your own bonnet when, it is obvious, such is not the motivation for the Act? 

This is what academics do

It may be but it may not be. Academics may push forward members of their own clique or those who share their ideology. We may say 'in an ideal world, academics would spend their time discriminating between good and bad ideas'. Sadly, plenty of academics are stupid and can do no such thing. One may say that is a reason for defunding Higher Education. But, that is not the purpose of the bill in question.  

when we curate syllabuses, make appointments, allocate graduate places and funding, peer-review papers and books, and invite speakers.

Academics may do all these things in a self-serving manner. 

In each of these cases we are exercising our professional judgment about the intellectual worth and seriousness of other people’s ideas.

Or, in each of these cases, academics are pursuing a selfish or ideological agenda.  

Of course, academics can and sometimes do abuse their power: it wouldn’t be a protected exercise of academic freedom if a mathematics department refused to hire a first-rate mathematician just because she was a Tory, or a vocal critic of Israel.

 It may be. Academic freedom can mean the freedom of the Institution to push a particular ideology. However, if it is in receipt of public funds this may be illegal. This is a justiciable matter. Suppose there is a College dedicated to providing higher education for Trade Union organizers. Only quite basic mathematics is required. A bigoted Tory, who happens to be a brilliant mathematician,  announces her intention to get hired with the express purpose of showing the proles they are all thickos. She will then try to brainwash them into accepting that the working class is simply too stupid to engage in collective bargaining. I think it would be perfectly proper for the College to refuse to employ her because she has advertised an intention in variance with their own charter. Should this trigger 'defunding'? Not necessarily. The doctrine of proportionality applies. 

Having laws curbing anti-Semitic hate-speech may be enough to make it irrelevant if a person is known, in their private life, to hold anti-Zionist views. Again this is a justiciable matter where a Court will balance the consequential risk of a nuisance, or an illegal action, against the likelihood that any such thing will occur. 

But much of what is under attack in the new Act, and the broader political onslaught on universities of which it is a part, is not the abuse of academic freedom, but academic freedom itself.

But this is not an academic argument because the relevant academic subject- viz constitutional law- is not being applied. It is merely the personal opinion of a person who teaches a different subject.  

My hypothetical example of a climate change sceptic applying for a job in Oxford’s geography department wasn’t idle: in a recent essay in the Times, Douglas Murray, a director of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, took as a sign of our putative crisis over free speech the difficulty someone who opposes a net zero emissions goal has in becoming a university vice chancellor.

So, Amia thinks this Murray guy has the credentials to make a credible academic argument. As far as I know, Murray is an author who studied English literature. Amia needs to appeal to someone who knows the law in order to impugn a particular statute. 

As Lord Wallace of Saltaire remarked in the Lords debate on the higher education legislation last year, ‘If challenging the allegedly oppressive liberal cultural elite means insisting on climate change sceptics being appointed to senior academic positions regardless of their attitudes to evidence and reasoned debate, then our universities and their reputation are, indeed, at risk.’

But there is no evidence that anyone is hell bent on appointing random nutters to Professorial chairs.  Credentialized nutters are another matter entirely. 

Quite. The university isn’t, and shouldn’t be, Hyde Park Corner, or the comment pages of the Times.

Why not? Provided teaching and learning and research are not affected- i.e. the primary purpose of Higher Education are served- why should we care what is said or what is worn or what is eaten on campus?  

Or, as a colleague and I once put it in a (peer-reviewed) paper:

It is permissible for disciplinary gatekeepers to exclude cranks and shills from valuable communicative platforms in academic contexts, because effective teaching and research requires that communicative privileges be given to some and not others, based on people’s disciplinary competence ...

Sadly, those 'gatekeepers' may be 'cranks and shills'. It is permissible to defund or otherwise deprive such 'gatekeepers' from authority if there is evidence that other similar institutions are achieving better outcomes without any such 'gatekeeping'.  

The university would largely be a waste of time for teachers and students, and its subsidisation a waste of resources for the rest of society, were things to be otherwise.

Some University departments really are a waste of time of this description. However, all that matters for public policy is 'opportunity cost'.  It may be that it is cheaper to warehouse unemployable cretins in a useless University Department rather than confine them in prisons or psychiatric hospitals. 

To point out that right-wing culture warriors

I suppose Amia sees herself as some sort of warrior.  

conflate academic freedom and free speech is, in a sense, to give them too much credit. In practice they subscribe to ‘free speech’ and ‘academic freedom’ only when, and to whichever ideological ends, it suits them.

They might say the same about Amia.  

The new Higher Education Act was given royal assent just nine days after the passage of the Public Order Act, which eviscerates the right to peaceful protest in the UK – just in time to empower the Metropolitan Police to arrest six members of the anti-monarchy group Republic on the morning of the coronation, with little outcry from the free speech brigade.

The fire brigade, we care about. The free speech brigade- not so much.  

Rishi Sunak has defended the police and their new powers, saying that people have the right ‘to go about their day-to-day lives without facing serious disruption’.

The law should curb nuisances- though a heavy handed approach may be counter-productive.  

‘Serious disruption’ – a phrase that appears 94 times in the Public Order Act – now legally includes many of the mildest tactics used by activist groups from the women of Greenham Common to Extinction Rebellion, including locking on, blocking roads and blockading oil terminals. It also includes, according to the Metropolitan Police, carrying rape alarms, for which three women’s safety volunteers were arrested ahead of the coronation.

Amia sees a very sinister pattern here. Neo-Liberalism wants to rape us and make us have genetically modified Neo-Liberal babies! Even the King is in on it!  That's what happens if you let a Punjabi become PM!

Right-wing newspapers unironically celebrated Sunak’s appointment of a free speech tsar as another volley in his war on ‘woke nonsense’ – a campaign, as Sunak described it last year, against objectionable viewpoints that have ‘permeated public life’: that biology doesn’t determine gender,

Every one knows that Big Corporations invented 'biology' just to make more profit! 

that language is malleable,

Big Corporations stand to make a lot of money if the author of this blog is addressed as 'he' rather than 'its-miaow-miaowness-Captain-Miaow!'  

that Britain must own up to its colonial past.

After which it can get rid of all those whose ancestors came from those colonies coz they were shipped here on slave ships- right?  

You can seek to eradicate such viewpoints from universities.

Or you can seek to promote them to the exclusion of all else.  

You can also believe that universities should become no-holds-barred venues for free and open debate.

No. We believe they should be such places because free and open debate is a good thing. The Bill aims to make it harder for nutters to prevent debate from occurring.  

But it takes a certain mental flexibility to think that the one can be a way of achieving the other.

No. It only takes a belief that one particular viewpoint is unassailable and a genuinely free debate would confirm this.  

Does the right contradict itself? Very well then it contradicts itself.

Says a Leftist who can do nothing else.  

The new Higher Education Act appears on its face to be in conflict with the ‘Prevent duty’

Nope. It only speaks of the exercise of rights currently within the law. 

created by the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, sponsored by Theresa May when she was home secretary. The government guidance on Prevent says that universities should prohibit visiting speakers who are likely to express ‘extremist views that risk drawing people into terrorism or are shared by terrorist groups’, even where the expression of such views is legal.

So, there is no right to express such views on a campus.  

In 2020 the Department of Education issued guidance on implementing the statutory curriculum which included the requirement that ‘schools should not under any circumstances use resources produced by organisations that take extreme political stances on matters,’ and listed as an example of an ‘extreme’ stance the ‘desire to abolish ... capitalism’. Under a new speaker vetting scheme introduced by Jacob Rees-Mogg last year, eight people have been disinvited from speaking at government events,

the Government is not an Institute of Higher Education.  

including Dan Kaszeta,

the Government has apologized. 

a chemical weapons expert, and Kate Devlin, who studies the interaction between humans and technology. Both were told their invitations had been rescinded because they had criticised the Tories on social media.

Government events are the government's own affair. Why does Amia mention the matter?  

The Higher Education Act makes universities and student unions that are derelict in their duty to uphold free speech liable to investigations and fines by the free speech tsar, as well as to civil claims brought by anyone who feels they have suffered ‘adverse consequences’ because of a university or student union’s ‘action or inaction’. It’s not clear just what this covers,

Little is clear to Amia. She thinks 'government events' have something to do with Higher Education.  

but here are some possibilities, ordered from the certainly actionable to the potentially so: a student union voting to no-platform fascists;

like whom? Rishi Sunak?  

a university failing to quash student protest at a visit from, say, a war criminal;

like whom? Tony Blair?  

a student group putting out a statement condemning a professor for being transphobic;

like J.K Rowling?  

faculty changing a syllabus in response to student complaints about its racist content;

Shakespeare was actually a disabled African woman who built the Pyramids. It is racist to pretend otherwise.  

students peacefully protesting outside a lecture;

Some racist 'professor' is saying Shakespeare wrote in English!  

a geography department voting not to hire a climate change denier. It isn’t difficult to imagine how these could be framed as violations of the new law;

only if it isn't difficult to imagine that Neo-Liberalism is RAPING everybody and inventing something called 'BIOLOGY' which is totes bogus! What's next? The assertion that Shakespeare lived in England? 

it is for this reason that its opponents worried, as the bill made its way through Parliament, about the vexatious claims it seems bound to generate. In a letter sent last year to the secretary of state for education, Gillian Keegan, the president of the Union of Jewish Students, warned that the bill could ‘foreseeably allow a range of extremists, including Holocaust deniers, legal recourse to obtain compensation if they are denied a platform’.

Some people do want Britain to pass a Holocaust denial bill.  

‘Adverse consequences’ is an extremely low bar: anyone who has been picketed or called names on Twitter might feel they have grounds to make a legal claim.

Which is already the case. The Bill clarifies the position. You have a defence in law if you have acted according to its provisions.  

Traditionally, it has been thought that a commitment to free expression required universities not to intervene when students protest or when faculty members publicly criticise other academics or politicians.

At one time, the tradition was to think that students had 'benefit of clergy' and could not be hanged for rape and murder.  

But the new law threatens to redefine such non-intervention as itself a failure to promote free speech.

Just as previous laws in some jurisdictions disallowed Universities from providing 'sanctuary' to pupils who had killed or raped Townies.  

These ambiguities serve a purpose. No university or student union wants to pay heavy fines or be dragged into court. The prudent course of action is to

observe the law. This has been clarified. Uncertainty has been reduced. 

silence dissent before it happens.

But 'dissenters' can still dissent in legal ways just as students could express their feelings without raping or murdering Townies and then relying on 'Benefit of Clergy'.  

No doubt universities will start hiring free speech compliance officers – chosen perhaps from the network of conservative academics who helped draw up the new legislation – who will advise on which forms of speech and protest are now verboten.

You can't stop universities wasting money one way or another.  

The result will be a chilling of speech: precisely what the Act’s architects and supporters claim they oppose.

The 'chilling effect' has to do with over-broad or ambiguous laws. Amia hasn't shown that the Act she complains off is over-broad. This is because it was drafted with the particular intention of encouraging a particular type of speech which an over-broad 'cancel culture' had foolishly attacked. No doubt, the law is a double edged sword and may be used by those whom- we suspect- the Tories dislike.  

Ideological​ contortions of this sort are familiar from the US, where ‘free speech’ has, on the right, been increasingly evacuated of principle.

The Left evacuated their bowels on it long ago.  

In January, the presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis inaugurated his second term as governor of ‘the free state of Florida’ by declaring, ‘We will never surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.’

or affluent senior citizens avoid death for decades.  

His project to restore freedom to his state has so far involved, among other things, blocking TikTok on servers at all educational institutions; prohibiting teachers and fellow students from using trans students’ chosen pronouns in public schools; prohibiting the discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools; barring minors from drag shows; prohibiting state universities from spending government funds on programmes that ‘advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism’; forbidding general education courses at state universities from including ‘a curriculum that teaches identity politics’ based on ‘theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities’; and mandating that schools review reading lists whenever a parent complains.

Amia, fool that she is, is pointing out that a British Government could do all these things with greater not less constitutional impunity. But all such actions would help Labour by marginalizing their lunatic fringe.  

Recently, one school in Florida restricted access to ‘The Hill We Climb’, the poem Amanda Gorman read at Joe Biden’s inauguration, after a parent complained that it contained ‘hate messages’.

America has always had stronger Freedom of Expression laws than we have. Amia is saying even the Americans are coming round to our way of thinking. Come to think of it, SCOTUS may reverse Sullivan v NYT.  

It could never happen in the UK, you might think.

It was the norm in the UK even into my College days. Post Brexit, we may revert to our bad old ways. 

But Turning Point USA now has a UK offshoot, whose Education Watch programme promises to collect incidents of lecturers demonstrating ‘left-wing bias’. Turning Point UK has received enthusiastic endorsements from Priti Patel and Jacob Rees-Mogg. A key architect of the new Higher Education Act, the Birkbeck political scientist Eric Kaufmann,

whom people listen to because he backs up his argument with statistical data of a type actual politicians would be foolish to ignore. Also he is an expert on Northern Ireland at a time of great change there. 

is on record endorsing DeSantis’s approach to higher education.

What matters is the endorsement of Florida's voters. Also, does the guy have a shot at the White House?  

Writing in the Telegraph earlier this year, Kaufmann warned of the ‘leftist capture of higher education’ – citing as evidence the fact that most young Britons say their country is racist – and praised DeSantis for understanding ‘that the only way to push back is through legislation and follow-through’. Kaufmann described with admiration DeSantis’s banning of a ‘high school curriculum in African American history which featured numerous writers in the [critical race theory] tradition’; his ‘takeover of a progressive Florida university, replacing its president and trustees with conservative appointees’; and his defunding of equity and diversity programmes. While Kaufmann concedes that some of these proposals go ‘too far’ – academic freedom, he says, means that professors should get to write curriculums – he exhorts Britain’s conservatives to take inspiration from DeSantis’s legislative approach: ‘Until the Tories discover their inner DeSantis, the blob will continue to spread the woke gospel and conservatism will have no future.’ Kaufmann is the co-author of two reports, published in 2019 and 2020, by the conservative think tank Policy Exchange on ‘Academic Freedom in the UK’. Together they set out a blueprint for a new ‘Academic Freedom Bill’. It bears a remarkable similarity to the new Higher Education Act. Kaufmann and his co-authors recommend, among other things, the extension to student unions of the duty to ensure freedom of speech; making universities liable to civil claims for free speech breaches; and the establishment of a new free speech tsar.

So Kaufman's work is  having a positive impact on actual politics unlike the woke nonsense Amia herself has specialized in. Why is she directing our attention to this rising star? He seems to be forging ahead on his own very well. Perhaps Amia hopes that Corbyn will take back the Labour party from Starmer and, once he comes to power, Kaufman will be strung up with piano wire. 

Other than Kaufman, Amia also hates- 

Nigel Biggar, the emeritus Oxford theologian who has insisted that the British Empire ‘was not essentially racist, exploitative or wantonly violent’;

though this is an opinion her own parents and grandparents would have shared though, no doubt, they may have emigrated to America which genuinely was essentially racist, exploitative and wantonly violent. 

 the Cambridge associate professor of divinity James Orr,

a brainy chap 

who has hosted both Jordan Peterson and the notorious peddler of race science Charles Murray

Murray does not peddle 'race science'. He was married to a Thai lady.  

at events for Trinity Forum Europe, a conservative Christian charity.

Christianity is bad. Did you know Jesus had a penis? Penises cause RAPE! 

After a photo emerged of Peterson with a man wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘I’m a proud islamaphobe,’

Sadly, people of a particular religion may well consider every other religion to be fraudulent.  

misspelling and all, Cambridge disinvited Peterson; in the Policy Exchange report from 2020, Kaufmann and his co-authors cite this case in support of their proposed legislation – it would have allowed Peterson to sue Cambridge. ‘I remember this,’ Peterson said in a discussion with Ahmed and Orr on his podcast in 2021. ‘It was a T-shirt outlining his criticisms of Islam – of radical Islam – as he saw it ... And I looked at it, and I looked at him ... And then I thought: “Well, you know, that’s your T-shirt mate, that’s up to you to wear that.”

Stalin destroyed more mosques and killed more Muslims than Genghis Khan. Still, at least Stalinists were equal opportunity haters.  

’ Orr responds feelingly: ‘Just listening to you recount your experiences ... is pretty moving to watch and difficult to hear.’

I must admit, I'm on Amia's side on this one. We must enforce untouchability such that guys wearing misspelled T-shirts are not allowed to come within thirty feet of us Brahmins.  

In their 2020 Policy Exchange report, Kaufmann et al claim that conservatives in the academy are subject to ‘a structural discriminatory effect’.

Good. We want our kids to get the fuck out of the Academy and to start earning big money.  

This notion isn’t without its ironies. Elsewhere, Kaufmann has derided the idea of structural discrimination as it pertains to race and sex, arguing that its proponents’ ‘only measure of such structures – disparities – is also what they are claiming to explain, a classic instance of circular reasoning’. This is false when it comes to racial and sexual discrimination, for which there are substantial bodies of evidence. But it makes more sense when applied to the claim that conservatives face structural discrimination in universities, of a kind that would explain their minority status.

The problem here is that Higher Education should be about raising productivity. If it becomes adversely selective, productivity falls. It may be a good thing for us individually if our kids quit the Academy quickly but it is a bad thing for Society as a whole. China will eat our lunch- or what is left of our lunch. Vivek Ramaswamy preferred to earn millions rather than become a Professor but he doesn't want his kids to be taught by woke cretins at Ivy League because then they will be vassals of Red China. 

People are as a rule politically biased, and it would be surprising if liberal lecturers didn’t sometimes discriminate against conservative ones, and vice versa. In one of their Policy Exchange reports, Kaufmann and his co-authors discuss a survey of 820 UK academics which suggests that a significant minority are willing to discriminate on ideological grounds. But the results indicate that it is right-wing academics who are most inclined to discriminate politically in hiring: 20 per cent of conservatives evinced a willingness to hire an inferior centrist candidate over a better qualified leftist candidate, while 15 per cent of leftists would hire a less qualified left-winger over a centrist. Half the conservatives indicated that, faced with two equally good candidates, they would choose a Brexiter over a Corbyn supporter, while only 40 per cent of those on the left said they would do the inverse.

The problem here is that 'left-winger' may correlate with a trait which lowers value addition in Higher Education. As far as tax payer funding goes, this is a case of 'derived demand'. The tax payer gets a return only when productivity rises more than proportionally to the opportunity cost.  

It is a robust sociological finding that the more education a person receives,

i.e. they stay on in the safe space of the Campus coz they are otherwise unemployable 

the likelier they are to lean left; by the same token, less education is correlated with political conservatism.

As is having gotten richer by your own efforts- i.e. productivity.  

There is also growing generational polarisation, with younger people – the people who go to university and, increasingly, the people who teach at them – tacking further to the left than their elders.

Their elders fucked up. Seriously, I don't blame kids for not trusting us. We were stupid, lazy, complacent and are taking way too long to just fucking die already.  

In other words, it is only to be expected that the people who study and work at universities are to the left of the average person.

More particularly if Universities are adding less and less value.  

As the authors of the Policy Exchange reports themselves acknowledge: ‘There is, therefore, a benign possible explanation – that highly educated people self-select into academic jobs – for much of why academia “leans left”.’

The problem here is that we think 'highly educated' means 'cretin' unless the dude's PhD is in some high value adding STEM subject. But, in that case, the PhD is like 'work training' of a highly specialized sort which can generate billions in Intellectual Property. It isn't saying 'Boo to Neo-Liberalism!' or 'Penises cause RAPE!' 

It would, therefore, require social engineering – of the kind conservatives oppose when it comes to remedying the under-representation of ethnic minority groups – to ensure that the university remains a stronghold of conservatism.

How can it 'remain' something which, Amia says, it currently isn't at all?  

It isn’t obvious exactly how Arif Ahmed fits into the conservative battle to retake the academy. He is a serious scholar – he works on a range of topics across epistemology, metaphysics and the history of philosophy

Nothing very original, I'm afraid. Still, it is relatively high IQ stuff- or was, thirty years ago.  

– and is also a fierce atheist and libertarian. In debates and interviews, he frequently cites left-wing positions – criticising Israel, or defending homosexuality and interracial marriage – as examples of speech that needs to be defended.

The fact is, Israel is making influential friends in its neighbourhood. It isn't the Muslim community in the UK which is driving the Boycott movement.  

He is on the record as opposing the Prevent legislation and Gavin Williamson’s instruction that universities adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which gives as an example ‘claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour’. In a piece for the Times announcing his appointment, Ahmed wrote that he would ‘defend free speech within the law for all views and approaches: postcolonial theory as much as gender critical feminism’.

Sounds like we have a safe pair of hands in our new Freedom Tzar. Amia seems to have forgotten that she is against all this.  

Perhaps​ the most frustrating effect of the right’s ideological war in defence of ‘academic freedom’ is that it has made it so difficult for the rest of us to talk about the actual state of university life without playing into the right’s hands.

The actual state of university life is shit because people like Amia are Professors.  There are plenty of smart South Indian origin people. They won't vouch for her. But the genuine proles too aren't going to be taken in by her because they rightly think she despises them and wants to sit with the clever (which, for her, means 'right wing') kids in the lunch-room. 

To anyone who teaches at a British or US university, it is obvious that the way students exercise power has changed in the last ten years or so.

To everybody else, it is obvious that students have no fucking power to exercise.  

There has been a noticeable increase in no-platforming and disinvitation campaigns, especially against trans-exclusionary feminists, and in demands to diversify and decolonise curriculums,

but smart kids aren't doing those subjects. Enrolment has shrunk. 

to transform sexual harassment procedures and policies,

that's a good thing and is happening all over the place 

to fire faculty members perceived to have objectionable views,

Social Media has made this necessary. I've had to fire my butler because of his objectionable views on vegetarianism. Well, I would have had to fire him, if I'd ever had enough money to hire a butler. Still, my luck is such, the fellow would be sure to be a fucking cannibal with a big Instagram following. 

and to make the university more hospitable to people from marginalised backgrounds. I welcome some of these developments and worry about others, as do most other academics on the left.

The rest of us don't give a shit TILL we hear of some Sciencey guy who can't hire the best and brightest to develop the tech we need to stay competitive with China because of 'diversity' or 'inclusivity' or some such shite. 

So long as tax money goes to HE, the demand for it is 'derived' from what it can do to raise productivity relative to 'opportunity cost'.  

On a recent visit to speak at a US university, I had a conversation with my host – a leftist feminist – about her students on the drive back from campus. We talked about their generational investment in being good and the way that can shade into moral censoriousness; their attachment to a politics of first-personal experience; their sometimes alarming trust in bureaucracies. These are the kinds of private conversation that nearly all university teachers have, and have always had.

If they are teaching worthless shit- sure. If they are doing useful research they would be talking about who will be first out of the gate with some important type of new tech. It is worth learning from the latter, not the former. Why not pre-emptively strike back against the opinionated cretin supervising you by getting in first with your grievance at being 'triggered' by them?  

Twenty years ago, when I was a freshman at Yale, I wrote a letter to the student newspaper criticising my college master for supporting an anti-union candidate for the New Haven Board of Aldermen. I defended, on the grounds of free speech, the master’s donations to the candidate’s campaign and his endorsement of the candidate in the student newspaper. But, I argued, the master had violated his pastoral duties by hosting a reception for the candidate in the master’s lodgings, to which he had invited all the students in college. ‘A residential college,’ I wrote, ‘should be a place of comfort and security.’

Why would a potential Alderman's presence on the campus reduce 'comfort or security' for any one?  Does the desire to be an Alderman correlate with a passion for causing discomfort to students by raping them and reducing their feeling of security by chopping off their limbs? I suppose so. Aldermen are like Actuaries in that respect.  

I was accusing the master of parting ways with that ideal.

Because a guy who wants to be an Alderman is bound to want to rape and decapitate all and sundry.  

But it wasn’t really that the master’s expression of his anti-union views – and his attempt to get students to vote for a political candidate who shared them – made me feel uncomfortable or unsafe. I thought it was an abuse of power,

Amia thinks 'Masters' have the power to brainwash anyone they invite into their 'lodgings' while wannabe Aldermen rape and decapitate them. To be fair, these are quite reasonable beliefs to hold about what happens at Yale- but only if you went to Harvard.  

but I also found his display of political assertiveness thrilling.

Aldermen too like displaying their 'assertiveness' before raping and decapitating all and sundry. This is very thrilling for nice South Indian girls from sheltered backgrounds.  

Even then one of the things I loved most about being at university as opposed to school was my professors’ willingness to talk openly about their political views: I came to know them not only as teachers of philosophy, politics and literature, but also as Straussians and Burkeans, liberals and neocons, communitarians and (much more rarely) Marxists. I spent so much time with conservative professors – found their ways of reading texts so compelling – that many of them mistook me for one of their own.

She was just as stupid as they were.  

So why did I write the letter? It was politics. I believed in and was campaigning for the incumbent, a keen supporter of the unions who represented Yale’s custodial and other workers. I had arrived at university just two months before, and was experiencing the headiness not merely of thinking about politics, but for the first time actually doing politics.

She was so successful at it that she became a Senator- right? 

Crucially, my complaint did not come from a sense of my own vulnerability as a student, even though I reached for a discourse of vulnerability to make my case.

She told stupid lies.  

It came from my own awakening sense of political power.

She has none. Being woke can't awaken a sense of having power or having a brain save in combination with lots and lots of drugs.  

Today I see a similar dynamic with many of my students.

They like telling stupid lies and think they are getting political power.  

That is why I described the change in campus culture as a shift in the way students attempt to wield power, rather than as a symptom of students’ weakened constitutions – their putative evolution into ‘snowflakes’, easily triggered and fearful of difficult ideas.

If you are studying worthless shite why not pretend you get triggered by anything you can't a passing grade in by watching a Netflix movie? 

This is the thesis popularised by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Granted, my students are more likely than we were to interpret their stress (rightly or wrongly) as a mental health issue, not just as part of what it is to be a student. (Then again, my generation, in the UK at least, wasn’t saddled with crushing amounts of student debt, and our job prospects, which seemed dismal at the time, retrospectively look good compared with theirs.)

Amia is saying 'my students won't even be able to get the shitty sort of job I have.'  

But, in the main, what I detect in students’ demands for syllabus reform, or the no-platforming of trans-exclusionary feminists, or even (perhaps especially) for professors to be fired, is not an expression of weakness, but an attempted assertion of power.

Which is what bullies do. Still, at least the kids aren't torturing cats.  

Or, more precisely, their self-description and sometimes self-understanding as weak, disempowered agents has become, for them, itself a form of agency.

Why stop there? Why not say their self-understanding as stupid lumps of shit is a form of agency?  

This isn’t necessarily a good thing. Too often it leads students to seek to exercise power through university bureaucracies, evincing a trust in institutional authority that sits in tension with any properly leftist politics.

But properly leftist politics sits in tension with the fact that the thing is either boring bureaucratic shite or else involves massacring the Royal Family.  

Once I was told by a departmental administrator that some students had complained about the blog posts of another student, which they said they found threatening and offensive. I read the posts; they were reactionary, poorly argued and mildly disturbing. But more disturbing to me was the fact that these students had thought it appropriate to complain to a university administrator about them.

Amia is of Indian heritage. Indian students prefer to beat each other with hockey-sticks rather than complain to 'administrators'.  

What powers were the students hoping that the university would arrogate to itself in dealing with this matter, and how and against whom did they think such power might be wielded in the future?

The answer is obvious. They were woke nutters who wanted to bully non-woke cretins.  

Did they want their own online political musings to be subject to the disciplinary gaze of the university?

This assumes they bothered with 'political musings'. Bullies may be evil but they are not necessarily stupid. Still, it must be said, any kid with a 'political' blog is likely to turn up on campus with an automatic weapon. What? I watch a lot of Netflix.  

These are the sorts of question that many university students, across the political spectrum, do not ask themselves often enough.

No. The question they don't ask themselves often enough involves whether incessant masturbation might not permanently ruin their eye-sight. 

Moral righteousness, a Maoist drive for ideological purity, brisk punitive action: these are the hallmarks of nearly all student politics. Levers of power are there to be pulled, just as surely as mum and dad, sir and miss, are there for dobbing-in.

Students may be a shitty species but do they really inform on their parents to the Secret Police?  In my day, you just made an anonymous call to the SAS saying your home was a secret IRA bomb factory. Serves Mum right for telling me to tidy up my room. As for Dad, he really should have raised my pocket-money. 

You can become alarmed at all this, or you can choose to treat it as a recurring phenomenon that often isn’t of any real consequence.

Or you can pretend to care one way or the other and dash off 10,000 words for the LRB 

The administrator who received the complaint about the blog consulted a few colleagues – all left-leaning, as it happens – and then told the students it was a protected exercise of free speech and that nothing could or should be done. That was the end of that. A few years ago, when a group of Oxford students launched a campaign to stop the emeritus law professor John Finnis from teaching on the grounds of his vocal opposition to homosexuality and immigration, the chief consequence was that the students were dragged through the national press as enemies of freedom.

No. We were laughing at them because they were law students. It is the job of a lawyer to destroy the other side's arguments not to shit herself and run away screaming. 

Amia finally gets round to the reason the Bill she objects to was passed.

 the disinvitation of Amber Rudd

a former Home Secretary! 

by an Oxford student group in 2020. Rudd had been invited to speak by UNWomen Oxford at an event celebrating her as a champion of ‘equality as chairperson of the all-party parliamentary group for sex equality’. Some students objected, arguing that Rudd’s involvement in the Windrush scandal made her an unsuitable spokesperson for equality.

Windrush was as harsh on women as men.  

Three days before the event was scheduled to take place, UNWomen Oxford set up an online form soliciting students’ views on Rudd’s appearance. An hour before she was due to speak, the group’s committee announced that it had held a vote on whether to rescind the invitation; a majority had voted to do so. On Twitter, Rudd called the eleventh-hour decision ‘badly judged & rude’. She was of course right. But would it have been a victory for free speech had the student group been legally bound to host Rudd – on the pain of fines or a civil claim – even when a majority of its committee were convinced they had made a mistake?

Free speech was not at stake. Some silly students hoped to humiliate Rudd but their action backfired. The Tories woke up to the fact that they could score a few PR points by appearing to get tough with Universities.  

Speaking after the incident, the then education secretary Gavin Williamson warned that ‘if universities are not prepared to defend free speech, the government will.’

Amia wants us to understand that Tories can keep some of their promises. Very sporting of her, I'm sure.  

And so it has. In April, Oxford’s LGBTQ+ Society called on the Oxford Union – not the student union, but the debating society and private club whose members are drawn largely from the university’s students – to reverse its decision to host the ‘gender critical’ feminist philosopher Kathleen Stock. The national furore that predictably followed led to the society’s members receiving hateful messages; the Telegraph thought it important to report that the society’s president had ‘retweeted anti-monarchist posts’. Then, the Oxford University Student Union forced the leaders of its own LGBTQ+ Campaign to rescind its call that the invitation be cancelled, on the grounds that it might not be compliant with the new Higher Education Act. Given that the Oxford Union isn’t technically affiliated with the university, this seems unlikely – but again the ambiguity of the law is useful to those who would like to apply it zealously. On Twitter, the Free Speech Union celebrated the result, citing it as evidence that the legislation for which it had campaigned was ‘already making a difference’.

Amia, very kindly, is explaining to us that not only are students shit at politics but that certain named Christian affiliated or Right Wing academics are good at it- as is the Tory party.  Why stop there? Why does she not say that people of her political stamp routinely wet the bed? 

Whatever one thinks of the protests against the Union’s decision to give Stock a platform, the spectacle of the state coercively regulating student activism in this way should give any non-authoritarian pause.

No it shouldn't. The thing doesn't matter in the slightest.  

In 1961, Oswald Mosley’s address to the Oxford Humanist Group on ‘Racial Purity’ was drowned out by heckling, hissing and boos from the student audience. (The pro-Mosley students replied with a chorus of ‘Sieg Heil’.)

So what? With hindsight we know the thing didn't matter in the slightest. It was the sight of Moseley on TV  bitterly complaining that his beefy Brown Shirts had kept getting beaten up by under-fed Jewish tailors from the East End which made him a laughing stock.  

In 1966, the neo-Nazi Colin Jordan was invited and then disinvited by the Oxford Union, which had decided that given the potential for student disruption at the event, it wasn’t worth the trouble.

Jordan had served a prison sentence for trying to create a paramilitary outfit. Dennis Healey punched him in the face. That's the sort of Labour politician we need. 

In 1974, the Oxford branch of the Monday Club – a conservative pressure group, at the time known for its resistance to decolonisation – hosted the MP and Monday Club vice chairman Harold Soref.

Who was Jewish but had a family connection to Rhodesia which perhaps explains his racialist views. There was an assassination attempt on him.  

A group of students forced their way into the meeting while Soref fled down a back staircase. Oxford’s Conservative, Labour and Liberal clubs all condemned the protesters’ action. In 1985, the Oxford Union cancelled an event with members of South Africa’s apartheid government after student protests led to the speakers’ withdrawal. In 2001, the Union rescinded an invitation to the Holocaust denier David Irving, again after widespread protests. Would the state of Britain’s democracy or universities be better off today if this activity had been subject to state inquisition?

Yes. More importantly, Britain would have got a higher return on its investment in HE. Many working-class students would have got more out of their stint at Uni. It is likely that students would not be obliged to pay fees in England and Wales if sensible steps had been taken fifty years ago.  

The long history of student protest raises another question: are today’s students unprecedentedly censorious?

They are pushing back against the cretinism of their teachers by being more cretinous yet.  

Perhaps. I suspect I am more likely to be subject to a student complaint for something I say in a lecture or seminar than I would have been ten years ago.

Because what you are saying is stupid shit.  

I know an English professor in the US whose dean made her apologise to students for making them read a paper about sex-differentiated behaviour in mice,

which has fuck all to do with English. Why not teach the kids to make millions by writing like JK Rowling?  

which she argued was evidence against the idea that gender is socially constructed.

Coz Society constructed my dick- right? Shame it skimped on the job.  

A graduate student once complained to me and my co-convenor that we had not put a content warning on Catharine MacKinnon’s ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State’,

that warning should have read 'this is stupid nonsense'. The dim bint thought that Porn had a bad effect. If so, it should be weaponized to use against our enemies.  Why drone strike ISIS when we can upload  clips of Gay Porn on their phones? Let them bugger each other to buggery. 

even though we had at the start of the course issued a blanket policy that permitted students to skip any class meeting, without explanation – which we had done in recognition that the reading for the seminar was emotionally demanding.

One way to get kids to take your course is to say 'you don't have to attend anything or read anything. Just say you got 'triggered' and you get your soft subject credit.'  

Another student, an undergraduate, told me she didn’t want to read MacKinnon’s work because she had heard (from her brother) that MacKinnon was a ‘TERF’ (she is not). A student asked me why I thought it was worthwhile to discuss in a lecture what sort of metaphysics of gender was required to vindicate the identities of trans women as women and trans men as men, given that he (a trans man) already knew that he was a man.

Why was he not given a PhD and a tenured position straight away?  

It is hard to insulate the evidential force of these anecdotes from the mainstream narrative of crisis. The PPE syllabus at Oxford features thinkers who were adamant in their defence of racial hierarchy, slavery, imperialism and patriarchy.

Some had dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! 

I have taught many students how to read and love Plato while rejecting his aristocratic politics.

but embracing his pederasty- right?  

I have argued in my classes that feminists should be suspicious of the idea of an innate gender identity,

why not just be suspicious, period? After all, a lot of feminists end up married to men. Believe me, they are all rat-bastards. 

that mainstream pro-abortion politics needs to reckon with the vulnerability of the human foetus,

If it weren't so fucking vulnerable it wouldn't be so easy to kill it.  

that none of us has perfect authority over our own ‘lived experience’,

unless that is actually a feature of our own 'lived experience'. The truth is I have 'perfect authority' over my lived experience as a Socioproctologist who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of the Head of my Institute which is why I was forced out of that prestigious post.    

and that much contemporary ‘identity politics’ is a political dead-end.

Virulent wokeness is a turd in the proverbial punch-bowl.  

My undergraduate student who was worried about reading MacKinnon read her and loved her.

Because she was as stupid as shit.  

The graduate student who complained about the lack of a content warning never took any action apart from writing us a polite if high-handed email. The student who challenged me about my lecture on the metaphysics of trans identities did so face to face, and what’s more convinced me that my single-minded focus on metaphysical questions when teaching transfeminism was an intellectual error. I have used the wrong pronouns for a non-binary student who did nothing but graciously accept my apology when I realised my mistake.

This, for Amia, is high drama. For the rest of us, it suggests that she teaches stupid shit to people who know it is stupid shit but realize that they themselves are stupid and thus have to settle for studying shit in order to get a credential.  

I am not saying that there is nothing to worry about.

Vivek Ramaswamy- who, like Amia, is of South Indian extraction- says there is something to worry about. The Chinese are studying useful stuff. Our kids aren't. We're fucked if this carries on.  

But what there is, and how much worry it warrants, is hard to separate out from the general fug of hysteria.

Amia has devoted herself to the intellectual equivalent of PMS.  

The frequency of no-platforming and disinvitation attempts, though still rare, appears to be on the rise in the UK, even as the percentage of actually cancelled events has fallen (without the intervention of legislation). A 2022 study by the Higher Education Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, documents an apparent decrease in British students’ commitment to free speech since 2016. In the survey of a thousand students, 79 per cent agreed that ‘students [who] feel threatened should always have their demands for safety respected’

Not just students, everybody thinks demands for safety should be respected. The question is overbroad. This is junk social science.  

(up from 68 per cent in 2016). Asked whether, ‘when in doubt’, universities ‘should ensure all students are protected from discrimination rather than allow unlimited free speech’, 61 per cent said yes, up from 37 per cent in 2016.

Again, the question is overbroad. It is tracking a change in the semantic value of 'unlimited' in the general population. COVID brought home to us the dangers in 'unlimited' freedom of all types.  

These results seem to paint a picture. Yet in the same survey, only 20 per cent said that students should have the right to stop offensive events from happening. And nearly half said they supported the government’s proposal to create a free speech tsar.

Students, like the rest of us, tend to lose interest in surveys and tick boxes at random. Nothing can be read into such exercises.  

Let’s leave aside statistical augury, and grant for the sake of argument that contemporary student culture is veering towards ideological intolerance. If so, what shall we do about it?

Amia's students are getting stupider and lazier year by year. If she can do nothing about that, fuck can she do about 'contemporary student culture'?  

The conservatives’ answer has been more government.

Better judicial remedies don't necessarily mean more government.  

But the worry is that this repeats the error many students make, which is to appeal to and thus embolden authorities and bureaucracies as a means of enacting cultural change.

Students make an error when they try to do stupid shit but can't because they have little power. 'Authorities' and 'bureaucracies' may be able to 'enact cultural change' because they have a lot of power.  

(And not just students. When Kathleen Stock was awarded an OBE in 2021, more than seven hundred philosophers wrote a letter of protest,

but philosophers are known to be as stupid as shit 

as if we should have hoped for better from Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.)

Amia is too stupid and ignorant to understand that the Monarch reigns, he does not rule.  

What would a government seriously committed to academic freedom do?

Defund the Academy. I don't get paid for exercising my sexual or political or other sorts of freedom. Why should tax payer money go towards the payment of academics?  

Most obviously, it would repeal the Prevent duty.

That will be repealed when the underlying problem disappears of itself.  

Less obvious, and more important, it would scrap student fees,

No. The Academy should be free to charge what it likes. But it should not be paid by the tax-payer for exercising its own freedom.  

thereby stopping students from seeing themselves as consumers entitled to having their preferences met, and universities from acting like commercial service-providers competing for student pounds.

So, Amia thinks 'academic freedom' means no freedom for the Academy to buy or sell anything. No doubt, she thinks a 'free market' is one where everything in the market is free.  

It would take measures to fight precarity among university workers, supporting academics’ calls for fair wages and a reduction in casualised contracts.

No it shouldn't. Being free means being free to do stupid shit and go bankrupt. The Government does not free me from the precarity I cause myself by mismanaging my finances though, no doubt, this is a case of my exercising my freedom.  

In May, Brighton University announced plans to fire 110 staff because of a financing shortfall, naming more than four hundred academics at risk of redundancy. Students occupied the office of Brighton’s vice chancellor in protest.

This caused money to appear by magic- right? 

The events at Brighton are hardly unprecedented – similar things have happened at the University of East Anglia, Roehampton, Goldsmiths, King’s College London and elsewhere.

 But no magic money fountain suddenly appeared at any such places. Sad.

Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that students increasingly think of academics as disposable; in the HEPI survey, 36 per cent of students said that academics should be fired if they ‘teach material that heavily offends some students’ (it was 15 per cent in 2016).

This might only prove that stupider kids are in Collidge. More and more of the smart kids are earning and learning useful skills. 

 In 2021, the political sociologist David Miller was sacked from his job at Bristol for his criticisms of Israel and Zionism, about which the University of Bristol Jewish Society complained, supported by more than a hundred MPs and peers and the All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism.

Miller said the Jewish Society was  “being used as political pawns by a violent, racist foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing”. He is a hate monger condemned even by the anti-Zionist, Corbyn loving, 'Jewdas'. 

As these cases remind us, the real danger comes not from complaining students, but from the university administrators who – sometimes under political pressure – too often cravenly seek to appease them.

Rather than cravenly seek to appease rabid anti-Semitic nutters.  

In the UK, the most notorious case of students calling for an academic to be sacked did not appear to fit this pattern.

Amia can't point to a single academic sacked because of Government pressure. She herself walked back her claim re. Miller after she was called on it. There remains only the Kathleen Stock case which is part and parcel of a wider political revolt against TERF fanaticism.  

The campaign in 2021 against Kathleen Stock, who was then a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, was led by an anonymous student activist group called Anti Terf Sussex. Launched on Instagram, the campaign was a horrific spectacle, involving vague threats (‘Our demand is simple: fire Kathleen Stock. Until then, you’ll see us around’), consumerist entitlement (one poster read: ‘We’re not paying £9250 a year for transphobia’) and balaclava-clad protesters with smoke flares. Adam Tickell, then Sussex’s vice-chancellor, condemned the campaign, taking particular exception to the attempt to pressure the university into firing Stock (though some of her defenders argued that he was too late in doing so). She resigned nevertheless, citing as the primary reason not the student campaign but years of having been ‘bullied’ by colleagues for her views. Stock said that her colleagues had called her a bigot online, condemned her in their lectures, hung trans pride flags near spaces where she taught, socially ostracised her, and attended a rival trans-inclusive philosophy talk organised by graduate students when she was due to speak.

Stock teaches shit and was bullied by others equally shit. But the anti-woke campaign will win because people worry that STEM subject mavens will face equally stupid bullying. 

It is hard, without knowing the details of these alleged incidents, to assess whether they rose to the level, as Stock claimed they did, of bullying or harassment. They might have. But there are versions of all these actions, consistent with the way Stock herself has described them, that would be unobjectionable from the perspective of academic freedom.

Just as rape may be unobjectionable from a similarly cockeyed perspective on sexual freedom.  

As an academic, I have no right to be exempt from my colleagues’ criticisms or public condemnation;

You have the same right as anybody doing any job whatsoever.  

I cannot insist that they attend my lectures, or socialise with me;

Sure you can. Similarly I can insist that all Super-Models should date only me.  

and I certainly cannot stop them from decorating their offices as they choose.

This isn't really true. You can stop the guy in the next cubicle from decorating his work-space with his own faeces.  

I’d be in even less of a position to expect these things if I had, as Stock has, gone on social media to condemn my critics in ad hominem terms.

One is welcome to expect anything one likes.  

(In 2018 a philosopher posted a Twitter thread advancing a substantive critique of Stock’s view that trans women should not be allowed into women-only spaces; in a now deleted reply, Stock described the thread as an act of ‘smug stupidity’, called those who supported the author’s position ‘morons’, and suggested that the author go back to writing their thesis.)

It is a substantive critique of an argument to point out that only a moron would make it. On the other hand, there can be no 'substantive critique' of the fact that 'women-only spaces' are meant for women only- not guys who think they are women despite incessantly raping chicks with their dicks. 

The important question – one that few of us are in a position to answer – is whether Stock’s colleagues recognised her right to pursue her academic research with job security; whether they treated her fairly in promotion exercises and reviews; and whether she was included on equal terms in the day-to-day activities of the university.

This is a legal question- not a particularly important one- which Amia is not in a position to answer because she is ignorant of the law.

What is important to Amia is that she has found out that all the clever and cool people- the kind she'd like to hang out with- think she is a cretin and avoid her clumsy attempts at ingratiating herself with them.  

Of course, most academics hope for more than just this. We hope that our colleagues won’t merely tolerate us, but will treat us as people like them,

Very true. Einstein was constantly weeping into his pillow coz Bohr snubbed him at the fifth Solvay Conference.  

worthy of their time and intellectual respect, whatever our differences. We hope for, in a word, collegiality. This doesn’t mean, as it’s often imagined to, carefully litigating our disagreements from first principles.

Einstein and Bohr did precisely that. This was good for Science.  

Often it means no more than avoiding contentious issues in order to have a friendly chat or get on with the business of co-marking exams. (One of my most enjoyable co-marking experiences was with my colleague William MacAskill, whose views I have criticised at length in the LRB.)

Amia enjoys 'co-marking'. Einstein and Bohr may have incessantly farted in each other's faces but they enjoyed doing Physics not 'co-marking'.  

When, occasionally, I have sensed an erosion of collegiality on the part of colleagues who are to my right politically, it has pained me.

Collegiality, it seems, consists of being invited to sit with the cool kids in the lunch room. This was a big issue at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton- thinks nobody at all.  

It’s the little things: the lack of a reply when I mentioned that a family member had gone to hospital with Covid;

which proves that Neo-Liberalism is very evil due to it invented 'Biology' which in turn created nasty things like viruses which are KILLING BROWN PEOPLE! Also some men have DICKS! Dicks cause RAPE!

We can't blame anybody for not engaging with Amia when she mentions family members being 'renditioned' by the medico-rape complex.  

the silence from someone who used to send kind, funny notes when they read my pieces.

Notes that read 'kindly stop making such a fucking exhibition of yourself. Seriously, it isn't funny anymore.'  

I sometimes fantasise about pointing out to these colleagues that they are doing what they accuse the left of doing: that I am happy to separate out my admiration for their minds from my dislike of their politics, so why can’t they do the same with me?

Because your mind is shit 

Sometimes I think about telling them I miss them.

And can we have a sleep-over and braid each other's hair and do each other's nails?  

Last​ term I had the students in my feminist theory seminar

i.e. cretins 

listen to the LRB podcast series

because they are literacy challenged 

by Meehan Crist on ‘Climate, Politics and Procreation’. Her guest in the first episode was the black feminist scholar and activist Loretta J. Ross.

Who is 70 years old. Meanwhile the Chinese are eating our lunch.  

Their conversation began with a discussion of Ross’s work at the first rape crisis centre in the US. In 1979, when Ross was 25 and a survivor of repeated sexual violence,

Eldridge Cleaver wrote in his book about how he spent a lot of time raping Black women so as to be able to do a better job once he got started on Whites. Ross was once a 'Marxist-Leninist'.  

she began teaching black feminism to a group of incarcerated men serving life sentences for rape and often murder:

It is important not to fist yourself incessantly as you play a podcast of this sort to your 'students'.  

So I told the story of what happened to me – or one of the stories, because I didn’t tell them all of them

otherwise they would have started stroking themselves off 

– and next thing I knew I didn’t see them as anything but human beings.

Like all the family members and others who had kept raping her as a girl.  

I wasn’t planning on having this rapport with them. As I said, I came down there angry, ready to curse them out. But it turns out that they were sincere in contacting the DC Rape Crisis Centre because they wanted to learn about black feminist theory and how not to maintain their status as rapists.

And thus get early release from the Parole board.  

And this was intellectually intriguing to me, because at the Rape Crisis Centre all we could do was put bandages on women and then send them back out to the world, often to get violated again. We had never quite figured out a process for preventing rape by talking to rapists.

They never did figure it out. On the other hand, getting buggered in jail might cause rapists to think about how not to keep offending once paroled.  

In the 1990s, Ross went on to join an effort to deradicalise members of the Ku Klux Klan, which she described as ‘having difficult conversations with a whole lot of people I wouldn’t bring home for coffee. I don’t want them to be my friends, but I needed to have conversations with them as a community organiser.’ Chris Smalls, the president and founder of the new Amazon Labour Union, has described the historic drive to organise one of Amazon’s Staten Island warehouses in similar terms:


We created our own culture. Amazon has its own culture that is run completely on metrics, numbers – no human interaction. While we interacted, we brought a human aspect to it, we cared for one another, we showed the workers every day that we cared for them. Even if they disliked us, we didn’t argue, we didn’t sit there and, you know, get into fights. We just continued to pretty much ... kill them with kindness ... I think workers respected that ... We just stuck to the issues and built off that commonality.

Ross and Smalls are remarkable individuals, but their approach to dealing with political difference places them in a long tradition on the left.

Ross would have been considered a 'sell-out' by her Marxist-Leninist colleagues of the mid Seventies.  Smalls was a rapper, not a member of a Revolutionary party, before being hired by Amazon in 2015. Unionizing Amazon workers could be a very lucrative business. But, like being a rapper, it might become dangerous if organized crime gets involved. 

Liberals talk about civility and toleration;

Which is why we think they pay dominatrices a lot of money to beat and abuse them 

conservatives exhort us to acknowledge a universal moral imperfection.

Not to me they don't. But then, Liberals too give me a wide berth.  

But it is the left that has made the act of engaging with people across deep ideological divides

which is what Donald Trump did 

– crucial to its project of building power from the ground up – the basis of its defining practice: organising.

Amia hasn't noticed that Business organizations are very good at organising. Why? The organising is not an end in itself. There is a big pay-off for getting and staying organized and then pursuing efficiency gains.  

‘The point of organising,’

is to raise productivity and hence the pay-off from organising 

the political theorist Alyssa Battistoni

who thinks 'the global ruling class' is intentionally destroying the environment. They are actually lizard people from planet X- right?  

writes, ‘is to reach beyond the people who are already on your side and win over as many others as you can. So you can’t assume the people you organise share your values; in fact, you should usually assume they don’t.’

This isn't organising. It is coalition building which is not concerned with productivity or efficiency or any actual pay-off. If everybody values having more money and more security, you have an organization which does useful stuff. Otherwise, you just have a bunch of guys who turned up expecting a wonderful party but who discover there is no booze, no snacks and no attractive chicks.  

It is true that not everyone who thinks of themselves as being on the left keeps faith with this vision of what it means to do politics.

Some on the Left aren't utterly useless. That's what keeps the Right on the qui vive.  

In the face of austerity and an unfolding climate crisis,

or in the face of being boring and stupid and useless and being incessantly snubbed by the clever kids 

it can be a rare and psychically satisfying exertion of power to trigger a Twitter pile-on, especially if it’s directed at someone whose views you consider dangerous.

Sadly Amia can't even do that.  

But the drive to eliminate ‘leftist ideology’ in the name of tolerance

as opposed to doing it in the name of common sense 

isn’t just logically self-defeating (presumably leftists have a point of view as worthy of tolerance as anyone else’s).

What they lack is common sense.  

It is also a threat to a form of politics which, at its best,

is useless 

demands and teaches something more than mere tolerance.

viz. a habit of intellectual inedia punctuated by coprophagy.  

In organising, winning over isn’t the same as winning the argument.

Neither matter. To organize is to gain the benefits of specialization, division of labour, economies of scope and scale etc, etc.  

Good organisers listen to people to figure out what it is they need – and then show them that, through the collective exercise of power, a world in which those needs are met is, contrary to appearances, possible.

No. An organization can burgeon on the basis of contracts of adhesion or just brute force. Good organisers increase productivity and efficiency. 

A good cult leader may 'listen to people' so as to manipulate them into believing that, contrary to appearances, everybody drinking the Kool-aid is the only way to get to a nice Planet where everyone will live happily for ten billion years  

Along the way you point out that other people, different people, also at the sharp end of power, have unmet needs too. You ask: if they stand up for you, will you stand up for them?

Very true. I stood up for the rights of Lesbian Nicaraguan goat-herders. Will they stand up for me now I've been hounded out of my post as President of the Institute of Socioproctology on dubious charges of sexual self-abuse? No. It doesn't matter what people 'at the sharp end of power' stand up for or sit down for or go to sleep for. A grand coalition of losers is still just a bunch of losers. 

Organizing either raises productivity, pay-offs, market power etc. on the basis of efficiency gains or it is shit. But that is what Amia has chosen to devote her life to studying. The result is that the smart kids no longer want to sit with her in the lunch-room. Sad.