Lionel Shriver’s full speech: ‘I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad’

By Lionel Shriver

I hate to disappoint you folks, but unless we stretch the topic to breaking point this address will not be about “community and belonging.” In fact, you have to hand it to this festival’s organisers: inviting a renowned iconoclast to speak about “community and belonging” is like expecting a great white shark to balance a beach ball on its nose.

The topic I had submitted instead was “fiction and identity politics,” which may sound on its face equally dreary.

But I’m afraid the bramble of thorny issues that cluster around “identity politics” has got all too interesting, particularly for people pursuing the occupation I share with many gathered in this hall: fiction writing. Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all. Meanwhile, the kind of fiction we are “allowed” to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.

Let’s start with a tempest-in-a-teacup at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Earlier this year, two students, both members of student government, threw a tequila-themed birthday party for a friend. The hosts provided attendees with miniature sombreros, which—the horror— numerous partygoers wore.

When photos of the party circulated on social media, campus-wide outrage ensued. Administrators sent multiple emails to the “culprits” threatening an investigation into an “act of ethnic stereotyping.” Partygoers were placed on “social probation,” while the two hosts were ejected from their dorm and later impeached. Bowdoin’s student newspaper decried the attendees’ lack of “basic empathy.”

The student government issued a “statement of solidarity” with “all the students who were injured and affected by the incident,” and demanded that administrators “create a safe space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted.” The tequila party, the statement specified, was just the sort of occasion that “creates an environment where students of colour, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, feel unsafe.” In sum, the party-favour hats constituted – wait for it – “cultural appropriation.”

Curiously, across my country Mexican restaurants, often owned and run by Mexicans, are festooned with sombreros – if perhaps not for long. At the UK’s University of East Anglia, the student union has banned a Mexican restaurant from giving out sombreros, deemed once more an act of “cultural appropriation” that was also racist.

Now, I am a little at a loss to explain what’s so insulting about a sombrero – a practical piece of headgear for a hot climate that keeps out the sun with a wide brim. My parents went to Mexico when I was small, and brought a sombrero back from their travels, the better for my brothers and I to unashamedly appropriatethe souvenir to play dress-up. For my part, as a German-American on both sides, I’m more than happy for anyone who doesn’t share my genetic pedigree to don a Tyrolean hat, pull on some leiderhosen, pour themselves a weisbier, and belt out the Hoffbrauhaus Song.

But what does this have to do with writing fiction? The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats.

In the latest ethos, which has spun well beyond college campuses in short order, any tradition, any experience, any costume, any way of doing and saying things, that is associated with a minority or disadvantaged group is ring-fenced: look-but-don’t-touch. Those who embrace a vast range of “identities” – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic under-privilege and disability – are now encouraged to be possessive of their experience and to regard other peoples’ attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft.

Yet were their authors honouring the new rules against helping yourself to what doesn’t belong to you, we would not have Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. We wouldn’t have most of Graham Greene’s novels, many of which are set in what for the author were foreign countries, and which therefore have Real Foreigners in them, who speak and act like foreigners, too.

Read the whole speech at The Guardian

Feminists treat men badly. It’s bad for feminism.

By Cathy Young of The Washington Post

Feminist male-bashing has come to sound like a cliche — a misogynist caricature. Feminism, its loudest proponents vow, is about fighting for equality. The man-hating label is either a smear or a misunderstanding.

Yet a lot of feminist rhetoric today does cross the line from attacks on sexism into attacks on men, with a strong focus on personal behavior: the way they talk, the way they approach relationships, even the way they sit on public transit. Male faults are stated as sweeping condemnations; objecting to such generalizations is taken as a sign of complicity. Meanwhile, similar indictments of women would be considered grossly misogynistic.

This gender antagonism does nothing to advance the unfinished business of equality. If anything, the fixation on men behaving badly is a distraction from more fundamental issues, such as changes in the workplace to promote work-life balance. What’s more, male-bashing not only sours many men — and quite a few women — on feminism. It often drives them into Internet subcultures where critiques of feminism mix with hostility toward women.

To some extent, the challenge to men and male power has always been inherent in feminism, from the time the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments catalogued the grievances of “woman” against “man.” However, these grievances were directed more at institutions than at individuals. In “The Feminine Mystique,” which sparked the great feminist revival of the 1960s, Betty Friedan saw men not as villains but as fellow victims burdened by societal pressures and by the expectations of their wives, who depended on them for both livelihood and identity.

That began to change in the 1970s with the rise of radical feminism. This movement, with its slogan, “The personal is political,” brought a wave of female anger at men’s collective and individual transgressions. Authors like Andrea Dworkin and Marilyn French depicted ordinary men as patriarchy’s brutal foot soldiers.

This tendency has reached a troubling new peak, as radical feminist theories that view modern Western civilization as a patriarchy have migrated from academic and activist fringes into mainstream conversation. One reason for this trend is social media, with its instant amplification of personal narratives and its addiction to outrage. We live in a time when jerky male attempts at cyber-flirting can be collected on a blogcalled Straight White Boys Texting (which carries a disclaimer that prejudice against white males is not racist or sexist since it is not directed at the oppressed) and then deplored in an article titled “Dear Men: This Is Why Women Have Every Right To Be Disgusted With Us.”

 

Read the whole story at The Washington Post

Guest Jonathan Haidt on the Gad Saad Show

Two of my favorite academics get together for an enlightening, down to earth conversation on a range of topics.

By Jacob Gershman of The Wall Street Journal

A group of law professors are accusing the civil rights office of the U.S. Education Department of taking “unlawful actions” that have led to “pervasive and severe infringements” of speech rights and due-process protections on college campuses.

An open letter signed by Harvard University professor Alan Dershowitz and 20 other legal scholars blasts a series of directives issued by the federal office to schools on dealing with sexual misconduct and harassment complaints from students.

The policies and procedures circulated in recent years are part of an Obama administration campaign to curb harassment at universities and combat a campus climate that it said too often treated victims unfairly. The professors say the government overreached. Their letter states:

“We recognize that sexual harassment represents unacceptable conduct, and those found responsible should be appropriately sanctioned. Some of us have witnessed the injustices resulting from institutions that downplay or ignore sexual harassment on their campuses, and we commend [the Office of Civil Rights] for taking a proactive approach to this problem.

In pursuing its objectives, however, OCR has…ignored constitutional law, judicial precedent and Administrative Procedure Act requirements by issuing numerous directives, and then enforcing these directives by means of onerous investigations and accompanying threats to withhold federal funding. OCR has brazenly nullified the Supreme Court definition of campus sexual harassment. These unlawful actions have led to pervasive and severe infringements of free speech rights and due process protections at colleges and universities across the country.”

The professors ask the civil rights office to “clarify which directives it considers to be guidance documents vs. regulations,” and call on lawmakers in Washington to enact a narrower definition of harassment.

Read the whole article at The Wall Street Journal

 

Free Speech Breaks Out at Univ. of Minnesota, Kansas, Elsewhere

By Nick Gillespie of Reason

Free speech is finding new defenders among faculty on college campuses. This is heartening, if more than a little overdue (it’s also more than a little sad that universities have taken so long to defend the freedom of expression and inquiry that makes them possible in the first place).

In a forceful commencement address delivered over the weekend at Rutgers, President Barack Obama called out students there for disinviting former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice from speaking at graduation a couple of years ago. While there’s no question that the Obama administration, via its Department of Education and its Office of Civil Rights, has given social-justice warriors unprecedented tools by which to suppress speech on campuses, he lectured “snowflakes” to toughen up already. “If somebody’s got a bad or offensive idea, prove it wrong,” he said. “Engage it, debate it, stand up for what you believe in. Don’t be scared to take somebody on. Don’t feel like you got to shut your ears because you’re too fragile and somebody might offend your sensibilities.”

More important than the words of an outgoing (and hypocritical) president are the actions of faculty themselves. Kansas University (KU) professors are pulling together a “free speech policy” that characterizes unfettered expression as  the “bedrock upon which academic freedom and the pursuit of knowledge are based.”

Read the whole article at Reason

Bernie Sanders: Campus Sexual Assault Requires Law Enforcement Response

Written by Joseph Cohn from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Speaking to an audience at the Black & Brown Democratic Presidential Forum in Iowa yesterday, United States Senator (VT) and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders echoed FIRE’s position in calling for law enforcement professionals to handle allegations of campus sexual assault. The Hillreports that Sanders argued, “If a student rapes another student it has got to be understood as a very serious crime, it has to get outside of the school and have a police investigation and that has to take place.” Sanders added, “Rape and assault is rape or assault whether it takes place on a campus or a dark street.”

FIRE agrees. As I told Congress last September when I testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training:

Victims of sexual assault deserve justice. Justice can only be served by competent professionals. Instead of creating a parallel justice system staffed by inexperienced, partial, and unqualified campus administrators to adjudicate campus sexual assault, policymakers should instead take this opportunity to improve and expand the effectiveness and efficiency of our criminal justice system to ensure that it provides an appropriately thorough, prompt, and fair response to allegations of campus sexual assault. Professional law enforcement and courts have the benefit of years of expertise, forensics, and legal tools like subpoenas and sworn testimony that are not available to campus adjudicators. These resources should be brought to bear on campus.

Sanders is in good company with his remarks. In a comment filed in March 2014 with the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), one of the country’s most respected victims’ rights advocacy groups, stated that it is “imperative that colleges and universities partner with local law enforcement around these crimes – from the time of report to resolution.”

Read the entire article at FIRE

David Rubin: College campuses need fewer listening sessions, more edgy dialogues

Below excerpt from an article on Syracuse.com by David Rubin:

Syracuse University is alert to these trends. Its administration has established a special Chancellor’s Workgroup on Diversity and Inclusion. It sponsored an open meeting earlier this month, billed as a “listening session,” to hear student concerns about the campus climate. I went, along with about 125 others.

The students did make a few suggestions for changes that would improve education on campus. They want a more diverse faculty, affordable tutoring services, and more courses on social justice topics.

Much of the discussion, however, addressed personal issues: that the campus was not a “safe space” for them; that they were constantly subjected to “micro-aggressions” by an insensitive white majority; and that the campus was not sufficiently diverse or integrated.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of these cris de Coeur, cries of the heart. But if students and administrators want to bring about change, this meeting and future meetings face two serious problems.

First, the people who need to hear these cries—the majority white faculty, staff, and student body–were largely not in the room. For them this was not a safe space to be, a concept that cuts two ways, although I don’t think the attendees at this meeting realize this.

Second, it was not a safe space because there was no true discussion, which is how change comes about in a democratic society. Not once in more than 90 minutes did anyone stand and say “I disagree with what was just said,” or “I have another perspective on that.”

The “discussion” was airless and self-validating. The single exception was an Hispanic faculty member who pleaded for a little humor in assessing true racial slights.

Otherwise, some of the complaints demanded responses that never came. One student said a music faculty member was unaware of the latest musical trends in this student’s culture. The student felt this was a micro-aggression against her. Why didn’t this young woman simply offer, in a friendly way, to visit the faculty member and introduce this new music? A micro-aggression? Please.

Since the university will continue these sessions next semester, they must make a stronger effort to attract students and faculty members with different views. The venue must be a truly safe space for everyone’s free speech. Audience members must not try to suppress the offensive speech they will hear. I constantly remind my students that the First Amendment exists to protect offensive speech. We don’t need a First Amendment to protect speech no one finds offensive.

Read the entire article at Syracuse.com

 

Shutting Down Conversations About Rape at Harvard Law

By Professor Jeannie Suk of Harvard Law School writing for the New Yorker.

This is a piece on a subject about which I may soon be prevented from publishing, depending on how events unfold. Last month, near the time that CNN broadcast the documentary “The Hunting Ground,” which focuses on four women who say their schools neglected their claims of sexual assault, I joined eighteen other Harvard Law School professors in signing a statement that criticized the film’s “unfair and misleading” portrayal of one case from several years ago. A black female law student accused a black male law student of sexually assaulting her and her white female friend. The accuser, Kamilah Willingham, has graduated from the law school and is featured in the film. The accused, Brandon Winston, who spent four years defending himself against charges of sexual misconduct, on campus and in criminal court, was ultimately cleared of sexual misconduct and has been permitted to reënroll. The group that signed the statement, which includes feminist, black, and leftist faculty, wrote that this was a just outcome…

But last week the filmmakers did more than understandably disagree with criticism of the film, which has been short-listed for the Academy Award for best documentary. They wrote, in a statement to the Harvard Crimson, that “the very public bias these professors have shown in favor of an assailant contributes to a hostile climate at Harvard Law.” The words “hostile climate” contain a serious claim. At Harvard, sexual harassment is “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including verbal conduct that is “sufficiently persistent, pervasive, or severe” so as to create a “hostile environment.” If, as the filmmakers suggest, the professors’ statement about the film has created a hostile environment at the school, then, under Title IX, the professors should be investigated and potentially disciplined.

To my knowledge, no complaint of sexual harassment has been filed with Harvard’s Title IX office—though I’ve been told by a high-level administrator that several people have inquired about the possibility—and I don’t know if the school would proceed with an investigation. Precedent for such an investigation exists in the case of Laura Kipnis, a feminist film-studies professor at Northwestern University, who earlier this year wrote an article criticizing aspects of Title IX policies and culture and was accused of creating a hostile environment on campus; Northwestern conducted an investigation and ultimately cleared Kipnis of sexual-harassment charges. A handful of students have said that they feel unsafe at Harvard because of the professors’ statement about the film. If a Title IX complaint were filed and an investigation launched, the professors wouldn’t be permitted to speak about it, as that could be considered “retaliation” against those who filed the complaint, which would violate the campus sexual-harassment policy.

What could possibly be the logic on which criticism of “The Hunting Ground” could be said to contribute to a hostile environment, or to cause a student to feel unsafe? The film features the first-person narratives of individuals who describe their sexual assaults and then go on to describe the insensitivity of campus officials or police who did not vindicate their claims. At the Sundance festival première, which I attended, when an audience member asked what people could do to join the fight against campus sexual assault, one of the survivors featured in the film responded, simply, “Believe us.” It is a near-religious teaching among many people today that if you are against sexual assault, then you must always believe individuals who say they have been assaulted. Questioning in a particular instance whether a sexual assault occurred violates that principle. Examining evidence and concluding that a particular accuser is not indeed a survivor, or a particular accused is not an assailant, is a sin that reveals that one is a rape denier, or biased in favor of perpetrators.

This is the set of axioms on which one might build a suggestion that challenging the accuracy of “The Hunting Ground” contributes to a hostile environment on campus. If I am a student at a school where professors seem to disbelieve one accuser’s account, then it is possible that they could disbelieve me if I am assaulted. That possibility makes me feel both that I am unsafe and that my school is a sexually hostile environment. Under this logic, individuals would not feel safe on campus unless they could know that professors are closed off to the possibility that a particular person accused of sexual misconduct may be innocent or wrongly accused. But, then, what would be the purpose of a process in which evidence on multiple sides is evaluated? Fair process for investigating sexual-misconduct cases, for which I, along with many of my colleagues, have fought, in effect violates the tenet that you must always believe the accuser. Fair process must be open to the possibility that either side might turn out to be correct. If the process is not at least open to both possibilities, we might as well put sexual-misconduct cases through no process at all.

Read the entire article at the New Yorker

This is Not a Day Care. It’s a University!

More push back against the politically correct totalitarians that have been protesting at various universities throughout the country.

Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, wrote the following open letter to the campus community.

This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love. In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.

I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic. Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims. Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”

I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience. An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad. It is supposed to make you feel guilty. The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization.

So here’s my advice:

If you want the chaplain to tell you you’re a victim rather than tell you that you need virtue, this may not be the university you’re looking for. If you want to complain about a sermon that makes you feel less than loving for not showing love, this might be the wrong place.

If you’re more interested in playing the “hater” card than you are in confessing your own hate; if you want to arrogantly lecture, rather than humbly learn; if you don’t want to feel guilt in your soul when you are guilty of sin; if you want to be enabled rather than confronted, there are many universities across the land (in Missouri and elsewhere) that will give you exactly what you want, but Oklahoma Wesleyan isn’t one of them.

At OKWU, we teach you to be selfless rather than self-centered. We are more interested in you practicing personal forgiveness than political revenge. We want you to model interpersonal reconciliation rather than foment personal conflict. We believe the content of your character is more important than the color of your skin. We don’t believe that you have been victimized every time you feel guilty and we don’t issue “trigger warnings” before altar calls.

Oklahoma Wesleyan is not a “safe place”, but rather, a place to learn: to learn that life isn’t about you, but about others; that the bad feeling you have while listening to a sermon is called guilt; that the way to address it is to repent of everything that’s wrong with you rather than blame others for everything that’s wrong with them. This is a place where you will quickly learn that you need to grow up.

This is not a day care. This is a university!

Yale Faculty Defend Freedom of Speech, Express Support for Christakises in Open Letter

 

As reported by FIRE

Forty-nine current or emeritus faculty members at Yale University have signed an open letter of support for Erika and Nicholas Christakis’ right to “free speech and freedom of intellectual expression.”…

The open letter states that “while the university stands for many values, none is more central than the value of free expression of ideas.” The letter goes on to cite Yale’s famous 1975 Woodward Report, which promises students and faculty members the right to “think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” The letter also expresses distress over the fact that Erika Christakis’ “modest attempt to ask people to consider the issue of self-monitoring vs. bureaucratic supervision” has been treated by many as an expression of support for racist speech.

“We have an obligation to say something reasonable about this,” Professor of Applied Physics A. Douglas Stone told the Yale Daily News in an interview about the letter. “The silence of so many people in terms of really defending the Christakises has solidified the narrative that they did something wrong.”

 

Read more here