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The racist meltdown at CPAC today, combined with the National Review’s feel-good story about a black shoeshine guy at the conference, put me in mind of a quote from National Review founder, and CPAC guiding light, William F. Buckley.

In the course of debating James Baldwin at Cambridge University in England in 1965, Buckley had this to say about Baldwin’s stateside celebrity:

“He is treated from coast to coast in the United States with a kind of unctuous servitude which in fact goes beyond anything that was ever expected from the most servile negro creature by a Southern family.”

Yep. That’s Buckley. That’s the NR. That’s CPAC.

It’s a problem.

James Olmsted, an adjunct professor of law at the University of Oregon, instigated a bizarre confrontation with UO student activists yesterday, in the course of which he shoved at least one student and snatched another’s cell phone. Videos of the incident — including one recorded on the stolen phone — have gone viral in recent hours.

The altercation took place on Thursday at a mock border checkpoint established by Students Against Imperialism, a newly-formed UO group concerned with “US imperial attitudes on the border with Mexico and in Israel/Palestine,” which it calls “examples of racial and imperial conflicts with gendered and class implications.”

In the video taken on the stolen phone, Olmsted is first seen aggressively lecturing a group of female activists about human rights in pre-Columbian America before urging them to “start a fucking war” if they “want the country back.” He then goes on to offer them disjointed and patronizing organizing advice before taking off his jacket and daring the students to “move” him. When a male student intervenes in an attempt to defuse the situation, Olmsted shoves him twice, calling him a “prick” and removing his own glasses before daring the student to “do something.”

Less than a minute later, he grabs a female student’s phone and places it, still recording, in his pocket.

Throughout the incident, the students are calm, reasonable, and cautious, while Olmsted — who appears as if he may be drunk — veers between instigation, sophistry, and defensiveness. The video taken on the stolen phone ends as Olmsted, having failed to negotiate an erasure of the recording, removes it from his pocket.

The only media coverage of this incident so far is a short piece from the UO student newspaper, and I haven’t seen a statement from the university yet.

But the blogs are all over it. Stay tuned…

Update | Olmsted used to be on the UO Law School’s adjunct faculty directory, but he’s not anymore.

Second Update | According to a statement from the university, Olmsted has been fired. The statement says that Olmsted’s “teaching responsibilities” have been “reassigned.” Though it goes on to say that the university is “unable to discuss details of this situation at this time,” it concludes that “we expect all members of the campus community to conduct themselves with the highest degree of respect for public discourse.”

Third Update | A UO blog has the text of a mass email sent out by the law school’s dean an hour and a half ago confirming Olmsted’s dismissal.

Fourth Update | The website Electronic Intifada reports that Olmsted will face criminal charges. No details were available from their source, though I have heard similar reports from eyewitnesses. More soon.

Fifth Update | Local news site KVAL reports that Olmsted was arrested at the scene of the altercation, and cited for theft and harassment. The stolen phone belonged to UO junior Jaki Salgado, who told KVAL that it was not returned to her until after police arrived. Reached by telephone on Friday afternoon, a “very upset” Olmsted declined to comment.

Sixth Update | Students Against Imperialism have released a press statement on the incident. In it, they refer to the demonstration as a “political theater piece,” and say that it was conducted in full compliance with university policies. UO police checked in with the activists before Professor Olmsted arrived, they say, and “left on good terms.”

Olmsted arrived approximately three o’clock in the afternoon, they say, some ninety minutes into the action. The describe him as “attempting to instigate a fight” with “younger female students of color” in the face of their attempts to de-escalate and mediate. In addition to shoving a male student who was not a part of the action, they say he pushed organizer Diana Salazar as he was retrieving his glasses — which he can be seen throwing to the ground in one video. They confirm that Jaki Salgado’s phone was only returned after police arrived, and say that Olmsted returned it at the insistence of another faculty member.

The statement, which was prepared earlier today, concludes by asking for “support from students, departments, the UO law school, administration and community members,” and calling on the university to fire him.

I have asked the organizers whether the statement will be posted in full online. If it is, I will link to it here.

Seventh Update | Olmsted has been reportedly barred from campus and charged with second degree theft and two counts of physical harassment. Second degree theft is a Class A misdemeanor in Oregon. Harassment is a Class B misdemeanor. The maximum possible combined penalty for these three charges is two years in jail, though the chances of a first-time offender serving significant jail time under these circumstances are low.

I’m running out to teach, but you really do need to read this NY Times piece on a bill that’s going to be introduced in the California state legislature today … and is expected to pass. The bill would require the state’s public colleges and universities to grant academic credit to online courses not provided by those institutions, including those offered by for-profite private companies.

For-profit higher education in the United States has long depended on public money — providers make most of their revenue from government grants and guaranteed loans. But the industry has been on the ropes recently as policymakers and students have woken up to the shoddy education and poor outcomes they provide.

They’re back.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this story is the endlessly repeated claim that the bill will give students the ability to register for crucial classes. “No college student in California will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn’t get a seat in the course they needed,” says one politician. “It’s almost unthinkable that so many students seeking to attend the public colleges and universities are shut out,” says the president of the American Council on Education.

But allowing students to substitute MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) offered by for-profit companies doesn’t give them access to the courses they’re locked out of. It provides a substitute for those classes — a simulation of them. And given that the reason that those classes aren’t available is that the state of California has chosen to defund public higher education, diverting more money from the state’s once-great public colleges into the pockets of discredited corporate rent-seekers is a mind-bogglingly audacious act.

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Two more things before I go to class.

First, on this, from the founder of a for-profit online course provider:

“This would be a big change, acknowledging that colleges aren’t the only ones who can offer college courses,” said Burck Smith, the founder of Straighterline. “It means rethinking what a college is.”

This quote can almost pass without comment, but in fact Smith is underselling here. Because this bill isn’t about whether “colleges” are “the only ones who can offer college courses,” it’s about whether public colleges will be the only ones providing public college courses.

Second, on this, from the president of the American Council on Education:

“These would be the basic courses that perhaps faculty gets the least psychic reward from teaching.”

For many of us, introductory courses are where we get the greatest psychic rewards from teaching. (For many of us who love teaching, in fact, introductory courses are pretty much all we teach.) And when those introductory courses provide few psychic rewards, it’s not because those subjects or those students aren’t rewarding, it’s because the demands of the bean-counters have rendered those courses unteachable in any appropriate way. For the president of the ACE to abandon those courses, those professors, and those students to YouTube and multiple-choice exams with such disdain is a travesty.

Last night on Girls there was a scene in which Hannah’s ex-boyfriend Adam sexually abuses his new girlfriend Nat.

The scene was written in such a way as to create ambiguity as to whether what Adam — a generally sympathetic, if overwhelmingly creepy, character — did was actually rape. Amanda Hess has a particularly good rundown, in which she describes the show as illustrating “what happens when a person you want to have sex with ‘has sex with you’ in a way that you do not want them to.”

Such equivocation focuses on the question of whether Nat can properly say that she’s been raped — whether she can prove that she’s been raped, whether she can show that she sufficiently articulated her discomfort. But that’s not the only way of framing the issue, and it seems to me that if we ask instead whether we can say that he raped her, it gets a lot simpler.

Because we, the viewers, know that he didn’t have Nat’s consent. We know that she wasn’t liking what was happening, and know that she was telling him to stop. And we know that when she said no, he didn’t slow down. He sped up. We know that he liked not having consent. We know that he wanted her not to be consenting.

The scene is only ambiguous if we adopt an adversarial relationship to Nat, or imagine her in an adversarial relationship to herself. It’s only ambiguous if we take our task as assessing whether she “did enough” to articulate non-consent.

But if we take it as a given that he knows she’s not consenting, and likes that she’s not consenting, then what she does or doesn’t articulate is irrelevant.

He’s raping her.

I’m not going to get into a whole huge thing about this, but in the grand order of the universe it does seem to me that snooping on your employees’ email to find out who’s been talking to the press is a more serious ethical violation than cheating on a college exam.

Update | Okay, one more thing. This…

“Several Harvard faculty members speculated that the administration had felt free to search the e-mail accounts because it regarded the resident deans as regular employees, not faculty members; Harvard’s policies on electronic privacy give more protection to faculty members.”

…is pretty messed up. As is this:

“Some of the resident deans said they considered the lack of notice — and even the searches, themselves — a violation of trust, but they refused to speak for the record because they lack job protection.”