Category Archive

As sophomore Stefanie Dazio writes at The Huffington Post, American colleges and universities are increasingly subjecting students to discipline for their off-campus actions. Their codes, she notes, often use “broad, vague language” that gives “university officials more discretion in sanctioning misconduct both on and off campus.”

Dazio, a student at American University, notes that her own campus changed its code of conduct last June to allow disciplinary action

“when, in the judgment of University officials, a student’s alleged misconduct has a negative effect on the university’s pursuit of its mission or on the well being of the greater community”

even if such “misconduct” took place off campus and did not violate any law.

The ten most-read posts of the week…

1. DREAM Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell: What Happened

How the bills failed in the Senate, and where they go from here.

2. Three Arrested at UC Santa Cruz Dance Party

Police bust an activist dance party on the Santa Cruz campus.

3. Campus Paper Runs Heartfelt, Thoughtful Apology for Rape Joke

A lesson in how to respond when you screw up.

4. Harvard Students of Color Blast Peretz Honor

Students reject New Republic editor’s bigoted remarks about Muslims, Latinos, and blacks.

5. Why Legacy Admissions Suck, and Why they Matter

The truth behind higher education’s biggest affirmative action program for rich white men.

6. Congressional Candidate: School Integration Will Lead to Mongrelization of the Races

The rantings of an old-school racist from the New York City suburbs…

7. O’Donnell: Co-Ed Dorms Will Lead to “Orgy Rooms”

…And some new-school wackiness from the Delaware Senate race. (2nd week on the chart!)

8. California Student Protest Crackdown Rolls On

UC Berkeley’s problematic judicial proceedings against last year’s student protesters.

9. On the “Why Can’t Whites Have a White Student Union?” Question

A classic post on an ugly question.

10. Universities Restrict Student Speech Across the Political Spectrum

Is suppression of conservative speech on campus political?

Outdoor dance parties have often been a way for radical activists to draw attention on campus recently, and sometimes a staging ground for actions as well. Last night, an activist dance party at UC Santa Cruz ended in a clash with police.

Details are still a bit fuzzy, but Occupy CA reports that three arrests were made, including one for the scary-sounding “attempted lynching” — which in this context apparently just means trying to spring someone from police custody.

More when I get it.

Megan McArdle loves the It Gets Better Project, but wonders if straight kids need an IGBP too:

“A lot of kids are horribly bullied–weird kids, smart kids, new kids, whatever–and some of them, too, kill themselves.  And even the many more who don’t might need to hear that it doesn’t just get better for gay people, but that Aspergers nerds and fat kids and everyone else who gets singled out by abuse really can go on to have a happy, meaningful life that they’re very glad they aren’t missing out on.”

To which a commenter responds with a pointed question:

“If we’re going to the trouble to tell people in an utterly artificial, man-made godawful situation that it will get better, perhaps we could also work on getting rid of the godawful situation?”

Earlier this week I posted the text of an essay in which George Orwell repudiated his famous 1942 claim that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.” Here are the key passages from that essay:

“[I am struck by] the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don’t mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects. I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point. … Nobody is searching for the truth, everybody is putting forward a “case” with complete disregard for fairness or accuracy, and the most plainly obvious facts can be ignored by those who don’t want to see them.

“We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are “objectively” aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant.

“This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions. … The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like.”

This is worth taking seriously, I think.

Orwell isn’t calling for “civility” here. He’s not asking people to hold back from arguing forcefully, even angrily. Bitterness and dispute are not his enemy. Neither is he calling for even-handedness. He’s not asking people to take unserious arguments seriously, or to give false claims undue respect. And he is not, finally, criticizing “extremists” or lauding an imaginary “reasonable” center.

What he’s saying is that a fair, honest attack is ultimately the most effective one.

As I noted on Tuesday, Orwell’s original 1942 essay had made three important arguments — that pacifism was an ineffective response to Nazism, that it was a moral philosophy born out of ignorance and shelteredness, and that many of those then calling themselves pacifists were actually fascist sympathizers in disguise. The problem with his “objectively pro-fascist” dig, as Orwell himself soon realized, is that it tore down the distinctions between those, collapsing three good arguments into one shoddy one.

Jon Stewart made an appeal earlier this month that on its surface seems to mirror Orwell’s. In announcing his upcoming Rally to Restore Sanity, he let loose “a clarion call for rationality” in political discourse, holding up proposed signs for the rally that included one reading “I disagree with you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not Hitler.”

But as Glenn Greenwald has noted, Stewart’s concern with the tone of political debate missed the mark:

“Political debates are inherently acrimonious — much of the rhetoric during the time of the American Founding, as well as throughout the 19th Century, easily competes with, if not exceeds, what we have now in terms of noxiousness and extremity — but far more important than tone, in my view, is content.  For instance, Bill Kristol, a repeated guest on The Daily Show, is invariably polite on television, yet uses his soft-spoken demeanor to propagate repellent, destructive ideas.  The same is true for war criminal John Yoo, who also appeared, with great politeness, on The Daily Show.  Moreover, some acts are so destructive and wrong that they merit extreme condemnation (such as Bush’s war crimes).  I don’t think anyone disputes that our discourse would benefit if it were more substantive and rational, but it’s usually the ideas themselves — not the tone used to express them — that are the culprits.”

I don’t know if Greenwald’s embrace of acrimony was an intentional echo of Orwell, but his argument is spot on. Sometimes you’re going to have to call someone out. Sometimes people behave horribly, and when they do, it’s no vice to say so.

Orwell could throw punches with the best of them. He rarely hesitated to speak his mind, and his typewriter was a terrible swift sword. But he understood that you can be righteous without being vicious, that you can eviscerate without falsifying, and that the first step in correcting a wrong is to understand it fully.