Category Archive

In 1942, with the Second World War raging, George Orwell wrote a short essay called “Pacifism and the War.” In it, he argued that pacifism was an ineffective response to totalitarianism, 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.

He also offered up a soundbite that lives on in political debate to this day: “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.”

It took Orwell barely two years to disavow that quote. In an article he wrote in late 1944,he declared that his previous claim had been both dishonest and counterproductive.

But although the original piece still circulates widely, the followup — in every way a stronger and more cogent one — has disappeared into relative obscurity. That’s a shame, because where the first piece is pretty much completely irrelevant to modern debates (Britain’s war-era fascists have no counterpart in contemporary politics, and where Orwell applies his analysis of pacifism to India and Gandhi he makes a complete mess of it), the second is one of his most thoughtful and contemporary pieces of writing.

Tomorrow I’ll post that second piece here on the blog (since it only exists in full online as a weirdly-formatted PDF), and on Thursday I’ll discuss its importance — to contemporary debates about Islam, to discourse in the blogosphere, to Jon Stewart’s upcoming rally on the Washington Mall — in more detail.

This post is the eleventh in a series of twelve counting down the top dozen student activism stories that will be making news on the American campus in the new academic year. Follow Student Activism on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with all these stories and many more!

Last year’s March 4 Day of Action was the biggest single day of student agitation in the United States since the Vietnam War era. Students at well over a hundred campuses in more than thirty states took to the quads and the streets to protest rising fees, cuts to services, hate crimes, repression of dissent, and the privatization of higher education in America.

March 4 was the culmination of a year of student organizing unprecedented in recent American history, and it captured national media attention as no student uprising has in decades.

And now it’s happening again.

Many of the same folks who supported the March 4 Day of Action have called for a repeat performance on October 7, just seventeen days from today. There’s been less time to prepare the ground for this one than there was last time, since students are only now returning to campuses, but buzz is already big and growing.

Stay tuned!

Could this be a trend?

For the second time in less than a year, a campus newspaper that ran a creepy, nasty rape joke has followed up not with a defense of its “satire” or a mealy-mouthed apology-to-anyone-who-might-have-been-offended, but a lengthy, thoughtful essay on the subject of rape and rape culture.

Here’s the end of the essay, but the whole thing is really worth reading:

“I deeply regret that I didn’t see what was depicted, and I apologize to the campus, to any survivors of sexual assault and, well, to any decent person who saw the graphic Friday and was offended. You’re right. We are absolutely in the wrong on this one and we’re doing our best to correct it. Part of that includes heightened awareness, on my part and on the part of the opinions editor, of what constitutes an acceptable graphic or editorial content. Part of that is painfully reviewing this issue in the light of comments on various websites and Facebook pages – both those attacking and those defending us. And to those defending us: While we appreciate some of your arguments on our behalf, ladies and gentlemen, suggesting that someone was “asking for” rape is misguided and precisely the problem here.

“Most of all, we, and the rest of The Exponent’s staff, are taking this as a learning opportunity. We’re students, just like many of the people contacting us. The Exponent is an educational institution. We’re making an effort to fully comprehend what we did wrong and to help educate others about issues of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse on college campuses, and we will be running several stories exploring these problems. To that end, I encourage you to participate in a constructive dialogue with us: What can we do to better cover women’s issues on campus? How can we help educate our readers?

“The first step, however, is to admit our mistake and apologize. That’s what I’m doing here. We erred and we’re sorry – not because of your response, but because we were wrong and would’ve been wrong even if nobody had said so.”

Kudos to Zoe Hayes for getting this one right.

This story is being spun as a left-vs-right one, but it’s really just a reflection of the habitual, unquestioned regulation of student speech and organizing that happens on most American college campuses every single day.

Christina Beattie, a student at Palm Beach State College, is trying to launch a local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative political group. As part of that project, she set up a table at a campus club fair, but her club hadn’t yet registered and the university made her stop.

The university says that Beattie was told to leave the fair because her group wasn’t formally chartered. Beattie says it was because of her politics. She also says that she’d asked in advance whether she could participate in the event, and that the same administrator who threw her out gave her the go-ahead by phone. But even if we take the university’s story at face value, their defense isn’t much of a defense.

College spokesperson Grace Truman told the local paper that “you can’t just come in, set up a table and say you’re forming a club,” and that “the college needs to be very clear who the clubs are.” It’s not clear, though, why that should be. There’s no indication that Beattie’s table was interfering with others’ use of the space, or that her actions were disruptive in any way. Why not just let someone “come in, set up a table, and say you’re forming a club”?

The reason, of course, is that it’s simpler for the university. If you limit tabling to registered clubs, the fair will be easier to manage. In exactly the same way, restrictions on demonstrating, chalking, and other extra-curricular activities help keep the campus running smoothly. But a campus, like any community, is a boisterous place, and whether it’s “running smoothly” isn’t — or shouldn’t be — the only measure of its health and vitality.

Conservative commentators assume (and assume and assume and assume) that Beattie would have been treated differently if she’d been a liberal, and it’s possible that they’re right. (YAF contends that other, apolitical, unregistered groups were able to participate in the fair, without saying whether those groups’ participation was brought to administrators’ attention.)

As any campus activist can tell you, though, liberal and left-wing students’ speech is frequently restricted at American colleges and universities. And even if Beattie was singled out because of her politics, that discrimination was only possible because limitations on student speech and assembly on campus exist.

There’s no legitimate reason why a college “needs to be very clear” which student groups exist on campus. There’s no legitimate reason why students shouldn’t be able to just set up a table at a meet-and-greet, so long as there’s enough room for them. To give priority to those student groups (formal or informal) who have signed up in advance, or to those who have been active on campus for a while, makes sense.

But to arbitrarily distinguish between “registered” and “unregistered” student groups serves neither the needs of the student community nor the demands of the First Amendment.

This piece was also published at Huffington Post.

Earlier this month, Martin Peretz — owner and editor in chief of the frequently-liberal New Republic magazine — wrote a blogpost suggesting that “Muslim life is cheap” and that it was time to stop “pretend[ing] that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment.”

He’s since sort-of apologized, but he’s said this kind of thing before, and anyway like I say the apology was pretty half-hearted.

But it turns out that Harvard University plans to honor Peretz by naming a student research fund after him, and that the fund is supposed to be formally announced at a big gala this Saturday. Various members of the Harvard community have raised a stink about this plan since the current story broke, but Harvard seems to be sticking with it.

Now, though, the presidents of five student of color groups at Harvard –the Islamic Society, RAZA, the Harvard Society of Arab Students, Latinas Unidas, and the Black Student Union — are asking the university to reconsider.

In an open letter released Thursday, the students point out that Peretz has made offensive comments about Latinos…

“[Mexico is] a Latin society with all of its characteristic deficiencies: congenital corruption, authoritarian government, anarchic politics, near-tropical work habits, stifling social mores, Catholic dogma with the usual unacknowledged compromises, an anarchic counter-culture and increasingly violent modes of conflict.”

…and blacks…

“So many in the black population  are afflicted by cultural deficiencies … in the ghetto a lot of mothers don’t appreciate the importance of schooling … a mother who is on crack is in no position to help her children get through school.”

…in the past, and argue that the Harvard honor “lends legitimacy and respectability to views that can only be described as abhorrent and racist.”

Harvard’s first statement on the controversy declared that “it is central to the mission of a university to protect and affirm free speech, including the rights of Dr. Peretz, as well as those who disagree with him, to express their views,” but the students of color letter points out that free speech is not the issue here. “We acknowledge Mr. Peretz’s right to hold and express these views,” they wrote, but object “to Harvard giving such ideas a platform, and … worry that in so doing the University, and the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies in particular, will be alienating a large segment of its student body.”

The students have asked Harvard to “reconsider having Mr. Peretz as one of the Celebration’s speakers, or at least [require] that he be publicly challenged to defend views that are, in our opinion, indefensible.”

The Harvard Crimson reported this morning that the director of the program that is honoring Peretz declined to comment for their article, except to say that the program’s governing committee would be releasing a statement on the matter later today.

Tuesday | The Crimson is now reporting that Peretz has been scrubbed from the speaker’s list for Saturday’s gala.