As requested by a couple of commenters, I’ve created a separate thread to discuss the issues raised by commenter “closet conservative” in response to my post on US academia. I’ll moderate, but not participate
by John Q on August 15, 2024
As requested by a couple of commenters, I’ve created a separate thread to discuss the issues raised by commenter “closet conservative” in response to my post on US academia. I’ll moderate, but not participate
{ 36 comments }
Doru Constantin 08.15.24 at 11:56 am
Many thanks to JQ for opening this thread!
I am not a philosopher, but I have a (probably naive) question for Closet conservative: Is your point that following opinions that are unpopular, or even contrary to current law, can be intellectually enriching? For instance, does Peter Singer’s position on disabled people fall into this category?
Also, where does one draw the line? How about interracial marriage? Would it be OK to discuss philosophical objections to it in a university setting?
Kenny Easwaran 08.15.24 at 5:51 pm
As the child of an interracial marriage, I think it would be absolutely appropriate, in the right context, to discuss philosophical objections to interracial marriage. It’s hard to properly understand the force of the arguments in favor of it without having the comparison of the arguments in favor and the arguments against.
Furthermore, I think it’s valuable to understand which arguments regarding cultural appropriation and colonialism might have implications regarding interracial marriage – for instance, a simplistic principle that it’s always wrong for anyone to engage in a cultural practice from a culture other than their own would have the implication that certain interracial marriages are always wrong, because there is no cultural practice of marriage that belongs to the culture of both participants. Openly discussing this sort of argument is important to help people think about how to more carefully formulate the principles that they endorse around any of these other subjects, and to think about what sorts of considerations might counterbalance others even when there are real concerns.
CJColucci 08.15.24 at 6:35 pm
This question makes me think about teaching religion in American public schools. It is absolutely OK to teach about religion. You just can’t teach that any particular religion, or religion in general, is true.
It would be perfectly proper to teach that, say, Catholics believe X, Presbyterians believe Y, Jews believe Z, and so on and so forth, though not that X,Y, or Z are true, along with the arguments adherents give for X,Y, and Z. Since the arguments for X,Y, or Z are generally unpersuasive to anyone not already in the club, that will naturally raise the question: So why do they believe this s**t? That question has a number of possible answers, sociological, psychological, or what have you, that do not presuppose the truth or falsity of X,Y, or Z. This would all be very valuable, if honestly and rigorously taught, but it is probably why, although certain groups of religious activists claim they want religion taught in public schools, it will never happen. We just can’t have nice things.
So by a similar logic, one could absolutely teach the philosophical objections to inter-racial marriages like mine. Properly presented, those arguments are evident nonsense unless you accept certain premises that would, if openly expressed, exclude you from polite society. So if you make them, rather than merely present and explain and explore them, you can expect certain consequences, both personal and professional.
Max 08.15.24 at 7:34 pm
If you want to have a conversation with your peers about something you find interesting, then it helps if they share that interest. If they do not, you will struggle to have the conversation you apparently crave.
If they don’t share your interest, you can’t really blame them for not talking it over with you. Of course, they might still do so, but when the issue in question is “controversial” and touches on classes of discrimination we see all around us, I expect that the conversation can only really be had with peers who trust you and your motivations. Most people aren’t really interested in providing free basic remedial education, or in refuting what amounts to little more than talking points. So you have to work to show them that that’s not the kind of conversation you want to have. And you may or may not succeed in doing so.
I recently refereed a paper for the Journal of Controversial Ideas on a Conservative bugaboo. It was all just straightforward talking points, with almost no gestures at the (large) extant philosophical literature. When it did engage with that literature, it weirdly painted allies as enemies by grossly mischaracterizing them as defending what they decry. Like, the position in question is actually quite a prominent one in the debate. It does your cause no good to pretend otherwise. It might make you sound more controversial, but those of us who know what you’re talking about know it’s garbage.
SusanC 08.15.24 at 7:36 pm
@Kenny Easwaran:
That’s a provocative argument :-)
As a first cut, I might go for: when we grant someone UK citizenship (or indeed, the kind of status you get by being married to a citizen) that is accepting them into the (British) society and giving them full permission to engage in whatever local cultural practise they want without fear of being accused of cultural appropriation.
Like, in gthe very unlikely event I ever become a US citizen, that gives me permission to celebrate Thanksgiving or attend a baseball match without it seeming out of place :-)
Tm 08.15.24 at 9:35 pm
Just a reminder. The question isn’t whether certain arguments are presented and discussed in appropriate settings. The question is whether intellectual diversity requires universities to hire faculty who hold the positions in question.
Closet conservative 08.16.24 at 6:07 am
Doru – “Is your point that following opinions that are unpopular, or even contrary to current law, can be intellectually enriching?”
That’s a good (not naïve!) question which I’m happy to discuss. But my initial point was rather that the liberal culture at universities may be part of the explanation for why there are few conservative professors. I have no empirical evidence for this, just personal experience. As a philosophy phd candidate at a US university, I regularly opt to self-censor my views on sensitive topics when around colleagues. This is a learned habit. I used to argue with people if they expressed leftwing views in my presence – in an amicable, non-combative way (as a philosopher, I love arguing!). However, this usually caused everyone in the room to look at me like I just blew a tuba at a funeral.
Example: one time I was in a graduate seminar where the class was a discussing a then-recent incident at Middlebury College, where Charles Murray had been invited by a club to speak on his book Coming Apart, which is about growing class divisions in US. Ultimately the event was cancelled due to disruptions by student protestors. My classmates fawned over the bravery of the protestors. In contrast, I had actually read the book and liked it, so I said that the protestors were being “whiny babies.” This made the professor furious and he told me to stop being a jerk. It was extremely awkward. Yet, many (probably most!) people outside academia would agree with me.
I eventually learned it’s easier to let academics blab about their leftwing views undisturbed. Of course, habitually self-censoring is highly unpleasant, to the point that I now feel disinclined to apply for academic jobs. Why spend my career either (1) suppressing what I think or (2) saying what I think and being treated as a pariah? I love scholarship, but ultimately I want be happy, and neither (1) nor (2) is conducive to happiness. I may be unusual to think this way, but I doubt it. I suspect I’m pretty normal, in which case many conservatives smell that academia is a leftwing tribe, and choose happiness over suffering. I feel compelled to offer this counterpoint because John Q’s OP argues that the scarcity of conservative professors is primarily explained by education and income – a claim that implies universities don’t have a culture problem.
As to whether following opinions that are unpopular can be intellectually enriching, my answer is yes, since unpopular opinions frequently turn out to be true, and believing true propositions is the definition of intellectual enrichment. Lack of intellectual diversity is a problem in the humanities because the only method for evaluating any given view, X, is basically this: I argue for X, and my peers evaluate my argument to see if they find it persuasive. Lack of intellectual diversity renders this method useless. If I present a pro-life argument to a room full of people who are pro-life, and everyone says the argument is great, this is terrible evidence that the argument really is great. Likewise, if Robert P. George writes a philosophy paper arguing for the “conjugal view” of marriage (a marriage is a permanent, monogamous, organic union between a man and a woman), and most philosophers think the argument is bad, this is terrible evidence that the argument really is bad. After all, almost all philosophers are leftwing, George’s conclusion is at variance with leftwing views, and people scrutinize conclusions they don’t like much more closely than views they do like. In other words, though we may aspire to objectivity, philosophical arguments can just be a Rorschach test. Eric Schwitzgebel’s research finds that philosophy professors are not less susceptible to cognitive biases in moral reasoning than average people, but rather equally susceptible: https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHPBJ
I’m not arguing for affirmative action for conservatives (that’s moronic). But I do think the lack of conservatives in humanities departments is a problem, given the methods of the humanities. (Lack of conservatives among hard scientists is not problematic, given hard scientists use more objective methods.) I don’t know how to solve the problem. But as we learn from Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step towards solving a problem is admitting you have one.
Doru Constantin 08.16.24 at 7:30 am
Tm @6
The two questions are connected if we assume that someone who believes in a certain position can also defend it most effectively, but I agree that (some form of) the second question is the more interesting of the two: how far must we push Mill’s “diversity of opinion” argument? Presumably not outside the consensus in that particular field (no place for kooks) but some way beyond what is socially accepted at that time.
One difficulty is that it’s easy to dismiss someone in the second case under guise of the first.
J-D 08.16.24 at 8:52 am
Everybody self-censors and everybody should self-censor. There are neurological conditions which impair the ability to self-censor and they are not good things.
Of course it does make a difference which things people learn to self-censor, but part of what this means that when somebody reports self-censoring it’s impossible to know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing without knowing something about the kind of (potential) utterances they’re self-censoring. Maybe sometimes the appropriate conclusion when you know what opinions somebody is avoiding expressing is that they should be avoiding expressing those opinions.
Maybe the professor was right! Telling people that they are ‘whiny babies’ is just the kind of thing which (at least sometimes) it is jerky to do.
No! No, it isn’t! Everybody does it, and that’s how it should be!
Of course universities have a culture (how could it be otherwise), but not every culture is a problem.
I have made the observation more than once, both here and elsewhere, that a historian, sociologist, anthropologist or political scientist studing the Ku Klux Klan needs to engage intellectually with the ideas of the Ku Klux Klan, but that universities do not need Kluxers on the faculty to make this possible.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not mean that there’s no difference between being a conservative and being a Kluxer and I also do not mean that universities should avoid hiring conservatives the same way they should avoid hiring Kluxers, but it is the case that it’s possible for university researchers to engage intellectually with conservative ideas without having conservative colleagues.
engels 08.16.24 at 11:26 am
many (probably most!) people outside academia would agree with me
I’d be surprised if most people outside of academia had even heard of Charles Murray.
superdestroyer 08.16.24 at 2:16 pm
I will repost what I wrote on the other thread:
Maybe part of the issue is that there is no equivalent of luxury beliefs on the right that exist on the left. One would think that someone like Rob Henderson who popularized the idea of Luxury beliefs and does have a PhD from Cambridge would be the kind of conservative that many universities would want to take a look at and possibly hire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_K._Henderson_(author)
The only reply was that Luxury beliefs is a stupid idea. The response demonstrated why conservatives do not get jobs with first tier universities. Not only go the conservatives have to have great credentials but also have to still believe in a laundry list of ideas that they may disagree with.
patrick linnen 08.16.24 at 2:21 pm
Why should universities subsidize (and otherwise allow to associate with their public image) those like Murray that would push the idea that there are inferior groups and superior groups (which coincidentally include the proposer) while basing their arguments on bad methodology, out-dated sources, and selective (and selective edited) quotes from religious writings? Much less protect them from any ‘liberal’ pushback that any other professor, liberal or conservative, would get.
MisterMr 08.16.24 at 2:58 pm
There is a general problem in philosophy and humanities (literature etc., I’m not speaking of social sciences) that there isn’t really a way to prove that an argument is wrong, other than that it is out of fashion.
So on the one hand it is true that unpopular arguments might be beneficial becvause they add a point of view, but on the other, if I have a silly theory like “space squirrels are our Gods and Creators and they are against interracial marriage”, and everyone says that this is stupid, I can’t just say “hey it’s an unpopular opinion so it should be taught for diversity”.
So there should be a way to differentiate between useless “cockroach” arguments and actually defensible differernt points of view.
Unfortunately I don’t have a solution for this (but when I’ll solve philosophy I’ll let you know).
CJColucci 08.16.24 at 3:56 pm
As Yogi Berra once said, if people don’t want to come to the ballpark, you can’t stop them.
Seekonk 08.16.24 at 6:07 pm
Conservatives may be relatively scarce in the humanities and social sciences departments, but as John Q notes they are quite well represented in economics departments, as well as law schools, business schools, and academia-adjacent think tanks, positions which give them an outsized, and imho quite harmful, impact on society.
Closet conservative 08.16.24 at 7:38 pm
MisterMr – You raise some very interesting points.
I agree that in philosophy, generally our best evidence that a theory is false is if everyone independently comes to the conclusion that it’s stupid. For example, if virtually every philosopher today independently judges that substance dualism (the mind and body are made of different substances) is stupid, this fills me with confidence that the theory really is wrong. The wisdom of crowds tends to be greater than that of any individual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
But the wisdom of crowds effect is undermined if a group is too ideologically homogenous. If 20 sports gamblers independently judge that the Patriots will win the super bowl, but all 20 are Patriots fans, this is not good evidence that the Patriots will in fact win the super bowl.
Likewise, if most philosophers agree that e.g. George’s conjugal view of marriage is bogus, but also most philosophers are some shade of leftwing – making the central claim of the view unintuitive to them to begin off – this is not good evidence that the conjugal view really is bogus. The political demographics of the wider US population look very different than the academia (social conservatism is a major political force in US!). So, the “unpopularity” of George’s view among academic philosophers doesn’t make it unpopular simpliciter.
In short, we should be alert to the possibility that in the humanities, the popularity or unpopularity of a view has a sociological explanation (e.g. the political demographics of the professoriate), which should undermine or at least dilute our confidence in the group’s collective judgment. This is not the case with substance dualism. It might be the case with the George’s conjugal view.
engels 08.16.24 at 7:40 pm
if people don’t want to come to the ballpark, you can’t stop them
Tell that to Elon Musk
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-x-lawsuit-advertisers-boycott-antitrust-2024-8?op=1
Max 08.16.24 at 8:19 pm
If you want to discuss the merits of a protest, but your opening gambit is “they’re whiny babies,” it’s not surprising that nobody was interested in having that discussion with you–especially if your putative interlocutors have already revealed themselves as being on the protestors’ side. If you want to have a discussion about sexual intercourse and your opening gambit is that a large minority of people–who only just won equal rights under the law after decades of struggle–are degenerates and perverts, then again, it’s not surprising that nobody felt up to having that discussion with you. And so on.
You have to be able to read a room. And if you’re desperate to have a discussion, then you need to know how to present your case so that others will take you seriously, as more than just a troll spouting the same old tired talking points. One way to do that is to win the trust and respect of your peers. That, of course, takes time. Another is to think carefully about how you present your opening conversational gambits, and to make them at the appropriate junctures.
That doesn’t always work, of course. But that’s a normal part of life.
wacko 08.16.24 at 8:29 pm
MisterMr @8 says: “There is a general problem in philosophy and humanities (literature etc., I’m not speaking of social sciences) that there isn’t really a way to prove that an argument is wrong, other than that it is out of fashion.”
In that case, it’s exactly like ‘atheist in church’. And if those church-like institutions weren’t awarding academic degrees, there would’ve been no problem whatsoever.
somebody who actually read the book human accomplishment 08.17.24 at 12:21 am
its always defending charles murray, a guy who will always get a cool eight figgie advance any time he wants one from whatever industrial slurry dumping billionaire decides to fund his next thumbsucker. i read coming apart and my immediate response was “this guy is paid a lot of money to hate the poor when america will do it for free”. charles murray does not need universities to have total crushing success. his ideas are in complete control of around 2/3 of the US. why would a university need to have him come to campus to say poor philadelphia whites have a genetic propensity for no-fault divorce and “women be sleeping around”? students can get that level of thinking that on demand via any video game youtuber they want. his ideas are in no danger of suppression just because some college attendees are so tired of hearing them from every corner of the rest of society that they’d rather give him the bum’s rush. i guarantee each and every one of those whiny baby protesters fully understood his argument because it’s screamed at them from every corner of america 24-7 from the moment theyre born. they just didn’t want to hear it one more fuckin time. human accomplishment was funnier. remember when he counted up a bunch of encyclopedia pages? he got paid millions of dollars to do that. anyway the university art museum is only open six hours a week now
hix 08.17.24 at 3:14 am
A lack of conservative philosophy profs would not rank particular high on my list of fears. Suppose that comes down to what you have to believe to be considered conservative in the US today.
MisterMr 08.17.24 at 6:50 am
@Closet Conservative 16
The question is if philosophers hold some opinions because they are leftwing, or if they hold these opinions and as a consequence they became leftwing.
A really large part of most people “moral intuitions” are not pure intuitions but reflect a moral common sense that is culturally determined. Since for many centuries religion was very important all our “moral intuitions” likely still reflect religious values (included atheist intuitions).
The job of a (moral) philosopher is more or less to rationalise and make explicit these values, and show where they are contradictory.
As a consequence it is natural that moral philosopher tend to be anti-traditionalists, because their job is to find errors and glitches in the traditional common sense morality.
So from this point of view IMHO it is natural that they tend to gravitate towards the left more than the average population (who might or might not question traditional values, and if it doesn’t will be conservative by definition).
@wacko
Or like a religious person among atheists?
That is to say, is the problem that average leftist professor has some core beliefs that he will not accept to question, or that the conservative professor has some core beliefs that she will not accept to question?
For myself, as a non philosopher utilitarian (also I’m not an academic), I have serious problems accepting moral systems that are not somehow utilitarian/hedonistic, but that is because IMO it is those other moral systems that make bonus assumptions that I’m forced to accept to follow them.
novakant 08.17.24 at 11:35 am
God, this isn’t so hard is it? If you can’t look someone who is the object of your argument in the eye while you’re making them and share the same space as a colleague on a regular basis, maybe your argument is faulty – something about universality, equal rights and so on.
But by all means, go for it and make elaborate arguments discriminating against gay people (Swinburne called it a disability). And from there why not expand to women, Jews, PoC, disabled etc. But don’t complain if nobody in their right mind wants to hang out with you – I would call it progress.
wacko 08.17.24 at 3:09 pm
MisterMr: “That is to say, is the problem that average leftist professor has some core beliefs that he will not accept to question, or that the conservative professor has some core beliefs that she will not accept to question?”
Like I said, aside from these institutions presenting themselves as an intellectual authority, I don’t see any problem in it. Like-minded individuals are free to organize a club. Moreover, at that club, they are free to discriminate against heretics.
The situation being discussed here is definitely about liberal dogmas. But if it was a story of you feeling unwelcome/uncomfortable at NRA meetings, then it would’ve been about traditionalist dogmas.
J-D 08.18.24 at 6:57 am
You don’t have to be a university to present yourself as an intellectual authority. Anybody can do that, and why not? You don’t have to accept anybody as an intellectual authority if you don’t want to, whether they’re a university or not. So what’s the problem?
LFC 08.18.24 at 8:57 pm
J-D @9
As you did in a previous discussion where this arose, you are failing to distinguish between different kinds of self-censorship. If I have an impulse to insult someone over a trivial matter, that would probably be a good time to exercise self-censorship. On the other hand, if I’m sitting in a classroom where the topic of discussion is, say, U.S. foreign policy and numerous people are denouncing the U.S. as a retrograde imperialist power bent on making the world safe for corporate capitalism and I (in this hypothetical case) have a different view, then if I self-censor because I’m afraid of what others will think of me, I’m avoiding what might be a productive debate. That kind of self-censorship is not desirable, and I take it that that kind of self-censorship is what closet conservative is referring to. (Note that I do not agree with CC’s views on marriage etc. or probably most other things, but that’s irrelevant to the point at hand.)
Ebenezer Scrooge 08.18.24 at 10:42 pm
Closet Conservative’s point is well-taken, even outside of the humanities or academia. Groupthink is everywhere, and it really isn’t good for organizations. I managed to be the tolerated in-house hippie in my own organization, but I would have had a lot more influence if I were closer to the Party Line. (I was tolerated because I could speak fluent Party Line.) But it’s hard to be an in-house hippie, and pretty emotionally unrewarding unless you so strongly buy into the organization’s mission that you’re willing to fight the Party Line.
Constructive dissidence is hard to manage, but some organizations try to encourage it. As far as I can see, the military does better than most, encouraging open dissident thinking by mid-level officers.
J-D 08.19.24 at 9:41 am
No, that’s not what’s happening. You are absolutely right that it makes a difference which views are being self-censored, but the person who failed to distinguish between different kinds of self-censorship is not me, but rather the person who introduced the subject of self-censorship and to whom I was responding, namely, Closet conservative. Closet conservative wrote ‘I regularly opt to self-censor my views on sensitive topics when around colleagues’ as if the bare fact of self-censorship taking place, independently of what the views are that are being self-censored, is an indicator of a problem.
Yes, you take it that’s what Closet conservative is referring to, but are you justified in taking it that way? Another thing Closet conservative actually wrote is that ‘I said that the protestors were being “whiny babies.”’ I am not the only person who has suggested that it might be a good thing, at least some times, if that kind of opinion were subjected to self-censorship. Do you think it’s a good thing if people are able to freely discuss their opinion that protester are whiny babies and why (or why not)?
Maybe, but what is relevant is whether there is a good argument in favour of the view that it would be a good thing for Closet conservative to be able to discuss freely their views about marriage. If we are agreed that there are different kinds of self-censorship, and if we are also agreed that some of them are good and some of them are bad, then it is relevant to ask into which of those categories should be placed the kind of self-censorship in which Closet conservative self-censors their views about marriage and why.
Tm 08.19.24 at 11:26 am
LFC 26: I dimly remember there recently have been “debates” at US universities where US foreign policy was an object of criticism, now do you happen to remember how that went?
My point being, self-censorhsip in the sense you use the term is almost never the problem right-wingers try to make it. What is and remains a real problem is actual censorship in the sense of students getting kicked out of university, teachers and professors losing their jobs or having restricted what they may say in public, university presidents being kicked out under pressure from right wing donors, books that don’t agree with right wing ideology being banned and destroyed, whole university departments being disbanded by right wing education-haters, the content of university and school teaching restricted and policed by fascist thugs, and so on.
But sure LFC go on pretending to not understand what is actually happening in the US culture war.
Tm 08.19.24 at 12:07 pm
And let’s point out that the notion of conservative “self-censorship” in the US 2024 is beyond silly given that the public face of the conservative movement consists of those “Mass deportation now” placards at campaign events where Trump and other fascists are demonstrating that they don’t need dog whistle any more, they are now able to just say it out loud, absolutely nothing is off limits any more. Yet those same people holding those hateful palcards and cheering to Trump’s calling Blacks stupid and whatnot will definitely claim, when asked by some dumbass NYT reporter, that you can’t say what you think any more, and they’ll dutifully write those silly newspaper pieces reporting breathlessly how “conservatives” are concerned about freedom of speech.
The concept of self-censorship isn’t completely devoid of meaning. When you are a resident of Russia having doubts about Putin and his war, you will definitely self-censor. But that is because there is actual censorship in place and everybody knows that you’ll go to prison if you say something wrong. So yes people are self-censoring, but that is a function of actually existing censorship. Self-censorship doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense in the absence of actual censorship.
basil 08.19.24 at 5:54 pm
I’m dubious about the existence of either a left majority, of left power or even left influence at (m)any US or UK institutions of higher education. Any organising this last year should have revealed that to even the most optimistic among us.
LFC 08.20.24 at 5:21 am
Tm:
A fairly brief reply as it’s late here. Of course I think it’s disgusting that, for example, Ron DeSantis has gutted New College in Fla. and basically destroyed it, as well as interfering in completely unjustified ways in school curriculums in that state. That there is a right wing assault on public education in certain parts of the US is undeniable and this is certainly part of a larger “culture war”.
However, that has little or nothing to do with whether students sitting in a class that may be far removed geographically and otherwise from the actions of a right wing governor and legislature are deciding to keep certain opinions to themselves for non-substantjve reasons, eg perceived peer reaction. As J-D suggests, perhaps certain opinions or ways of expressing them should be self-censored, but most should not be imo, assuming some general ground rules of discussion, such as no insults, are agreed on. Your assertion that there is no self-censorship in the absence of actual censorship is, I think, false as an empirical matter. This was discussed in a previous thread here which I’ll try to link to later.
Tm 08.20.24 at 8:07 am
LFC, I think you should ask yourself what the empirical basis for your claim is that there is a problem of self-censorship in the absence of actual sanctions for expressing the views in question.
Dishonest claims by right wing ideologues? Sorry to be blunt but if you are that gullible, I don’t know what to say. Do you ever ask yourself why nobody is concerned about self-censorship by left-wing students despite the fact that there are actual efforts to ban and sanction those views while there are absolutely no efforts anywhere in the US to ban and sanction the expression of right wing views?
somebody who remembers there actually is a subject which is illegal to talk about in college classes in the U.S. 08.20.24 at 8:39 pm
Tm @ # 33 raises a trenchant point. lets not forget that its actually illegal to mention critical race theory within 500 feet of a classroom in florida, georgia, south carolina, alabama, mississippi, virginia, tennessee, arkansas, kentucky, texas, oklahoma, utah, iowa, north and south dakota, idaho, and montana. the colleges in those states serve millions of students. and don’t forget that even in states where it isn’t prohibited YET, there were multiple attempts that narrowly fell short.
if a student raises their hand and says “how come, 50 years after roe v wade, elite law schools are still largely racially segregated, specifically with respect to black americans?” the teacher had better fucking self-censor if they don’t want their university shut down and the library burned. remember that florida just ordered the destruction of a gender studies library this week, fired the librarian and shut down the program.
this isnt a culture war, its an actual war, the target is disfavored minorities, and step one is ensuring that the only thing that can be said in classrooms is “actually everything that happened to them, they fabricated, did to themselves, or deserved.” step two is criminalization – trans people can explain that one to you if you’re not sure about what’s coming for you next. i will leave step three as an exercise for the reader
LFC 08.21.24 at 3:22 pm
somebody @34
Since Roe v. Wade had nothing to do with racial segregation, I’m puzzled by the question that you have the hypothetical student posing.
someone who forgot that brown v board of education hadnt technically been overturned yet 08.21.24 at 5:55 pm
egg on my face! well, it will be illegal to be right about it soon, so why not be wrong now?
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