It seems that University of Chicago professors are much in the news this week. We recently discussed the controversy of posting by University of Chicago Professor Brian Leiter saying that military leaders should “depose” President Donald Trump and jail him. Now another Chicago professor is under fire. Notably, while no one called for Leiter to be fired for wistfully discussing a military coup, there is a chorus of writers and academics calling for the canning of Harald Uhlig, the senior editor of the prestigious the Journal of Political Economy. Uhlig is also the Bruce Allen and Barbara Ritzenthaler Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. The reason is that Uhlig had the audacity to criticize Black Lives Matters and the movement to Defund The Police. Joining this effort is New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who is striking out at someone for giving his opposing view — an intolerant position that now appears to be official policy at the New York Times. It is all part of the new order where writers call for censorship, academics call for removing academic freedoms, artists call for art removal, and politicians call for dismantling police.
Uhlig wrote on Twitter Monday night: “Too bad, but #blacklivesmatter per its core organization @Blklivesmatter just torpedoed itself, with its full-fledged support of #defundthepolice.”
He added:
“Suuuure. They knew this is non-starter, and tried a sensible Orwell 1984 of saying oh, it just means funding schools (who isn’t in favor of that?!?).But no, the so-called ‘activists’ did not want that. Back to truly ‘defunding’ thus, according to their website. Sigh. #GeorgeFloyd and his family really didn’t deserve being taken advantage of by flat-earthers and creationists. Oh well. Time for sensible adults to enter back into the room and have serious, earnest, respectful conversations about it all: e.g. policy reform proposals by @TheDemocrat and national healing.”
His comments immediately led to an effort to get him fired including the ever-present online petition where viewpoint intolerance is some how strengthened by numbers. Leading this ignoble, anti-free speech effort are academics like University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers who teaches in the Ford Public Policy school but appears to have a strikingly low tolerance for opposing views on public policy.
Uhlig is accused of “trivializing the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement” and “hurting and marginalizing people of color and their allies in the economics profession.” He is also being denounced because he did not support the NFL kneelers. In 2017, he wrote
‘In any case, it is pretty clear, that the current kneeling and the current defense-of-freedom-of-speech is not about some courageous act of standing up for democratic values.
‘I would so love that to be true, really. Instead, it is all just Anti-Trump-ism.’
A letter calling for Uhlig’s ouster states ‘Prof. Uhlig’s comments published on his blog and Twitter posts dated June 8th, trivializing the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and drawing parallels between the BLM movement and the Ku Klux Klan, are outrageous and unacceptable.”
The KKK accusation appears to be derived from a blog post in which he asked: “Would you defend football players waving the confederate flag and dressing in Ku Klux Klan garb during the playing of the national anthem?” That does not “draw a comparison” between the movements. It makes a standard comparison between acts of expression, a typical “slippery slope” argument used in countless academic and legal works.
Krugman however does not seem even slightly interested in the context and instead cried “white privilege” – a label that now routinely precedes terminations of editors, academics, and others who disagree with a new orthodoxy:
Krugman called him ‘yet another privileged white man’ in a series of tweets
Uhlig was called a racist by academics like University of Victoria economist Rob Gillezeau who wrote: “Racists shouldn’t be allowed to gatekeep our profession.”
I understand that Uhlig’s writings upset people. Academics often upset people, sometimes by design, in advancing unpopular perspectives. I can also understand why people would be uniquely ticked when they read a posting mocking the protests like this one:
“Look: I understand, that some out there still wish to go and protest and say #defundpolice and all kinds of stuff, while you are still young and responsibility does not matter. Enjoy! Express yourself! Just don’t break anything, ok? And be back by 8 pm.”
Much like a recent controversy of a UCLA professor it was a mocking tone that many would not have taken. However, this is a political debate that is raging around the country and many on both sides are using superheated or ironic or mocking language. What we have not seen are demands to can academics using such language on the other side like fellow Chicago Professor Leiter.
Nevertheless, Uhlig issued an apology:
“My tweets in recent days and an old blog post have apparently irritated a lot of people. That was far from my intention… My tweets in recent days and an old blog post have apparently irritated a lot of people. That was far from my intention: let me apologize for that. Did I choose my words and comparisons wisely? I did not. My apology, once again. Let me also make clear that all these are just my views, not pronouncements by the JPE and most certainly not the @UChicago or my department.”
The attack on Uhlig as “white privilege” has become a common refrain. We recently discussed how the President of the Minneapolis City Council dismissed anyone who voices concerns over defunding or dismantling the police as just voicing their bias from a “place of privilege.” Thus, to object to this radical proposal is now proof of privilege.
None of this matter with the wave of intolerance sweeping over our campuses, where academics call for the punishment of fellow academics for voicing opposing views. Professors like Jennifer Doleac, an economics professor at Texas A&M University, tweeted “Yep, lead editor at a top journal. Hopefully not for much longer.” It is that simple.
Figures like Klugman are not just the loudest voices, they are now the only voices that seem to appear on the pages of newspapers like the New York Times. What was striking about the recent controversy over the column by Sen. Tom Cotten was not just the writers at the New York Times calling for the resignation of their editors and barring future columns with such opposing views. It was the silence of the other writers who did not utter a word as their newspaper yielded to these demands. As I discussed earlier, however, history has shown that today’s rebels often become tomorrow’s reactionaries. Such attacks on individuals like Uhlig will not stop with him. It becomes an insatiable appetite as the intolerance for opposing views grows.
Recently, protesters took over a precinct in Seattle and declared it the People’s autonomous zone. I was struck by one flier of one of the protesters that read “I support this, but what’s next?”
For those who are joining calls for sack editors and fire academics, it is a question that should concentrate their minds.
Citizens call for the removal of academics for supporting a return to the slave culture in it’s lates version – Socialism in any of its three forms. Communism, Naziism or Socialist Regressive Liberalism..
Three quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville that describe America today. Will his book be targeted for burning?
In democracies, men are never still; a thousand accidental circumstances move them constantly from place to place and almost always something unforeseen, something, so to speak, improvised, prevails in their lives. Hence, they are often forced to do what they have not properly learned to do, to talk about what they have hardly understood and to devote themselves to projects for which they are unprepared by a long apprenticeship. (Democracy in America)
In democracies, a man’s life is more complicated. The mind of one man will almost always embrace several aims at the same time and these are frequently wholly foreign to each other. Since he cannot be expert in all of them, he easily becomes content with half-baked ideas.
Americans, who almost always retain a calm bearing and cool appearance, are nevertheless carried away well beyond boundaries of common sense by some sudden passion or rash opinion, so that they commit in all seriousness strangely absurd things.
https://isi.org/intercollegiate-review/inattention-killing-democracy/?utm_source=MailChimp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Intercollegiate-Review-6-11-2020&utm_content=inattention-killing-democracy&utm_source=Intercollegiate+Studies+Institute+Subscribers&utm_campaign=ec28d6514e-Intercollegiate-Review-6-11-2020&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3ab42370fb-ec28d6514e-93293141&goal=0_3ab42370fb-ec28d6514e-93293141
I think b.l.m. is another ponzi scheme.
Piss on all of Chicago and all liberals everywhere. They like guns? We need to shoot back and shoot until they are gone.
Notably, while no one called for Leiter to be fired for wistfully discussing a military coup,
Wistfully? This wasn’t some Hollywood celebrity expressing a sadness that this President is still in office. This is an influential law professor from a prestigious university calling for a military coup. You’re being blinded by your allegiance to your alma mater.
BLM = Black Looters Murder
This column is somewhat disingenuous. One would get the impression from the heading that people are asking for Leiter to be fired from his job. The petition asks for the Leiter to be removed from his editorial position. Academics typically serve as editor as a “service” to the profession. Their main responsibility is finding reviewers for peer-reviewed articles. Editors are unpaid or receive a modest stipend at best. Editors are selected by the membership of the professional organization or the board of the governing body. As an editor, he is to some extent, a public face of the profession. Thus, to the extent that the membership does not agree with the editor’s politics, I don’t think it unreasonable to ask the editor to step down.
This is very different from a petition that would have Leiter fired from his tenured professor position.
They are just asking him to be removed from the editorial position – and for good reason. The guy is a racist – and instances of his racist ramblings are very well captured here: https://twitter.com/JustinWolfers/status/1270488165481144320
See for yourself.
But Turley – like he does not see skin color – does not see racist statements too. What can you do?
Planned Parenthood actually KILLS 1600 blacks daily yet I see no one on the left calling them racists or petitioning to de-fund them.
Perhaps conservatives should quit complaining about Planned Parenthood. Im done with it myself.
How progressive of you. If they don’t stand for something, they will fall for anything.
The prof isn’t racist, maybe to an imbecile like you he is. There is no evidence that his viewpoints impacts his editorial position.
From the article.
“His comments immediately led to an effort to get him fired including the ever-present online petition
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeWCydRScsJriZQCiwblT-nVOWZqJHjJa-JjU3h1Xe-Br_R0g/viewform
where viewpoint intolerance is some how strengthened by numbers.”
From that Google docs URL:
“Letter calling for the resignation of Harald Uhlig as Editor of the Journal of Political Economy.
The form Letter calling for the resignation of Harald Uhlig as Editor of the Journal of Political Economy is no longer accepting responses.
Try contacting the owner of the form if you think this is a mistake.”
It’s very obvious to me that when anyone says anything publicly, it’s the FIRST thing they say that reflects their true beliefs. The apologies after that, as well as the other groveling, are coerced reactions to the mob.
This makes book burning look pretty tame. And to think these are ‘learned’ people.
It occurred to me that the whole idea of “white privilege” is eerily similar to what might have been called “Jewish privilege” in 1930s Germany. And last week, we had our own version of Kristallnacht.
And the real shame is that most of the “woke” gen x-ers and Millennials have no idea what I’m talking about.
Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
This serves the fascist govt/corporate state which is called the USG. These are the entities which have pulled no punches in ending free speech. It has been shocking to see the amount of information pulled from the web. It has been appalling to see what USG and its poodle, the UK, are doing to Assange. The corporations and the govt. have whole teams of psyop units to shut down dissent. These moves will kill freedom of speech and the ability to access knowledge which powerful interests do not want people to have.
Killing free speech has been a long time operation of the corporate state which is about complete at this time. USGinc. has used identity politics to help accomplish the goal of ending freedom of speech and thought. People who buy into identity politics need to snap out of it, right now.
I don’t expect that PK is sincere about his concern for “white privilege”, as he embodies it! However, there are people who are sincere but fail to understand the dynamics being played out against them by USGinc and other powerful interests. To those people I would say, please step back and examine why you are helping the government and powerful corporations/interests silence other people. You cannot learn by silencing others. You are constricting your world, your mind and your life. Do not participate in doing that to yourself or others. Resist, for real.
From the BLM ‘manifesto’:
We see ourselves as part of the global Black family…who exist in different parts of the world.
We are guided by the fact that all Black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression…immigration status…We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.
We…dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women…impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.
We build a space…free from…environments in which men are centered.
We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family…
We foster a queer‐affirming network…freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking…”
https://web.archive.org/web/20151004200336/http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/
I propose that BLM should alter the tense of the verb within the statement, “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family” to “We DISRUPTED the Western-prescribed nuclear family”, owing to that now being an accomplished fact. They should probably add the modifier, “successfully” preceding the verb, although that may introduce some unintended irony to statement.
John Mosby – here is some video on BLM as a wing of the DNC
https://twitter.com/i/status/1270856718487097346
I hope this works, never copied a Twit before 😉
Thank you ,Sir, for your kindness. The link did indeed pull up. Strangely, all the recipients of ActBlue appear to be Democrats. Perhaps one of the two groups should consider a color change. ActBlack, or perhaps BlueLivesMatter. The former is probably preferable, as the latter might be misconstrued as support for police officers. That could become a dicey situation, although there would great potential for entertainment.
John Mosby – ActBlue is a SuperPAC for the DNC. So, if you donate to BLM, you are donating to the DNC. Now you can see why the Democrats are kissing their rings all the time. They are a cash cow. DeBlasio wants to take NYC funds and give it to BLM. Okay, DeBlasio will be giving NYC funds to the DNC.
I am reminded of a book I read once, about wandering knaves who pretended to be madmen, annoyed the citizens, and then cadged contributions from the populace to simply go away. I suppose the hustle is still going on.
“The Bedlam has a long staff, and a cow or ox-horn by his side; his clothing fantastic and ridiculous; for being a madman, he is madly decked and dressed all over with rubins (ribands), feathers, cuttings of cloth, and what not, to make him seem a madman, or one distracted, when he is no other than a wandering and dissembling knave.” This writer here points out one of the grievances resulting from licensing even harmless lunatics to roam about the country; for a set of pretended madmen, called “Abram men,” a cant term for certain sturdy rogues, concealed themselves in their costume, covered the country, and pleaded the privileged denomination when detected in their depredations.”
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16350/16350-h/16350-h.htm#TOM_O_BEDLAMS
I suppose they have evolved to wearing dreadlocks and tossing Molotov Cocktails. But, make a contribution, and they will still go away.
A careful reading of the evidence – including the petition – linked by JT above – shows the call is not for the professor’s removal from his faculty position, but as editor of the journal, which Krugman says is a powerful gate keeper position.
OK, maybe that’s wrong, but those in that profession may reasonably want someone they view as more even handed at a “gate keeper” position affecting their work. Maybe JT should have made that more clear and discussed the importance – or lack of importance – of that position.
You mean replace Uhlig with someone like Krugman who got a Nobel Prize for writing an esoteric theory that is never applicable in the real world and who spews his mental farts from the fortress of the NYT? Yeah, that’s the kind of “fair-minded” person the thought-police want to lead everything: a zealot who frequently has erred in his NYT-heralded economic predictions like how the economy would crater right after Trump took office (genius!). If all of these people above produced a rational thought, as opposed to their vomits like those above, then there might be a basis for serious consideration. But this is the age of rage, packed with “profound thoughts” like ‘Defund the Police,’ so we can expect that someone, likely from BLM, will replace this fellow at the Journal.
So Don, you claim there is a difference of opinion over who should have that gate keeper position?
Say it ain’t so!!
I goog;ed the bigger issue here – firing of faculty and why. Found this:
“I gathered together all cases from 2015 to 2017 involving:
a faculty member at an American degree-granting postsecondary nonprofit institution;
who was fired, forced to resign/resigned as part of a settlement, or demoted/denied promotion;
due to speech perceived by critics as political.
Sources included the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, AAUP, FIRE, and Campus Reform. You can view the resulting dataset here.
Inevitably there were ambiguous cases. Some involved professors who resigned over withering public criticism but retained the support of their institutions (e.g. Areej Zufari at Rollins College, Dale Brigham at the University of Missouri). In others, the evidence was suggestive but ultimately too thin to establish causation (e.g. Daniel Browning at William Carey College). Such cases were excluded from the dataset. On the other hand, I chose to include deans and comparable non-faculty academics (e.g. Nicholas Christakis at Yale University, N. Bruce Duthu at Dartmouth College) on the grounds that doing so contributes to an overall assessment of the campus free speech situation.
What remains are 45 cases from 2015 to 2017 where a faculty member was fired, resigned, or demoted/denied promotion due to speech deemed by critics as political. Of these, more than half (26) occurred in 2017, the clear majority (19) being over liberal speech. This disparity persists even after removing terminations occurring in private religious institutions.”
also, with graphs by age groups:
” if you look closely, you will note that iGen’ers are slightly more supportive on average of banning certain types of offensive speech than older generations, but there is no sudden spike or sweeping change. If these numbers are meant to show that iGen’ers are different, you need to really squint to see it.[3]
There are other problems with Stevens and Haidt’s theory. Not only are young people’s attitudes in line with national averages, but their intensity levels are too. This becomes obvious once we distinguish between degrees of support for speech bans….”
https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speech-crisis-a-close-look-at-the-evidence/
The Washington Post and the New York Times are exhibiting that same spinelessness that is the backbone of Fox News. It is an issue of direction. While the Post and the Times go in the direction of bias and weakness, Fox News arrived long ago. The pendulum swings to the same degree in both directions. After police brutality and racism overlapped recently, Newton’s third law explains the response. To leave out the action or the reaction is bias. The Post and the Times do themselves a dishonor when they swing too far left. Read the BBC or Reuters for a more balanced and objective perspective. However objective a perspective one takes, Trump and Republicans are the problem. BLM is a reaction to this right wing disease.
Issac, as a subscriber to the NYTs who wrote the editors expressing my displeasure with the “resignation” of the editor, I think you fail in confusing the editorial page and the paper’s (also the WaPo) excellent reporting. I think to most subscribers the latter is why they do so – opinions are easy to come by or free and those on the NYTs – with maybe a few exceptions – are not considered the best, or a reason to spend that money. Being the paper of record are and is.
I might direct you to the WSJ which is also known for excellent reporting, but who’s editorial page does not even pretend to be balanced and is widely considered a hot mess of right wing noise. That’s not what most people who know what they are doing buy the paper for.
“Read the BBC or Reuters for a more balanced and objective perspective.”
You’re kidding, right? While not as hysterical as CNN and MSNBC, both of the news organizations you cite are decidedly left leaning.
Want the truth? Start checking out whatfinger.
The full assault is underway!
Let’s fix our language. They are not “writers and academics” they are liberals and Democrats. And anyone with common sense should avoid using their self -aggrandizing, autocratic names they’ve usurped- they certainly are not “intelligentia”, ” intellectual elite”. They are most often incompetent, hateful, bigots.
Turley has a habit of referring to it as “intolerance”. That does not seem strong enough. They are punishing free men for their thoughts and ideas. Why isn’t that straight up oppression?
Candace Owens tweeted or retweeted a video that seemed to show that much of the money going to BLM was actually going into Democratic coffers. That actually makes sense.
The answer to “what’s next?” can be found in the French Revolution with Jacobins executing the other radicals, in the Russian Revolution with the Bolsheviks executing the other socialists, and the Cultural Revolution in China with students denouncing and beating their Leftist teachers.
Defund the Intelligentsia
The one area of our society that has never seen any “real reform” that is being called for, is the US congress. How is it there are only three black senators, when blacks make up 13% of the population? If we want to respond to the calls of “white privilege” maybe the congress is a place to start. After all Chuck S. and Nancy P. have literally never worked a 9-5 job in their lives and now have amassed campaign war chests that makes it impossible for a “non-privileged” individual to ever challenge them for their seat at the table. I had always felt that our elections were defacto term-limits; this does not seem to be the case when we have an overseer class of people that are professional legislators. How about 5 term limit for the house and a 2 term limit for the senate? The term limited people can return and run after 4 years of being out of office. If systemic racism is the greatest threat to our society – can’t the congress step up and actually address this threat head on? After 40 plus years of being at the levers of power, maybe its time for a change.
When the world of academia accepted the likes of Bill Ayers into their fold they lost all credibility from there on after. This article only confirms a well accepted fact among the practical and those with necessary common sense. Why waste our time on a closed book. Academia is dead at this point.