Attended a Wesleyan Seattle event last night at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill, where Michael Roth gave a speech / fundraising pitch in connection with Wes’ current capital campaign. I thought I’d mention a few of his comments concerning the current political climate:
He brought up the Mahmoud Khalil matter. He said that it’s actually a conservative value to not arrest, harass, deport (pick your verb) people over their individual political views, and he added that while he didn’t share Khalil’s political views (he actually used stronger language on that point, which is interesting in itself), it is anathema to our base values that he should be arrested and deported for it.
He noted that there have been various academic and institutional efforts to reach out to various conservative faculty and academic organizations, including a few academics that were appointed to UF by DeSantis, to engage in some discussion about what’s been going on with the new administration. He noted that they were wide open to that kind of "finding common ground’ collaboration. He also mentioned that all of these people are concerned about Trump’s current scorched earth approach. He quipped that folks outside the school are shocked to hear that Wesleyan people are reaching out to these groups but that for those who actually know the school it’s the most Wesleyan thing.
Predictably, he noted that “everybody in academia is petrified" and shared that some of his colleagues at peer institutions are taking a turtle approach to all of this and are trying to stay ‘heads down’ in an attempt to protect, and in some cases even curry favor for, their institutions. On this point, he shared that he received an e-mail from a prominent conservative writer who is a friend of his (everyone in the room seemed to know who this was but me and I had to leave so didn’t get to ask). In the e-mail, the writer wrote, and he quoted, “Michael, what is going on right now is a pandemic of cowardice among people who know better. This is a time in which people need to be bold. We may not always agree on this or that, but I sure respect what you all do at Wesleyan.”
As he was saying this ^^, I was wondering if he was aware that he was in the city where Perkins Coie is based. A relatively conservative female lawyer I know, who practices out of Nashville, wrote this to me the other day about the Perkins EO: The attacks on the law firms really bothers me because that is how parties remediate their rights. I agree – scorched earth. On this point, the general counsel of a Fortune 500 company with whom I attended law school opined to me that if all of the big law firms stood up to the EO it would overwhelm the administration and they would back down. But, she said, “who’s going to go first?” Again, a pandemic of cowardice. I haven’t read the EO all the way through yet, but what I have read is outrageous.
This may get thrown into one of the political threads, which would suck because those threads are mostly a war zone.
ETA: my soccer player’s alma mater, which I have purposefully not disclosed on CC, but which is a top SLAC, is one such institution that, in my estimation, falls into the cowardice category. I won’t comment on the others as they are not LACs and thus outside the scope of concerns for this thread.
I suspect it’s Mytheos Holt`10 who contributed articles to the National Review for several years after graduation from Wesleyan:
[Mytheos Holt | National Review]
(https://www.nationalreview.com/author/mytheos-holt/)
He has shifted in recent years to beating the drum for conservative causes in such blogosphere echo chambers as The Daily Caller, The Federalist, The American Spectator and a 2019 stint as a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute: 2019 Lincoln Fellows - The Claremont Institute
Why? He is vocal, has opinions that he is not afraid to debate and is respectful of alternative views. Pretty refreshing compared to those who are so afraid of offending anymore that they are nonsensical in their responses. He is a refreshing example of how discourse should happen.
Agreed. He is a personality and some people prefer their leaders to be a bit more staid and buttoned up and he is not that, which I understand. But I think he is a clear thinker and his views tend to be fair and often surprisingly practical. In particular, I think he’s been thoughtful about free speech on campus and I am a supporter of his “safe enough spaces” POV. And he is a guy who wants his school’s students to have a POV and to be passionate about it but without taking over the campus and disrupting the day to day functioning of the university. Another poster in another thread put it well: you are free to say what you want, but you are not free to make me listen. That’s Roth in a nutshell on protest.
I can’t call him a complete follower of classical liberalism because I don’t have an inventory of all of his views, but he seems to be classically liberal on matters of free speech and civil liberties. Not sure what he thinks about limited government, economic freedom, etc.
The time and place restrictions have been weaponized though. While most of us would agree that freedom of movement should not be restricted, this can’t mean that being forced to walk around a protest is a restriction. Those words should be saved for not being able to access a building at all.
I also note that noise violations have been enforced on some political groups, but not others. The very people using time and place arguments and restrictions enforce those selectively. Having been on college campuses for more than 4 decades now, I’m one of those people who are frequently annoyed by the jam bands ratcheting up the music on Thursday and Fridays for any number of weekly gatherings and festivals. All approved by the Dean of Student Life’s office, not a care in the world for the noise blaring into the classes.
I find the sudden concern with “noise” to be really really rich.
We’ll have to be careful and keep this tied to Roth’s comments and/or to his M/O on managing student protest. It’s not been my experience with clear-thinking people that protest should be off someplace where it’s neither seen nor heard. I think Roth has been pretty clear about what to me are pretty basic expectations. He allowed an encampment right behind North College in the heart of campus and sanctioned 24/7 protest even though it technically violates campus rules. But he was clear that vandalism and disruption of the college’s day-to-day operations (which would include, I assume, building take-overs and interruption of lectures by surprise visitors) and behavior that made other students feel unsafe or harassed wouldn’t be tolerated. I don’t see that as unreasonable. For those who do, imagine instead of Palestinian supporters we were talking about an alt-right group or a pro-life group. As it is, Roth was clear in the last sentence of his Slate piece and consistent in his remarks at the event: the content of your views should have no effect on the restrictions you face. I myself believe he means it.
If that’s the case, then I denounce that practice, as would Roth.
No, not all of them. There’s no evidence, for example, that Roth has, and he’s been open about his views on Israel/Palestine. And if anything, those who have been selective have been so in favor of the Palestinian protestors. For example, I don’t think Harvard was nearly hard enough on the protestors in the libraries. You don’t need to be in the libraries. Imagine some pro-lifer parading around the library, albeit quietly, with a blown-up image of an aborted fetus. Would that be ok? Not disruptive? What I find rich is that the safe spaces crowd all of sudden got tough and expected Jewish students to buck up and deal with it. These things cut both ways and the worm turned on that crowd. I think most of the issues with these particular protests have had to do with harassment, vandalism, and actual disruption of basic school functions. I don’t care what anybody says, I wasn’t paying $65k a year so that my kid could be prevented from getting to class or get through a lecture w/o someone interrupting it to read some hackneyed statement or, worse, harassed for being Jewish or for any reason. And that happened. I attended a few of these protests myself, on both coasts. Believe me, there isn’t much hyperbole about what was going on. I saw it myself. And it’s those things that I think Roth did well to prevent at Wesleyan by being clear up front with basic expectations.
As a non-Jew, this is what I found most troubling about the Wesleyan protests. The campus is pretty accessible and always has been. There were very few T&P issues involved. But where my Jewish friends and I tended to part ways was the degree to which the pro-Palestinian protesters were permitted to put forward one-sided views, some of which struck them as antisemitic. They argued that some of the phrases used were dog whistles - an argument with which I tend to have a great deal of sympathy. However, I think Roth made the correct decision not to start parsing words and phrases with the demonstrators. My friends would say, “But, you realize some of the things they’re saying are just wrong factually.” To which I replied, “You know it, and I know it. But…” The conversation trailed off into a mix of hurried farewells, but in the end I think I came down on the First Amendment right to say things that are factually incorrect. Whether by saying these things, the protesters were being politically incorrect, to me - again, as a non-Jew - was brand new territory.
The fine line in all of this is when the speech crosses the sometimes blurry line into harassment. Certainly, to me anyway, factual accuracy is irrelevant; people can scream incorrect things until they’re blue in the face. Antisemitic dog whistles starts us on the path toward the line, but really unless people are being followed around and cannot reasonably get away from it, then that goes too.
Wesleyan’s was not one of the protests I attended, so I can’t speak to that one. I can say unequivocally that there was robust and direct antisemitism expressed loudly at the protests I attended. No whistles needed there.
Seems like it went how it should have at Wesleyan. Curious what it was like at the other NESCAC campuses.
So this D3 men’s Final Four is interesting: one semi features LACs (NESCAC of course) in Wes and Trinity, while the other semi features universities… NYU and WashU.
I checked out the bracket and it was neat to see that WashU took out UW-LaCrosse in the quarters. I think that’s probably the first time I have ever thought, spoken, or written of those two schools in the same sentence.
I think you could probably say the same thing about the Elite Eight matchup between NYU and the University of Redlands (SCIAC league school). I’m a Redlands alum and it was fun to watch them get so far in the tournament. The first time they’ve gone past the first round!
