Destroying The Counterrevolutionaries

Our reading for today is from Philip Dybvig, 2022 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics.

‘‘I realize I have been too pure. I assumed that a lot of people shared my dream (expressed for example by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) of ending oppression. However, the dream of most people (especially but not exclusively the oppressed) seems to be becoming the oppressor. This is why there is a strong correlation between abusers of children and people who were abused as children.

Claudine Gay has power now and she is the oppressor of any group not favored by her and other people in power. This is a common pattern in governments heading for totalitarianism. First, say you represent the oppressed. Then you get power and oppress non-favored groups. This leaves you in a morally indefensible position that could not survive given free speech, so you do what you can to destroy anyone ("counterrevolutionaries") who disagrees with your narrative.’’

Many of us feel the same as Professor Dybvig.  We wanted a society dedicated towards equality and opportunity for all.  We now feel as though we've fallen through the looking glass into a mirror world.  We thought structuring a society based on race and ethnicity was morally bad and a practical impediment to a successful multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious society where we could live together and respect each other as individuals. The Gay crowd, which now controls many of America's leading institutions, thinks differently and it is why we are in the most important fight of our lives.

The controversy over Claudine Gay is not about free speech or plagiarism.  She is staying in her position because the Harvard Board believes in the same things she does.  That's why she was selected to be president of the institution in the first place.   It certainly was not for her scholarship.  What she has proved throughout her career and, in particular, in her most recent role as Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Harvard, is she is a skilled bureaucrat, ruthless and manipulative in achieving her goals of ensuring race essentialism and a new race-based hierarchy, which the Harvard Board believes should become the core value for the university.

It has certainly served her well in her own career.  Claudine Gay does not come from an oppressed background herself.  Her Haitian parents voluntarily immigrated to this racist hellhole, settler-colonialist country during the 1960s, meeting each other in New York City.  Her mother was a registered nurse, her father a civil engineer, and Claudine spent most of her childhood in NYC and then in Saudi Arabia where her father worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  Claudine attended Philips Exeter Academy, one of the most prestigious private boarding schools in America, spent a year at Princeton, before transferring to Stanford to complete her undergraduate work, and obtained a doctorate in political science from Harvard. The ideology of race essentialism and resentment is something she absorbed from our nation's leading educational institutions.  It allowed her to assume the identity of the oppressed and empower her rise.  Gay knew where privilege truly resided in academia. (1)  Ironically, Gay's own family background exhibits the symptoms of Whiteness shown in the chart in Footnote 7 of my Equality or Equity post.

Gay has been open about her mission, including derailing the careers of academic blacks who oppose race essentialism.  On August 20, 2020 she sent a memo to the Arts & Sciences Faculty of Harvard in her role of Dean.  Here are some excerpts:

"As we look ahead to the start of a fall semester unlike any other, we confront the realization that we are now living history in the making. This moment has been shaped by crises old and new, as one pandemic has collided with another. The COVID-19 pandemic is a truly singular event; a public health threat that has spared no part of our academic enterprise from disruption, forcing us to reimagine everything from undergraduate residential life to the daily activities of our labs and libraries. Meanwhile, a second pandemic is unfolding, one with deeper roots in American life. People across the world have risen up in protest against police brutality and systemic racism, awake to the devastating legacies of slavery and white supremacy like never before. The calls for racial justice heard on our streets also echo on our campus, as we reckon with our individual and institutional shortcomings and with our Faculty’s shared responsibility to bring truth to bear on the pernicious effects of structural inequality."

"This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered. The national conversation around racial equity continues to gain momentum and the unprecedented scale of mobilization and demand for justice gives me hope. In raw, candid conversations and virtual gatherings convened across the FAS in the aftermath of George Floyd’s brutal murder, members of our community spoke forcefully and with searing clarity about the institution we aspire to be and the lengths we still must travel to be the Harvard of our ideals. It is up to us to ensure that the pain expressed, problems identified, and solutions suggested set us on a path for long-term change. I write today to share my personal commitment to this transformational project and the first steps the FAS will take to advance this important agenda in the coming year."

"This fall, we will reactivate the cluster hire in ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration, with the goal of making four new faculty appointments. These appointments are critical to our long-term efforts to strengthen our research and teaching capacity, and ensure that our students have access to this vital body of knowledge. In order to accelerate our progress, however, I am also establishing the Harvard College Visiting Professorship in Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration to recruit leading scholars of race and ethnicity to spend a year at Harvard College actively engaged in teaching our undergraduates."

"What is required is focused, intentional action at every level of the FAS to dismantle the cultural and structural barriers that have precluded progress."

"These initiatives are just a starting place. Our engagement in anti-racist action and the infusion of inclusive practices into all aspects of our teaching and research mission reflect a new sense of institutional responsibility and will require sustained effort over time. "(2)

This is the goal, not just of Claudine Gay. but of the Harvard Board which selected and recently affirmed its confidence in her.  These are the values Harvard stands for.

You can many other writings and talks by Gay repeating the same story.  She, and many others, believe in a conspiracy theory in which ONE THING explains everything.  There is no room for nuance, contingency, individuality, or the many other factors that occur in real life. It flattens out history and humanity into a cartoon. This type of thinking is not uncommon and extends across the political spectrum.  For instance, Steve Bannon is always promoting his theory of the ONE THING that explains everything, the difference being that Bannon constantly flits about what that ONE THING is.

It also explains what Gay and the two other university presidents who recently testified meant when they said that whether calls for genocide against Jews would violate university policy depended on the "context".  What they meant by "context" is different from what most listeners probably thought.  In Equity speak "context" means determining who was calling for genocide and against whom.  It is the Leninist principle of Who?Whom?, which defined the key political question as who will defeat or dominate whom, except applied in a racial, not class, analysis.  

For a white person to call for murder of people of color would be genocidal, because it is an Oppressor dominating the Oppressed.  However, the Jews of Israel are white and settler-colonialists, and therefore Oppressors, so it is not genocidal if called for by people of color.  The same reasoning applies to white Americans, who are also guilty of settler-colonialism, and the reason the United States is fundamentally illegitimate.   America is the ultimate target of the new racists.  Dismantling what Gay refers to as "the cultural and structural barriers that have precluded progress", requires America's dismantling.  Perhaps a better way to state this is a country called the United States of America would still exist but its existing substance would be removed and replaced by a completely different filling based on different principles.

Those complaining of "double-standards" about what these institutions are doing are missing the point.  Those who believe like Gay think they are being perfectly consistent and accuse those adhering to traditional liberal values as having double standards because those "neutral principles" are not really neutral, in reality favoring the Oppressors.  We are talking two separate and distinct languages.  We are talking using a language of mutual respect to each other as individuals, while their ideology is based on groups and power based on a hierarchy of those groups as noted by Professor Dybvig.

It also explains this:

Notice who is missing, who is left out? This was on the website of Harvard's DEI Department.  Amid the recent uproar it has been deleted, but, as far as we know, the events will still be held. There is no double standard here from an DEI perspective.  The Oppressed are entitled to such celebrations, the Oppressors are not.

We also saw this recently in Boston, when Mayor Wu's office made a mistake in sending out an invitation to a Holiday dinner restricted to politicians of color to a broader audience.  The Mayor brushed off criticism and went ahead with the dinner.  A dinner restricted to white politicians would have generated outrage but there is no double standard here either.

I was encouraged to see that earlier this month Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from Harvard's Antisemitism Advisory Committee, which Gay had established in November.  Rabbi Wolpe phrased it more politely than I did in Equality or Equity: Which Side Are You On?, but clearly realized that the committee was designed to be ineffective.  His resignation note is carefully phrased; giving faint praise to Gay as "a kind and thoughtful person" but focusing on how intractable the current situation is "given the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty,";

the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil.

Battling that combination of ideologies is the work of more than a committee or a single university. . . This is the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning. 

Wolpe correctly observes that battling these ideologies is an enormous task because of the degree to which our institutions have been penetrated and occupied by its adherents.  It's not just elite universities; almost all of higher education has succumbed in recent years.  You can find plenty of examples, but here are two involving musicians.

University of North Texas Professor of Music Timothy Jackson was leading a quiet life, editing UNT’s Journal of Schenkerian Studies (named after Heinrich Schenker, an Austrian musicologist). Then, in 2019, another professor claimed that classical music was excessively "white" and Schenker a racist.  Jackson decided to devote the next issue of the Journal to the subject with essays taking various positions on the claims, claims which Jackson objected to and included and essay by himself in the issue.

Upon publication a group of UNT graduate students issued a letter denouncing Jackson's "racism" and demanding his termination, a demand joined in by other faculty.  In response, university administration launched an investigation into the Journal, removed Jackson as editor, and banned him from participation in committee work in his department.  Jackson's belief that debate was appropriate was his big mistake.  Debate is not allowed in this ideology, because it is a characteristic of Whiteness.  Jackson filed a lawsuit against the administration and Board of Regents which is proceeding in the federal courts.(3)

Sometimes you don't even have to say or write anything at an academic institution to fall afoul of the new rulers.  For two decades, Daniel Mattson worked as a performer and adjunct faculty member at the School of Music at Western Michigan University.  What no one knew for most of that time, because Mattson did not discuss his personal life at school, was that he had been raised a Catholic, as an adult had lived a homosexual life, and more recently, had abandoned that life and returned to his faith, writing a book in 2017 explaining why.

It was in 2021 that a fellow music school professor and self-proclaimed LBGTQ activist became aware of the book and made it a public issue, claiming that Mattson's private views were "damaging" to the LBGTQ community.  Though the activist quickly recruited students and administrators to support terminating Mattson, there were never any claims that Mattson had expressed his views to students or administrators.

The head of the Music School issued a stated that while Mattson was “free to express his beliefs, we cannot ignore the fact that they are harmful to members of our LGBTQ community, particularly our students.”  Mattson was then told his contract would not be renewed.  While Mattson filed suit and recently settled with the university, the message has been sent about what views, even private beliefs, are acceptable and which are not.

As Professor Dybvig pointed out, Mattson and Jackson are counterrevolutionaries from the perspective of DEI.  Their views are not worthy of debate; they must be suppressed.  It is not just about repressing these two academics, it is to intimidate other academics and students from following in their footsteps.  These two stories are not aberrations.  This is now routine behavior in academia.

We saw another recent example when a progressive Jewish Oakland City Councilor and well known environmental advocate was disinvited from speaking to a Berkeley environmental studies course because the students objected to his views on Israel.  You can read the disinvitation letter here but two points of interest:

The letter contains a convoluted section on speech in which the students say they want open discussion, but only if the speaker agrees with them, and gives in to their demands:

"We believe that productive dialogue and learning requires speakers who can provide thoughtful and well-informed perspectives.  It is not our intention to stifle diverse voices, but rather to ensure that the voices we engage with are grounded in a sincere commitment to knowledge and truth.  In addition to advocating with your constituents for a cease-fire, we ask that you forego your visit to our class."

The other is the common DEI position that it constitutes a package of beliefs, all of which must be agreed to or else you will be expelled as a heretic.

"As an Oakland City Council member with a platform advocating for environmental and social justice, affordable housing, and universal access to health care, among other things, it is utterly disappointing and hypocritical for someone of your esteem to be in support of the apartheid state of Israel . . . "

"In our shared field of study, Conservation and Resource studies, one cannot simply pick and choose which social and environmental injustices to advocate for."

This is DEI in a nutshell.  This is faith-based education.  This is medieval thinking.

And it is not just higher education as pointed out in my prior very, very long piece on Equality or Equity.  One can also ask, do you believe in K-12 education or indoctrination in?  That earlier piece had a few examples but there are a couple of new ones worth mentioning.

The first ones raise the basic question of what specific problem is DEI trying to solve?

In 2020, the state of Oregon announced that, due to the Covid emergency, it was suspending its proficiency requirements in math and reading that were required to obtain a high school graduation certificate.  This year the state announced it was ending its proficiency requirements because of equity concerns regarding children of color.  In summary, the state was announcing that since felt unable to properly educate children of color it would give up on the effort and, in the process, effectively lower standards for all students.

More recently, the progressive Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, announced plans to close the city's eleven high achieving selective admission high schools to order to boost equity.  The regular Chicago schools are failing with terrible results for students.  The new plan will have inequitable impacts. Well off parents will be able to move or place their children in private schools, while the less wealthy who have talented children (and largely of color) will be trapped in a failed educational system.  It will be more equitable however in ensuring the failure of a larger percentage of children.

Why would anyone be doing this?  I can understand why the teachers unions support these moves.  Ideologically, all of the national unions support DEI and racialism and, as a practical matter, it makes it easier for teachers to avoid any accountability for results.

I can only conclude that indoctrination throughout K-12 is the priority.  Give children the minimum they need to know in order to make them activists, willing to, without questioning, follow the directions of senior activists.  I read an article a couple of days ago about how one of the anti-Israel groups focuses on recruiting students who don't know much about the subject.  Sounds like K-12 will be a perfect recruiting ground for them. (4)

In my earlier post, I mentioned California's mandatory Ethnic Studies curriculum, which is still a year away from its formal initiation.  However, many California school districts are proceeding with their own versions.  In September, the Santa Ana Unified School District was sued by several Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Congress and the ADL,  The complaints alleges that the District:

"knowingly circumvented the law and was misleading in its effort to pass curricula with dangerously anti-Jewish teachings that violate state rules and ethical standards, all without community awareness. Documents responsive to a Public Records Act request revealed this lack of transparency was intentional, as those developing the curriculum questioned how to “address the Jewish question” and suggested collaborating with outside organizations with a history of controversial viewpoints, instead of with the Jewish community. When members of the community discovered the school board’s actions and appeared at a meeting to publicly comment following the controversial curriculum’s covert approval, they were harassed with antisemitic rhetoric." (5)

The shocking results of the recent Harvard Harris poll shows how much has already been lost. 

 

A note before proceeding further.  I think both of these are poorly worded questions, it is not good polling methodology.  Further, the responses to other questions undercut the extreme data in the 18-24 age group (you can find the entire poll here - the specific questions can be found at pages 56-57).

My conclusion is that the results overstate the degree to which respondents support the propositions regarding Jews and Whites as Oppressors.  However, the gradations in responses by age group are consistent with what we see happening across society today, I think those polling gradations are real, and it is that trend that is troubling.  While the data shows that American society, as a whole, still rejects these assertions, among the youngest segment they have broad support and it is there we see the direct impact of what is happening in K-12 and higher education, as well as in social media.

A lot of initial reaction focused on the answers to the Jewish question, but looking at both together it shows that while there is an element of antisemitism it is largely folded within the Whiteness narrative.  They cannot be separated and emphasize again why it is a losing strategy, along with being morally wrong, for Jewish groups to try to be embraced by DEI.

While the data may overstate the extent, it shows that the evil ideology described by Rabbi Wolpe is winning over the younger generations.  

When Professor Dyvgig refers to counterrevolutionaries, it implies that there are revolutionaries.  He is correct, Claudine Gay and those like her are revolutionaries.  After years of laying the groundwork, the revolution took place in the summer of 2020 and it has been consolidating its position since then, eliminating its enemies.  We who oppose them, where ever we may be across the political spectrum are, indeed, counterrevolutionaries.  All those in opposition need to understand this.  Gay and company are playing for keeps, they will not desist on their own, and they will continue to try to crush all opposition; it is required by their beliefs, just as it was for the Jacobins and Bolsheviks.  The difference is they don't need to employ the guillotine or the gulag.  They can do it by denying educational and employment opportunities, censoring your ability to express yourself, intimidating others from supporting you, and educating your children.  To accomplish their goals they will not play by the rules we are used to.  Defeating them will require ousting the adherents of this faith from the institutions they control and not allowing them to gain new footholds.

UPDATE: Dec. 18 - Tablet magazine just published an article by Natan Sharansky, "Our False Partners", which echoes many of the themes in this post and in The Danger Within: Equality or Equity, Which Side Are You On?.  Sharansky was a Russian Jew and Soviet dissident who was jailed by the communists for nine years.  After an international campaign seeking his release, he became the first political prisoner freed by Mikhail Gorbachev, after which he emigrated to Israel.  His concluding paragraphs:

Some people believe that as we fight against antisemitism, our goal should be to prove to progressives that Jews belong in the ranks of the oppressed, that not all of us are white and privileged. But why should we accept the premises of a corrupt and corrupting ideology that stands against the most basic liberal values?

We need not push ourselves into organizations whose ideology denies our equal rights and moral worth. And we must not abandon our Zionism or deny our identity in order to fight for a better future, because this so-called better future will then be rotten from the core.

Instead, we should carry on our own traditions with pride. Jews have a noble history of fighting against racism and injustice. In continuing to do so, without compromising who we are, we will find our true allies.

Now more than ever, Jews must both embrace our unique mission and reaffirm core liberal values. Without the former, we have lost our compass, our reason to carry on as a people. Without the latter, no one—not only Jews, but all individuals and minority groups—will be safe from the destructive effects of totalizing ideologies and the wishful thinkers who support them.

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(1) Gay's ascendance and the role played by elite institutions instilling a sense of paranoia and resentment in non-whites brings to mind a 2018 incident at Smith College, when a black woman student alleged racist behavior by a cafeteria worker and security guard (both white), leading to their dismissal and public humiliation. Though an investigation concluded there was no racism involved in the incident and the two employees acted properly, it was too late for them (they had trouble finding employment elsewhere after all the publicity) and did not deter the college administration from taking "corrective" actions to address imagined racism as though the incident was racist.  By the way, this is a common pattern for when allegation of racism turn out to be unfounded or even hoaxes; the institutions involved take corrective action as though the incident really occurred.

The student who made the accusation, Oumou Kanoute, was part of a family of immigrants from Mali.  She received a scholarship to attend a prestigious private school in Connecticut and then a full scholarship to attend Smith.  According to her LinkedIn page she is currently working as a Research Assistant Intern at the Columbia School of Social Work at a lab that "focuses on innovative ways to conceptualize, and measure racism".  In case you visit the CSSW, it has published a glossary of terms "you may see or hear used in class, during discussions, and at your field placements".   Helpfully, it provides definitions for "White privilege", "White supremacy", "Whiteness", and "White Fragility & Sensitivity".  "Capitalism", of course, deserves a definition, "A system of economic oppression based on class, private property, competition, and individual profit. See also: Carceral System, Class, Inequality, Racism".  The animus against capitalism is, I've come to believe, based on several factors:

A general association of anything I don't like in the world with capitalism

The aftermath of the 2008 recession

The association of capitalism with evil Western Civilization

The absence of the Soviet Union and the Communist Bloc countries

Most of all, the surprising (to me) idea that economics is a zero-sum game.  There is only so much wealth and thus it must be redistributed.  Anyone who has "too much", whether it be an individual, group, or nation, must have stolen it. The creation of wealth seems to be an alien idea even with our experience of the past three centuries.

For a useful corrective read The Escape From Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100 by Robert William Fogel.

And "Antifa" is defined as "A movement to address the rise of perceived fascist movements, using direct action rather than policy reform. Started by various autonomous groups and folx, in response to fascism, Nazis, racism, and the far-right".

Examples of Antifa activists who took direct action against "fascists".

We have someone whose family voluntarily came to America because it offered them opportunities they could not find elsewhere, and Kanoute was privileged to attend elite institutions for free where she was indoctrinated to believe she was oppressed and discriminated against and taught to interpret every action by white people as driven by racism.  And now she is at a social work school whose declared purpose is to indoctrinate students along the same lines so they, in turn. can spread the message.  Here is someone who appears to have had some abilities and might have made a contribution to our country, but instead has been taught to become a grievance hoarder.  Shame on these institutions! 

This also reminds me of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and of its perpetrators, the Tsarnaev brothers, Muslims who emigrated from Russia and settled in Cambridge where they graduated from the public schools.  There was a shocked reaction from Cambridgians when the Tsarnaev's were identified as the culprits because they believed, being educated in Cambridge schools, the brothers would not have encountered prejudice and learned tolerance.  Having worked in Cambridge for over a decade and being familiar with the schools it did not surprise me.  American history in Cambridge is taught as "black arm-band" history, a sordid tale of racism, colonialism and exploitation.  What contempt the Tsarnaevs must have developed for our country as they listened to this litany of woe and evil.

We are acculturating our young people to hate their country and each other.  This will not end well. 

(2) It shouldn't be lost on anyone that Gays preaches anti-racism when the institution over which she presides was so blatantly discriminating against Asian-Americans that the Supreme Court had to step in to stop it.

When I read stuff like this, I'm compelled to ask what is the specific problem, or problems, you are trying to solve, and how are you planning to solve them?  And don't answer me by just restating the same slogans and catchphrases you've just used.  Don't tell me I need to accept your truth or else I'm exhibiting White Fragility.  So far, since 2020 I've seen:

- what DEI advocated for policing has led to thousands of deaths in the black community and a breakdown of order in our most vulnerable communities

- a race to the bottom in education in the name of equity

- discrimination against Asian Americans

- a crackdown on dissent

- the encouragment of hate and resentment between different races and ethnic groups

Michael Nayna, a liberal Australian documentarian, found himself caught up in the drama at Evergreen State College a few years ago, for many a canary in the coal mine incident, and since then has devoted himself to understanding the phenomenon.  Here is his take:

In its narrow sense, an ideology is a set of political stories a group of people tell to facilitate mass action. They're quasi-religious oversimplifications of reality that possess dogmatic believers to interpret themselves & the world around them through a fixed schema [being] part philosophy, part science, & part spiritual revelation that offers believers a sense of purpose in overcoming oppression. 

[There are] similar patterns of ideological thought in Communism, Nazism, certain feminisms, & even strains of libertarianism. They all proposed that people were governed by hidden systems of oppression, they just had different ideas about who the oppressors were. 

Each ideology studied a particular class of people & claimed they were living in a false consciousness that served the interests of another class. The task of the ideologue was to liberate the oppressed population by educating them about the yet-to-be-seen tyranny

The term “Woke” itself was coined by its true believers and it refers to the feeling of awakening from false consciousness to see the hidden systems of oppression they believe govern the world.

What differentiates Woke Identitarian ideology from its predecessors is the fluidity of its oppressed class. They have tenaciously adapted the core doctrines of "systemic oppression" to many different identity groups.

 

 

 Ideologies of the past worked on behalf of a single, cumbersome block of people - the workers (communism), the Aryan race (Nazism), the female sex (radical feminism), but Woke equips many classes with sub ideologies & unifies them with Intersectionality.

Anywhere a social grievance can be found, an academic franchise can be built using core "systemic" doctrines - Black people are oppressed by whites through systemic racism, women by men under systemic sexism, gays by straights under heteronormativity. .. trans people by gender conformists under cisnormativity, disabled by the abled under ableism, fats by thins under thin privilege, all the way down to left-handers being oppressed under the brutal reign of right supremacy. 

[T]hey claim the social order they seek to depose is itself an ideology. Take [Cisgenderism]. They claim those who are comfortable with their biological sex, & value their normative identity more than trans identities, which is most people, have been inculcated into a systemic ideology. The only way to escape this ideology is to adopt Woke ideology & work on its behalf

Each "system of inequality" can be loosely described as normal patterns of behaviour & thought. They trace all social inequality to the fact that most people do similar things & there are expectations, laws, & institutional practices built around this reality.

The bell curves of social behaviour are seen to inherently oppress the outliers, & "equity" is the social engineering enterprise of flattening out norms so that new ways of living can be discovered & practised unencumbered by the oppressive gaze of cultural values.

I’ve come to realise the foil for Woke ideology is a simplistic reduction of our Western cultural heritage. Through relentless ideological critique, they’ve managed to reduce our diverse legacy of customs, beliefs, political procedures, & ethics to a “systemic ideology”.

A civilisation is neither a system nor an ideology. It’s an evolved ecology of meaning & practice that can’t be dismantled & rearranged at will to produce desired outcomes. This reductive, mechanistic conception of culture is Woke’s biggest tell.

Underneath all the hypnotic academic jargon lies the same simplistic model, repeated again & again - Cultural norms are "systems" that produce disparate outcomes & we need to reengineer our "system" to produce more equity. 

(3)  I read the competing articles when this matter became more widely known in 2021.  I thought Jackson made a compelling case that Schenker was not a racist and thought some of the contrary arguments were very weak but regardless, what I read was a civilized, polite discussion and not one warranting disciplinary action.

 (4) It was an article in The New Yorker on Students for Justice in Palestine, quoting a SJP steering committee member:

 "SJP is oriented in a special way.  The idea is to appeal to people who know nothing."  He added that after a year with SJP, "I really had a pretty solid grasp of what Palestinian liberation meant, and how interconnected it was to all the other struggles we see on the streets".   

(5)  A cautionary note.  In its press release, the American Jewish Congress indicated it supports the idea of Ethnic Studies curriculum, with its objection being to its treatment of Jews: 

“Done right, ethnic studies prepare students to live in an increasingly diverse society. Done wrong, they can be divisive and discriminatory,” said Marc Stern, AJC Chief Legal Officer.  “Public comment and debate are essential to devising a broadly acceptable ethnic studies curriculum. Community input is not just important, it is also the law, one the Santa Ana district has blatantly violated. The district must open up its curriculum for public examination so families can ensure their children are receiving instruction in ethnic studies that emphasizes diversity rather than discrimination.”

This is a terrible error.  The proper position is to oppose Ethnic Studies curriculum.  There is no way to get Ethnic Studies in K-12 right and the current alignment of forces means that, whatever the good-faith intent of Jewish groups, these type of curricula will ultimately encourage division and discrimination.  Please give up the pipe-dream and embrace reality.