Anti-CRT activist Chris Rufo blocks us on Twitter for some reason, but I can embed this:
The president of Brown University has an op-ed in the NYT comparing the abolition of the DEI bureaucracy to the suppression of Galileo.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 25, 2023
She has it exactly backwards: DEI does not cultivate genius; it stamps out genius. Galileo himself would be punished as a straight, white male.
Christina Paxson [Email her] is the President of Brown University, and has written The Gravest Threats to Campus Speech Come From States, Not Students, NYT, April 21, 2023.
She has a lot to say about Galileo and Charles Darwin, and what she calls ”Joseph McCarthy’s persecution of people for their political beliefs.” This is ahistorical—McCarthy was investigating security risks in the U.S. government, not pro-Communist professors.
As for science denialism, it still exists at Brown U, shutting down research on gender dysphoria:
More Science Denialism: Brown U. Puts Kibosh on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria Study https://t.co/s8IuZviWME pic.twitter.com/5qWyUoErf1
— VDARE (@vdare) August 29, 2018
President Paxson herself signed a letter to the faculty condemning a student who had written about racial differences in lactose intolerance.
Free speech vs. science denialism at Brown: "In a letter to the faculty, Provost Richard M. Locke, President Christina Paxson and Executive Vice President Russell Carey said “many members” of the university community found the columns “deeply offensive.”https://t.co/KDlopzYRwN
— VDARE (@vdare) April 25, 2023
Racial differences in lactose intolerence are as well established as racial differences in skin color, but at Brown, the university paper retracted this column saying ”said “’The white privilege of cows,’ published Oct. 5, relied on the incorrect notion that biological differences exist between races.”
Well, as Galileo said ”It still moves”... and real scientists know about dairy farming and Western Civilization , even if no one is allowed to say it at Brown.
What caught my attention was the idea that all the students are doing is ”yelling.”
Fantastic editorial by President Paxson (Brown University): "[I]t is ludicrous to claim that state-sponsored censorship — which carries the full force of the government and can even entail criminal penalties" is equivalent to students yelling at speakers https://t.co/p8GUBIP3rZ
— Pamela Herd 🐀 (@pamela_herd) April 21, 2023
Here’s how Paxson, pictured right, puts it:
Proponents of these laws attempt to justify them by repeating claims that universities are places where political correctness runs rampant and students are intolerant of alternative viewpoints. In my experience, these problems are much less pervasive than media coverage suggests, but they do exist. Students should not violate university policies and shout down speakers they don’t agree with. And peer pressure, like cancel culture in the larger world, is unfortunate and sometimes suppresses debate. Universities work hard to prevent and address these problems. We need to support open inquiry and debate both inside and outside of classrooms.
But it is ludicrous to claim that state-sponsored censorship—which carries the full force of the government and can even entail criminal penalties—is justified by student misconduct or peer pressure.
The problem at universities isn’t shouting, it’s antifa violence, and the reason that they’re passing state laws to deal with it is because the universities won’t enforce the law, protect conservatives, prosecute criminal offenses, or do the minimum of expelling a student who commits violence against a wrongthinker.
There are also Federal Civil Rights laws that could be used to prosecute the attackers—those aren’t being enforced either.
Here’s half a dozen posts from 2017 on the Battle of Berkeley:
So all I can say is: on the campuses, we didn’t start the fire.
