In “Race and Social Panic at Haverford: A Case Study in Educational Dysfunction,” Quillette’s Jonathan Kay gives a detailed account of how Woke-permeated campus-wide insanity can be triggered by nothing in particular. Kay makes a strong case that Haverford College, a private and expensive far-left-leaning liberal arts institution, self-spiraled into moral panic in a way that brings to mind the meltdown of Evergreen State, a story told and experienced by evolutionary psychology professors Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying. See also, Weinstein’s discussion of Evergreen with his brother, Podcaster Eric Weinstein (“The Portal“).
The self-annointed thought police are still working overtime at Haverford, where free-speech is merely a phrase and where tribal truths are the reality. I could not imagine sending any student to Haverford if they wanted to learn how to think self-critically and be prepared to hold a job in the outside world.
Jonathan Kay’s long article leaves a pit in my stomach and casts a pall over my evening as I write this comment. He needed to fill his article with an extraordinary amount of details in order to substantiate his extraordinary conclusions, including the following: A) Nothing insensitive or racist occurred at Haverford College leading up to the current shrill unrest. B) Nothing that happened at Haverford justified the long ridiculous list of student demands (to which the administration mostly acceded). C) Most chillingly, the administrators of Haverford (and many other colleges) lack the the necessary resources to have meaningful conversations with students or to take respectable negotiating positions during these Woke-fueled paroxysms.
A few excerpts from Jonathan Kay’s excellent article:
[T]he mania that swept Haverford College in late October and early November 2020 lays bare, with unusual clarity, the fervid atmosphere of grievance and self-entitlement that has made the administration of elite colleges and universities so difficult.
Of all the Haverford community members I spoke with, the only one who asked to be quoted by name was recently graduated philosophy major Alex Gutierrez, who once summarized the mindset of campus activists in an essay about Jacques Lacan. “Modern activists have psyches that are built for the joy of transgression,” he observed. “They engage in activism so they can repeatedly experience that joy, a joy that is denied them in everyday life because everyday life is dominated by the ethics of pleasure… And so they need to invent fictional dominant orders so that they can defy them. This is why protesters would actually be extremely unhappy if oppression went away. They want white patriarchy to be as powerful as possible, so they can defy it.”
Gutierrez wrote these words before his alma mater fell into upheaval in late October. But his analysis seems apt. When students complained that Raymond had caused them “harm” with her October 28th email, they weren’t really speaking up as activists denouncing racism on campus (since there doesn’t seem to be much of it), but as consumers whose parents paid good money for them to experience the sensation of transgressive social-justice heroism. “Normally, the administrators are the perfect target for student transgression,” Gutierrez told me. “They take the abuse and they’re not supposed to push back. That’s part of their role. That’s what students expect.”
Let me see if I can offer a complementary analysis to your summary of the Quillette piece.
I think Kay’s presentation highlights the continuity of the structural flaws in campus radicalism that were evident in the demonstrations that tore up colleges in the 1960s.
During the 1960s campus radicals agonized over their “mauvaise foi” in not taking their rebellion to the streets, or the ghettos, where real change could be, in Marxist theory, accomplished.
Most “heavy” SDS undergrads knew the colleges were playpens and felt lucky to have an ROTC barracks to burn, or a science building that did research for napalm manufacturers, to bomb. Those handy targets allowed them to practice radicalism and still make it back to the dorm to study for the next day’s quiz.
Yes, often there were student strikes, and often there were clashes with the police, or in extremis the National Guard, right in the quadrangle. But for the most part, the campus was a safe bubble, most SDS radicals knew it and felt sheepish about it. College was the original “safe space “ for a low commitment radicalism. The student deaths at Kent State were an anomaly.
Consequently, after the ‘68 Chicago riots, SDS broke up into factions, mostly on the issue of how to ground an off campus praxis; in fact, one of the factions got so exercised about the emptiness of campus Marxism, that they hatched into the terrorist Weather Underground.
You could say that in general the campus radicalism of the 1960s, while clinging to the safe base of the college campuses, was generally outwardly directed towards the practical issues of the war and civil rights.
By contrast, the “woke” campus activists of today have little anxiety about their lack of real, practical social justice impact. They don’t risk their lives on far away, Deep South voter drives. They just keep their radicalism on campus, because they have brilliantly solved the theory and praxis issue of their professors’s generation. They have found another way to be radical and never leave campus. They merely attack each other and terrorize their professors which is easier than facing the batons of the police in ghettos. Or, the sawed off shotguns of the Ku Klux Klan.
Their politics is inner directed, as is evident in their complaints about the administration doing so little to make them comfortably free of micro aggressions.
Now indeed, it must be said that some students do practice radicalism off campus, sort of.
BLM has created a mostly safe venue for faux radical actions like stopping traffic on a highway. But the police today, act much better than Mayor Daly’s cops did, at least when it comes to the indelicacy of cracking a white middle class kid’s skull. And yes, of course, a few college kids will dress black and join antifa; but, the majority want to stay safe and cancel other White privileged members of the faculty and staff who can’t beat them up.
By contrast, the campus activists of the 1960s at least looked around for something on campus to attack that could plausibly be depicted as part of the outside world, like a university takeover of ghetto real estate for a new dorm.
But today’s campus “woke” don’t, for the most part, feel any sense of bad faith for keeping every action near the Student Union. Their principal targets are not Dow Chemical, or the Pentagon, but rather other members of the campus community.
So, I think one of the reasons very liberal campuses, like Haverford, self immolate is that a cultural Marxism of the Frankfort School variety, and a French deconstructionist school have together taught kids that the social justice struggle is mostly cultural, so they never have to leave campus. The bourgeois enemy can be their assigned roommate, or the TA who gave them a “C.”
How convenient. How convenient.
The result is that the campus “woke” of today have to frantically invent enemies on campus to make their praxis feel real. Even when, as you Erich point out, nothing racist really happened, they will invent an event by some abstruse interpretation of a dean’s anodyne statement.
The campus rads of our youth were skinny limbed, granola munching boxers who got in the public ring with gloves heavier than their watery biceps. But they were boxers.
The campus rads of today stick with Twitter and Zoom. They are shadow boxers.
Mark: They are experts at yelling and tearing down. I have yet to see their meaningful real-work plans for for building a society geared toward human flourishing
I don’t think they are actually engaged in politics in any real definition of the word. Politics requires a confrontation with “plurality” or the ontological fact of others, who by definition will have a different take on what to do with the public world, because each of us, being part of a plurality, literally see things from a different perspective.
Politics also requires the acknowledgement of a common “world” of institutions, and ideas, and art, and forums that require care.
Most campus radicals not to mention a lot of BLM activists really have no idea of engaging with their countrymen, or accepting the existence of a common world.
I see much of this through the writings of Hannah Arendt.
There was a time in the Spring of last year that I thought the BLM movement was attempting to address a public world through their loud and rambunctious critique of public statues, which are certainly a part of public space.
However, it soon became obvious that they were not recognizing any idea of public space at all. I think they really aim to strip the public world of any meaning whatever.
When they tore down General Grant’s statue and started the fracas over the World’s Fair era statue of St. Louis, I decided that BLM’s real mission was to show that they had the power to strike at any segment of public space at will, and so dominate discourse.
The beating of the Rosary praying 22 year old last Summer took place at about the time that I decided that BLM and their college allies don’t have any interest in politics, strange to say.
The campus kids have as their prime mission the creation of political adversaries where none necessarily exist. I don’t think they are engaged in politics so much as what we used to call consciousness raising” or passing through several layers of “wokeness’ which makes their enterprise more gnostic and religious than political.