Two Minutes to Midnight on the Clock Towers

The Stephen Hsu and Bret Weinstein affairs were warnings that foreshadowed academia's fall.

Stephen Hsu is a brilliant physicist with a penchant for crunching and analyzing data. But in 2019, Hsu was forced to resign from a Vice President position after activists floated a petition around Michigan State University, where Hsu was a professor and administrator.

You see, Hsu had decided to pursue truth instead of social justice. 

Hsu, a Chinese American, made the grievous sin of looking at evidence to see whether narratives about racism held up concerning questions having to do with the distribution of opportunities or excessive force by police.

In one such instance, Hsu made an appearance on a controversial podcast. There, he claimed IQ was the strongest predictor of income and opportunity—by far. In other words, IQ predicts "underrepresentation." One could look at people's self-reporting on ethnicity and match that against their IQ scores. If there were systemic racism, Chu would expect to find high-IQ minorities in low-paid jobs or those same minorities restricted from academia.

But he did not.

He found that the distribution of opportunities tracks ever-so-closely to the distribution of IQ, race be damned. Of course, such is taboo because it stands in stark contrast to fashionable claims about systemic racism über alles.

With that, they tried to run Hsu out of Michigan State. 

There is undoubtedly controversy about 'race science,' especially given the idea of race—and reporting on race—can be a nebulous exercise. That had not been Hsu's concern in this case. Still, the mere accusation of race science was enough to inspire calls for Hsu’s ouster. And though he didn’t lose his faculty position, they put him in the broom closet. Few involved in the affair seemed terribly concerned about whether Hsu's research methods were sound or his claims valid.

The university had to trump up other charges to justify firing Hsu from the VP position. The discovery of alleged "conflicts of interest" only came after Hsu's notorious views on IQ and opportunity became widely known. Instead, the implications of Hsu's work were too taboo to abide.

This statement from the MSU Graduate Employees Union said it all:

The GEU recognizes that academic freedom entitles a scholar to express ideas without professional disadvantage. However, the VP of Research and Graduate Studies has tremendous power in determining research budgets and therefore tremendous responsibility in doing so in agreement with University values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Diversity. Equity. Inclusion.

DEI

These values seem benign enough until you realize they are intended to circumscribe all other values. In other words, no one is to question them. Yet they mean something more insidious than outward appearances would suggest. Beneath the surface, facts are to be replaced by values. Science is to be replaced by activism. Civil society is to be replaced by assertions of political power.

Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy, said of the Hsu affair: 

I do think that researchers have a duty to consider how their research will be used, to understand the implications of their research for society and to help safeguard against scientific misuse.

I don't want to misinterpret Farahany, but errant appeals to such purported duties offer justification for those stifling free speech and open inquiry.

Even if we stipulated that Hsu's conclusions were mostly false, we might ask What is the limiting principle for such a duty? Under what circumstances should evidence be suppressed? When should a researcher be muzzled? After all, science depends on truth trackers presenting countervailing evidence in a process similar to philosopher Karl Popper's conjecture and refutation. This research could be misused!

If it weren’t for Fauci’s deadly gain-of-function debacle, one might think Farahany’s Duty is just a political Kafka trap shrouded in the precautionary principle. It's too easy for anyone to claim "scientific misuse" whenever evidence contradicts some favored power narrative. It functions like an Obi-Wan wave by ideological admins with axes to grind.

In Hsu's case, it's not merely that his research runs counter to the narrative that everything I don't like about America is because of racism. An entire secular religion now depends on waging war against open inquiry.

Stephen Hsu was collateral damage in that war.

A Day of Absence

2017. At Evergreen State University in Washington, students declared a People of Color Day. In previous years, this day had been set up so that people of color could stay home from class voluntarily, purportedly to signify how their value to the campus would be missed. To my knowledge, no one at Evergreen had, up to this point, registered public concern about a de facto day of segregation, a condition against which so many in the Civil Rights Movement had struggled. It would just be for a day, after all, and it could all be explained by reference to a play.

But this particular year, the policy had changed. White students and professors were required to stay away from campus in a symbolic act of self-abasement. The change had come in the wake of Evergreen's hiring a new president, George Bridges. According to various accounts, Bridges almost immediately expanded university administration and allied himself with factions obsessed with race and' social justice.' Some months before People of Color Day, there had been a meeting of the 'Equity Council' whose stated purpose under Bridge's charge was to "[advance] Evergreen's commitment to and aspirations for greater equity, diversity, and inclusion of underrepresented populations in our campus community." Just how, exactly? Through "proactive, strategic, and sustained initiatives for progressive institutional change." In other words, a taxpayer-funded group dedicated to political activism and indoctrination now had authority over important aspects of campus life.

Once the Equity Council had convened, faculty members were notified of its new manifesto and told they were either allies or enemies of its contents. Such binaries are eerily reminiscent of Puritan America, when people believed one was either on the side of God or in league with the Devil. Of course, to be aware of such history, one would likely have to have been taught it. 

In any case, one professor of evolutionary biology, Bret Weinstein, objected to the new policy, which he explained in an email to a staff member.

There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles (…), and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.

Neither the Equity Council nor the student groups who bought into their manifesto saw things this way. Weinstein's patient voice of dissent would be unwelcome—both in the infamous email and in general. It’s not just because the other side disagreed but also because the university environment at Evergreen State had become intolerant of dissent. 

As it happens, students who shared Weinstein's concerns confided they were afraid to speak up. Most thought they would be branded as white supremacists. The message was clear: if you are white, it's not enough to acknowledge the marginalized struggles. You must also feel the sting of exclusion. Otherwise, how will you atone for your white privilege? Oh, and if you disagree, watch out. And through the equity manifesto, the administrators had essentially sanctioned a group of students to use unreason and intimidation in response to a tenured professor with grave concerns about, you know, forced segregation. Weinstein, a mild-mannered Jewish liberal with an excellent teaching and publishing record, would be branded a racist. Why? Because you are an ally or an enemy. In the Manichaean minds of the woke student body, Weinstein was the other. 

When Weinstein refused to stay home on People of Color Day, things quickly turned south. A group of students—long since steeped in messages of social justice victimhood—found Weinstein and surrounded him. Some students cursed. Others menaced. At one point, he was unable to leave. He would have to wait for the campus police to arrive to get out. While he waited, he tried to reason with the students. But that assumes reasonable listeners. The students surrounded Weinstein like some scene out of Children of the Corn, recording with their smart devices, shouting over him as he sought calmly to engage.

The same group of students would also surround President Bridges. They shouted the meek president down, called for Weinstein's ouster, and insisted the university president "shut the fuck up" whenever he offered any half-hearted defense. Because he had not purged the university of the enemy (Weinstein), Bridges had become the enemy. The irony is most pronounced in videos of the president. One can't help but see a man neutered by his own ideology, self-flagellating for DEI. Even in interviews after the encounter—where students treated him with utter disrespect—Bridges defended their behavior. 

Weinstein, by contrast, came across to outsiders at least as a picture of calm. Eventually, Weinstein resigned. He settled for $500,000 on condition that the University admitted no wrongdoing.

The Long March

The gains made in the Civil Rights movement are being rolled back. At least in my lifetime, the waves of incivility are worsening. It need not be that way. But just as the fires of racism were being tamped into embers, Marxism's intellectual and cultural remnants sought refuge in the academy. These activists set about fanning the flames again, blending the grand narrative of class warfare into a grand narrative of racialized warfare. 

Of course, class warfare never really went away.

So, what we were witnessing throughout the 1990s and 2000s was the slow and deliberate inculcation of illiberal ideas. This has come to be known as the "long march through the institutions." (Rudi Dutschke was channeling Gramschi.)

Adherents have successfully programmed these ideas into much of the educated elite. Recent events demonstrate, for better or worse, how much ideas still matter decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In 1930, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci likened the strategy to preparation for trench warfare. You don't want to try a frontal attack, though Gramsci, you want to weaken civil society, which he saw as the bounty of freedom but the ruling class's cultural hegemony: 

The massive structures of the modern democracies, both as state organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the 'trenches' and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely 'partial' the element of maneuver which before used to be 'the whole' of war….

Higher education, then, became the primary beachhead for those with illiberal agendas. But Gramsci had taught them to be patient in their strategy. To transform a generation, those purveyors would have to undertake a multigenerational effort to occupy the university and spread a particular mind virus to students year after year. But that meant the university would no longer be dedicated to pursuing truth. It would be dedicated to social justice.

Year after year, that idea metastasized until an institution once dedicated to learning would become dedicated to activism. The transformation of universities into reeducation camps was complete.

It’s 12:01.