She wasn't cancelled. She was fired for incompetence. That isn't censorship, that is removed from office for cause. Her job is to be a president. A president says "this is who we are and this is where we are going". And then the president leads. She didn't lead at her school and she didn't communicate the goals of the university to the faculty, students, or to the congressional committee.
I think she was doing exactly what she was hired to do , to preside over the advance of the DEI woks agenda.She was expected to do it in a way that Sane Americans would not notice. The 10-7 massacre however forced the subterfuge out into the open a few years ahead of schedule.. There was no way she could explain the duplicity in front of Congress. The Board was fully on board with the Woke ideology , they were not ready to be unmasked yet.
I think Savodnik is correct that as a general principle we should not answer cancellations with cancellations. But the bigger point here is yours: she was not cancelled, but rather fired for incompetence and bringing disgrace on the (admittedly already disgraceful) institution.
Had she said that the university was supportive of nonviolence, she could have taken a stand against Hamas and the Israelis and their violent ways. She then could have said that students protesting the Israelis and Hamas were encouraged to protest peacefully. She was against all violence, but all for free speech. That is taking a stand. Depending on how forceful and eloquent she was, she could be seen as a leader.
What she did was equivocate and fumble, stumble, and look unintelligent. That's the last thing you want a president of an Ivy league university to convey. Wrong image. Fired.
Totally agree we should eliminate safe spaces and forced/encouraged divisions and all the other nonsensical things they've been doing, and return to the traditional collegiate focus on education and free thought.
That said, I'd say that she did get canceled, AND that she deserved it. Why? Because it doesn't hold water to shield some groups and throw others to the wolves. The students (and all Americans) need to be treated equally, period.
If, after all this, we make the adult decision to stop building bias and discrimination into college life, great. But it needs to be AFTER the far left gets a taste of its own medicine, not before. Among other things, that's the only way they'll understand and back away from the toxic mess they've created.
Also, if you read the fine print, she's not leaving Penn. She resigned as president but is staying on as a professor. (!) This is an insult, and shows the University doesn't plan to change any more than they are forced to at gunpoint.
Unless these universities rehire those they've terminated for defending Halloween costumes and other imagined transgressions, she needs to get the same punishment they did. Period.
You hit the nail on the head. In their own overreach into ideology, leaders at many universities are not fair or consistent. They were merely discriminating against "evil groups" and getting away with it. Once the veil has been raised, this inconsistency is hard to defend.
Wait are you saying a leftist A LEFTIST has been dismissed for being incompetent? There will be many unemployed leftists if this becomes a trend toward meritocracy. Do you think it would take within States and the fedzilla governments?
It's hard to raise money from donors if your brand is tainted by charges of antisemitism. And raising money is the #1 job of a college president. So that's why she had to go.
In fairness, her answers before the committee weren't inappropriate though the recent history at Penn suggests major problems with free speech there. All three could have dodged this bullet by clarifying the question Stefanik asked:
"Congresswoman, if your question is whether words calling for support of genocide of Jews and the eradication of the state of Israel can be said on the campus of Penn, the first Amendment demands that my answer be 'yes.' If actions that threaten, disrupt or harass take place on the Penn campus or at any event Penn sanctions, such actions will be condemned and referred to law enforcement as appropriate."
The lawyers who prepped these three for what was the world's most likely to be asked question unquestionably suck.
The question, though, was whether calls for genocide violated Penn's code of conduct, not the First Amendment. Further, the antisemitism on these campuses has indeed erupted into harassment, menacing, and other conduct.
Indeed. Fired for incompetence. The person who needs to make amends and fix the corrupt DEI complex is the next president. If they wont do it, then fire that one too and the next one, until you find someone with the courage to do what is right.
Spot on. Indeed, one could argue that her lack ability to lead in this particular area— trying to fix limits on free speech that have been happening on her watch on campus— that lack of fortitude is an equally fireable offense.
It is ludicrous to argue that in the current pervasive culture of DEI in these once great institutions, that anyone can argue “ freely”. A wholesale dismantling of this upside down, morally bankrupt DEI structure must occur. Why this author states that “ she stood up for free expression” and she faces an impossible dilemma that to be fair was not of her own making” are patently false. Calling for “ free expression” only for Jew hatred “ while supporting the “ micro aggressions” and censure or expulsion for “ misgendering “ is not what most sane Americans call free expression. This is what the woke left does. They take vocabulary that already has an accepted definition and misapplies it in an attempt to confuse and obfuscate. It’s a huge CON. McGill would not have been hired for this position If she did not wholly support this DEI nonsense that has close to fully destroyed academia and true scholarship. She is an entrenched part of this crazy ideology and is certainly not the person who will work to dismantle it and restore true FREE SPEECH for all. Neither is Gay or Kornbluth or Salovey ( why has Yale been given a pass here or Princeton etc)
They are all guilty of this fraud and it needs to stop if it already isn’t too late.
Let’s put ourselves in these young jewish kids’ shoes…. God forbid, but how would these university administrators feel if THEY were the subject of death threats on campus by angry mobs of students and professors??
That would be horrible! I’m guessing they would put a stop to it very quickly. They would NOT cite the free speech rights of the perpetrators … and they would indeed be afraid.
It is an obvious fact that calling for genocide of Jewish students does indeed constitute harassment and it needs to stop immediately.
It is not the job of our college students to fight Hamas’ war.
At a university we are training YOUNG adults who are inexperienced in the world how to interact in a meaningful and thoughtful way; that’s the job of the universities. Allowing them to act as angry, canceling mobs is the exact opposite of what we want them to learn.
The DEI departments need to be abolished. All they have amounted to is ideology enforcement which strips away students’ freedom of thought, opinion, and expression with threats of censure, class failure and expulsion. It is how the universities are controlling our young students’ thoughts today.
DEI hit squad: Forcing people to call an obvious biological male a “woman” and having to call him “she” is GASLIGHTING, and as such, is violence against one’s sense of reality.
In fact, the NATIONAL DOMESTIC VIOLENCE HOTLINE describes it this way:
“[Gaslighting] is an extremely effective form of emotional abuse that causes a victim to question their own feelings, instincts, and sanity. As a result, the abusive partner has a lot of power (and we know that abuse is about power and control).”
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, gender dysphoria prevalence accounts for 0.005–0.014% of the population for biological males and 0.002–0.003% for biological females. (May 2023). The transgender “movement” mocks the suffering and mental anguish of these true gender dysphoria sufferers and has turned their pain into a media circus.
Women’s sports: Putting on lipstick and a dress does not suddenly turn your Y-chromosome into an X-chromosome.
A man’s penis, testicles and male hormones are still there… and the previous growth and strength that a man goes through is NOT negated by taking female hormones…. In fact, his testosterone ensures that his strength will stay in tact. So, beyond the shadow of a doubt, these men pretending to be women will win every female sport because they are indeed bigger and stronger. I’m sorry… it is just not fair to women… and it is an out-and-out attack on women’s sports.
Our media outlets declaring that the “Woman of the Year” is a transgender is ULTIMATELY INSULTING TO WOMEN EVERYWHERE. So men are actually better women than a woman who has two X-chromosomes?!! Really?! HOW INSULTING.
If a guy wants to dress up as a woman, go for it, dude. I could care less. But don’t make me call you by any particular name, don’t invade my space, and don’t threaten me in places like women’s locker rooms, public bathrooms and in our sports. How unsafe the women in prisons must feel when these trans “women” men are in their spaces. As if life wasn’t already hard enough for women in prison.
AGAIN, let’s put ourselves in these poor female students’ shoes… How would President Gay or President Magill feel if THEY had to undress in front of a biological male who is pretending to be a woman? What if THEY were subjected to this in their own spaces??
Can’t express how sick I am of reading articles like this. Can someone find me a single example of a hard woke leftist publicly apologizing and committing to changing their view for any reason other than the threat of losing their job?
The only progress that’s been made towards rooting out these disgusting ideologies from our institutions has been when people face actual consequences for them. That has only very recently begun to happen, first with bud light boycotts and now with this.
News flash: the cuddly kumbayah approach has failed for years. Let people suffer the consequences of their words now. And no, an overpaid college president losing their diversity hire job because they waffled on calls for actual genocide is not equivalent to a $70k/yr worker getting fired because they don’t think women have penises.
I disagree. When you are doing a bad job, you should be fired or forced to resign. She's demonstrated that she cannot handle a leadership position.
She's still a professor of law at UPenn, she has not been blackballed from working in academia, nor has she been censored on campus or on social media. This is not an example of cancel culture.
"Bad job" to you and a lot of other people, might be a "good job" to the school when the school is so intent on implementing DEI ideology and tamping down on anything else that deviates, while staying out of public scrutiny. I'm wondering how many people at UPenn thought she was doing a bad job vs. she's the victim. She was just exposed for the double standard that they've all actively and purposefully been allowing under the banner of DEI group think.
Personally, I find it objectionable she gets to remain employed by the university. Much as I hate cancel culture and hope we move past it, the Ivy League schools terminated professors, including tenured ones, for suggesting that maybe it's okay for students to have a little fun with Halloween costumes. Why should she get better treatment than those she and her cohorts have ousted for less-impactful "transgressions."
A sage philosopher of the 20th century named Yogi Berra (not a guru but a baseball player) said , “in theory there’s no difference in practice and theory, in practice there is”. Such is the case with your argument which is good in theory. In practice she can’t possibly be the one to marshal wholesale changes simply because one million people heard her testify under oath that genocidal language depends on context just like pronouns.
It seems to me that the article demonstrates how the emphasis has shifted.
This is not about freedom of speech or any other freedom.
The fact is that basic concepts such as lie-truth and good-evil are no longer obvious and “depend on the context.”
Mechanisms capable of resisting an avalanche of lies are collapsing. The lie is processed, becomes ambiguous, covered with the right words and then presented as the truth.
Evil receives new fashionable definitions, is surrounded by false narratives, and is presented as the truth.
And in these cases, no freedom works anymore. That is, it already works against truth and goodness.
Supporting a declaration of annihilation of any group is not just allowing free speech. It is condoning the implications therein.At some point we have to differentiate free speech from bandwagonning ( my neologism)
“Voltaire was wrong.” Good thrust! “Bandwagonning” may be a new term, but not a new phenomenon. It is the very thing all institutions of learning should strive to identify and eliminate. Isn’t being able to think and speak on your own regardless of the crowd the greatest benefit of education?
Mate, I reckon you should edit that comment quickly before someone buys the domain "therein.At" and puts up a page calling for the targeting of some group. If this happened to a tweet from Rudi Giuliani, it can happen to you. :-)
In a culture of "speech is violence" and crying wolf over the matter, you've got a quagmire. Who's speech truly qualifies as "not violence"? I think any reasonable person could find the line, but we've gone past reasonable dialogue and allowed debate a while back. Basically you are right, but that requires a whole group of people to do a reverse course and admit their definitions and terms are bogus.
Whatever happened to the pledge of allegiance, do they still say it in school? “One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The Ivy universities have removed God, and we see the result. They have divided the indivisible into “affinity groups”. Blacks need separate classroom from whites, less they feel inferior. They have divided our indivisible country into a zillion offended groups vs the evil white male. And liberty and justice for all is fine unless you are Jewish, or a white “oppressor” , or a male, or of European ancestry. By the time they are done, liberty and justice is only for a few “victim” elites. They are not teaching education, they are doing political indoctrination. They should all lose their tax exempt status as required by law.
'I understand why the powers that be wanted her out: she stood up for free expression and, in this case, that meant defending the rights of antisemites.'
Mr. Savodnick, in my view, is slightly wrong here. Magill's gone because she exposed her support of favoured speech, not free speech. Her school, like so many others, loses credibility when everything not Left is censored from speakers to pronouns, but allows demonstrations calling for the eradication of Israel from river to sea to go ahead.
While Mr Savodnik is to be commended for wanting to defend freedom of speech, I think the dismissal of people like Liz Magill is, paradoxically, a crucial step in that defense. The principle of free speech is part of a complex of values that together make up the ethical basis of a free society. I don't think you can run a university or a liberal democracy on neutrality regarding the most important values. If a university like Penn doesn't actively take a stand in favor of the values on which a free and equal society stands then it's condoning the destruction of those values. Magill's behavior was and ought to be repulsive to any person and any institution to whom it is important a) to live in a free society where b) minorities don't have to fear for their lives.
There's more to be done than firing Magill, for sure. The issue is not free speech here, the issue is the glaring and appalling double standard of tolerated, encouraged and compelled speech. I strongly believe that university's should have speech standards. The university's should set a standard for civilized, rational argumentation in the spirit of the Western Enlightenment. University's are there for the purpose of making judgments, they have simply gone off the rails and are making bad judgments. Insults, bigotry and propagandist cant should be exposed, discouraged and even removed from the campus when it is extreme. That is education. That is intellectual inquiry.
The solution is a widely-publicized boycott of companies doing DEI politics, a freeze on donations to DEI institutions, and removing the federal bureaucrats sending billions and billions of our tax dollars to DEI funding.
The issue is that these private universities not practicing free speech and debate when it comes to gays, trans, blacks but only pull out “ free speech” to justify calls for intifada and river to the sea, etc” is a grand hypocrisy. No one should be calling for violence against any group. It’s an issue of grossly selective enforcement. How this author and others can’t understand that is a mystery. Or are you pretending to not understand this crucial point?
I agree with you about the hypocrisy. I lean towards being a free speech absolutist. However, under no circumstances should free speech be allowed when there are calls for violence, period.
I attended college in Washington DC in the early 80s. I can recall we had all kinds of people come and speak at the university. We had anarchists, communists, socialists, fascists, Maoists, the PLO, cult leaders, the JDL, etc. All were free to speak. Some said some outrageous things! However, none were allowed to advocate violence.
So, I am in agreement with you on this specific issue. I was just so shocked at the testimony of these university presidents. But, this is where we are in 2023. They, like the Left, are obsessed with conformity. No deviation is allowed. It is like the women who oppose trans athletes in women sports. They are silenced. These college presidents probably feared the same. They feared the mob and the backlash.
I agree with those principles. What I disagree with Is his opening statement that “ Liz Magill should not have been forced to resign... that it is a blow to academic freedom”.She is a woke ideologue who does NOT believe in free speech for everyone. ,The CRT woke cultists must go, that she is still a tenured law professor is still a scandal. I fully support real freedom of speech and ideas for everyone , that standard must be applied uniformly. Liz Magill has not done that. Everyone knows this , it is a matter of public record at Penn as noted by other commenters..
Universities are in the business of educating and providing an environment for research. As such, they are in the business of making judgments. Our predicament is the result of the fallacy that important civilizational work does not entail making judgments. The purpose of the Constitution is to ensure that these judgments are made by private agents, not enforced by law.
Yes she needed to be sent to a "re-education" camp. That is the problem. She had to go, and Gay must go too. We are seeing the end of the DEI model of higher education. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming us. Antisemitism is secondary; this is about the hypocrisy of DEI overreach. Americans have had enough of this hypocritical nonsense, and Jewish people provided the perfect test case. We do not fit the DEI model: we are the invisible color. And Magill's smarmy smirking smug legalism demonstrated the hypocrisy for all the world. Who wants to pay for their kids to get that nonsense? The other two presidents will go too. It is simply bad business to keep the DEI model going when it chases students from Harvard, MIT and Penn into the open arms of Dartmouth and Yale. Perhaps we will even start sending our students to Japanese universities. This is what happened to Detroit. Rather than Datsun it will be Todai University.
You make a great case for firing Magill and most of the rest of her staff and faculty. Does anyone think she is up to dismantling the DEI complex? No. And neither is anyone who has supported microaggressions, snowflakes, racism and antisemitism displayed on campus for years.
Fine, but where is the evidence that Magill would have changed her spots if she'd stayed? A change of leadership might bring another same-old time-server to the top, but it might - and Penn must have a governing body of presumably intelligent people - lead to the appointment of a new broom.
It's a damning indictment of C21 intellectualism that it got itself into this moral morass. But sometimes it needs a train wreck to provide a wake-up call.
We're hostage to feelings. The emotional frailty of a generation of individuals whose whims have seldom been denied. They will soon be in complete control. Meanwhile in the powder kegs of the middle east the inbred muslims are emboldened. Thanks leftists.
Ok...just stop...the majority of Americans have stood by in silence while the Marxist/socialist/leftists have taken over the academy...now that their vile hatred for America and our freedoms have been exposed we are supposed to just look the other way again...NO...it is time for them to suffer consequences for their actions...I don't care one iota if every leftist, DEI administrator, and fake social sciences professor ends up jobless living in a homeless encampment in San Fransisco...they created this situation now live with the consequences...
Making excuses for them and what they have done with malice of forethought is insane...g.
She wasn't cancelled. She was fired for incompetence. That isn't censorship, that is removed from office for cause. Her job is to be a president. A president says "this is who we are and this is where we are going". And then the president leads. She didn't lead at her school and she didn't communicate the goals of the university to the faculty, students, or to the congressional committee.
Liz Magill failed at her job. Fired.
I think she was doing exactly what she was hired to do , to preside over the advance of the DEI woks agenda.She was expected to do it in a way that Sane Americans would not notice. The 10-7 massacre however forced the subterfuge out into the open a few years ahead of schedule.. There was no way she could explain the duplicity in front of Congress. The Board was fully on board with the Woke ideology , they were not ready to be unmasked yet.
I think Savodnik is correct that as a general principle we should not answer cancellations with cancellations. But the bigger point here is yours: she was not cancelled, but rather fired for incompetence and bringing disgrace on the (admittedly already disgraceful) institution.
Had she said that the university was supportive of nonviolence, she could have taken a stand against Hamas and the Israelis and their violent ways. She then could have said that students protesting the Israelis and Hamas were encouraged to protest peacefully. She was against all violence, but all for free speech. That is taking a stand. Depending on how forceful and eloquent she was, she could be seen as a leader.
What she did was equivocate and fumble, stumble, and look unintelligent. That's the last thing you want a president of an Ivy league university to convey. Wrong image. Fired.
Then be prepared for continued asymmetric conflict.
Totally agree we should eliminate safe spaces and forced/encouraged divisions and all the other nonsensical things they've been doing, and return to the traditional collegiate focus on education and free thought.
That said, I'd say that she did get canceled, AND that she deserved it. Why? Because it doesn't hold water to shield some groups and throw others to the wolves. The students (and all Americans) need to be treated equally, period.
If, after all this, we make the adult decision to stop building bias and discrimination into college life, great. But it needs to be AFTER the far left gets a taste of its own medicine, not before. Among other things, that's the only way they'll understand and back away from the toxic mess they've created.
Also, if you read the fine print, she's not leaving Penn. She resigned as president but is staying on as a professor. (!) This is an insult, and shows the University doesn't plan to change any more than they are forced to at gunpoint.
Unless these universities rehire those they've terminated for defending Halloween costumes and other imagined transgressions, she needs to get the same punishment they did. Period.
You hit the nail on the head. In their own overreach into ideology, leaders at many universities are not fair or consistent. They were merely discriminating against "evil groups" and getting away with it. Once the veil has been raised, this inconsistency is hard to defend.
Wait are you saying a leftist A LEFTIST has been dismissed for being incompetent? There will be many unemployed leftists if this becomes a trend toward meritocracy. Do you think it would take within States and the fedzilla governments?
It's hard to raise money from donors if your brand is tainted by charges of antisemitism. And raising money is the #1 job of a college president. So that's why she had to go.
In fairness, her answers before the committee weren't inappropriate though the recent history at Penn suggests major problems with free speech there. All three could have dodged this bullet by clarifying the question Stefanik asked:
"Congresswoman, if your question is whether words calling for support of genocide of Jews and the eradication of the state of Israel can be said on the campus of Penn, the first Amendment demands that my answer be 'yes.' If actions that threaten, disrupt or harass take place on the Penn campus or at any event Penn sanctions, such actions will be condemned and referred to law enforcement as appropriate."
The lawyers who prepped these three for what was the world's most likely to be asked question unquestionably suck.
The question, though, was whether calls for genocide violated Penn's code of conduct, not the First Amendment. Further, the antisemitism on these campuses has indeed erupted into harassment, menacing, and other conduct.
Indeed. Fired for incompetence. The person who needs to make amends and fix the corrupt DEI complex is the next president. If they wont do it, then fire that one too and the next one, until you find someone with the courage to do what is right.
Spot on. Indeed, one could argue that her lack ability to lead in this particular area— trying to fix limits on free speech that have been happening on her watch on campus— that lack of fortitude is an equally fireable offense.
It is ludicrous to argue that in the current pervasive culture of DEI in these once great institutions, that anyone can argue “ freely”. A wholesale dismantling of this upside down, morally bankrupt DEI structure must occur. Why this author states that “ she stood up for free expression” and she faces an impossible dilemma that to be fair was not of her own making” are patently false. Calling for “ free expression” only for Jew hatred “ while supporting the “ micro aggressions” and censure or expulsion for “ misgendering “ is not what most sane Americans call free expression. This is what the woke left does. They take vocabulary that already has an accepted definition and misapplies it in an attempt to confuse and obfuscate. It’s a huge CON. McGill would not have been hired for this position If she did not wholly support this DEI nonsense that has close to fully destroyed academia and true scholarship. She is an entrenched part of this crazy ideology and is certainly not the person who will work to dismantle it and restore true FREE SPEECH for all. Neither is Gay or Kornbluth or Salovey ( why has Yale been given a pass here or Princeton etc)
They are all guilty of this fraud and it needs to stop if it already isn’t too late.
Yes, they do it until they get caught. Until then, they will rain hell itself down on you for wearing Halloween costumes.
Let’s put ourselves in these young jewish kids’ shoes…. God forbid, but how would these university administrators feel if THEY were the subject of death threats on campus by angry mobs of students and professors??
That would be horrible! I’m guessing they would put a stop to it very quickly. They would NOT cite the free speech rights of the perpetrators … and they would indeed be afraid.
It is an obvious fact that calling for genocide of Jewish students does indeed constitute harassment and it needs to stop immediately.
It is not the job of our college students to fight Hamas’ war.
At a university we are training YOUNG adults who are inexperienced in the world how to interact in a meaningful and thoughtful way; that’s the job of the universities. Allowing them to act as angry, canceling mobs is the exact opposite of what we want them to learn.
The DEI departments need to be abolished. All they have amounted to is ideology enforcement which strips away students’ freedom of thought, opinion, and expression with threats of censure, class failure and expulsion. It is how the universities are controlling our young students’ thoughts today.
DEI hit squad: Forcing people to call an obvious biological male a “woman” and having to call him “she” is GASLIGHTING, and as such, is violence against one’s sense of reality.
In fact, the NATIONAL DOMESTIC VIOLENCE HOTLINE describes it this way:
“[Gaslighting] is an extremely effective form of emotional abuse that causes a victim to question their own feelings, instincts, and sanity. As a result, the abusive partner has a lot of power (and we know that abuse is about power and control).”
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, gender dysphoria prevalence accounts for 0.005–0.014% of the population for biological males and 0.002–0.003% for biological females. (May 2023). The transgender “movement” mocks the suffering and mental anguish of these true gender dysphoria sufferers and has turned their pain into a media circus.
Women’s sports: Putting on lipstick and a dress does not suddenly turn your Y-chromosome into an X-chromosome.
A man’s penis, testicles and male hormones are still there… and the previous growth and strength that a man goes through is NOT negated by taking female hormones…. In fact, his testosterone ensures that his strength will stay in tact. So, beyond the shadow of a doubt, these men pretending to be women will win every female sport because they are indeed bigger and stronger. I’m sorry… it is just not fair to women… and it is an out-and-out attack on women’s sports.
Our media outlets declaring that the “Woman of the Year” is a transgender is ULTIMATELY INSULTING TO WOMEN EVERYWHERE. So men are actually better women than a woman who has two X-chromosomes?!! Really?! HOW INSULTING.
If a guy wants to dress up as a woman, go for it, dude. I could care less. But don’t make me call you by any particular name, don’t invade my space, and don’t threaten me in places like women’s locker rooms, public bathrooms and in our sports. How unsafe the women in prisons must feel when these trans “women” men are in their spaces. As if life wasn’t already hard enough for women in prison.
AGAIN, let’s put ourselves in these poor female students’ shoes… How would President Gay or President Magill feel if THEY had to undress in front of a biological male who is pretending to be a woman? What if THEY were subjected to this in their own spaces??
Can’t express how sick I am of reading articles like this. Can someone find me a single example of a hard woke leftist publicly apologizing and committing to changing their view for any reason other than the threat of losing their job?
The only progress that’s been made towards rooting out these disgusting ideologies from our institutions has been when people face actual consequences for them. That has only very recently begun to happen, first with bud light boycotts and now with this.
News flash: the cuddly kumbayah approach has failed for years. Let people suffer the consequences of their words now. And no, an overpaid college president losing their diversity hire job because they waffled on calls for actual genocide is not equivalent to a $70k/yr worker getting fired because they don’t think women have penises.
Firing Liz Magill probably won't solve the problem.
But like 100 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it's a great start.
I disagree. When you are doing a bad job, you should be fired or forced to resign. She's demonstrated that she cannot handle a leadership position.
She's still a professor of law at UPenn, she has not been blackballed from working in academia, nor has she been censored on campus or on social media. This is not an example of cancel culture.
yes. more like as demotion and still getting paid. less work. less stress and still getting paid. sign me up
Agree.
She has not been cancelled. She has been anointed a martyr with tenure, which beats having to work for a living.
"Bad job" to you and a lot of other people, might be a "good job" to the school when the school is so intent on implementing DEI ideology and tamping down on anything else that deviates, while staying out of public scrutiny. I'm wondering how many people at UPenn thought she was doing a bad job vs. she's the victim. She was just exposed for the double standard that they've all actively and purposefully been allowing under the banner of DEI group think.
Personally, I find it objectionable she gets to remain employed by the university. Much as I hate cancel culture and hope we move past it, the Ivy League schools terminated professors, including tenured ones, for suggesting that maybe it's okay for students to have a little fun with Halloween costumes. Why should she get better treatment than those she and her cohorts have ousted for less-impactful "transgressions."
A sage philosopher of the 20th century named Yogi Berra (not a guru but a baseball player) said , “in theory there’s no difference in practice and theory, in practice there is”. Such is the case with your argument which is good in theory. In practice she can’t possibly be the one to marshal wholesale changes simply because one million people heard her testify under oath that genocidal language depends on context just like pronouns.
I enjoy Mr. Savodnik's writing, but this one was so off target.
Way off target and disingenuous. His arguments are factually incorrect, illogical naive and I don’t think he actually believes what he wrote.
I actually wonder if he wrote this purely to be counterpoint to Bari, in the spirit of real debate.
The author's perspective is valid, represents many, and should be discussed in a respectful and genuine manner.
TFP is leading by example. Our presidential debates should look more like this. They did when I was a kid.
It seems to me that the article demonstrates how the emphasis has shifted.
This is not about freedom of speech or any other freedom.
The fact is that basic concepts such as lie-truth and good-evil are no longer obvious and “depend on the context.”
Mechanisms capable of resisting an avalanche of lies are collapsing. The lie is processed, becomes ambiguous, covered with the right words and then presented as the truth.
Evil receives new fashionable definitions, is surrounded by false narratives, and is presented as the truth.
And in these cases, no freedom works anymore. That is, it already works against truth and goodness.
I could not disagree more.
Voltaire was wrong and so are you.
Supporting a declaration of annihilation of any group is not just allowing free speech. It is condoning the implications therein.At some point we have to differentiate free speech from bandwagonning ( my neologism)
and from incitement to violence.
“Voltaire was wrong.” Good thrust! “Bandwagonning” may be a new term, but not a new phenomenon. It is the very thing all institutions of learning should strive to identify and eliminate. Isn’t being able to think and speak on your own regardless of the crowd the greatest benefit of education?
Mate, I reckon you should edit that comment quickly before someone buys the domain "therein.At" and puts up a page calling for the targeting of some group. If this happened to a tweet from Rudi Giuliani, it can happen to you. :-)
In a culture of "speech is violence" and crying wolf over the matter, you've got a quagmire. Who's speech truly qualifies as "not violence"? I think any reasonable person could find the line, but we've gone past reasonable dialogue and allowed debate a while back. Basically you are right, but that requires a whole group of people to do a reverse course and admit their definitions and terms are bogus.
Exactly.
Whatever happened to the pledge of allegiance, do they still say it in school? “One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The Ivy universities have removed God, and we see the result. They have divided the indivisible into “affinity groups”. Blacks need separate classroom from whites, less they feel inferior. They have divided our indivisible country into a zillion offended groups vs the evil white male. And liberty and justice for all is fine unless you are Jewish, or a white “oppressor” , or a male, or of European ancestry. By the time they are done, liberty and justice is only for a few “victim” elites. They are not teaching education, they are doing political indoctrination. They should all lose their tax exempt status as required by law.
'I understand why the powers that be wanted her out: she stood up for free expression and, in this case, that meant defending the rights of antisemites.'
Mr. Savodnick, in my view, is slightly wrong here. Magill's gone because she exposed her support of favoured speech, not free speech. Her school, like so many others, loses credibility when everything not Left is censored from speakers to pronouns, but allows demonstrations calling for the eradication of Israel from river to sea to go ahead.
While Mr Savodnik is to be commended for wanting to defend freedom of speech, I think the dismissal of people like Liz Magill is, paradoxically, a crucial step in that defense. The principle of free speech is part of a complex of values that together make up the ethical basis of a free society. I don't think you can run a university or a liberal democracy on neutrality regarding the most important values. If a university like Penn doesn't actively take a stand in favor of the values on which a free and equal society stands then it's condoning the destruction of those values. Magill's behavior was and ought to be repulsive to any person and any institution to whom it is important a) to live in a free society where b) minorities don't have to fear for their lives.
There's more to be done than firing Magill, for sure. The issue is not free speech here, the issue is the glaring and appalling double standard of tolerated, encouraged and compelled speech. I strongly believe that university's should have speech standards. The university's should set a standard for civilized, rational argumentation in the spirit of the Western Enlightenment. University's are there for the purpose of making judgments, they have simply gone off the rails and are making bad judgments. Insults, bigotry and propagandist cant should be exposed, discouraged and even removed from the campus when it is extreme. That is education. That is intellectual inquiry.
The solution is a widely-publicized boycott of companies doing DEI politics, a freeze on donations to DEI institutions, and removing the federal bureaucrats sending billions and billions of our tax dollars to DEI funding.
"Insults, bigotry and propagandist cant should be exposed, discouraged and even removed from the campus when it is extreme."
I am not sure exactly what you are trying to say here with the "cant should."
Again, it all comes down to whose definition of "extreme" gets used! What is an "insult?" What is "bigotry?" What is "extreme?"
So yes, the issue IS one of free speech.
The issue is that these private universities not practicing free speech and debate when it comes to gays, trans, blacks but only pull out “ free speech” to justify calls for intifada and river to the sea, etc” is a grand hypocrisy. No one should be calling for violence against any group. It’s an issue of grossly selective enforcement. How this author and others can’t understand that is a mystery. Or are you pretending to not understand this crucial point?
I agree with you about the hypocrisy. I lean towards being a free speech absolutist. However, under no circumstances should free speech be allowed when there are calls for violence, period.
I attended college in Washington DC in the early 80s. I can recall we had all kinds of people come and speak at the university. We had anarchists, communists, socialists, fascists, Maoists, the PLO, cult leaders, the JDL, etc. All were free to speak. Some said some outrageous things! However, none were allowed to advocate violence.
So, I am in agreement with you on this specific issue. I was just so shocked at the testimony of these university presidents. But, this is where we are in 2023. They, like the Left, are obsessed with conformity. No deviation is allowed. It is like the women who oppose trans athletes in women sports. They are silenced. These college presidents probably feared the same. They feared the mob and the backlash.
Disa, read again what Peter Savodnik called for: it says it all. Very similar to the University of Chicago Principles.
I agree with those principles. What I disagree with Is his opening statement that “ Liz Magill should not have been forced to resign... that it is a blow to academic freedom”.She is a woke ideologue who does NOT believe in free speech for everyone. ,The CRT woke cultists must go, that she is still a tenured law professor is still a scandal. I fully support real freedom of speech and ideas for everyone , that standard must be applied uniformly. Liz Magill has not done that. Everyone knows this , it is a matter of public record at Penn as noted by other commenters..
Look up cant in the dictionary.
Universities are in the business of educating and providing an environment for research. As such, they are in the business of making judgments. Our predicament is the result of the fallacy that important civilizational work does not entail making judgments. The purpose of the Constitution is to ensure that these judgments are made by private agents, not enforced by law.
Yes she needed to be sent to a "re-education" camp. That is the problem. She had to go, and Gay must go too. We are seeing the end of the DEI model of higher education. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming us. Antisemitism is secondary; this is about the hypocrisy of DEI overreach. Americans have had enough of this hypocritical nonsense, and Jewish people provided the perfect test case. We do not fit the DEI model: we are the invisible color. And Magill's smarmy smirking smug legalism demonstrated the hypocrisy for all the world. Who wants to pay for their kids to get that nonsense? The other two presidents will go too. It is simply bad business to keep the DEI model going when it chases students from Harvard, MIT and Penn into the open arms of Dartmouth and Yale. Perhaps we will even start sending our students to Japanese universities. This is what happened to Detroit. Rather than Datsun it will be Todai University.
You make a great case for firing Magill and most of the rest of her staff and faculty. Does anyone think she is up to dismantling the DEI complex? No. And neither is anyone who has supported microaggressions, snowflakes, racism and antisemitism displayed on campus for years.
Fine, but where is the evidence that Magill would have changed her spots if she'd stayed? A change of leadership might bring another same-old time-server to the top, but it might - and Penn must have a governing body of presumably intelligent people - lead to the appointment of a new broom.
It's a damning indictment of C21 intellectualism that it got itself into this moral morass. But sometimes it needs a train wreck to provide a wake-up call.
We're hostage to feelings. The emotional frailty of a generation of individuals whose whims have seldom been denied. They will soon be in complete control. Meanwhile in the powder kegs of the middle east the inbred muslims are emboldened. Thanks leftists.
Ok...just stop...the majority of Americans have stood by in silence while the Marxist/socialist/leftists have taken over the academy...now that their vile hatred for America and our freedoms have been exposed we are supposed to just look the other way again...NO...it is time for them to suffer consequences for their actions...I don't care one iota if every leftist, DEI administrator, and fake social sciences professor ends up jobless living in a homeless encampment in San Fransisco...they created this situation now live with the consequences...
Making excuses for them and what they have done with malice of forethought is insane...g.