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Academic Witnesses To The Persecution

Within American institutions, wokeness has become the Establishment -- and it is merciless to dissenters
Serious head teacher aggressively looking to camera sitting by table, education

I’ve been sorting out the quotes from my interviews with people who grew up under Soviet-bloc communism. Here’s a passage from an interview I did with a professor who teaches on a science faculty at a major American university. She grew up in an Eastern bloc country, under intense oppression. She is a closeted Christian in her academic workplace. In this passage, she is talking about how Americans don’t want to hear her — and how she is afraid to speak her mind anyway when it comes to matters of political and cultural controversy:

So many times I’ve told people that something here is like under communism, and they’ll just shut me down and say oh, but that’s communism, and then ignore me. Once, when I was visiting [a top laboratory], a group of us were talking about politics at the end of the workday. I said that it’s not good to live under communism, but everybody else said well, it was wrongly implemented in your country. Everyone in the room! I had a hard time being there. I believe everybody who was present is in some sense brainwashed. They think the same way. One of them even said that certain people should be eliminated.

Most people in my university, and most scientists — it feels like that at some point if they discover that I don’t agree with the things they’re talking about, my career will be over. Everybody is so open, they’re talking in front of me like I’m really one of them. It really looks like this is what’s normal within a community.

They’re all on the political left. They all do a lot of virtue signaling with these “safe space” stickers. What happens when I’m the only one who doesn’t have that sticker?

Back in communism, we all had to do certain things to protect ourselves. You don’t know, you might be sent to the camps. You might even lose your life. Here’s what I think is happening: they’re trying us little by little, with a few little things. Then they will do something serious.

In communism, you know it’s evil, so it’s easier to start forming some kind of countercultural communities. But here, people think it’s not such a big deal, so they don’t form these communities. As long as we don’t recognize evil as evil, it won’t be possible to resist.

In my university, I don’t have a single person I can talk to about any of this.

Isn’t this incredible? This woman grew up under communist oppression, but when she tried to talk about it among a group of scientists, they shut her down as not knowing what she was talking about. And she is scared to death that if anybody in her university — again, a major US university — finds out that she’s secretly a Christian and a dissenter from wokeness, that her career will be destroyed.

You might call her fears exaggerated. But are you going to tell someone whose grandparents had all their property stolen from them because the communist judged them to be class enemies that she should just trust the system, even though she sees how her left-liberal colleagues talk about conservatives? Are you going to tell someone whose parents were atheists, and professors, but who refused to join the Communist Party, and who suffered serious oppression as a result, that the leftists in America would be just fine if they knew that she was a Christian, and a political conservative? Please.

If I were a liberal academic, I would be ashamed that someone like this professor was too afraid to speak her mind, for fear of persecution. If I were a liberal academic, I would be ashamed that the student government at Hobart and Smith Colleges in New York refused to let a couple of students establish a campus chapter of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute — basically a conservative book club — because they were afraid it would “cause stress to the student body.” 

You know this stuff happens all the time. Can you see why someone who grew up under communism, and who now works in American academia, would be so afraid? I was surprised, frankly, by what this professor told me, because her university does not have a reputation for wokeness.

Just now, a reader posted a link to this short commentary at Inside Higher Education, by Eboo Patel, a Muslim interfaith activist who served as an adviser to President Obama, in which it occurs to him that

talking about identity in terms of power, privilege and oppression is no longer the woke insurgency, but rather the cultural establishment. If you talk in this way, you are not showing your subaltern stripes — you are flashing the badge of insider dominance. The badge of power.

What are the implications of this? [New York Times writer Jay Caspian] Kang [in a piece about Andrew Yang and identity politics] notes at least one:

many people might be coming to see the self-appointed arbiters of racial politics, and the candidates working to satisfy them, as the establishment. Those people will be happy to see anyone willing to break from our rigid prescriptions.

But there are others as well. What if the people who speak in the language of identity politics were to recognize that their framework was the culturally dominant one? The one that helped you get into an elite college or win a coveted internship? If you spoke that language, you were working with dollars in a world of people who earned only rupees, or some other less valuable currency.

I’m not commenting on the accuracy or worth of wokeness. I’m commenting more on its increasing dominance in, as Kang notes, the world bounded by players like Harvard and The New York Times.

Don’t laugh, conservatives. It is a good thing for liberals like Patel to open their eyes and see that wokeness, for all its pretensions of defending the underdog, is very much the overdog in terms of having and exercising institutional power. Their power is so great, and so malicious, that yeah, you pretty much need to stand with people willing to stand up to them.

When I interviewed the émigré professor, I did not ask her if she voted for Donald Trump, and/or planned to vote for him in 2020. It wasn’t relevant to my book project, so it didn’t occur to me. But if I had, I feel certain that she would have said yes. She is a quiet, soft-spoken, middle-aged woman, but she knows who has the power in her world, and how they exercise it. As I type this, I’m recalling the look on her face when she talked about the scientist in that laboratory discussion, the man who talked about a just society as one in which problematic classes of people are “eliminated.” For her, this is what the Left in America is becoming: a Yankee-Doodle-Dandy version of the people who crushed her grandparents, her parents, and her country.

I just went into my file and found a transcript of a phone interview I did with a professor in a humanities field who grew up in the Soviet Union. She talked about how when she was at Yale working on an advanced degree, fellow students shut her down every time Marxism came up, and she tried to talk about life in the USSR. She said: “I saw in them actual rage. They didn’t want to hear it.”

She went on:

Some people tell me I’m being alarmist, but more and more agree with me. Yesterday a colleague who teaches physics wrote me from [a coastal state]. He told me that he wanted to speak out against [the campus left-wing mob] but is terrified of becoming a pariah – not for his job, because he’s tenured, but because all his friends would leave him.

In my situation, at my university, I have to live an intellectual and spiritual life underground. “’m silent about so many things with [students and colleagues] because I know that they would honestly and sincerely see me as some kind of monster because of the things I believe, which are in no way radical.

She told me that she cannot stand Donald Trump, but has come to see supporting him as the only way she can register any kind of resistance against the left-wing campus commissars. She also said that people have no idea how vulnerable they are to this mindset, because of social media.

You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow. You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works. This is why people like me are so upset today. I’m so glad you’re writing this book.

UPDATE: Oh. Oh! This is the ne plus ultra of privileged cluelessness. A reader cites this hathotic column on CNN.com by the president of Wesleyan University, who claims that “woke students” are being made into scapegoats, like “welfare queens” of the 1980s. Excerpt:

The images of the welfare queen and of the woke student are convenient because they provide excuses to not engage with difference, placing certain types of people beyond the pale. These scapegoats are meant to inspire solidarity in a group by providing an object for its hostility (or derision), and educators and civic leaders should not play along. Instead of arousing easy antipathy, they should strive to cultivate the robust exchange of ideas across differences. In the year leading up to the next national elections, these exchanges are more important than ever.
We desperately need young people to assume their civic responsibilities, and universities have a responsibility to help them to do so. Over the next 12 months, I am optimistic that we will see the activism of college students refute the charge that their politically correct generation just cancels others, or that it is self-satisfied in its condescending “wokeness.” That charge serves only the status quo, and the continuation of the status quo today would mean a very bleak tomorrow.

 

Read it all. I almost want to send that guy a Trumpy Bear for Christmas.

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