Law professor Jonathan Turley on the advance of soft totalitarianism at Syracuse University:

The law has always drawn a line between malfeasance and nonfeasance in considering unlawful acts, but Syracuse University is about to eradicate any real distinction in newly proposed rules by Professor Keith Alford, the university first diversity an inclusion officer. Under the new rules, students would be punished for simply witnessing “bias-motivated” incidents and “acts of hate.” The change was demanded by the #NotAgainSU which demanded expulsion for “individuals who witnessed the event or were present, but did not take part.”

Alford sent an email warning that students:

“The Code of Student Conduct has been revised, based on your input, to state that violations of the code that are bias-motivated—including conduct motivated by racism—will be punished more severely. The University also revised the code to make clear when bystanders and accomplices can be held accountable. The code will be prepared and distributed for students to sign in the fall.”

It does not go as far as the student group demanded in requiring expulsion, the rule also does not clearly state how silence or inaction will be judged in any given circumstance. It appears left up to the investigators. That uncertainty will prompt many to guarantee compliance by speaking or acting to avoid even the chance that they might be subjected to a highly damaging bias charge.  The school also warned that new cameras were being installed in “first-floor lounges,” “public areas,” and within residency hall elevators. Thus, any student who failed to immediately act would be observed and presumably at risk of being investigated or charged under the new rule.

More:

The concern raised by the Syracuse rule is that there remains controversies over vague universities standards on bias or race motivated violations including microaggressive language or actions.  Recently, a student writer at Syracuse was sacked for simply questioning the basis for claims of institutional racism. What is viewed as bias-motivated speech for some is viewed as political speech by others. The new rule would suggest that even students who do not agree that an incident is “bias-motivated” must still act to avoid scrutiny or punishment. Students could feel an obligation to prove that they are not racist by immediately and openly opposing such acts, lest they could be next to be accused.

Given the rising concerns over the erosion of free speech on our campuses, the punishing of students for nonfeasance for merely being witnesses or passive adds a new chilling element to speech. It is not just silencing those who now fear expressing their views on campus. It would now require speech and action to avoid possible discipline.  For those students, the new rule creates a “prove you are not a racist” (or biased) burden.

Read it all.

I’m reminded of the leftist writer Freddie de Boer’s 2017 essay “Planet of Cops,” in which he said, in part:

The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.

(To be fair, he also goes after right-wing “cops”…)

Back to Syracuse. Can you imagine? Now you’ll have to report any possible violation to the bias cops to save your own skin. It’s like living in East Germany. Who on earth would want to go to college in such a place? Think about having to prove that even though someone saw you near the scene of a “bias incident,” that you didn’t hear it — this, to keep you from being punished.

Would you want to risk that on your record, for the sake of a Syracuse diploma? Could the Syracuse administration possibly make studying there more fraught with anxiety and neurosis?

Sometimes readers will e-mail me to ask why I focus so much on what happens on campus. Here, from Live Not By Lies, is why:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter.

Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”

This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in pre-revolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are
transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.

Here’s why we have to pay close attention to colleges: What happens on campus will eventually reach through all of society, or at least to institutions (e.g., corporations) whose ethos is determined by college graduates. You will sooner or later come to the realization that your fate can be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse theories of power and identity.

How far will it go? Here’s something incredible: Adolph Reed, a black Marxist professor who is one of the country’s foremost political theorists, had his planned speech to the NYC chapter of Democratic Socialists of America cancelled because it wasn’t ideologically correct. From the NYT: