… in front of the offices of hapless Universities UK, the organization that, in a recent document, told that country’s universities that they can enforce segregation of men and women at public, university-sponsored events.
The news clip starts with invited speaker Laurence Krauss [scroll down] expressing disgust, and leaving the room, when he scans his audience at a recent university-sponsored forum on religion and realizes he’s been tricked into appearing at a separate but equal event. The clip continues with coverage of yesterday’s well-attended demonstration in front of UUK’s offices.
Krauss’s disgust and exit were spontaneous, the instinctive reactions of a decent human being to indecency. The various forms of protest at sanctioned gender apartheid in British universities – a petition, the demonstration – are planned, organized responses. As long as both forms of response continue to be expressed – instinctive disgust on which one is willing to act, and considered political strategies – democracy will win through.
Nick Cohen, in the Spectator, is as shocked and embarrassed as the rest of us that leaders at British universities have officially condoned separate but equal.
Universities UK is taking a momentous step, which goes against 150 years of struggle for women’s emancipation… They want to allow segregation at public meetings in publicly financed institutions. Or to put it another way, obscurantist clerics are trying to take over public spaces, and the universities are going along with them… . Rosa Parks … fought back. Naively, I assumed that her battle had been won. Now it looks like we must fight it all over again.
And once again let UD note that the very momentousness of this step, its outrageous offense to universities and to free societies, seems to have been a healthy shock to many people’s systems.
The petition to rescind the endorsement of sexual apartheid at British universities is already at seven thousand signatures.
Don’t let the vice-chancellors who issued the endorsement get away with the segregation of women at their universities.
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On some level, this action is so grotesque that UD continues to have trouble believing that it has happened.
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But it has happened. Aux armes.
… “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever.”
The petition condemning sanctioned gender apartheid in British universities is here.
The petition calling for the rescinding of a Universities UK document permitting sex segregation in British universities is heating up the airwaves, having in only a couple of days attracted almost seven thousand signatures.
Manfredi La Manna, an economist at the University of St Andrews, writes to the vice-chancellors of Scottish universities:
[M]ake a stand for Scottish universities and state unequivocally that the abhorrent guidance on external speakers issued recently by [UK Universities] does not apply to Scottish
universities.
The document mandates any British university to accede unconditionally to the conditions imposed by any external speaker who demands a gender segregated audience.
Indeed, in the Orwellian newspeak language of the UUK document, it is the “imposition” of an “unsegregated” area contravening the “genuinely held religious belief” of the speaker demanding segregation that British universities should oppose so that the “freedom of speech of the religious group or speaker is not curtailed unlawfully”.
Do you really want your female students to be treated as sex
objects and second-class citizens and to be marshalled into special female-only pens so that the
“genuinely held religious belief” of external speakers is not
challenged? Would you have
acceded to the demand for race segregated audiences by the Dutch Reformed Church (before it apologised for its role in propping up apartheid)?
La Manna is quite right to note the Orwellian newspeak by which, as women are herded into pens, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
After pointing out that the document is “horrible,” “wretched,” and “stupid,” Charles Crawford goes on to sketch a non-disgraceful policy.
[For] an open event no segregation along gender or other lines is acceptable…
As with all grotesque illiberal eruptions, the UUK document is in fact bolstering freedom of speech by mobilizing people against its vileness. Sometimes people need to be reminded of the democratic basics. Fools like the authors of this document provide reminders.
… many of them distinguished. Whew. I always worry that people won’t get their act together when things this bad happen. Women will not be segregated by bigots in British universities. Not if the rest of us have anything to say about it.
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Already over five thousand people have signed the petition. That was fast.
More and more people are paying attention to those complicit with the silencing of women in British universities. See my posts here and here. Now Sarah Khan lends her voice.
Universities UK’s new published guidelines suggest side to side segregated seating is acceptable as “both men and women are being treated equally” and therefore women would not experience “less favourable treatment.”
Universities UK clearly cannot see the wood for the trees. The idea that both men and women are equally segregated and therefore treated equally is highly erroneous. Perhaps one could argue such a point if so many [campus Islamic groups] weren’t such patriarchal constructions; shaped, structured and led by men.
So let me spell it out for Universities UK. [S]egregation results in ‘less favourable treatment.’ It enables the unequal distribution of power between men and women, resulting in gender based discrimination and inequality. It manifests itself in few female speakers being invited to speak to a mixed audience, limited decision making powers by female members, and how there has never been a female president of an Isoc.
Segregation perpetuates discriminatory social norms and practices, shaping male attitudes about women and restricting the decisions and choices of women. By allowing gender segregation, Universities UK are complicit in the gender inequality being perpetuated by Isocs; [Universities UK’s approval of gender segregation] will only make it easier for Isocs to treat socially unequal groups, in this case women, even more unequally.
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Preacher Haitham al Haddad, who has spoken in approximately twenty Isocs in the last two years, argues that women should withdraw from public life. [He hopes] to disempower them by denying them their economic self-determination and to silence them through their invisibility…
Universities UK are not only giving speakers like him a green light to say these things but are also preparing the gender segregated seating for him to say it.
Watch Britain’s universities carefully. They will show you how to hand your school over to vile demagogues.
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Nice comment on IHE‘s coverage:
This is such a step backward in civil and human rights, I am almost rendered speechless. “Separate but Equal” worked so well during the Jim Crow South or during Apartheid. Good on you, Britain, for working to bring this long-discredited viewpoint back into vogue…
If your university is inviting speakers who demand gender-segregation, perhaps you should start seriously looking at the sanity of those who bring these speakers [to] campus…
A Guardian writer describes a new report approving gender segregation in British universities.
Good grief. The compromise is that women can’t be put at the back: “The room can be segregated left and right, rather than front and back.” Depressingly, the National Union of Students has endorsed this. What’s wrong with “side by side” segregation? Just ask how that would look if universities allowed speakers to demand separation by race.
This sickening report – which UD hopes self-respecting UK universities will ignore – caves to what the Guardian writer calls “the sexist eccentricities of some religions.” If only they were as innocuous as eccentricities. They are profoundly encoded convictions, excruciatingly out of place in liberal democracies.
If liberal democracies don’t fight back in places devoted to intellectual and social freedom – places like universities – they are making the world safe for theocons. UD is proud of the way her country has decisively rejected theocons at the polls (Rick Santorum, Ken Cuccinelli); for contemporary Britain she feels sorrow and alarm.
Yes, fine, go ahead and segregate by gender at university events, says this British group. Separate but equal, dontcha know. Works every time.
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“Outrageous.” Yes. Keep it coming.
… it’s about helicopters.
The Ira Rennert – Michael Bloomberg lifestyle seems finally to have alienated New Yorkers.
Throughout the race, Mr. de Blasio overshadowed his opponent by channeling New Yorkers’ rising frustrations with income inequality…
I’m sure, as Greg Mankiw, Eric Cantor, and Lawrence Kudlow insist, it’s all just petty envy. Once these millions of New Yorkers understand that their progressive politics are simply an embarrassing epiphenomenon of their desire to be as rich as Ira Rennert, no doubt they’ll go back to voting for the I’ll land my fucking helicopter wherever and whenever I fucking want crowd.
… An official who consistently used his elected office to promote policies that shamed, marginalized, and patronized women and other minorities was met with a “no.” … The vote may have been close, but in the end Virginians, especially women, showed that they simply don’t believe that the commonwealth of Virginia should be in the business of discriminating against homosexuals, legislating an extreme anti-sodomy agenda, shuttering Planned Parenthood clinics, pressing an invasive trans-vaginal ultrasound law, and supporting a draconian illegal immigration law…
Cuccinelli was proudly and self-avowedly one of the most activist attorneys general the commonwealth had ever seen. From the very outset, his political ambition was to impose upon the state a social and religious code that may have made perfect sense to him, his supporters, and his conscience, but came across as extreme, hateful, and intrusive to most everyone else.
… Virginia women who were mostly affronted by talk of trans-vaginal ultrasounds and clinic closures and constraints on birth control, know a whole lot about what they need to be protected from and when. And today they voted to “protect” themselves from Ken Cuccinelli.
Just this month, there was an incident at Jendouba University in northwest Tunisia, near Algeria. Groups of Salafists – most from outside the university – blockaded it to protest the punishment of some Salafist students who violated the law, and they managed to stop all classes. Exams could not be held, and the students risked losing the entire year as a result. There was no intervention from the police. So, we are in a critical period. The Salafists believe they are above the law and operate in impunity.
Tom Bartlett’s review of a big new biography of liar, thief, bigamist, and fascist symp Paul de Man brings back memories, for UD, of her time in his classroom when he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.
The truth about him wasn’t yet known, and indeed UD had been instructed to find him a demigod.
She recalls her puzzlement, watching him lecture about the language of Yeats and Rilke, at this haughty reptilian man, scarcely aware of the students sitting behind him as he trailed his chalk from one language group to another on the blackboard.
The New York Times limned the grieving after his death, and UD again said huh? “In a profession full of fakeness, he was real,” mourned one of his followers. And UD thought Well yeah real but really nasty. She didn’t know why he felt so removed from human emotion, from any authentic human setting… She figured it was snobbery, that his real life, his warmth, lay somewhere (his home institution?) but had been put on ice while he was in Hyde Park…
… de Man was … a convicted criminal. In 1951 a judge in Belgium sentenced de Man in absentia (he had fled to the United States by then) to six years in prison for theft and fraud related to Hermès, the publication house he created and ran. De Man had looted the funds of the company to cover his own lavish expenses. In one case, Barish writes, de Man engaged in a “deliberate swindle” of a family friend, fooling him into making a loan that was never repaid. All told, more than a million Belgian francs disappeared — and, before he could face creditors and courts, so did de Man.
His conduct in his personal life was similarly irresponsible. The most heart-wrenching example is the abandonment of his three young sons from his first marriage (a marriage he didn’t end before marrying a second time, adding bigamy to his résumé). He did not support or even see the boys — even refusing to take a phone call from one of his sons years later.
Harold Bloom despised de Man’s “serene linguistic nihilism,” and UD was I suppose privileged to witness that nihilism – that confidence game, really – in action in a classroom in Chicago in 1979.
But why did this repellant man, this obvious fraudster, capture Yale? The author of the biography speculates:
“Most of the time we don’t know what we’re doing. When someone comes along and seems to have it right or to be very clear and very intelligent and immensely seductive, intellectually and personally, we say ‘Right, let’s go that way.'”
This can’t be quite right. Yalies are hardly know-nothings. And de Man was as seductive as … Rush Limbaugh. Joseph McCarthy. Huey Long. Ted Cruz. He was just like those guys. Not at all physically attractive, and immediately identifiable as an easily irritated narcissist. But – also like those guys – de Man was excitingly wildly himself, a big old nasty old way out there unto the breach POS.
I think intellectuals as much as anti-intellectuals are susceptible to serene – which is to say, sociopathically rockhard-confident – nihilism. Bloom called it for the bullshit it was, but a lot of other people fell for its brass balls come and get me coppers Nietzscheanism.
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UD finds it intriguing that today’s nihilists – the group of people in this country everyone’s calling nihilists – are the Ted Cruz-run tea partiers, and that their party shares de Man’s abiding impulse: secession. As his biography makes clear, de Man was always running away – from countries, marriages, crimes, children, and of course meaning. The impulse de Man embodied and appealed to was toward withdrawal from a messy world full of all sorts of incorrect people and the embrace of a pure cult of just a few correct people. Yale was the cult of de Man.
[A]lthough we were all supposed to act shocked and appalled when a Confederate flag showed up in front of the White House during a [recent] Tea Party protest …, nobody actually was.
de Man’s Yale was the functional equivalent of Tod Palin’s Alaska – a fantasy island just for us.
The Paul de Man story should remind us that anti-democratic dreams, and the dreams of unreason, are perennial, and widely shared.
[Y]ou can’t just kill someone’s revolutionary nihilism. The Ted Cruz “filibuster” is a great example: it served no actual legislative purpose, and at the end of his idiotically long speech, Cruz ended up voting yes on the very bill he was trying to kill. That’s zombie politics, and the problem with zombies is that — being dead already — they’re incredibly hard to kill.
The point here is that the zombie army, a/k/a the Tea Party, is a movement, not a person — and it’s an aggressively anti-logical movement, at that. You can’t negotiate with a zombie — and neither can you wheel out some kind of clever syllogism which will convince a group of revolutionary nihilists that it’s a bad idea to get into a fight if you’re reasonably convinced that you’re going to lose it.
Felix Salmon is right. In the case of serene political nihilism, we can only do what people have been doing with de Man. We can only unmask it.
From William Galston’s review of Tyler Cowen’s book, Average Is Over:
There’s nothing we can do, says Mr. Cowen, to avert a future in which 10% to 15% of Americans enjoy fantastically wealthy and interesting lives while the rest slog along without hope of a better life, tranquilized by free Internet and canned beans.
Bread and circuses is not the policy of a republic, but rather of an empire entering moral senescence. Nonetheless, Mr. Cowen seems untroubled by his hyperpolarized vision.
The kindest description of his stance is moral indifference: “It will become increasingly common to invoke ‘meritocracy’ as a response to income equality,” he writes, “and whether you call it an explanation, a justification, or an excuse is up to you.” While allowing that some might consider extreme socioeconomic inequality unjust, he revives the neoconservative canard that relatively well-off academics lead the charge against such inequality because they envy the status privileges of the wealthy. He seems not to have considered the possibility that his depiction of our future might fill them with justified revulsion.
Over the course of writing this blog about universities and professors, UD has encountered the neoconservative canard about envious academics again and again. A few years ago, Jonathan Chait gathered a few of many examples in a Los Angeles Times column titled Envy Them? No. Tax Them? Oh Yeah. Greg Mankiw, Chait noted, thinks that academics concerned about staggering personal wealth in the context of rising inequality are simply caught up in “the politics of envy.”
What’s depressing is that even highly credentialed conservatives such as Mankiw equate any discussion of class inequality with “envy” of the rich. The accusation is actually bizarre. Liberals want to make the rich pay higher tax rates not because they hate them. (In fact, as conservatives love to point out in other contexts, many liberals are rich.) It’s because somebody has to pay for the government, and the rich can more easily bear higher rates.
Paul Krugman echoes Chait.
To show concern over the growing inequality is to engage in the “politics of envy.”
But the real reasons to worry about the explosion of inequality since the 1970’s have nothing to do with envy. The fact is that working families aren’t sharing in the economy’s growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there’s good reason to believe that a society in which most people can reasonably be considered middle class is a better society – and more likely to be a functioning democracy – than one in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty.
Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity won’t be easy: the middle-class society we have lost emerged only after the country was shaken by depression and war. But we can make a start by calling attention to the politicians who systematically make things worse in catering to their contributors. Never mind that straw man, the politics of envy. Let’s try to do something about the politics of greed.
Krugman and Chait were writing in 2005. That Cowen can happily continue the canard suggests that it will be very difficult to kill. You can call it a canard; you can call it bizarre; you can call it a straw man. It will keep coming at you.
What UD has tried to do in some of her writing here is, as Krugman suggests, look in a different direction: the politics of greed. She has been intrigued by this statement from Robert Hughes about the art market:
[T]he present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.
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A certain amount of envy toward the rich is normal. It is to be expected. Indeed, that envy can be an engine, a motivator, a thing that helps our economy of entrepreneurs hum along. The politics of envy crowd, however, wants to scare us into believing that this emotion is becoming pathological, even violent, a threat to the republic. Lawrence Kudlow writes that the envious are really saying
“How dare they be successful earners and investors… Should we go out and shoot [the super-rich] for their success?”
Eric Cantor also seems to have in mind French revolutionaries using envy of the rich to trigger civil war:
There are politicians and others who want to demonize people that have earned success in certain sectors of our society. They claim that these people have now made enough, and haven’t paid their fair share. But, pitting Americans against one another tends to deflate the aspirational spirit of our people and fade the American dream.
I believe, with Galston and Krugman, that the greater menace lies in the “moral senescence” of a country of “great extremes.” Senescence, not riots. As Robert Reich remarks, “If you give up on democracy, you are basically saying to the moneyed interests, the powerful people and institutions of society Take it all… Then we are a hundred percent plutocracy.” This is why, on the subject of universities, I dwell on obscene endowments and the universities who pay each of their money managers $35 million a year to make their endowments grow toward… what? They are already in the tens of billions. The hundreds of billions? It’s why I talk about universities who honor trustees like Steven Cohen, a man with a personal fortune of nine billion dollars, and a man in constant trouble with the SEC.
