The foolishness of university administrators and journalists on full display

George Orwell understood how intellectuals can ignore what is bang in front of their faces.

George Orwell didn't actually say 'Some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals believe them' - but he may as well have.  It's a line that sums up his thinking about both stupid ideas and intellectuals.  It also captures the double-standards of intellectuals - and of university administrators in America and so-called 'journalists' in Australia.

In today's Australian Financial Review, the journalist Aaron Patrick channelled a little bit of Orwell.  This is how his piece began:

For a Harvard University professor, it might have been a straightforward question.

'Does calling calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules on bullying on harassment?' asked Elise Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman at hearings in Washington on Tuesday.

Claudine Gay, the university's new president, didn't have a definitive answer.  'It depends on the context,' she said.  Anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation - that is actionable conduct and we do take action.'

As Patrick says, surely ‘You don't need a PhD to understand that advocating mass murder is wrong.’ Indeed.

Only an intellectual could say - 'It depends on the context'.  University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill gave the same answer as Gay to the same question - it was about 'the context'.  That prompted Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, to describe Magill's answer as 'absolutely shameful' and he called on the university's board of trustees to ‘discuss her future’.  Then the next day Magill released a video attempting to explain what happened. The situation wasn’t improved when she said:

There was a moment during yesterday's congressional hearing on anti-Semitism when I was asked if a call for the genocide of Jewish people on our campus would violate our policies.  In that moment, I was focused on our university's longstanding policies aligned with the US Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable.  I was not focused on, but I should have been the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human being can perpetrate.

Apparently it took her a day to work that out the meaning of ‘genocide’.  Only a university administrator when asked whether a call for genocide violates university policy would say something like 'it depends on what the policy says'.

Douglas Murray, as usual, brought some some sense to all of this in a piece titled 'Universities have let evil grow on campus.  They do not deserve to survive' - a sentiment it’s hard to disagree with.

At the hearing, the head of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania were asked a set of questions that should have been very easy to answer, but oh how they struggled and botched their responses.

One cannot help feeling that, if these university leaders had been asked the question about any other minority, their answers might have been different.  For American university presidents have presided over campuses which in recent years have become increasingly devoted to rooting out 'hate speech', 'white supremacy' and every other 'trigger' term of our time.  They have disinvited members of the Trump administration,  They have chased out women who have argued that biological sex is real.

Perhaps if black students had been hounded on their campuses, or Muslims, or trans students, then some moral clarity and leadership might have occurred.  But not here.  Because this was Jews, so everything - it seemed - had to be 'in context'.

Which is all at one with the evil ideology which has gestated on American and British [and Australian] campuses for a generation.  It has produced a population which claims that speech is violence and even 'silence is violence', but which in the wake of the biggest massacre of the Jews since the Holocaust, and a massive surge in anti-Semitism, has either said nothing or outright defended terrorists.  That is the true nature of evil.

If you're interested you can watch the exchange between Stefanik and Magill here, it's 90 seconds long, and this is the five minute exchange between Stefanik and Harvard's Claudine Gay.  They're hard to watch.

Here in Australia a fortnight ago a committee of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (the journalists' trade union), the union committees of both the ABC and the Guardian, and a few dozen 'journalists' signed a letter to national media outlets on the 'Ethical reporting on Israel and Palestine'.  The letter called for among other things treating statements from the democratically-elected government of Israel the same as statements from a terrorist organisation, Hamas, and providing: 'historical context when referencing the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.  The conflict did not start on October 7 and it is the media's responsibility to ensure audiences are fully informed.'

There's that word again.  'Context'.  But there's context - and then there's context.  The context of me being late for a dentist appointment is my car had a flat tyre.  That's context that serves as an explanation or an excuse or justification for what happened.  Saying though that journalists should 'provide historical context when referencing the October 7 Hamas attacks' is something altogether different.  What's the 'context' to mass murder?  The journalists' letter doesn't explain.  Nor does it explain how providing 'context' to October 7 avoids the risk of coming close to justifying terrorism.

In 1945 Orwell described the sort of reaction we’ve seen to October 7. 'Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their merits but according to who does them.'  That's why those American university heads couldn't give a straight answer.  It's because it's left wing students calling for genocide - the same students that university administrators have spent decades appeasing and giving in to - that college presidents are reluctant to take a position on what to most people is a fairly simple question. Universities have humoured the stupidity - and worse - of students for so long that it’s now impossible for college administrators to say enough is enough. In addition, decades of postmodern theory have taught intellectuals to think there is no right or wrong, everything is subjective, and whether calling for genocide is wrong depends on the 'context'. 

Orwell understood that intellectuals have the capacity to convince themselves of anything.  In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston was tortured into believing 2+2=5 - but for intellectuals to believe that they only need to offered tenure at a university.  It's the genius of Orwell to recognise the rewards that came Smith from succumbing to Big Brother and giving up his capacity for independent thought.  'He had always plenty of money nowadays.  He even had a job, a sinecure, more highly paid than his old job had been.'

What Orwell did actually say about intellectuals and foolishness is from a piece he wrote in 1945, 'Notes on Nationalism'.  He didn't much like 'nationalism' and he was careful to distinguish it from 'patriotism'.  To Orwell support for 'nationalism' was to hope for an increase in national power, while 'patriotism was 'devotion to particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people.' On the other hand, 'the abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.'  Orwell understood that intellectuals are particularly prone to believing things that conform to their worldview. For example, this what intellectuals thought about the Second World War.

It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings.

The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany.  He could believe these things because his hatred of the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed.

There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind.

I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops have been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.  [The italics are mine.]

That’s where Orwelll's quote about supposedly smart people believing stupid things comes from.  The second part of that sentence is as important as the first - 'no ordinary man could be such a fool.' 

Here in Australia the Voice referendum gave us a perfect example of exactly what Orwell was talking about.  On the Albanese government's Constitutional Expert Group on the Voice were six law professors.  The Expert Group unanimously concluded that giving to some Australians according to their race a constitutionally enshrined right to make representations to government would not divide Australians and would 'not provide anyone with special rights'.  To paraphrase Orwell - 'only a law professor could believe that'.  Ordinary Australians were not so foolish.  They understood the Voice for exactly what it was, which is why 60% of Australians voted for racial equality and the idea that all Australians are equal.

Orwell talked of intellectuals and their folishness and here’s just two of his deliciously written examples. This is from his 'Antisemitism in Britain' also written in 1945.

During the past twenty-five years the activities of what are called 'intellectuals' have been largely mischievous.

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that if the 'intellectuals' had done their work a little more thoroughly, Britain would have surrendered in 1940.

And there's this from 1944:

I don't share the average English intellectual's hatred of his own country and am not dismayed by a British victory…

People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.  For example, right up to May of this year the more disaffected English intellectuals refused to believe that a Second Front would be opened.  They went on refusing while, bang in front of their faces, the endless convoys of guns and landing-craft rumbled through London on their way to the coast.

It's been nearly another 80 years since Orwell wrote of the largely mischievous activities of intellectuals.  When journalists claim the 'context' of terrorism must be explained and when those charged with the education of future generations can't find it in themselves to unequivocally condemn calls for genocide, you can't but help feel the mischievous work of the intellectuals is almost done.  But then you turn back to Nineteen Eighty-Four and what Orwell said about ordinary people.

If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.