This appeared in today’s City Journal and has been sent around via Twitter. It captures my thinking during these stupid times. It was written by Glenn Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Economics at Brown University. I will be posting this to my Blog before (a) my blog is taken down for not being “woke” enough (yes, apparently hosting services are now going around and checking), (b) it is censored by the Gods of Twitter and lost forever, and (c) my voice, come November, is completely drowned out (I am gasping for air as it is). At present, I am disgusted by what is happening in my country.
No, wait. I must admit that my sense now is that it is no longer “my” country as I might have otherwise defined it, as an abiding sense of common purpose and project. I feel absolutely no affinity with at least half the populace who are now fully in favor of dismantling a system that was the only hope for the world. I carry no common cause with the placard-carrying “protesters” even here in Little Old Laramie, much less the rioters in the bigger cities. I cannot comprehend the building rhetoric around “defunding the police” that (not surprisingly) Hillary Clinton and others have co-opted. I am beyond flummoxed that a mere utterance of “all lives matter” would get me shunned, if not unemployed (witness the NBC Sportscaster who suffered that fate). I have witnessed an addled citizenry of sheeple who blithely gave up their civil liberties in the face of a bad cold (COVID19).
No, this is not the country I grew up in.
So here it is. He wrote …
Last week, in the aftermath of the national fury that has erupted, and continues, over the apparent killing by a Minneapolis police officer of a black man, George Floyd, while he was being taken into custody, a letter appeared in my inbox from Christina H. Paxson, president of Brown University, where I teach. The letter, sent to thousands of students, staff, and faculty, was cosigned by many of Brown’s senior administrators and deans.
We write to you today as leaders of this university,” the letter begins, “to express first deep sadness, but also anger, regarding the racist incidents that continue to cut short the lives of black people every day.
It continues:
The sadness comes from knowing that this is not a mere moment for our country. This is historical, lasting and persistent. Structures of power, deep-rooted histories of oppression, as well as prejudice, outright bigotry and hate, directly and personally affect the lives of millions of people in this nation every minute and every hour. Black people continue to live in fear for themselves, their children and their communities, at times in fear of the very systems and structures that are supposed to be in place to ensure safety and justice.
I found the letter deeply disturbing, and was moved to compose the following response, which I shared with a colleague. I’m happy now to share it as well with City Journal’s readership.
Dear ____:
I was disturbed by the letter from Brown’s senior administration. It was obviously the product of a committee—Professors XX and YY, or someone of similar sensibility, wrote a manifesto, to which the president and senior administrative leadership have dutifully affixed their names.
I wondered why such a proclamation was necessary. Either it affirmed platitudes to which we can all subscribe, or, more menacingly, it asserted controversial and arguable positions as though they were axiomatic certainties. It trafficked in the social-justice warriors’ pedantic language and sophomoric nostrums. It invoked “race” gratuitously and unreflectively at every turn. It often presumed what remains to be established. It often elided pertinent differences between the many instances cited. It read in part like a loyalty oath. It declares in every paragraph: “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident.”
And just what truths are these? Well, the main one is this, that racial domination and “white supremacy” define our national existence even now, a century and a half after the end of slavery.
I deeply resented the letter. First of all, what makes an administrator (even a highly paid one, with an exalted title) a “leader” of this university? We, the faculty, are the only “leaders” worthy of mention when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-pushing apparatchik thinks? It’s all a bit creepy and unsettling.
Why must this university’s senior administration declare, on behalf of the institution as a whole and with one voice, that they unanimously—without any subtle differences of emphasis or nuance—interpret contentious current events through a single lens?
They write sentences such as this: “We have been here before, and in fact have never left.”
Really? This is nothing but propaganda. Is it supposed to be self-evident that every death of an “unarmed black man” at the hands of a white person tells the same story?
They speak of “deep-rooted systems of oppression; legacies of hate.” No elaboration required here? No specification of where Brown might stand within such a system? No nuance or complexity?
Is it obvious that “hate”—as opposed to incompetence, or fear, or cruelty, or poor training, or lack of accountability, or a brutal police culture, or panic, or malfeasance—is what we observed in Minneapolis?
We are called upon to “effect change.” Change from what to what, exactly?
Evidently, we’re now all charged to promote the policy agenda of the “progressive” wing of American politics*. Is this what a university is supposed to be doing?
[Russo Note: what he is saying here is simply that, come November, we must “change” out from a Republican President to a Democrat. In other words, Brown University is now “in the tank” for a Dem President. Well, we went through “hope and change” with Obama (a black man) for 8 years. What “change” did he effect?]
I must object. This is no reasoned ethical reflection. Rather, it is indoctrination, virtue-signaling, and the transparent currying of favor with our charges (read: students, who might otherwise burn down building). The roster of Brown’s “leaders” who in lockstep signed this manifesto remind me of a Soviet Politburo making some party-line declaration. I can only assume that the point here is to forestall any student protests by declaring the university to be on the Right Side of History.
What I found most alarming, though, is that no voice was given to what one might have thought would be a university’s principal intellectual contribution to the national debate at this critical moment: namely, to affirm the primacy of reason over violence in calibrating our reactions to the supposed “oppression.”
Equally troubling were our president’s promises to focus the university’s instructional and research resources on “fighting for social justice” around the world, without any mention of the problematic and ambiguous character of those movements which, over the past two centuries or more, have self-consciously defined themselves in just such terms—from the French and Russian Revolutions through the upheavals of the 1960s.
My bottom line: I’m offended by the letter. It frightens, saddens, and angers me.
Sincerely,
Glenn
