Georgetown Law Prof Warns of ‘Maoist Takeover’ of Academia
“The academy is a different place today than it was only a year ago and was different a year ago than it was five years before.”
Even people who consider themselves liberal are, in many cases, not woke enough for the new left.
Ed Whelan writes at National Review:
Georgetown Law Professor Decries ‘Maoist Takeover’ of Academia
In a courageous Quillette essay titled “Georgetown’s Cultural Revolution,” Georgetown law professor Lama Abu-Odeh reflects on what the recent brouhaha at Georgetown law school over a professor’s statements about the performance of black law students illustrates about the broader trend in American academia. Professor Abu-Odeh’s observations are all the more noteworthy as she is a Palestinian Muslim feminist leftist.
According to Abu-Odeh, when nearly all non-black faculty signed a letter that “acknowledge[d] the many levels at which [they] must confront ongoing white supremacist notions underlying ideas of merit that may contaminate assessment and performance” (she’s quoting the letter), “two white professors of the boomer generation with plenty of progressive credentials pushed back”—but only very weakly. Of these weak statements and the silence they received, Abu-Odeh observes:
The silence to my mind is telling. It speaks of the lack of resources within progressive thinking that could be drawn upon to resist the trend that has bedeviled American academia over the past few years. The academy is a different place today than it was only a year ago and was different a year ago than it was five years before. Terror and dread fill academic workers, professors, and staff alike, and it is everywhere. Neither the call for distinguishing between unconscious bias and structural racism; nor for dismantling “merit” so that “minorities” succeed, seem able to do the work the authors of these emails want them to do.
They fail to deliver responses of the kind, “Let’s just talk about this. Maybe the problem is overdetermined and is not reducible to ‘unconscious bias.’” What they beget instead is a combination of dread and virtuous self-congratulation. These two sentiments, dread married to virtue, constitute to my mind the affective embodiment of progressive ideology prevalent among white liberals as developed in its most privileged space: academia. They are typical. They are two faces of the same coin: flip and you see dread, flip again and you see virtue.
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Comments
It’s interesting how the most educated and credentialed people are also the ones with the least common sense and integrity.
And the ones with the least amount of backbone, moral fortitude, and courage. Theirs is a conformist herd mentality on steroids, yet they’re the ones always crowing about how they “speak truth to power” or some similar bs cliche.
And of course, no one can touch them in their high ivory towers where these “academics” are self-appointed masters of all they survey.
Wokeness is feeling the chill wind (or may I say dread) of its mortality, when Palestinian Muslim feminist is looking to un-jump the shark.
But the shark has been jumped, let them enjoy all they have bought. We’re all woke now! Leftists, you broke it, you bought it.
That cat has been out of the bag for years. The closest thing we have to North Korea in this country is every college and university.
Not really. At least not if you’re going with the “Maoist” idea.
North Korea is a different animal, with its ‘Juche’. That’s entirely a cult of personality, with some language adopted from Marxism. It’s more traditionally religious in character.
Maoism is more what we see with the “woke” carp. It’s “Cultural Revolution” all over again, with the shaming, the denunciations, the struggle sessions. We haven’t seen any dunce caps yet, but I think that’s primarily because we have Twitter instead.
Warns of ‘Maoist Takeover’
“Warns” implies it can be stopped. Too late. This warning is much, MUCH too late.