The University of Michigan’s Cancel-Culture Problem: ‘It Has Real Consequences’

By Charles Hilu

Friday, July 29, 2022

 

Locals living in the southeastern part of the Lower Peninsula have nicknamed the University of Michigan the “People’s Republic of Ann Arbor.” In the fall of 2021, that moniker gained a bit of legitimacy when students attempted to cancel Bright Sheng, a professor of musical composition, who showed his class Laurence Olivier’s 1965 film adaptation of Othello, in which the actor donned blackface. Though the university fully reinstated Sheng after an investigation, his ordeal was reminiscent of those of professors during the Cultural Revolution — which Sheng lived through in Maoist China — who faced denunciation and intimidation from their students for contradicting the regime.

 

The saga involving Sheng is far from an isolated incident, but rather part of a larger problem of cancel culture within the university, where students attempt to make the administration punish faculty members by forming cancellation mobs. Although the university usually does not fire professors after the formation of a mob, students are being incentivized to use unprofessional methods to air their grievances, several faculty members at the school told National Review.

 

“We’re in the middle of a cultural revolution,” said English professor Scott Lyons. Within the University of Michigan, there is a “toxic ideology that is trying to push aside certain principles that allowed our universities to become great in the first place, like Enlightenment principles, academic freedom, free speech, collegiality.”

 

One of the main problems in the culture, according to Lyons, is that students are taking offense at professors’ statements or views — sometimes foolishly and sometimes legitimately — and refusing to express their grievances in a productive manner.

 

“I would relish that conversation if it were handled in a collegial way,” he said. “But if you start a petition against me, put it on social media, and call me names, I mean, then I gotta call my lawyer, so that’s a terrible way to do it.”

 

One professor who had that experience is Dr. Kristin Collier, who was slated to speak at the medical school’s July 24 White Coat Ceremony, a rite of passage that welcomes incoming medical students into their profession. Michigan students created a petition demanding that the university prohibit Collier from speaking, citing her pro-life views. Although she would not be speaking about abortion, students were doubtful that, given the selection of a speaker with such beliefs, the university would “continue to advocate for reproductive rights.”

 

However, Dr. Marschall Runge, the medical school’s dean, would not acquiesce to the mob’s demands and publicly stated that Collier would still speak at the ceremony.

 

Although Runge refused to succumb to the students’ pressure, the ceremony was not without controversy. As soon as Collier was introduced, a number of the students receiving the coats walked out of the venue.

 

Another member of the faculty to feel the wrath of the outrage mobs is psychology lecturer Eric Fretz. Though he indicated his support for the “equity goals” of the university, he expressed concern to NR about the methods by which the administration is pursuing them. For each of his classes, he includes a disclaimer in his syllabus that apologizes for the possibility of “soft sexism,” but even this has caused problems for him.

 

“Born in the 1960’s,” it reads. “The end of the era for all moms being at home, all textbooks showing only male scientists, etc. You never escape your youth. I try to do a good job being balanced with my examples and being sensitive to social justice issues. If I say something that annoys you, or use all male examples during a lecture, feel free to call me on it.”

 

Fretz said one student took offense at that passage and brought it up to him, and he asked for her feedback in changing it. He told the student to “tell me how I should express this concept: I’m open to being corrected.” Unfortunately, he told NR, “there was no engagement. That was apparently not a goal of hers.”

 

After the meeting, he said, she attempted to incite outrage in the class group chat. When other students did not see the problem with it, she took her case to the university’s Office for Institutional Equity (OIE), which handles complaints of racial and gender discrimination and sexual misconduct. The office proceeded to investigate Fretz.

 

Representatives from the department requested a meeting with Fretz, telling him, “There’s been a complaint,” he told NR. Although Fretz’s attendance would be completely voluntary, he felt that the process carried an “implied threat,” with the officers insinuating that refusal to participate would have negative consequences.

 

At the meeting, which he called “bizarre,” the representatives laid out the student’s complaint about the offending text. Fretz then shared his side of the story, including information about his conversation with the student and her efforts in the group chat. The representatives did not take official action against him, but they told him he should put a section in the syllabus encouraging students to contact OIE if there are any problems.

 

“I was appalled,” Fretz said. “I said, ‘Excuse me, are you telling me to put a phrase in my syllabus asking my students not to talk to me, but to report me to the university’s investigation arm that’s in charge of investigating rapists and sexual abusers?’”

 

Other professors across many different subject areas have been targeted in a similar fashion. In late June, the Michigan Daily published an investigative report on alleged “microaggressions” in the class of art professor Phoebe Gloeckner. When students took offense at comics she showed in class, they asked for a session where all aggrieved students could share their feelings. Gloeckner declined, offering to meet with students individually instead, but the students would not agree to her terms.

 

Gloeckner, Collier, and Sheng declined to comment for this report. Though Gloeckner and Sheng’s cases resulted in investigation, they are not the norm, according to the university.

 

“First,” associate director of public affairs Kim Broekhuizen told NR in an email, “it’s important to note that while our Equity Civil Rights and Title IX office reviews all complaints that come into the office; not all complaints are investigated, which is when a formal investigative process is launched. There’s a big difference between the two.”

 

More often than not, she said, cases such as Sheng’s and Gloeckner’s will not result in a formal investigation. “In these cases, education and resources will be provided to the unit or individuals involved with the goal to address any harm caused by the situation.”

 

Although not all complaints lead to formal investigations, and Sheng, Collier, Fretz, and Gloeckner still have their jobs teaching at the university, such controversies as theirs can lead to consequences that extend beyond the university’s bylaws.

 

“If somebody is seen as problematic because of an allegation,” said Lyons, the English professor, “the administration might officially be refraining from firing them, but there can be a social cost in terms of that person’s reputation that results in things like people not coming to their talks.”

 

Being cut out of social functions with other faculty members can make a scholar “something like a pariah.” One way it manifests, according to Lyons, is in peer-review files, where potential employers can acquire information about professors’ reputations among their peers.

 

“If your reputation has been tarnished in some way, as evidenced by [the fact that] no one wants you to come over to their house, or no one’s going to come to your event or something like that, then it has real consequences on your career,” he said.

 

For some scholars, this type of culture has grown intolerable, and the status quo may become unsustainable, with the students’ bad behavior encouraging faculty members to leave.

 

“I really don’t know how much longer I can bear being employed by the University of Michigan,” said Fretz, the psychology teacher. “The administrators absolutely do not care. You’re presumptively the bad guy.”

Thanks for the ‘Memory’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, July 28, 2022

 

The thing you have to understand about Donald Trump, says Claremont Institute chairman Tom Klingenstein, is that “Trump is a manly man,” an exemplar of “traditional manhood.”

 

Well.

 

There is, I think, a contrary point of view.

 

Donald Trump is a whiny Palm Beach pasha whose put-upon servants soothe him by playing showtunes — specifically, the sad songs from Cats — when he’s feeling a little verklempt. He has your Aunt Jeanie’s social-media addiction and wears more makeup than the hog-tied hooker I predict somebody will find in the trunk of Anthony Weiner’s rental car one of these days. His Manhattan apartment is the sort of gilded and frescoed mess that would have made Liberace say, “Tone it down, Nancy.”

 

Donald Trump isn’t a warrior-prince — he’s a character who got cut from Glee for being too campy.

 

But I suppose I don’t see this issue precisely the same way they do over at Claremont. When it comes to pegging a man for the virile type, they know whereof they speak.

The White House Can’t Weasel Its Way Out of a Recession

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

 

When is a recession not a recession? When it is bad for Democratic incumbents.

 

From time immemorial, the definition of “recession” in the financial press and the political conversation has been “two or more consecutive quarters of declining real GDP.” The Biden administration, fearing bad news in the near future, is trying to weasel away from that definition. More to the point, it is trying to persuade its friends in the media and in the bureaucracy to do the president’s weaseling for him.

 

“But but but!” come the predictable replies. “What about the National Bureau of Economic Research, huh? They use a different definition!”

 

This is true. The NBER defines a recession subjectively, as a “significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.” You can read a more detailed discussion of that here. The NBER notes that it has at times defined a recession as something other than two consecutive quarters of declining real GDP: “For example, in the case of the February 2020 peak in economic activity, we concluded that the drop in activity had been so great and so widely diffused throughout the economy that the downturn should be classified as a recession even if it proved to be quite brief.”

 

What that example says is not what Biden and his friends want it to say, in that the NBER declared a recession in spite of not having two quarters of tanking GDP — and what the Democrats want is for the NBER to declare that there is no recession despite two straight quarters of tanking GDP (if the numbers do indeed prove to be as bad as expected).

 

You can be sure that if there is real GDP growth of 0.0000000001 percent, the Democrats will snap right back to the two-quarters rule, and declare that there is no recession.

 

What the Biden administration and such slavering Democratic factota as the Center for American Progress are arguing is that we should not consider ourselves in a recession, even if we have two quarters of declining real GDP, because the labor market is so strong. The problem with that line of argument is that the labor market is not very strong — we have low unemployment, true, but we also have declining real wages. “Americans are working more hours for less money” is not a plausible definition of a strong job market. And even with that low unemployment, we haven’t even gotten entirely back to the pre-pandemic number of total jobs.

 

Those declining real incomes are the reason the Biden administration’s “No recession here!” strategy is not only dishonest but genuinely stupid. Ask the average American how the economy is doing and you are not going to get a lecture about real GDP vs. nominal GDP and the distortive effects of quarterly measuring conventions. You are going to get an earful about the cost of gasoline, food, clothes, rented apartments, airfares, and practically everything else. And the Biden administration is not going to talk its way out of Americans’ skyrocketing bills.

 

In fact, the No. 1 item on the NBER’s list of indicators to consider when evaluating whether we are in a recession is “real personal income less transfers.” And when it comes to real income, the patient looks like he’s ready for the electric-cardiac-paddle thingies:

How much fun does that look like?

 

The words cannot be spoken aloud, but surely somebody has advised Joe Biden that he should be praying for a mild recession — because a recession is usually what you get when your anti-inflation policies are working. And while the nominal problem is GDP, the real problem is inflation.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Is Paying the Price for Going ‘Woke’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Saturday, July 23, 2022

 

Howard Schultz should have listened to me.

 

A decade ago, I wrote a book in which I observed that one of New York City’s most infamous and intractable municipal problems — its lack of public restrooms — had been in part solved by the private sector, and by one business in particular: Starbucks. That was the case in my neighborhood, at least: On any given afternoon, the Starbucks at Park Row and Beekman would have a restroom line 10 or 20 long, mostly European tourists carrying Century 21 shopping bags — it must have been in a guidebook somewhere.

 

It was a classic case of the private sector creating a public good while bringing in new customers. But the public sector has to do its part, too, when it comes to basic services such as public safety. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has been a lifelong champion of the kind of sentimental urban progressivism that has helped to turn the public spaces of cities such as Portland and Philadelphia — and, unhappily, New York — into part-time homeless shelters and makeshift psychiatric wards.

 

And now his business is paying the price for that.

 

Only a few years after opening all of its bathrooms to the general public as a grand social-justice gesture, the coffee chain is closing stores around the country — mostly in big, progressive, Democrat-run cities — because the locations have become too dangerous for customers and staff. Homeless people camp in the bathrooms or make mad scenes in the cafes. So many junkies are using Starbucks restrooms to shoot up that the company has been obliged to install needle-disposal boxes in some of its stores — Welcome to Portland! — and the employees who had to clean up those messes understandably complained about possible exposure to HIV and hepatitis.

 

Here are two things that don’t go together very well: 1) Selling caffeinated adult milkshakes for six bucks a cup and 2) hepatitis.

 

Schultz, who describes himself as a “lifelong Democrat” and who is big on the issues you’d expect the CEO of Starbucks to attend to — gay marriage, climate change, etc. — has toyed around with running for president a couple of times, and promised a politics based on a “deep level of compassion and empathy for the American people.”

 

But what Americans need from their government isn’t compassion and empathy. Americans need safe streets, clean and orderly public places, effective law enforcement, and security in their persons and property. That isn’t the sort of thing that you get from Kshama Sawant and the Socialist Alternative crackpots in Seattle’s city government — it’s the kind of thing you get from hardheaded practical city leaders of the kind Rudy Giuliani used to be before he decided to become Donald Trump’s drunk monkey-butler.

 

They’re closing five Starbucks stores in Seattle, the chain’s hometown — and so far, they aren’t closing any in Provo, Utah. There’s a reason for that.

 

There are whispers that this is a covert campaign against union organizers in Starbucks stores, but I think Schultz is starting to understand in a practical way what Democratic governance means for a big city: He complains that the municipal governments in question have “abdicated their responsibility” when it comes to law enforcement and mental health. Yes, they have.

 

But so has Howard Schultz, who was bullied into making a groveling apology after Starbucks employees in Philadelphia declined to let two men, who had not bought anything, use the café’s restroom. The men were black and were arrested when they refused to leave. Starbucks apologized, changed its bathroom policy, fired the employee who called the police, and paid the two men an undisclosed sum of money. Which is to say, Starbucks buckled under precisely the kind of nonsensical woke cultural politics that is ruining the cities where Starbucks now finds itself forced to close stores.

 

Portland and Seattle won’t enforce order in their cities — and Starbucks won’t enforce the rules in its own stores, because doing so puts the company on the wrong side of the sophomoric social-justice sensibilities that Howard Schultz unfortunately shares.

 

Woke capital plants the seeds of its own destruction — and cowardice is its own punishment.

Who Is Our Ukraine Policy For?

By Nate Hochman

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

 

Seven in ten Americans say inflation is “a very big problem for the country,” according to a May public opinion poll from the Pew Research Center. That makes the issue far and away the most pressing concern in the minds of the public — some 15 points above “the affordability of health care,” which 55 percent of Americans ranked as “a very big problem” in the survey.

 

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky might not be reading American public-opinion polls, but he’s certainly aware inflation is a problem around the world. So it was odd for him to dismiss inflation as “nothing” in his interview yesterday with Piers Morgan. When asked about the “growing number of Americans who don’t think the country should be spending so much money on a war in Europe when there are so many problems domestically,” Zelensky responded that Ukrainians were “fighting for absolutely communal values” and that “therefore, inflation is nothing, COVID is nothing. Ask those people who lost their children, their peace, their property at the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion. Who is thinking about masks and COVID? Who is thinking about inflation? These things are secondary.”

 

It should go without saying, of course, that for the Ukrainians fighting for their lives, the financial concerns of Americans struggling to make ends meet here at home would seem trivial. High gas prices 4,000 miles away don’t mean much when you’re in a war for the survival of your nation. But Zelensky was talking about U.S. foreign policy. He wasn’t only arguing that inflation and Covid didn’t matter to Ukrainians in the face of Russia’s invasion. He was arguing that, relatively speaking, it shouldn’t matter to Americans; their domestic concerns should not affect their willingness to support the “communal values” for which Ukraine fights, values he believes “are professed in the United States and in Europe.” Zelensky adds that the “integrity” of the United States is at stake in the conflict.

 

With respect to Zelensky, he is not the one who gets to determine American foreign policy. Call me old-school, but I tend to think American foreign policy should be oriented toward serving the interests of the American people. We can unite in solidarity with the Ukrainian people’s struggle against Putin’s aggression, providing aid to help with their war effort, but our assistance should be dictated by — and directed toward — the American interest. As Ukraine’s leader, Zelensky is obviously going to want us to subordinate our domestic concerns to those of the country he leads. But America should think of its own interests first. Appealing to financially insecure Americans by downplaying their problems is, to put it mildly, not a recipe for winning over hearts and minds in the nation that has been Ukraine’s most generous backer during the war. (This, alongside a Vogue photo shoot, doesn’t strike me as prudent optics either.)

 

If Zelensky wants to make a case for continued American support, he should be able to explain why such policies are in the American interest. And he should explain it in concrete, material terms, without abstract appeals to vaguely-defined “communal values” or side-swipes at struggling working- and middle-class Americans who are already predisposed to wonder how sending billions of their tax dollars to a conflict in a far-away country is serving their communities.

 

Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have been courageous in their fight to resist Putin’s advances, and the moral case for their cause is unambiguous. But he should not be so dismissive of America’s own problems as he makes the case for continued American support. We are an exceptionally generous country, but not infinitely so. To Americans, inflation is not “nothing”; it matters a great deal. Zelensky should be able to convey that he understands this. If he fails to do so, he might find his cause suffering in America as a result.

I Remember the ACLU

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, July 28, 2022

 

Headline from The Nation:

 

The Arizona Prison System Is Censoring The Nation. We’re Doing Something About It.

 

Arizona prison authorities are stopping incarcerated people from reading The Nation. We’re working with the ACLU’s National Prison Project to assert their First Amendment rights.

 

At times like this, it would be a very fine thing to have an ACLU that was a civil-liberties-and-free-speech organization rather than an ACLU that is a free-speech-sometimes–except-if-we-don’t-like-it-in-which-case-you’re-on-your-own organization. Having real principles makes coalition-building easier. The ACLU may still make the occasional political stretch, but the organization seems to have lost its way.

 

We’ve seen this kind of thing before: When Amnesty International stuck to its mission — prisoners of conscience — William F. Buckley Jr. was on the board, and it had cross-ideological support for its core program. When it became just another left-wing advocacy organization, it lost its vitality. Roughly the same thing happened to the NAACP. On the right, the NRA lost its way when it took its eye off the Second Amendment ball and became in effect a subsidiary of the Republican Party and an unfocused right-wing culture-war committee.

 

We could use an organization that does what the ACLU used to do. But I fear that Americans, particularly American liberals, have long ago stopped believing their own dogma.

The Descent of Democratic Man

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

 

Why don’t the Democrats have better leaders?

 

We know why the Republicans don’t have better leaders: The GOP turned itself into a Donald Trump personality cult, and would-be alternatives such as Ron DeSantis of Florida haven’t figured out how to get out from under the considerable shadow of the former president. Republicans may find some focus if, as expected, they have a good election in November. William Munny might have made a good political analyst: “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

 

But you’d think the Democratic Party would at least throw up some interesting leaders, if not necessarily good ones. Young voters have soured on Joe Biden — for the obvious reason that the more future you have the more irritating it is when someone devalues it — but they still back Democrats decisively, as evidenced by their generic-congressional-ballot preferences. College-educated people, women, and the most-affluent communities all lean Democratic. Immigrants in Texas, California, Florida, Massachusetts, and New Jersey lean a lot more Democratic than Republican. Two of the political indicators you would think would go hand-in-hand with being a Democrat — not being especially proud of your country and enthusiasm for butchering unborn children — are at or near all-time highs.

 

That’s not to say that America-hating well-off educated young women from immigrant backgrounds with an unseemly passion for abortion can’t be boring mediocrities — Ilhan Omar exists — but you’d think that a party with those characteristics would produce some interesting cultural churn.

 

Instead, you get Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer — the Senate majority leader who, at a spry 71 years of age, is the youngest member of that group by almost a decade.

 

What do they have in their second tier? The Squad, who are basically campus Democrats who somehow ended up sitting at the grown-ups’ table. Elizabeth Warren, another grim septuagenarian who has been trying to become a celebrity since she was writing dopey self-help books. Dick Blumenthal of Greenwich and not of Dien Bien Phu.

 

In a very amusing (seriously — what’s got into Ben Mathis-Lilley?) piece at Slate, possible post-Biden contenders are given due consideration. They are not an inspiring bunch. Roy Cooper, the North Carolina governor whose great boast is that he gets elected in a state where Democrats generally have a hard time of it these days. Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, one of those sad wretches who has been running for office practically all of her life. John Fetterman, the son of a wealthy insurance executive, who went to grad school at Harvard and then spent his days pretending to be a blue-collar guy in Braddock, Pa., serving as mayor while living on an allowance from his parents. Jared “Who?” Polis. Connecticut barnacle Chris Murphy, another scion of suburban wealth (his father was managing partner at Shipman & Goodwin) who has never done anything except hang around politics. Kirsten Gillibrand, last heard describing herself as a “young mom” at 52 years of age.

 

Gavin Newsom.

 

Maybe it’s a class thing, with so many prominent Democrats hailing from that very strange parochial class of upper-upper-middle-income to genuinely rich-adjacent politically connected families. Gillibrand’s father was a lobbyist crony of Al D’Amato’s. Pelosi’s father was mayor of Baltimore (so was her brother) and a member of the House of which she currently is speaker. Newsom has exactly the biography you’d expect of someone named “Gavin.” (He started a wine business with the help of some Getty money.) Whitmer’s father was the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and a minor political figure. Roy Asberry Cooper III, a former Young Democrats president born during the Eisenhower administration, is a Chi Psi and a lawyer; his father was a lawyer and a tobacco farmer, a fact that must have amused the heck out of him when his state accepted that multi-million-dollar vaping settlement. Jared Polis, who was Jared Schutz before he got into politics, is a graduate of La Jolla Country Day School (he would have just missed Tucker Carlson there), a true child of the 1990s whose Princeton thesis was titled “Paradigm Shift” and whose family earned the better part of a billion dollars selling its online-greeting-card business back when you could get mad money for a company with “dot-com” in its name.

 

The Republicans at least have some genuine plebs in their ranks: Q-Anon kook Lauren Boebert was a knocked-up high-school dropout who started a Hooters knockoff that eventually went bust after losing its lease — because there is nothing that screams “Real America!” like fake Hooters. Her foundational political document is the Rifle Rodeo food-poisoning-outbreak report. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a different Q-Anon kook, was a CrossFit instructor until she became obsessed with conspiracy websites, which are now the road to Congress for Republicans. Not going to get prolier-than-thou with that bunch. There are still some classic Republicans out there, like the Trump-endorsed nut in Michigan who got canned by his law firm when his employers accused him of padding his billing, which is some old-school, Alex P. Keaton-type Republican stuff.

 

So, maybe it’s class. Maybe it’s something in the water. Maybe it’s just bad luck.

 

Or maybe it is evolution in reverse: Consider the Senate seat from New York currently held by Kirsten Gillibrand. Before Gillibrand, the seat was held by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not exactly Cincinnatus, but before Clinton, it was held by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a genuinely interesting and intelligent contributor to American life; trace it back from Moynihan and you get James Buckley (“the sainted junior senator from New York”), Bobby Kennedy, and, if you go far enough, Gouverneur Morris. Some scoundrels and rat-bastards in that bunch, to be sure, but many welcome breaks from the insipidity of Senator Gillibrand. Kyrsten Sinema’s seat once was held by Barry Goldwater. Senator Warren’s predecessors include John Kennedy, Henry Cabot Lodge, Charles Sumner, Daniel Webster, and John Quincy Adams — Hyperions to a Birkenstock. The Impossible Burger guys could whip up a more convincing senator in their mad-vegan-scientist lab.

 

Elections are binary, they tell us. So is testicular cancer, if you’re lucky.