Airhead Celebrities Tout Ferguson Lies

Marquette in Academic Freedom Hall of Shame

From the (liberal) Huffington Post, “Free Speech on Campus: The 10 Worst Offenders of 2014.”

Featured, of course, is Marquette, and its attempt to fire us for a blog post that the politically correct crowd did not like.

Marquette University

Marquette University’s chilling campaign to revoke the tenure of political science professor John McAdams due to writings on his private blog ensures its place on this year’s list. McAdams criticized a graduate instructor for what he viewed as her inappropriate suppression of certain viewpoints for in-class discussion (one student’s opposition to same-sex marriage in particular), and the instructor came in for heavy criticism. Marquette then suspended McAdams without due process and abruptly cancelled his classes for the next semester. It also publicly insinuated that McAdams violated its harassment policy and was a safety threat to the campus, despite a complete lack of proof for either charge. Marquette’s disregard of due process and its incredible denial that its campaign against McAdams’s tenure implicates free speech or academic freedom in any way should frighten anyone concerned about faculty rights. Indeed, if the university succeeds in removing McAdams, free speech and academic freedom will lose whatever meaning they had at Marquette.

The fact that a liberal website would post such an article underlines an important fact: among liberals, there is still a substantial number of old-style traditionalists who favor free speech and expression.

Unfortunately, they are becoming rarer, especially in universities, where the center of gravity increasingly shifts toward politically correct people who happily will shut up opinions of which the disapprove. Indeed, this whole business arose when one Philosophy instructor expressed the intention of doing just that.

Vocabulary of Suppression

Campus leftists have a whole verbal arsenal to use against speech they don’t like. They may call it “harassment.” Or “offensive.” Or “uncivil.” Or “hate speech.” Or “cyber bullying.” Or claim it creates a “hostile learning environment” or “hostile work environment.”

The simple message is “shut up.”

And the clear corollary is “we are going to punish you if you don’t shut up.”

Do Black Lives Matter?

It’s not so clear that they do to the activists who use that slogan.



We are not entirely sure that “broken windows policing” is quite as effective as the hype suggests, but there is no question that it’s a policy promoted by people who really do believe that black lives matter.

Interestingly, it seems that rank and file black people (as opposed to the race hustling activists) favor such policing.

Consider, for example, a poll of black people in New York City, as reported by the leftist outlet The Root.

Despite the looming specter of police brutality, which casts shadows over street corners, neighborhoods and homes across black America, 56 percent of black voters in New York City support “broken windows” policing tactics, compared with 61 percent of the city’s white voters, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll.

The controversial policing style frames community disorder and signs of neglect—such as broken windows, littering and loitering—as indicators of encroaching crime that will lead to more dangerous communities and must be addressed with the full force of the law.

In theory, broken-windows policing, and its variants stop-and-frisk, zero-tolerance and quality-of-life policing, are tactics used by officers who are hyperinvested in keeping communities safe, clean and crime-free. In practice, however, they provide opportunities for racial profiling and resulting antagonistic and abusive encounters between law enforcement and people of color.

Interestingly, when participants in the Quinnipiac poll were asked whether police officers should “actively issue summonses or make arrests for so-called quality of life offenses,” including selling small amounts of marijuana or making loud noise, 60 percent of black voters said yes, a negligible difference from the 59 percent of white voters who said the same.

“It’s different where you live from what you see in the media,” said Quinnipiac University Poll Assistant Director Maurice Carroll. “Overall, black New Yorkers are negative about cops citywide. White voters are positive. But looking at cops in their own neighborhood, the support turns positive among black voters and heavily positive among whites.

“Does it improve the quality of life in your neighborhood when police arrest someone for a low-level offense, or does it increase neighborhood tensions? New Yorkers decide for quality of life,” Carroll added.

Contrary to the activist myth, black people don’t see the courts as excessively harsh on criminals. The following tabulation is from the National Opinion Research Center General Social Survey, combining polls from 2008 through 2012 (to get a reasonable number of black respondents).

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The numbers show that while blacks are a bit more likely than whites to say the courts are “too harsh” (27 percent as opposed to 10 percent for whites) a robust majority of blacks (56 percent) say the courts are “not harsh enough.” Another sixteen percent of blacks say the courts are “about right.”

Given that rank-and-file black people don’t seem to agree with the race hustlers, how do the politically correct types respond?

The Root went to one Arlene Eisen to provide a politically correct gloss on the findings.

“If [we are to] assume the study is reliable, then you have to ask, ‘What black people?’ Generally, more middle class and professional people will prioritize protecting property,” said Arlene Eisen, the author and primary researcher of Operation Ghetto Storm, a frequently quoted study on the extrajudicial killing of black people. “Then, you need to consider the level of political education of whoever responded to the survey. This includes what a lot of people call ‘internalized racism’—where black people learn a lot of the same views of themselves as whites. Unfortunately, there is very little in the education system and corporate media to counter the hegemonic status of white supremacy.”

Thus politically correct people always end up demeaning the people they are supposedly championing. “Those ignorant blacks,” she seems to be saying, “are anti-black racists too. They just aren’t educated enough to see what’s going on.”

To whom do black lives matter?

To rank-and-file black folks, yes. To people who favor strict law enforcement, yes. To the race hustlers who would rather have a political grievance than to protect black lives, no.