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New York Mets slugger Daniel Vogelbach had a night to forget as he was booed off the field by his own fans during Friday's defeat to the Atlanta Braves. The Mets were shut out by the Braves bullpen, with Vogelbach putting in an especially disappointing performance.
The slugger struck out four times in the game and didn't manage to record a single hit in five at-bats on the night, causing fans to boo him and call for him to be DFA'd.
Femaleness and its Discontents 2
The parade of horribles continued: “Hate crimes are on the rise.” Mills and her audience picture white Trumpists beating up blacks, Asians, and gays, notwithstanding the fact that hate crime suspects are disproportionately black. Invocation of climate change? Check. Invocation of the “constant threat of gun violence,” which, like climate change, can “feel overwhelming?” Check again. (Actually, the only people facing a “constant threat of gun violence” are residents of inner-city neighborhoods, who may be caught up in the dozens of fatal black-on-black shootings that occur daily across the country. The answer to that threat is proactive policing, a solution that most college presidents would dismiss as racist.)
Mills issued an invitation to a “university-wide conversation, starting today.” That conversation would address how NYU might “create and sustain a fully inclusive community where everyone can thrive.” The invitation was doubly tendentious. Such “conversations” (i.e., one-way harangues) have been going on nonstop for the last decade—see Beilock’s 2018 pledge to ensure that Barnard was an “inclusive environment free from fear and hate.” Second, the implication that NYU is not already a fully inclusive community is absurd. The groups whom Mills and her colleagues insist are being excluded are in fact preferred at every juncture, whether in admissions or hiring. If the beneficiaries of those preferences do not “thrive” at the same rate as members of non-preferred groups, it is because their academic skills are, on average, weaker. That weakness is the reason for preferential policies in the first place.
Other aspects of Mills’s CV are equally emblematic—her research on race and gender, her oversight of NYU’s Abu Dhabi satellite as senior vice provost for Global Programs and University Life, her directorship of NYU’s film Production Lab, and her collaboration with Chelsea Clinton on a documentary. (Filmmaking is not the liberal arts’ comparative advantage—books are. But the filmification of the humanities continues apace.)
The contemporary university is always on the prowl for new sources of income to support its burgeoning bureaucracy. That means going abroad and overlooking violations of academic morality that would be disqualifying locally. Drag queen story hours are celebrated on American campuses, but they might not be welcomed in Abu Dhabi, where cross-dressing is illegal. The Sharia-inspired legal code in the United Arab Emirates allows for execution for homosexual sex acts. But students in Abu Dhabi pay full tuition at higher rates than American students, so NYU’s bureaucrats will focus their attention on what Mills calls “persistent” discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the U.S. To date, one supposed exemplar of such allegedly persistent discrimination, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, has not called for the criminalization of homosexual sex, or for its capital punishment.
The most far-reaching effects of the feminized university are the intolerance of dissent from political orthodoxy and the attempt to require conformity to that orthodoxy. This intolerance is justified in the name of safety and “inclusivity.” It turns out that females and males assess the value of debate and the legitimacy of speech restrictions unequally. The 2022 FIRE College Free Speech Rankings reported “stark” differences in whether female and male undergraduates would allow speakers with “offensive” ideas (such as the belief that abortion should be illegal) to come on campus. In the 2021 FIRE rankings, over 40 percent of students at Barnard and Wellesley (women’s colleges, all) supported the use of violence against dissenters. In a 2018 Knight Foundation survey of over 4,400 college students, reported in Quillette, 71 percent of males agreed that protecting free speech is more important than promoting an inclusive society; 59 percent of females agreed that promoting an inclusive society is more important than protecting free speech. Two-thirds of male psychology professors from top universities polled in 2021 believed that pursuing truth was more important than pursuing social equity if the two conflict; around a third of male respondents said that the issue was “complicated.” Fifty-two percent of female psychologists answered that the issue was complicated, while only 43 percent prioritized truth. A 2017 YouGov survey of over 2000 U.S. adults found that 56 percent of men said that colleges should not protect students from offensive ideas, whereas 64 percent of females said that they should. Men support the development of knowledge that explains reality, even if such knowledge threatens egalitarian norms, whereas females are more willing to suppress such scholarship if it poses “potential moral threats,” as Quillette put it.
As long as the rhetoric of safety, threat, and trauma remains dominant, the push to shut down non-progressive speech will continue. And now the traumification of everyday life, like other modern academic trends, is fast spreading outside the campus. Emotional-healing coaches help the public “navigate” trauma in the “space of healing and self-development,” as a press release for one such coach, Rebeccah Silence, put it. The media operate in full trauma mode. The use of the word “trauma” in New York Times news stories rose by nearly 30 percent between 2020 and 2021 and by nearly 300 percent from 2000 to 2021. In a June 22, 2022, email to the paper’s senior editors, a Times standards editor said that he was sympathetic to this impulse. After all, the standards editor wrote, “mass shootings, a pandemic, war, the murder of George Floyd and an attack on the U.S. Capitol” had left “wounds, shock and scarring in their wake.” A college president could not have put it better. But trauma, the editor suggested, didn’t need to be the Times’s “go-to term for any and all stress, pain, suffering, scarring, shock, agony and wounds.” Alternatives? How about: “stress, pain, suffering, scarring, shock, agony and wounds,” the editor proposed. The possibility that Times news coverage would simply dial back the hysteria was apparently inconceivable.
Colleges have been the conveyor belt into the outside world of safetyism, of the belief that minorities in the U.S. are endemically victimized, and of the ideas that words wound, that certain beliefs equal hate, and that such “hate” should be banned. Linda Mills may not fully subscribe to all those concepts. But she is part of a monumental shift in university life that has put such propositions into widespread circulation and that affects the principles by which we govern ourselves. The feminized university would be unlikely to choose the motto NYU adopted at its founding in 1831, reflecting its working-class, non-entitled self-image: Perstare et Praestare (Persevere and Excel). Excellence is now understood to underwrite white male privilege. Perseverance, absent a helping bureaucrat, is too much to ask of students who are, as irony-proof Princeton protesters put it several years ago, sick and tired of being sick and tired. A better motto for today (not in exclusionary Latin, of course) would be: Fight hate and recover from trauma!'--From Heather Mac Donald in City Journal
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