Two defenses of Camille Paglia

There’s no doubt that Camille Paglia is a provocateur and a self-promoter, but there’s equally little doubt that she truly believes what she’s saying. Much of what she’s saying goes against the Authoritarian Left, even though she’s on that side of the divide. She also has the Leftist street cred of being a woman, a lesbian, and someone who identifies as transgender (she says she’s never felt like a woman). Besides that, she’s a historical and literary scholar, and though I haven’t read a lot of what she’s written, I was much taken by her poetry anthology and analysis Break, Blow, Burn which was reviewed favorably by Clive James in the 2005 New York Times.

What makes the Woke hate Paglia is that she voices opinions about the relationships between men and women, about the #MeToo movement, about victimization, and other matters—opinions that aren’t politically congenial to the Woke (see the videos I posted here). Her bona fides hasn’t saved her this time, for, as I reported not long ago, students at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she works as a tenured professor, demanded that she be disciplined for her activities and for scheduling an upcoming talk called “Ambiguous Images: Sexual Duality and Sexual Multiplicity in Western Art.” Never mind what she was going to say (the protestors didn’t know): Paglia had crossed too many boundaries into Unwokeville. The students demanded these things (this is a quote):

1) Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color. If, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.
2) The University of the Arts must cease to provide Camille Paglia additional platforms such as public events and opportunities to sell her books on campus.
3) The University of the Arts must apologize for its embarrassing response to this situation, and specifically President David Yager must apologize for his wildly ignorant and hypocritical letter.
4) The University of the Arts must sit down with a group of transgenders [sic] students and survivors of sexual assault to discuss how they can best be supported moving forward. This group must include students of color.

UArts: you are disrespecting your students and putting them in danger. Do better.

No selling her books on campus! What the hell kind of censorship is that? And note the stupid, gratuitous, and completely bogus accusation of Paglia “endangering” them. Maybe endangering the opinions they get from their Facebook friends, but that’s all.

These familiar lists are depressing, and all too often cowardly university administrators cave in to them. Fortunately, University President David Yager didn’t; he wrote a reasonable letter to the University community refusing to give in to these demands and reiterating the dangers of the kind of censorship the students were calling for.

Paglia’s demonization and her defense by Yager have inspired two columns this week: one measured but firm and the other splenetic but funny. Both make the point that students are overly entitled and neglecting their educations in favor of extreme and ill-conceived programs of social justice. And they cry out for a return to the purpose of an education: to learn not just knowledge, but how to think.

The first column, in The Atlantic (click on screenshot), is by the eminently reasonable Tom Nichols, an international affairs expert and author of the well-reviewed book The Death of Expertise.  I’m just going to give quotes as I have nothing much to add to what he says, and I agree 100%.

Referring to misguided “activism” not just at the College of the Arts, but also at Middlebury College, Swarthmore, and Sarah Lawrence, he says this:

This is not activism so much as it is preening would-be totalitarianism. If college is to become something more than a collection of trade schools on one end and a group of overpriced coffeehouses on the other, Americans have to think about how we got here and how to restore some sanity to the crucial enterprise of higher education.

First, we have to recognize a shameless dereliction of duty among faculty and administrators. Student activism can be an important part of education, but it is in the nature of students, especially among the young, to take moral differences to their natural extreme, because it is often their first excursion into the territory of an examined and conscious belief system. Faculty, both as interlocutors and mentors, should pull students back from the precipice of moral purity and work with them to acquire the skills and values that not only imbue tolerance, but provide for the rational discussion of opposing, and even hateful, views.

Instead, in the name of respect and relevance, even tenured faculty sometimes quail before the anger of people barely out of high school. Paglia has always been a notable exception here, and it is encouraging to see Swarthmore College’s president, Valerie Smith, refusing to meet with student protesters unless they end their occupation of college offices. (The students want the fraternities disbanded, which happened; they want a promise from Swarthmore that they will never come back. They’re staging an occupation not over losing, but over not winning quite enough to suit them.)

Overall, unfortunately, the typical reaction to such events is to “hear” the students and to allow them to stomp on the very traditions of rational inquiry they’re supposed to be learning while in college.

This is what’s happening now at Sarah Lawrence, at Williams College, at Middlebury College, and many others that I don’t have room to name.

Nichols also has a diagnosis and a prescription, which resemble those suggested by the curmudgeonly Rex Murphy in the next highlighted article:

As I wrote in a book titled The Death of Expertise, much of this, at institutions both great and humble, proceeds from a shift in the late 20th century to a kind of therapeutic model of education, which prioritizes feelings and happiness over learning. Colleges take the temperature of their students constantly, asking if they feel fulfilled, if they like their courses, and if they have any complaints. Little wonder that the students have made the short and obvious jump to the conclusion that they should be in charge.

And the prescription: the administration (and especially the faculty) has to stop coddling students by meeting their every demand, and remember the purpose of universities:

Changing this culture will be hard, but it starts with the confident assertion by faculty that they are there for a reason and know what they are doing. Students must be reminded that they petitioned the institution for entry, and not the other way around; they asked the university to allow them to enter into a contract in which the professors are obligated to educate them and they are obligated to fulfill the requirements that will allow those professors to recommend them to the university for graduation.

This last point is especially important. The contract is not just a bill for client services from the university’s dutiful employees. It is a promise by the students to accept instruction, rather than to give it.

Do I sound old and grumpy? Maybe I am, but then so is Tom Nichols.

And even more so is Rex Murphy, who wrote a pro-Paglia and anti-Woke-University column in Canada’s conservative National Post. I don’t know Murphy, but Diana MacPherson, who called this piece to my attention, notes that “Rex Murphy can be a jerk but it’s funny when he does it to someone else.

Indeed. Look at the money quote below (and click on the screenshot if you want to read his fulminations):

After defending Paglia’s scholarship and reiterating that colleges are places where students come as knowledge-seeking mendicants, Murphy discusses the Outrage Brigade that tried to dethrone Paglia at her school.

The mob had a sliver of rationality. They did halt the railroading long enough to consider that the outright firing of a tenured professor might be illegal. While this caused a brief stumble, they quickly suggested a route past the obstacle: “However, if, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.” And, finally, they slobbered a puffball of social-justice meringue on their efforts by also insisting that she be “banned from holding speaking events or selling books on campus. In their telling, her ideas “are not merely ‘controversial,’ they are dangerous.”

Now, the answer to this cloddish, puerile, arrogant, self-righteous, ideological twaddle — the lexicon of social-justice hollow-heads everywhere — is: “Just who do you think you are? Intellectually, you’re still in the cocoon. You are yet birdlings in the nest waiting for momma to bring you a worm. What possible standing do you have to ‘demand’ elders and betters yield to your uninformed, ignorant whinings. Not only will we not ‘yield’ to your jejune demands, we laugh at the very notion that you have some ridiculous right to make them.

“Obviously you are not university material, Depart. There must be some low-end coffee shop in need of sweepers, and even there you should be careful about telling its owner, your boss-to-be, which people and of what colour he must hire, if he foolishly hires any of you.

Just once I’d like to hear a University administrator at places like Middlebury or Williams say something like this: not in those words, of course, but in the sense of those words.