Queen's University Belfast has issued the warning to undergraduates studying a module called Further Adventures in Shakespeare on its BA Eng
By: Chris Hastings
Published: Jun 25, 2023
Is this a case of crazy wokery I see before me? Actors ridicule university trigger warnings over blood in Macbeth
Queen University Belfast has issued a warning to students studying Shakespeare
It stressed Macbeth 'could cause offence' due to its depictions of 'bloodshed'
Similar warnings have been applied to the Twelfth Night and Titus Andronicus
It is Shakespeare's most violent play – a bloody saga packed with stabbing, strangling and poisoning that reaches a grisly climax with a beheading.
And for more than 400 years audiences have been enthralled – if a little disturbed – by the butchery of Macbeth.
But now one of the UK's top universities stands accused of 'infantilising' students after it warned them they might be 'offended' by the 'bloodshed' in the play.
Queen's University Belfast has issued the warning to undergraduates studying a module called Further Adventures in Shakespeare on its BA English course.
'You are advised that this play could cause offence as it references and / or deals with issues and depictions relating to bloodshed,' the warning, a copy of which has been obtained by this newspaper under Freedom of Information laws, states.
The university has also applied similar warnings to the Bard's Richard III, Twelfth Night and Titus Andronicus.
Some of Britain's biggest theatrical stars last night branded the warnings counterproductive and unnecessary. They point out that Macbeth, which was first performed in 1606, is particularly popular with schoolchildren.
Sir Ian McKellen, who starred opposite Dame Judi Dench in Sir Trevor Nunn's landmark 1976 RSC production, said warnings such as this could undermine the dramatic impact of the piece.
He said: 'My sister (a teacher) used to show Sir Trevor Nunn's TV version of the 1976 Macbeth to her teenage students.
'She'd pull down the blinds, start the video and then leave the classroom and count the minutes till she heard the first scream from within. Had the youngsters had trigger warnings in advance, the effect of the play would have been considerably diminished.'
He added: 'I remember talking to a priest who saw a number of performances of the stage production at the Stratford Other Place.
'He would hold out his crucifix throughout the performance, to protect the audience from the devilry conjured by the cast. I suppose these triggers are something similar.'
Call The Midwife star Jenny Agutter, who has acted in Shakespeare's The Tempest, King Lear and Love's Labour's Lost, said: 'I don't understand why anyone should feel warnings are necessary for Shakespeare's plays. Unless we need to be constantly warned that depicting human nature might cause offence.'
Sir Richard Eyre, the former Director of the National Theatre who has directed productions of Hamlet, Richard III and King Lear, said: 'It's completely fatuous and totalitarian to try to police people's minds with these absurd warnings. Ridiculous, contemptible, infantilising.
Presumably the people putting out the trigger warnings feel they are able to cope with the content of these plays, but weaker, younger, less intelligent people aren't.' Doctor Who star David Tennant and The Good Wife actress Cush Jumbo are due to star in a new production of Macbeth which opens in London in December. It is one of four major productions of the play set to open in the UK.
Queen's Belfast's trigger warning for Twelfth Night centres on what it calls the 'depictions relating to sexuality or gender. Warnings for Richard III and Titus Andronicus relate to depictions of disability in the former and 'race and or racism' in the latter. A spokesperson for Queen's University Belfast declined to comment.
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'[A priest] would hold out his crucifix throughout the performance, to protect the audience from the devilry conjured by the cast. I suppose these triggers are something similar.'
Very apt. It's magical thinking. Especially considering they've not only been shown to not work, they've been shown to make things worse.
The inmates I teach are serious, disciplined, hard-working students, eager to engage with ideas.
By: Brooke Allen
Published: Mar 5, 2023
Many of us who care deeply about education in the humanities can only feel despair at the state of our institutions of “higher” learning. Enrollment in these subjects is plummeting, and students who take literature and history classes often come in with rudimentary ideas about the disciplines. Interviewed in a recent New Yorker article, Prof. James Shapiro of Columbia said teaching “Middlemarch” to today’s college students is like landing a 747 on a rural airstrip. Technology such as messaging apps, digital crib sheets and ChatGPT, which will write essays on demand, has created a culture of casual cheating.
Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.
Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet. Cyber-cheating, even assuming they wanted to indulge in it, is impossible. But more important, they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones. My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.
My students at the prison sit through a 2½-hour class without any loss of focus. They don’t yawn or take bathroom breaks. I have taught classes on the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Romanticism, George Orwell, South Asian fiction. We’ve done seminars on Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Together we have read Montaigne, Rousseau, Keats, Erasmus, Locke, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Goethe, Petrarch, Rabelais, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rohinton Mistry. The students write essays in longhand; during the pandemic I taught a correspondence class via snail mail. Some of them do read “Middlemarch,” and their teacher finds the experience far more gratifying than trying to land a 747 on a rural airstrip. We encourage them to treat different societies in history as experiments in time travel, where they try to understand the mores of particular eras as though from the inside. They are very open to that approach, unlike university students, who tend see the past only as one long undifferentiated era of grievous unenlightenment: not just one damn thing after another, but one damn oppressive thing after another.
Like students at elite institutions, most of my incarcerated scholars are politically liberal. Unlike them, many are religious, and that proves surprisingly enriching in studying these authors, who would have been amazed to know they would one day be read by classrooms full of atheists. One of my more devout students, a Protestant who converted to Islam, was so distressed by Voltaire’s disrespect for established creeds that he had to be comforted by other class members. They informed him that he was exactly the sort of person Voltaire was aiming his polemic at, and therefore he could understand the force of it in a way his irreligious peers couldn’t.
My hours at the prison are rich in such moments. In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades. Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits. No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements. And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.
If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same? Or ask professors to try to create an atmosphere where these habits can prevail? Perhaps prison education can serve as a model of how to return to true learning and intellectual exchange.
Is freedom of speech harmful for college students? Why is this question even being asked? In light of recent eruptions of student protests a
By: Michael Shermer
Published: Mar 22, 2016
The French political journalist and supporter of the Royalist cause in the French Revolution, Jacques Mallet du Pan, famously summarized what often happens to extremists: “the Revolution devours its children.” I was thinking about this idiom—and its doppelgänger “what goes around comes around”—while writing a lecture for a talk I was invited to give at my alma mater California State University, Fullerton on the topic: “Is freedom of speech harmful for college students?” The short answer is an unflinching and unequivocal “No.”
Why is this question even being asked? When I was in college free speech was the sine qua non of the academy. It is what tenure was designed to protect! The answer may be found in the recent eruptions of student protests at numerous American colleges and universities, including Amherst, Brandeis, Brown, Claremont McKenna, Oberlin, Occidental, Princeton, Rutgers, University of California, University of Missouri, Williams, Yale, and others. Most of these paroxysms were under the guise of protecting students from allegedly offensive speech and disagreeable ideas—defined differently by different interest groups—with demands for everything from trigger warnings and safe spaces to microaggressions and speaker disinvitations.
Between the 1960s and the 2010s, what went wrong?
[ Students at Rutgers University protest a talk by Milo Yiannopoulos by smearing red on their faces and shouting “hate” when he challenged them to hear other points of view. ]
The Problem
Trigger warnings are supposed to be issued to students before readings, classroom lectures, film screenings, or public speeches on such topics as sex, addiction, bullying, suicide, eating disorders, and the like, involving such supposed prejudices as ableism, homophobia, sizeism, slut shaming, transphobia, victim-blaming, and who-knows-what-else, thereby infantilizing students instead of preparing them for the real world where they most assuredly will not be so shielded. At Oberlin College, for example, students leveled accusations against the administration of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and the ne plus ultra in gender politics, cissexist heteropatriarchy, the enforcement of “gender binary and gender essentialism” against those who are “gender variant (non-binary) and trans identities.” The number of such categories has expanded into an alphabet string, LGBTQIA, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual and any other underrepresented sexual, gender, and/or romantic identities.1 This is not your parents’ protest against Victorian sexual mores, and the list of demands by Oberlin students would be unrecognizable to even the most radical 60’s hippies:
The creation of a school busing system for Oberlin, Ohio’s K–12 schools, paid for by the college.
The establishment of special, segregated black-only “safe spaces” across campus.
A more inclusive audition process in the Conservatory that does not privilege Western European theoretical knowledge over playing ability.
The creation of a bridge program that will recruit recently-released prisoners to enroll at Oberlin for undergraduate courses.
The most audacious demand was “an $8.20/hour stipend for black student leaders who are organizing protest efforts.” These students wanted to be paid for protesting!
As often happens in moral movements, a reasonable idea with some evidentiary backing gets carried to extremes by engaged moralists eager for attention, sympathy, and the social standing that being a victim or victim sympathizer can bring. Soldiers suffering from PTSD, for example, may be “triggered” by the backfire of a nearby automobile, but no one has proposed that automobile manufacturers put “trigger warnings” on cars to accommodate soldiers. As well, the Harvard psychologist Richard McNally points out that trigger warnings may have the opposite effect for which they are intended, because “systematic exposure to triggers and the memories they provoke is the most effective means of overcoming the disorder.” McNally sites an analysis by the Institute of Medicine, which found that “exposure therapy is the most efficacious treatment for PTSD, especially in civilians who have suffered trauma such as sexual assault.” In other words, face your problems head-on and deal with them. An additional problem with trigger warnings is that the number of triggers has expanded to the point where nearly every speech and lecture could contain triggering words, turning communication into a moral hazard. Finally, who determines what is “triggering” anyway? The very concept is a recipe for censorship.
Safe space, according to the organization Advocates for Youth, is “A place where anyone can relax and be fully self-expressed, without fear of being made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome or challenged on account of biological sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, cultural background, age, or physical or mental ability; a place where the rules guard each person’s self-respect, dignity and feelings and strongly encourage everyone to respect others.” Some such places even contain pillows, soothing music, milk and cookies, and videos of puppies.
In addition to infantilizing adults, this practice often means protecting students from opinions that they don’t happen to agree with, or shielding them from ideas that challenge their beliefs, which has always been one of the most valuable benefits of a college education. In any case, college campuses, along with the cities and states they’re in, are already designed to be safe from violence and discrimination based on the rule of law enforced by the police and courts. In point of fact, most of these colleges nestled in American cities are among the safest places on earth. If you want to build a safe space for people who really need it, go to Syria or Somalia. And if this opinion triggers you or makes you feel unsafe then you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on in the world.
Microaggressions are comments or questions that slight, snub, or insult someone, intentionally or unintentionally, in anything from casual conversation to formal discourse. According to the University of California publication Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send, examples include:
Asking, “Where are you from or where were you born?” or “What are you?” This implies someone is not a true American.
Inquiring, “How did you become so good in math?” (to people of color) or suggesting “You must be good in math” (to an Asian), which is stereotyping.
Proclaiming, “There is only one race, the human race” or “I don’t believe in race.” This denies the significance of a person of color’s racial/ethnic experience and history.
Opining, “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” or “America is the land of opportunity.” This suggests that the playing field is level, so if women or people of color do not fill all jobs and careers in precise proportion to their population percentages, it must mean that the problem is with them, or that they are lazy or incompetent and just need to work harder.
[ Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send (click image to enlarge) ]
Yes, language matters, and some comments that people make are cringe worthy (e.g., saying “you people” to a group of African Americans, or “you’re a girl, you don’t have to be good at math”). But do we really need a list of DOs and DON’Ts handed out to students and reviewed like they were five-year olds being taught how to play nice with the other kids in the sandbox? Can’t adults work out these issues themselves without administrators stepping in as surrogate parents? And who determines what constitutes “hate,” “racist” or “sexist” speech? Who it happens to bother or offend? Students? Faculty? Administration? And as with the problem of trigger words, the list of microaggressions grows, turning normal conversation into a cauldron of potential violations that further restricts speech, encourages divisiveness rather than inclusiveness, and forces people to censor themselves, dissemble, withhold opinion, or outright lie about what they believe.
An incident at Brandeis University in 2015 is instructive: when Asian American students installed an exhibition on microaggressions, other Asian American students claimed that the exhibit was itself a microaggression that triggered negative feelings, leading the president to issue an apology to anyone “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.” Agreed, blurting out “Why do you Asians always hang out together” is lame, but at this point in history it just makes the communicant sound more like a bore than a bigot, and more deserving of eye rolls than public humiliation.
[ Brandeis University microagression display, later declared a microagression (click image to enlarge) ]
Speaker disinvitations—cancellations of invited speakers—have been accelerating over the past decade. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), 257 such incidents have occurred since 2000, 111 of which were successful in preventing the invited guests from giving their talks. In 2014, for example, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was invited to give the commencement speech at Brandies University, where she was to also receive an honorary doctorate. After students protested, citing her criticism of Islam for its mistreatment of women, the administration caved into their demands and Ali was no-platformed (as it is called in England). Worse, in this theater of the absurd, students from U.C. Berkeley attempted to no-platform the comedian and social commentator Bill Maher for his alleged “Islamophobia,” code for anyone who criticizes Islam for any reason. Maher delivered his commencement oration nonetheless, telling the very liberal student body that “Liberals should own the First Amendment the way conservatives own the Second Amendment,” pointing out that apparently irony is no longer taught at this birthplace of the 1960’s free speech movement. This was topped by students at Williams College who, in October 2015, succeeded in disinviting Suzanne Venker, author of The Flipside of Feminism. Venker was invited to participate in the college’s “Uncomfortable Learning” lecture series but, well, she made some students feel too uncomfortable. “When you bring a misogynistic, white supremacist men’s rights activist to campus in the name of ‘dialogue’ and ‘the other side,’” whined one student on Facebook, it causes “actual mental, social, psychological, and physical harm to students.” Physically harm?
[ Banner from the website of Ayaan Hirsi Ali ]
The effects of such protests are often the opposite of what the protesters sought. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s speech, for example, was printed in the Wall Street Journal where it was seen by that paper’s 2.37 million readers, many orders of magnitude more than would have heard it on campus. Bill Maher turned his Berkeley brouhaha into a bit for his HBO television show Real Time, which carries over four million viewers. More irony.
What may have started out as well intentioned actions at curbing prejudices and attenuating bigotry with the goal of making people more tolerant, has now metamorphosed into thought police attempting to impose totalitarian measures that result in silencing dissent of any kind. The result is the very opposite of what free speech and a college education is all about.
Why such unrest in the academy—among the most liberal institutions in the country—surrounded as these students are by so many liberal professors and administrators? Here I will offer five proximate (immediate) causes, one ultimate (deeper) cause, and some solutions.
Proximate Causes
1. Moral Progress
As I document in The Moral Arc, we have made so much moral progress since the Enlightenment—particularly since the civil rights and women’s rights movements that launched the modern campus protest movement in the first place—that our standards of what is tolerable have been ratcheted ever upward to the point where students are hypersensitive to things that, by comparison, didn’t even appear on the cultural radar half a century ago. This progress has happened gradually enough on the news cycle measure of days and weeks to be beneath the awareness of most observers, but fast enough that it can be tracked on time scales ranging from years to decades. For example, remember when interracial marriage was a divisive debate? Me neither. But recall the now-jarring words of the trial judge Leon M. Bazile, who convicted Richard and Mildred Loving in the case (Loving v. Virginia) that ultimately made its way to the Supreme Court in 1967 and overturned laws banning interracial marriage: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” Same-sex marriage went through a similar evolution as interracial marriage, culminating in the 5–4 decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2015 to make same-sex marriage the law of the land, another data point in the long-term trend toward granting more rights to more people.
Interracial marriage and same-sex marriage are themselves the legacy of the rights revolutions that first took off in the late 1700s when the idea of rights was invented and then demanded, first in the American Revolution (starting with the Declaration of Independence in 1776), then in the French Revolution (with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789), inspiring subsequent rights revolutions and documents (for example, Declaration of the Rights of Woman in 1791). The result, two and a half centuries later, has been the abolition of slavery, the eradication of torture, the elimination of the death penalty in all modern democracies save America, the franchise for all adult citizens, children’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, and even the rights of future generations to inhabit a livable planet. Who knows, perhaps one day soon we’ll even grant rights to Artificially Intelligent robots. In other words, most of the big moral movements have been fought and won, leaving today’s students with comparatively smaller causes to promote and evils to protest, but with moral emotions just as powerful as those of previous generations, so their outrage seems disproportionate.
2. Transition from a Culture of Honor to a Culture of Victimhood
In a culture of honor one settles minor disputes oneself and leaves the big crimes to the criminal justice system. Over the past two decades this has been eroded and is being replaced by a culture of victimhood in which one turns to parent-like authorities (faculty and college administrators, but not the law) to settle minor disputes over insults and slights.2 The culture of honor leads to autonomy, independence, self-reliance, and self-esteem, whereas the culture of victimhood leads to dependence and puerile reliance on parental figures to solve ones’ problems. In this victimhood culture the primary way to gain status is to either be a victim or to condemn alleged perpetrators against victims, leading to an accelerating search for both.3 A student at the University of Oxford named Eleanor Sharman explained how it happened to her after she joined a campus feminist group named Cuntry Living and started reading their literature on misogyny and patriarchy:
Along with all of this, my view of women changed. I stopped thinking about empowerment and started to see women as vulnerable, mistreated victims. I came to see women as physically fragile, delicate, butterfly-like creatures struggling in the cruel net of patriarchy. I began to see male entitlement everywhere.
As a result she became fearful and timid, afraid even to go out to socialize:
Feminism had not empowered me to take on the world—it had not made me stronger, fiercer or tougher. Even leaving the house became a minefield. What if a man whistled at me? What if someone looked me up and down? How was I supposed to deal with that? This fearmongering had turned me into a timid, stay-at-home, emotionally fragile bore.
It is not that there are no longer real victims of actual crimes, but it is a disservice to them to equate the trivial peccadillos of microaggressions or triggering words with brutal rapes and murders. A feminist named Melody Hensley, for example, who was once the Executive Director of the Center for Inquiry in Washington DC. claims that years of online stalking and social media trolls gave her PTSD on par with that of combat soldiers, disabling her from being able to work. Not surprisingly, war vets were not sympathetic.
3. From Anti-Fragile to Fragile Children
One response to the 1970s and 1980s crime wave was a shift toward “helicopter parenting” in which children were no longer allowed to be, well, children. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains why through the concept of anti-fragility: “Bone is anti-fragile. If you treat it gently, it will get brittle and break. Bone actually needs to get banged around to toughen up. And so do children. I’m not saying they need to be spanked or beaten, but they need to have a lot of unsupervised time, to get in over their heads and get themselves out. And that greatly decreased in the 1980s. Anxiety, fragility and psychological weakness have skyrocketed in the last 15–20 years.” Those kids are today’s college students, and as a consequence they have brittle bones and thin skins. An example of an anti-fragile person with strong bones and thick skin is the model Isabelle Boemeke, who tweeted what she does when verbally harassed on the streets by ogling men:
Here’s what I do when catcalled: roll my eyes, if he’s Hispanic say “chinga tú madre!”, put earphones on, continue with life.
— Isabelle Boemeke (@isaboemeke) February 10, 2016
4. Puritanical Purging
Social movements tend to turn on themselves in puritanical purging of anyone who falls short of moral perfection, leading to preemptive denunciations of others before one is so denounced. The witch crazes of the 17th century degenerated into such anticipatory condemnations, resulting in a veritable plethora of nonexistent sorceresses being strapped to faggots and torched. The 20th century witnessed Marxist and feminist groups undergoing similar purges as members competed for who was the purist and defenestrated those who fell below the unrealizable standard. On the other side of the political spectrum, Ayn Rand’s objectivist movement took off in a frenzied build up after the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1959, but by the time the philosopher-novelist died in 1982 most of the insider “collective” had been expunged for various sins against the philosophy, from listening to the wrong music to challenging the founder on any point of substance or minutia. Such purification purges are among the worst things that can happen to a social movement.
[ Pre-emptive denunciations lead to witch hunts. ]
5. Virtue Signaling
Related to puritanical purging is virtue signaling, in which members of a movement compete to signal who is the most righteous by (A) recounting all the moral acts one has performed and (B) identifying all the immoral acts others have committed. This leads to an arms-race to signal moral outrage over increasingly diminishing transgressions, such as unapproved Halloween costumes at Yale University, which led to a student paroxysm against a faculty member, a cell-phone video of which went viral and nearly brought the campus to a stand still. This is an example of what Maajid Nawaz means by “regressive liberalism,” where freedom of speech and expression are sacrificed in the name of tolerance, which is actually intolerance. One of the first acts of totalitarian regimes is to restrict dissent and free speech, so perhaps it should be called totalitarian liberalism.
[ Yale college master Nicholas Christakis (in blue shirt) is verbally assaulted by a student who accused him of not doing enough to censor the wearing of Halloween costumes that could be seen as offensive. “Who the fuck hired you?” the girl with the backpack screamed at the professor. ]
An Ultimate Cause
A deeper reason behind the campus problem is a lack of diversity. Not ethnic, race, or gender diversity, but viewpoint diversity, specifically, political viewpoint. The asymmetry is startling. A 2014 study conducted by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute found that 59.8 percent of all undergraduate faculty nationwide identify as far left or liberal, compared with only 12.8 percent as far right or conservative. In a 2015 study published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences Arizona State University psychologist José Duarte and his colleagues reported that 58–66 percent of social science professors identify as liberals, compared to only 5-8 percent as conservatives. Given the power of beliefs to drive actions, college students today stand next to no chance of receiving a balanced education on the most important topics of our time and for which social science is best equipped to study.
[ This graph captures the political bias problem well. From: Klein, Daniel B. and Charlotte Stern. “Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Views of Social Scientists.” Critical Review, 17, p. 264. (click image to enlarge) ]
What goes around comes around. Today’s liberal college professors were radical college students in the 1960s and 1970s, protesting “the man” and bucking authority. One reason faculty and administrators are failing to stand up to student demands today is that they once wore those shoes. Raising children and students to be dismissive of law and order and mores and manners leads to a crisis in consciousness and the rejection of the very freedoms so hard won by their parents and teachers. A generation in rebellion gave birth to a generation in crisis. Thus it is that the revolution devours its children.
Solutions
There is no magic bullet solution to the problems the academy faces today, but as liberals have known for some time it takes decades—even generations—to right the wrongs of the past, so solutions are likely to be incremental and gradual, which is almost always a good thing when it comes to social change, as it leads to less violent and more peaceful actions on the part of both activists and their opponents. Contra Barry Goldwater, extremism in the defense of liberty is no virtue; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no vice.4
Hiring practices fall under this rubric. If the academy is already comfortable with and active in seeking to diversify its faculty by ethnicity, race, and gender, why not viewpoint as well? Given the entrenchment of tenure this will take time, but as that scribe of moral progress Victor Hugo observed, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”5
In the meantime, viewpoint diversity can be increased almost overnight by inviting speakers from a wide range of perspectives—political, economic, and ideological—even if (or especially) if they are offensive to faculty and students. And no more disinvitations! If you invite someone to speak, honor your word, own your decision, and stand up to the cry bullies (as they’re called in this neologism). The assignment of books and papers for students to read—especially for courses in history, English literature, the humanities, and the social sciences—can and should include authors whose positions are at odds with those of most academicians and student bodies. And professors: in addition to assigning students articles and opinion editorials from the New York Times, give them a few from the Wall Street Journal. Balance The Nation magazine with Reason magazine, The American Prospect with The American Spectator, National Public Radio with Conservative Talk Radio, PBS with Fox News.
Viewpoint diversity, however, is subservient to the deeper principle of free speech, which should be applied indiscriminately across the academy, as it should across society and, ideally, the world. What does free speech mean? First, it does not mean that you can lie about someone. Libel laws are in place to protect people from defamation that causes reputational and financial harm. Second, free speech does not mean that the government, public institutions, or private persons, businesses, or publications are required to promote or publish the opinions of others. As the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, for example, it is not incumbent on me to publish articles or accept advertisements just because we’re in the business of publishing. Institutions should have the freedom to restrict the speech of anyone who utilizes resources within the jurisdiction of its own institution, such as a school newspaper. The government, however, cannot restrict citizens’ speech just because it finds their opinions distasteful, offensive, or critical of its policies. (Exceptions have been made for treason and the passing on of national secrets to enemies, but crying “fire” in a crowded theater was most likely an exception that proves the rule.)
Holocaust deniers, creationists, and 9/11 truthers, for example, should have the right to publish their own journals and books, and to attempt to have their views aired in other publications and media venues, as in college newspapers and web sites, but no one is obligated to publish them. Alex Grobman and I wrestled with the free speech issue in our 2004 book Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? As we opined: “Being in favor of someone’s right to freedom of speech is quite different from enabling that speech.” But we chose to write a book about their movement and arguments, quoting them extensively because, we believe, “In the bright light of open discussion the truth will emerge.”6 And although I declined to publish an ad submitted by a Holocaust denier in Skeptic (running an advertisement in our magazines carries the imprimatur of endorsement), I did debate Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review (the leading Holocaust denier organization) in a public forum they hosted.
The freedom of speech has been one of the driving forces behind moral progress because it enables the search for truth. How? There are at least five reasons:7
We might be completely right but still learn something new.
We might be partially wrong and by listening to other viewpoints we might stand corrected and refine and improve our beliefs. No one is omniscient.
We might be completely wrong, so hearing criticism or counterpoint gives us the opportunity to change our minds and improve our thinking. No one is infallible. The only way to find out if you’ve gone off the rails is to get feedback on your beliefs, opinions, and even your facts.
Whether right or wrong, by listening to the opinions of others we have the opportunity to develop stronger arguments and build better facts for our positions. You know that the world is round and goes around the sun, that evolution is real, and that the Holocaust happened. But can you explain how you know these facts? What are the best arguments and evidences for these facts? Could you articulate them clearly and succinctly in a debate or conversation? As John Stuart Mill noted in his classic 1859 work On Liberty: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”
My freedom to speak and dissent is inextricably tied to your freedom to speak and dissent. Once customs and laws are in place to silence someone on one topic, what’s to stop people from silencing anyone on any topic that deviates from the accepted canon? The justification of censorship laws in the consequentialist argument that people might be incited to discrimination, hate, or violence if exposed to such ideas fails the moment you turn the argument around and ask: What happens when it is you and your ideas that are determined to be dangerous? It is the Principle of Interchangeable Perspectives that I introduced in The Moral Arc: For me to expect you to listen to me I must be willing to hear you. If I censor you, why shouldn’t you censor me? If you silence me, why shouldn’t I silence you?
This argument against censorship was well articulated in Robert Bolt’s 1960 play, A Man for All Seasons, based on the true story of the 16th century Chancellor of England, Sir Thomas More, and his collision with King Henry VIII over the monarch’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. In the play a dialogue unfolds between More and his future son-in-law Roper, who urges him to arrest a man whose testimony could condemn More to death, even though no laws were broken. “And go he should, if he were the Devil himself, until he broke the law!” More entices.
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that.
More: Oh? And when the law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast…and if you cut them down…do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.8
For our own safety’s sake we must grant our devils their due.
When the student assembly voted to require faculty to alert students to upsetting educational materials, administrators pushed back.
By: Katherine Rosman
Published: Apr 12, 2023
Last month, a Cornell University sophomore, Claire Ting, was studying with friends when one of them became visibly upset and was unable to continue her work.
For a Korean American literature class, the woman was reading “The Surrendered,” a novel by Chang-rae Lee about a Korean girl orphaned by the Korean War that includes a graphic rape scene. Ms. Ting’s friend had recently testified at a campus hearing against a student who she said sexually assaulted her, the woman said in an interview. Reading the passage so soon afterward left her feeling unmoored.
Ms. Ting, a member of Cornell’s undergraduate student assembly, believed her friend deserved a heads-up about the upsetting material. That day, she drafted a resolution urging instructors to provide warnings on the syllabus about “traumatic content” that might be discussed in class, including sexual assault, self-harm and transphobic violence.
The resolution was unanimously approved by the assembly late last month. Less than a week after it was submitted to the administration for approval, Martha E. Pollack, the university president, vetoed it.
“We cannot accept this resolution as the actions it recommends would infringe on our core commitment to academic freedom and freedom of inquiry, and are at odds with the goals of a Cornell education,” Ms. Pollack wrote in a letter with the university provost, Michael I. Kotlikoff.
To some, the conflict illustrates a stark divide in how different generations define free speech and how much value they place on its absolute protection, especially at a time of increased sensitivity toward mental health concerns.
After decades of university battles over tinderbox issues of students’ rights, speech codes and how best to grapple with unpopular speakers and ideas, proponents of free speech are lauding Ms. Pollack’s quick and unequivocal action. They characterize it as part of a larger national shift, marked by university leadership more forcefully pushing back against efforts to shut down speakers and topics that might offend.
“What was unique about the Cornell situation is they rapidly turned in a response that was a ‘hard no,’” said Alex Morey, the director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan organization focused on issues of free speech. “There was no level of kowtowing. It was a very firm defense of what it means to get an education.”
Ms. Morey called it the “Stanford Effect,” referring to a 10-page open letter written in March by Jenny Martinez, dean of Stanford University Law School, in which she affirmed her decision to apologize to Stuart Kyle Duncan, a Donald J. Trump-appointed federal appeals judge, after hecklers interrupted his speech.
Earlier this month, Neeli Bendapudi, the president of Pennsylvania State University, released a four-minute video explaining why she believed a public university like Penn State had a legal and moral obligation to host speakers who espouse views that many may find abhorrent. “For centuries, higher education has fought against censorship and for the principle that the best way to combat speech is with more speech,” she said.
Ms. Morey called it the “Stanford Effect,” referring to a 10-page open letter written in March by Jenny Martinez, dean of Stanford University Law School, in which she affirmed her decision to apologize to Stuart Kyle Duncan, a Donald J. Trump-appointed federal appeals judge, after hecklers interrupted his speech.
Earlier this month, Neeli Bendapudi, the president of Pennsylvania State University, released a four-minute video explaining why she believed a public university like Penn State had a legal and moral obligation to host speakers who espouse views that many may find abhorrent. “For centuries, higher education has fought against censorship and for the principle that the best way to combat speech is with more speech,” she said.
Cullen O’Hara, co-editor-in-chief of The Review, said that the editorial board did not believe the student assembly represented a majority of students and saw the resolution as endemic of broader free speech issues.
“We are very opposed to trigger warnings which we think would chill the discussion in classrooms, which we already believe are one-sided,” said Mr. O’Hara, a senior.
The student assembly will discuss the trigger-warning resolution with the administration on Thursday, at a previously scheduled meeting between Ms. Pollack and the assembly.
“I think the response is purposeful in focusing on the wrong part of the resolution,” said Valeria Valencia, a senior and the Cornell University Student Assembly president, “turning it into an issue of academic freedom and not one of protecting students, when both things can coexist.”
Ms. Ting, the writer of the resolution, said she is considering amending the proposal. “But first I want to do more due diligence and reach out to faculty and administration to see how we can find the right balance,” she said.
[ Via: https://archive.ph/tRcfo ]
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"an issue of academic freedom and not one of protecting students, when both things can coexist."
No, they can't. It’s like science and religion coexisting. What happens when they inevitably butt up against each other? Because at some point they will. And one of them will have to win.
If students need to be "protected" from ideas, then they're not ready for college. That student needs to seek help. Students need to take responsibility for themselves, not demand the university tiptoe around them. Especially since there is no "bottom" to what can be demanded in the name of safety.
Cornell is better off saying “no” now and then requiring justification for any specific cases brought to them, than saying “yes” now and then trying to put the genie back into the bottle.
‘They are training people who will not be able to see half the population as human beings who need compassionate treatment.’
By: Lisa Selin Davis
Published: May 17, 2023
Lily Cooney was fully committed to social justice. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, the now-26-year-old writing tutor marched proudly in Black Lives Matters protests through the streets of Portland, Oregon.
But the culture in which she was steeped began to take a toll on her mental health. As a white person, she felt responsible for America’s racist legacy of slavery, and worried about her relationship with her Asian American girlfriend. “I felt like I was hurting her, harming her, just by being white,” Cooney told me.
Though she knew she was a lesbian, she began to identify as nonbinary, a result of her understanding that being a “cis woman” was “associated with colonization and white supremacy and oppression.”
One day in June 2020, she found herself suddenly unleashing a tirade against the next-door neighbor of a friend, a white man who said he supported BLM but had cops in his family whom he supported, too. “I had this moment afterwards where I was like, ‘This is not how I want to behave. I don’t want to be a person who just screams at people because they’re white.’ ”
Anxious and depressed, she had trouble concentrating on work. “I started just going a little crazy,” she said. She decided she needed therapy to work on both her “internalized white supremacy,” her “white guilt,” and to “become a better person.’ ”
In January 2021, Cooney sought help from a black therapist in Portland she found through a therapy database, who agreed to work with her around issues of race and gender.
Initially, they practiced mindfulness and self-compassion techniques, from forgiving oneself out loud to the “butterfly hug,” crossing arms and tapping the chest. The therapist even cried with her when she cried about sexual assault or feeling unsupported in relationships. Cooney felt supported and eventually, more in control, more accepting of herself as female.
Then something unexpected happened. The stronger and more mentally healthy she felt, the less Cooney viewed the world through the lens that had informed her activism—a binary perspective that split all people into categories: white and black, oppressor and oppressed, victimizer and victim.
“I care about equality, I care about racism, I care about homophobia, I care about trans people being safe. I just don’t want to walk around in the world where everyone’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are dictated by their identities,” she said.
Cooney wanted to share her newfound realizations, but feared being canceled and ostracized—by her friends, fellow activists, perhaps even her girlfriend. The burden weighed on her, and therapy seemed the place to address it.
When she first tried to do so, in June, 2022, Cooney’s therapist reacted badly. She told Cooney that critiquing cancel culture was giving in to “white supremacy culture,” and said Cooney was making her feel “unsafe” as a black woman. By the end of the session, the therapist had given her an ultimatum: they could continue to work together and keep cancel culture discussions off the table, or “the relationship was over,” Cooney said.
Cooney continued with the therapist for six more months, but her therapist seemed to emphasize Cooney’s victimhood, reiterating that other people were responsible for her oppression as a gay woman. “She said, ‘You’re not free because of homophobia and sexism. You’ll never be free.’ ”
Cooney began pushing back, expressing views the therapist had declared taboo such as not wanting to categorize people based on their identities, or asserting that too many people were being shamed and punished for minor supposed transgressions. Finally, her therapist told Cooney their relationship was finished.
Ultimately, the thing she had feared the most—being canceled for her views—had happened, by the person with whom she was supposed to be able to share her deepest secrets. “I was just totally in shock, just kind of dead inside,” Cooney told me.
Cooney is not alone in finding therapy overtaken by the same kind of social justice ideology prevalent in schools, medicine, and the law. I spoke with more than two dozen therapists and clients who painted a disturbing picture of what happens in the treatment room when therapists make the tenets of this ideology central to their work, instead of offering empowering approaches that help patients make better choices and take control of their lives. Some patients, like Cooney, have also found themselves “fired” for expressing unacceptable thoughts.
I spoke to new therapists, some still in training, who describe a profession that teaches the ascribing of oppressor or victim categories to patients, based on their innate characteristics, instead of seeing them as individuals. Several sources said their applications to graduate schools required them to make a written commitment to anti-racism. Some said they’d been penalized for asking the “wrong” questions in class, detailing how this ideological encroachment damages their own mental health.
I reviewed mission statements and other documents released by professional organizations in recent years, revealing how this revolution has transformed the central tenets of the therapeutic process.
And I talked to psychologists and others fighting back. They described their alarm at how the very people who are supposed to help ease trauma become the source of it, as therapy sessions transform into ideological struggle sessions. British psychotherapist Val Thomas told me “the reason this happened is that activists captured the institutions and professional bodies of counseling and psychotherapy.”
At a time when as many as 90 percent of adults believe there’s a mental health crisis in this country, parts of the mental health profession are in crisis too.
An Overcorrection
There is no doubt that, historically, the fields of psychology and psychiatry—founded in the 19th and early 20th centuries by men like Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and others—made many mistakes and did people serious harm. Bookshelves are filled with volumes on the mistreatment of women. In the early 20th century the field embraced eugenics, leading, especially in America, to appalling treatment of black people. Homosexuality was classified as a mental illness until 1973.
In recent decades, the profession has sought to address its bad treatment and historic wrongs. This led to the development, in the ’80s, of “cultural competency”—an awareness of one’s own biases and a commitment not to impose them onto clients. Subsequently, as psychiatrist Sally Satel describes in a recent article, the idea that therapists required specific training to treat minorities expanded. By the early ’90s, the American Psychological Association (APA) had updated its ethics code, requiring therapists to behave in “culturally sensitive” ways and appreciate “the worldview and perspectives of those racially and ethnically different from themselves.”
“The whole point of understanding cultural differences was that you didn’t walk in and assume,” says Christine Sefein, until recently a professor of clinical psychology at Antioch University’s Los Angeles campus. But over the past decade—spurred by the rise of social media, Trump’s election in 2016, and George Floyd’s murder in 2020—Sefein, like many in her profession, began to see the mission change to something more insidious: imposing the bias and framework of Critical Social Justice (CSJ)—the term some psychologists use to refer to social justice ideology.
According to CSJ, one’s identity categories are paramount to the therapeutic process. Neutrality and objectivity—once the cornerstones of the practice—are now tools of oppression and white supremacy. The major professional organizations for the therapeutic fields have in recent years produced scholarship, mission statements, position papers, and curriculums reflecting this newfound dogma, one that leads therapists to refashion themselves into social activists.
In 2015, the American Counseling Association (ACA), which represents over 60,000 professional counselors, published the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies, dividing counselors and clients into “privileged” and “marginalized” groups and encouraging them to “possess an understanding of their social identities, social group statuses, power, privilege, oppression, strengths, limitations, assumptions, attitudes, values, beliefs, and biases.” They identify “social justice” as “one of the core professional values of the counseling profession.”
The American School Counselor Association offers training for school counselors in all 50 states as “leaders in social justice advocacy, working to eliminate racism and bias in schools.” The National Association of Social Workers—the largest membership organization of social workers in the world—says that “social workers pursue social change” and “embrace the intrinsic role we have in combating discrimination, oppression, racism, and social inequities.” They add, “The NASW Code of Ethics calls on all members of the social work profession to practice through an anti-racist and anti-oppressive lens.”
The influential American Psychological Association, which has more than 146,000 members and is the primary accreditor for psychology training programs, in 2021 issued an “Apology to People of Color for APA’s Role in Promoting, Perpetuating, and Failing to Challenge Racism, Racial Discrimination, and Human Hierarchy in U.S.” Also in 2021 it published an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion framework, promising to “embed” these principles “throughout all aspects of our work.” This includes a commitment “to applying psychological science to create a more equitable and inclusive world” and elevating and honoring “the voices and perspectives of marginalized social and intersectional identities.”
Florida psychologist Nina Silander researched the political bias within the APA, finding a 532 percent increase in politically slanted communiqués—almost 80 percent left-leaning—from 2000–2002 to 2017–2019. (Her data will be published in July, in a chapter of this book.) She says an unacknowledged irony of social justice dictating the therapeutic approach is that it often fails to understand the patient in the room. “A lot of immigrants, or ethnic minorities in general, actually possess surprisingly conservative or more traditional values,” Silander said. Therapists who approach these clients through the lens of social justice may be “wholly unprepared for that reality.”
A recent journal article by more than two dozen academics titled “In Defense of Merit in Science” writes of the APA’s new mandate: “They promote a radical, non-evidence-based, untested psychotherapy that encourages patients to see their problems through a lens of power and race.” This is an abandonment of best practices, they write. “This is not science; it is ideology and, arguably, malpractice.”
Weakening the Client
Critics of this ideological turn have no trouble acknowledging that systemic racism, homophobia, and sexism exist, and that patients may be damaged by these forces. “Of course oppressions exist, of course unfairness,” says Carole Sherwood, a psychotherapist in the UK who has studied the impact of social justice on the field. But, she adds, “The whole idea of identity politics doesn’t fit with therapy because we look at individuals, we look at unique individuals. We don’t group people. The minute you start grouping people and slapping labels on them, you’re making assumptions.”
“Psychology, and especially clinical psychology, is oriented to the individual,” said Tab Shamsi, a clinical psychologist at the University of Chicago who has written about his field’s ideological shift. “But a lot of this social justice ideology isn’t concerned about the individual.”
Counselors steeped in this ideology may assume that systemic racism—rather than, say, destructive habits or distorted thinking—is the source of depression for all patients who are racial minorities. Or that discrimination and stigma (known as the “minority stress model”) rather than concurrent mental health issues are to blame for a young person’s gender distress.
Critics of the CSJ approach are concerned that therapists then focus on forces outside the client’s control, rather than empowering the patient to make positive personal change.
The point of therapy is for clients to “develop more insight into what is troubling them and be able to live more resourcefully,” says UK-based psychotherapist Thomas. “The problem with critical social justice–driven therapy is that there’s only one way of understanding the client’s difficulties. And that understanding is: you are operating in a sort of nexus of oppressed or oppressor groups in society.”
As Thomas put it: “Woke therapy weakens the client.”
Andrew Hartz, a clinical psychologist in New York, points out that when a therapist injects a specific political worldview into the therapy room, many patients are left feeling it isn’t “safe to ask questions.” This population includes, he says, conservatives, liberals, and moderates who feel stifled and censored; people of color who are concerned about racism yet object to anti-racism ideology; gay people alienated by the LGBT culture wars; cops vilified by communities they serve; and more.
Kobi Nelson, now a 41-year-old high school teacher in Colorado, was seeing a therapist for anxiety and depression and to help her assert herself more. Nelson grew up working class in the fundamentalist Church of Christ community outside of Denver, where she was taught that girls should be quiet and self-effacing.
Nelson was pursuing a PhD in education at the University of Colorado a few years ago, and her therapist encouraged her to speak up in class. Many of the classes, from “urban education” to “critical theory,” focused on power, privilege, and critical race theory. This explicitly linked whiteness with oppression
One day, Nelson followed her therapist’s advice and raised her hand to ask why it was okay for students of color to have “safe spaces” to work out racial issues, but white students struggling to understand their “privilege” shouldn’t. “What if white people could have ‘safe spaces’ to work out their privilege in places of higher education before they became urban teachers?” she inquired.
The room went silent, then the professor, a person of color, yelled at Nelson, “There are no safe spaces!” There was more yelling, and though one student gingerly pointed out that they’d probably misunderstood Nelson’s point, the others debated Nelson’s power and privilege. She was shaking, devastated, but she didn’t want to cry “white women’s tears” or leave, which would be seen as white privilege. After that, she says her fellow students shunned her, no longer collaborating on presentations or papers.
When she talked to her therapist about what happened, the therapist pushed Nelson to examine her own racism, instead of helping her to deal with the pain of her public shaming. “It brought me right back to that place that I grew up in, which was this church that said because you are a woman, because of an immutable characteristic, you can’t speak up,” she told me. She felt she was treated like a “heretic” because she didn’t fit the model of an oppressed person.
At least church offers a path to redemption. But not social justice. “There’s no forgiveness. You’re just confessing and confessing and confessing,” Nelson said. “I think many who go into therapy honestly don’t feel like they have a lot of agency, and it doesn’t help when your therapist is confirming that.”
For the burgeoning number of young people experiencing gender dysphoria—distress with one’s biological sex—not only does pressure inside the profession limit the kind of psychological care they receive, so does pressure from outside. More than 20 states have laws banning what is called “conversion therapy.”
Conversion therapy typically refers to the now-discredited efforts to change gay people’s sexual orientation to straight. But in the context of gender distress, activists have intentionally reengineered that phrase to include any therapy that doesn’t immediately and completely affirm a young person’s desire to change genders. This means the therapist cannot explore possible sources of dysphoria such as traumatic childhoods, sexual abuse, and family homophobia. It’s also well-documented that many gender-dysphoric young people have numerous other mental health conditions that need addressing. These include autism, ADHD, eating disorders, and self-harm.
Because “anti-conversion therapy” laws may prohibit exploring those other issues, and require therapists simply to affirm a person’s gender identity, providing exploratory therapy can be dangerous. These laws “create a chilling effect,” says Lisa Marchiano, a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia who often works with clients with gender issues. “Good therapists are afraid to do good therapy. They want to get away from this topic altogether.”
This leaves the rising number of “detransitioners,” people who have made a gender transition, realized it was a mistake, and wish to return to their birth sex, without professional psychological support. “When a client decides to detransition, affirming therapists have no professional tools to cope with it,” said Joe Burgo, a California-based psychologist who works with detransitioners.
(When I told Dr. Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer of the APA, about the patients being damaged by CSJ, he said he had never heard of the problem. The bigger issue, he said, is therapists whose religious or ideological beliefs spur them to deny care to sexual and gender minorities. He pointed me toward the APA’s Code of Ethics, which states that psychologists should be “aware of and respect cultural, individual, and role differences” and “try to eliminate the effect on their work of biases.”)
Treatment based on dogma and ideology contradicts proven modalities like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT helps patients manage anxiety, depression, and other problems by recognizing and mastering destructive thought patterns and behaviors. Rather than focusing on, say, microaggressions as the source of personal distress, CBT encourages people to put things in perspective, stop catastrophizing, and gain control over their reactions and perceptions.
But one therapist in training—who was afraid to be named—said that much of what she is learning is the opposite of CBT. “My concern is that we’re not helping people heal and transcend,” she said. “We’re just helping people live in their victim mentality.”
Training Wheels
The ideologically motivated therapists of tomorrow are being trained today, and anyone who publicly questions the dogma risks jeopardizing their career before it starts.
Take Leslie Elliott, now 46 years old, who was a part-time wellness consultant and homeschooling mother of four when she decided to go back to school in 2019 to get her master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling from the online program at Antioch University.
As her studies progressed, she told me, “I started to be disturbed by the ideological bent of the program.” For example, a faculty advisor told Elliott—who considered herself liberal—that the school was aware they are producing counselors who would not be able to work with Trump supporters. “They are training people who will not be able to see half the population as human beings who need compassionate treatment,” Elliott said.
As she neared the end of her program in the fall of 2022, all students were required to sign a civility pledge that had been put in place after the death of George Floyd. It read, in part:
I acknowledge that racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, ageism, nativism, and other forms of interpersonal and institutionalized forms of oppression exist. I will do my best to better understand my own privileged and marginalized identities and the power that these afford me.
Despite being against racism, sexism, and all the other “isms,” she refused to sign, even though her refusal meant that her master’s degree was, she said, being “held hostage.”
“It was like a purity test,” she told me. She posted a video sharing her concerns that “counselors were being trained not to remain objective and neutral with their clients.” Instead, she said, “We were taught that our main role as counselors was not in our work with clients—individuals and families—but rather as activists for social justice.”
Students were taught they need to assess themselves and their clients on a continuum of privilege, using criteria such as race, gender identity, disability, and more. “For each of these categories we are to give ourselves either a value of ‘marginalized’ or ‘privileged,’ and do the same for our clients,” she said. “And then add these up and see who’s more privileged. And this teaches you how you’re supposed to interact with your client.”
Depression, bereavement, relationship issues, or any host of problems that might bring a client to a therapist were subsumed under identity categories, Elliott said. White clients, students were instructed, should be made to become more aware that they were perpetrating white supremacy. For clients who were not white, the students were told to help these patients “increase their racial identity salience”—that is, to see their problems as race-based, even if they weren’t.
After her video was released, the dean of her program published a statement accusing her of “white supremacy, transphobia, and other harmful ideologies in direct opposition to our professional ethical guidelines.” (The provost did not return several emails from The Free Press requesting comment.)
Antioch’s approach to training future therapists is hardly unique. Delaware Valley University offers a master’s in counseling psychology whose “focus is on developing socially conscious counselors with an interest in facilitating an equitable and fair society for everyone.” New York University’s Silver School of Social Work master’s program offers “clinical social work practice with a social justice perspective.” Montclair State University’s master’s in counseling puts an “emphasis on the infusion of multicultural counseling and social justice practice in all courses.”
This trend is not limited to the U.S.
Carole Sherwood, the British psychotherapist, sent Freedom of Information requests to 30 clinical psychology training courses in the UK. Her goal: “to try and find out the extent to which they had all been captured by critical social justice ideology,” she told me. All 21 of those that responded touted their expansive adoption of these ideas.
Given the training that new counselors and psychologists are receiving in the U.S., not only would they be unreceptive to offering services to those who don’t share their political views, an entire half of the population would be unwelcome because of their chromosomes.
For more than a decade, psychology has been predominantly female. Women now make up almost 75 percent of students in psychology graduate programs (in other counseling professions, the percentage is even higher).
A white, male graduate student in the Midwest, who received an undergraduate degree in psychology in 2015, noticed a sharp contrast in the tone of instruction when he returned to school three years later to pursue a PsyD in clinical psychology. “Everything in terms of the language, in terms of acceptable discourse, had completely altered,” he said.
His program, and others like it, had started to push “levels of activism that we need to be engaged in in order to be good psychologists, to be good clinicians, to do what is morally right and correct in society.” Identity, he said, mattered more than anything else.
He was often the only male in the room and sometimes felt shunned and shut down by classmates, who accused him of “centering himself” if he objected during their discussions of “hegemonic masculinity” and “internalized misogyny,” or to the assumption that every male was an oppressor. “These ideas are no longer just being utilized to identify and spot oppressive circumstances or inequality, but are really being used to silence anyone who has a different viewpoint,” he said.
He also worried about the men and boys who would be seen by ideologically trained therapists. He said several of his female classmates expressed discomfort with males and concern about having to treat them. Usually, though, he didn’t speak up. The fear of being ostracized, or even reported to administrators, if he did so affected his own mental health.
Woke therapy weakens therapists, too. After Trump’s election in 2016 and then the death of George Floyd in 2020, Christine Sefein, who taught graduate students at Antioch, said she noticed her students becoming increasingly delicate. One couldn’t hand a paper in on time after being misgendered, requiring two weeks of bedrest. Students announced they’d fire clients who voted for Trump. “You can’t practice as a therapist if you are that fragile,” said Sefein.
Her students went from “being curious and wondering to being assumptive,” says Sefein, herself a first-generation American whose parents emigrated from Egypt. She resigned in 2021, in protest over the encroachment of politics into her program.
Val Thomas says that any students questioning what’s happening to the profession will be labeled a reactionary or bigot, and “taken through a process of moral reeducation.”
One student at a highly ranked East Coast program texted articles to some classmates questioning the gender-affirming model of transitioning minors, and describing how several countries have severely limited young people’s medical transition. Another student reported her, and she was put on a remediation plan and found to be deficient in “orientation to multiculturalism and social justice advocacy,” because she had “openly shared content that shows a bias against the transgender community, which demonstrates a need to grow in sensitivity towards diversity.”
Compelled to appear before a panel of professors, she disavowed the perspectives she shared in order to continue. If she received another poor evaluation, she was warned, her fitness to continue in the program would be reconsidered.
“We’re in this graduate program where critical thinking I assumed was encouraged. But it’s apparent that we can think critically as long as we’re in the same ideology,” she said. If therapists “can’t handle information that is outside of their realm of comfort,” she asked, “how can they possibly be in the position to counsel clients?”
Fighting Back
Therapists concerned about the direction their profession is taking are banding together to offer alternatives.
Christine Sefein is now part of Critical Therapy Antidote, a platform co-founded in 2020 by Val Thomas. Its website says it “has become a significant platform for critiquing the tenets of Critical Social Justice in relation to therapy. . . . We provide support, advocacy and resources for an increasingly beleaguered profession.”
Andrew Hartz is launching the Open Therapy Institute this summer, whose mission is to “foster open inquiry in mental health care and support those underserved in the face of politicization of the field.” The institute will offer professional development for therapists and promises to provide patients therapy from professionals who “strive to be open, curious, and empathic,” he said.
In 2021, psychologist Brian Canfield, Professor of Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Florida Atlantic University, co-founded the International Association of Psychology and Counseling to, according to the website, “oppose all forms of racism, cultural bias, discrimination. . . and cancellation” and to promote “critical thinking over indoctrination.” Canfield told me, “Under no circumstances, ethically or morally, should we use our clinical positions to proselytize or try to shape the worldview of our clients.”
Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano is president of the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association, which launched in 2021. The website explains, “We are here because those who are exploring gender identity or struggling with their biological sex should have access to therapists who will provide thoughtful care without pushing an ideological or political agenda.“ And Joe Burgo is a co-founder of Beyond Transition. Launched in 2021, it offers low-cost, non-ideological therapy for detransitioners.
Some are finding alternatives to providing therapeutic services for clients. Leslie Elliott refused to cave to the demand that she sign the mandatory pledge and so has not received her master’s degree—she hired a lawyer to resolve her dispute. In the meantime, she formed a peer counseling group with others concerned about encroaching ideology in the workplace, and offers private coaching, based on her belief, as her website says, that “we are each a whole and unique person, not divisible into ‘identity’ categories or political parties.”
As for Lily Cooney, she feels free to express herself, and no longer has the desire to go to therapy. “At this point,” she said, “I feel like what I can do for myself is healthier than what these ideologue therapists can do for me.”
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When your therapist wants to assimilate you into the collective.
Is the era of woke censorship coming to an end on campus? The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, among others, are heralding a new epo
By: Eric Kaufmann
Published: May 2, 2023
Is the era of woke censorship coming to an end on campus? The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, among others, are heralding a new epoch in which university leaders stand up to snowflake students. While it’s encouraging that progressive legacy media outlets are nailing their free speech colours to the mast, these are counter-wavelets on the surface of a rising swell. Progressive illiberalism is not going anywhere because it is baked into the demography of tomorrow’s professors.
The Post cites a number of examples of institutional pushback, including Cornell’s refusal to implement a mandatory trigger warnings policy on academic freedom grounds. The paper and others note the encouraging defence of liberalism at Penn and Vanderbilt, along with Harvard’s new Steven Pinker-fronted Council on Academic Freedom, a group of over 50 faculty members who have robustly lined up against the culture of progressive conformity on campus.
The sceptic in me says it’s one thing to strike down a trigger warning for an innocuous book which doesn’t touch sacred progressive beliefs. Penn’s current trial of controversial law professor Amy Wax for legal speech will be a far more important barometer of the new administrative liberalism.
Still, the gradual emergence of a liberal centre willing to speak its name is cause for optimism. This came to broader attention with the Harper’s Letter in July 2020, continued with an Economist editorial in April 2021, and was followed by the first New York Times editorial in March 2022. Since then, the NYT has run a series of articles challenging campus conformity and has even been willing to court protests by running pieces sceptical of gender reassignment surgery. WaPo is late to the game, but confirms the trend.
[ Fig. 1. Source: College Fix Campus Cancel Culture Database; FIRE Scholars Under Fire database; David Acevedo, ‘Tracking Cancel Culture in Higher Education’, National Association of Scholars (NAS) ]
Why the turnaround? Incentives explain a lot here. First, some of the energy in cancel culture has ebbed post-George Floyd, with the number of cancellation attempts dropping back to the (still high) levels of the mid-2010s (Figure 1). Second, the attacks on universities from the Right, encapsulated in Ron DeSantis’s campaigns against critical race theory and gender theory, permit liberals to use a “both sides” defence of liberalism. Conservative media attention also focuses centrist liberals on the need for internal reform rather than the prospect of further embarrassment. The Right has been a vital ingredient in the new liberalism.
But in the long run, liberalism is giving way to progressivism in elite spaces. The new cultural liberalism in the media reflects the views of senior staff members, and is opposed by affinity groups and young employees. That’s important, because surveys consistently find that “woke” values are twice as prevalent among younger Leftists than among older Leftists. Over 8 in 10 undergraduates at 150 leading US colleges say speakers who say BLM is a hate group or transgenderism is a mental disorder should not be permitted to speak on campus. What’s more, 7 in 10 think a professor who says something that students find offensive should be reported to their university. Young academics are twice as censorious as those over 50. These are the editorial teams and professoriate of tomorrow.
[ Source: Eric Kaufmann, ‘The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary America’, Manhattan Institute 2022 ]
The steady erosion of free speech values is generational. Today’s young people are far more censorious than the young people of 1980 or even 2000, and they won’t grow out of it. While Zoomers are scared of being cancelled, figure 2 shows that they accept this risk as part of their political ideology.
Administrations’ occasional rebukes of student activists or adoption of high-minded academic freedom resolutions will make little difference to this speech climate. The situation in universities increasingly reflects a transformational current of illiberalism, guided by the generations who will one day form our elite.
The free-speech fallout at Stanford Law School continues after last Thursday’s headline-making, administrator-endorsed shoutdown of a federa
By: Jessie Appleby
Published: Mar 15, 2023
The free-speech fallout at Stanford Law School continues after last Thursday’s headline-making, administrator-endorsed shoutdown of a federal judge by students who said his views were too “harmful” to be aired on campus.
Hundreds of students dressed in black and donning face masks emblazoned with the words “counter-speech is free speech” lined the halls of Stanford Law on Monday to protest Dean Jenny Martinez’s subsequent apology to Fifth Circuit judge Stuart Kyle Duncan for the treatment he received when he attempted to speak at the school last week.
The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reported that the whiteboard in the classroom where Martinez teaches constitutional law was covered in flyers defending the students who shouted down Duncan.
And when Martinez’s class adjourned at 11 a.m., Sibarium said, “[p]rotesters, dressed in black and wearing face masks that read ‘counter-speech is free speech,’ stared silently at Dean Martinez as she exited [the room.]”
The same report said nearly a third of the law school joined Monday’s protest. Additional reporting by Fox News said hundreds of black-clad students surrounded the dean:
“They gave us weird looks if we didn't wear black” and join the crowd, first-year law student Luke Schumacher said. “It didn't feel like the inclusive, belonging atmosphere that the DEI office claims to be creating.”
Another student, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the experience was “eerie.”
”The protesters were silent, staring from behind their masks at everyone who chose not to protest, including the dean,” the individual said.
Of course, this kind of peaceful protest is protected by Stanford’s strong free speech policies — the same policies that also protected Duncan’s speech when these students demanded that his speech be canceled due to the “harm” his appearance and message would cause to Stanford.
As FIRE wrote yesterday, Duncan, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, was invited to speak at a Federalist Society-hosted event, “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter,” last Thursday at Stanford. But when Duncan attempted to speak, he was shouted down and heckled by student protestors. When the judge eventually requested that a university administrator restore order, Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach stood up and delivered a prepared speech accusing the judge of harming students by his presence.
On Saturday, Martinez and Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne issued a formal apology to Duncan for the disruption to his Thursday speech. The letter said the students’ right to protest did not include disrupting an event and acknowledged Steinbach’s mishandling of the situation.
Several student groups issued statements in response expressing their anger at the apology and defending the actions of those who disrupted Duncan’s speech as merely the exercise of the students’ own First Amendment right to protest. And Monday’s student protest of Martinez followed.
Stanford’s own policy, as well as California’s Leonard Law, provides Stanford students First Amendment-like free speech rights. But contrary to the argument of the Stanford protestors on their masks and flyers, shouting down an invited speaker is not free speech. It’s a heckler’s veto — and it’s censorship.
Unlike the disruption of Duncan’s speech last Thursday, there is no evidence Monday’s protest of Dean Martinez was disruptive. Yet students protesting on Monday also demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of free speech and the First Amendment in their claims that silencing an invited speaker is within students’ free speech rights and that their dean was wrong to apologize for the event’s disruption.
FIRE routinely defends the free expression rights of both invited speakers to speak and student protestors to protest a speaker. FIRE also defends students’ right to ask pointed questions or make rude or uncivil comments during a Q&A session. But students’ right of protest does not include the right to disrupt an event to the point that it is unable to proceed as planned. Counter-speech can’t happen if the speaker is censored.
It’s clear that Stanford’s promises to enforce their non-disruption policies won’t be enough to ensure a thriving culture for discussion and debate on campus. Students have to know what free speech means, and that it is a force for good. The elite students of Stanford Law must come to learn that free expression is the most powerful tool for social change ever devised — one they could quite capably use to their advantage. But that won’t happen if they keep begging administrators to protect free speech rights only for them.
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Yet another law school produces students who don't know the first thing about the First Amendment.
If these children are so fragile that they can't stand for a judge they don't like to present at an event they didn't have to attend, how in the world can they be expected to advocate in front of, and take orders from, such a judge in the real world? Do they think they get to choose which judge hears the case?
