Identity Politics and Academic Freedom.

Identity politics attempts to supplant material reality with an essentialist reading of the individual which relies upon denying the social constructions of these identities while conterminously building up the notion that this identity is inherent, felt. Identity politics is a discourse which functions precisely to reify subjectivity such that any questioning of this identity ends up being answered with claims that the question itself is “discursive violence.” Paradoxically the adherents to identity politics claim its ethos speaks for the oppressed group, but in reality it speaks for the individual. For instance, while racially-motivated and sex-based acts of violence are known phenomena, even discussions in the classroom when teaching rape law have come under fire by aspiring attorneys in law school because of individuals who hijack these discussions as “violence”. The bracketing of personal experience has made its mark in academia such that identity politics requires, much like religion, that the subject not question it, that she should just feel it and the truth will set the subject free.

[...]

The construction of identity politics relies specifically on the neoliberal experience of the individual whereby it is impermeable to change, it never shifts, and it is entirely blocked off to dialogue with competing discourses. This is what I call hypertrophic subjectivity—where each individual confers her own truth based on rigid notions of the singular identitied experience. Dare you question my experience, my right is to claim a violence that your words commit to me. These are times of faith-based unreason where disagreement is understood as an obstruction to one’s freedom. (I think to the tired phrasing of “Let’s agree to disagree” which merely contorts disagreement as agreement from the party who is uncomfortable to find herself before a person who refuses to be her mirror.) Surely, we might begin to consider that one can both be free and in a state of disagreement or challenge.

Speaking with my friend, Geneviève, a few years ago, we framed our experiences as women who come from families where one parent is “white” and one parent is brown within this troubling scene of identity politics. This conversation left us with several conclusions, one being that identity politics never could embrace us (or us it) because the very narrative which claimed to free the sexual or racial other, merely turned on its head the dynamic of who others and who is othered. And logically our lives and bodies were such that no intractible narrative of identity would ever capture our subjectivity simply because identity politics, by attempting to break down homogenous notions of race, gender, and sexuality, ended up reconstructing newer monoliths of the same. In reviewing the problems of callout culture, the bashing of those who make materialist readings of the social, and the general atmosphere of intolerance for divergent opinions within academia, we came to realise that these social behaviours were the result of a hermetically sealed notions of selfhood whereby nothing permeates the discursive membrane separating individuals.

Julian Vigo, Rebels Without a Cause: The Assault on Academic Freedom. Counterpunch 06/02/17.

Related

• This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like, by Jesse Singal. New York 05/02/17.
• Philosopher’s Article On Transracialism Sparks Controversy (Updated with response from author) Justin W. Daily Nous 05/01/17.
• The Campus Mob Came for Me—and You, Professor, Could Be Next, by Brett Weinstein. 03/30/17.
• I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me, by Edward Schlosser. 06/03/15.

Ralph McInerny, on Continental and Analytic Philosophy

From Ralph McInerney's Students Guide To Philosophy (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1999) -- a hilarious accounting of the development of philosophy, and how we got into the mess we are in today. Suffice to say he doesn't mince any words, and I'm sure he had as much fun writing it as I did reading it).

From its beginning, medieval education sought to establish a modus vivendi between faith and reason. This remained true in the thirteenth century. The recovery of philosophy had to be accommodated to the theology based on Scripture. For one brief shining century everything cohered. Faith and reason fully complemented one another. The range of reason was what Plato and Aristotle thought it was. The human mind could know the divine and know that the soul was immortal. Christianity had an ally in the life of reason, and vice versa. It did not last.

Soon thinkers in the name of faith began to devalue reason and eventually the mind had only language to play with. Nominalism and the Reformation effectively dismantled the medieval synthesis, paving the way for modernity. Descartes spoke of a tree of knowledge and the quest for method sought a new systematic integration of the different sciences, but philosophy became progressively more isolated from the natural sciences and mathematics. The turn from the world to the mind as the primary concern of the philosopher led to a succession of theories purporting to establish the a priori conditions for thinking. But the distinction between being and being known blurred to the point where to be and to be thought were identical. What would unify the enterprise of human thought was no longer a connection among the sciences, but an understanding of why we think as we do.

The last great effort of idealism is phenomenology. The return “to the things themselves” disappointingly became a concern with the constituting acts whereby objects become objects (i.e., the conditions of presence), and what had seemed a realism became one more effort to tease from the structure of our mind the character of its objects, to anticipate experience, to turn thinking into a kind of thing-ing that generates its own object. This alteration of the program of phenomenology caused the recently canonized Edith Stein to part company with Edmund Husserl.

Phenomenology, like drugs, is addictive. Imagine finding sentences like the following meaningful: “In fact, after Nietzsche had brought to an end and completed all the possibilities—even inverted—of metaphysics, phenomenology, more than any other theoretical initiative, undertook a new beginning.” (Jean-Luc Marion) It would be more accurate to say that philosophy, both Continental and analytic, succumbed to Teutonic gurus who uttered gnomic pronunciamentos. The influence of a Heidegger and a Wittgenstein can be difficult to comprehend, yet these are the two most influential philosophers of our century. Each proclaimed himself to be a new beginning. Ezra Pound, in his Cantos, sought to produce lines like the uneven ones in the remnants of Sappho’s verse. Some modern philosophers aspired to write pre-Socratic fragments. The style was aphoristic, arguments were scarce to nonexistent, a mood was induced or an attitude produced which ruled out questioning. Nietzsche was tolerable because the madness had no method. In Heidegger, Nietzsche is given credit for having brought metaphysics to an end, whatever that might mean. Heidegger is the first post-metaphysical thinker. He must be; he tells us so. Wittgenstein sought to redefine philosophy, yet boasted in old age that he was a professor of philosophy who had never read Aristotle. One would have bet on it.

There is little sign that the influence of Heideggerian and Wittgensteinian gnosticism is abating. Like a fever, it will have to work itself out. Meanwhile, academic philosophy is in the doldrums, light-years distant from the questions that alone can justify it. If one could make sense of the claim that all -- all! -- the possibilities, inverted or not, of metaphysics had been brought to an end and completed by mad Nietzsche, one might agree or disagree. But what would either mean? It is best to heed Jeeves’s remark to Bertie Wooster. “You would not like Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”

It may seem a relief to turn to analytic philosophy from the polysyllabic breathlessness of Continental philosophy. But this is to turn from Heidegger to Wittgenstein, the one as enigmatic as the other. The linguistic turn, like the transcendental turn, aims at putting philosophy /in any traditional sense out of business. The seemingly straightforward desire to establish the meaning of meaning has not met with success. So we are back at the beginning; philosophy in the twentieth century, like philosophy in the sixteenth, is still trying to get started.

Its present state is obscure, its past nonexistent, and its future nothing worth waiting for. To say that modern philosophy has abandoned classical and medieval philosophy is simply to accept its self-description. Since this has still not led to anything, perhaps it is time to question the wisdom of the abandonment.

Thoughtcrime

The University of Illinois has fired adjunct professor Ken Howell, a Catholic, for teaching Catholic morality . . . in a course on (what else?) Catholicism:

Dr. Kenneth Howell began teaching courses on Catholicism at the University of Illinois in 2000. He has now been informed by university officials that he will not be allowed to return next semester.

The series of events leading up to the termination of Dr. Howell's adjunct professorship began in May, when Howell sent a mass email to the students in his Introduction to Catholicism class. The e-mail was intended to help students prepare for a midterm question which asked them to describe utilitarianism. The different moral judgments regarding homosexual acts made by utilitarianism and natural moral law were cited as examples to assist the readers in composing their answers.

A complaint was later made on behalf of a student in Dr. Howell's class objecting to the exposition of Catholic moral teaching contained in the professor's e-mail on the grounds that it constituted "hate speech". The complaint was circulated among university administrators and presented to Dr. Robert McKim, the head of UI's religion department, who met with Dr. Howell and informed him that he would not be asked back to teach future courses.

Dr. Howell offered to compromise by electing to refrain from discussed the subject of homosexuality in all future classes; an offer summarily rebuffed by McKim. Howell then appealed to his first amendment rights and the principles of academic freedom, pointing out that he had done nothing more than his university-approved job of presenting his students with the unembellished facts of Catholic moral doctrine. This plea was also ignored, and Howell was informed that McKim's decision not to renew his employment was final. ... [more]

(HT: Brian Niemeier, Peoria Religion & Politics Examiner)

Updates

• Dr. Kenneth Howell's personal account of his firing (HT: Thomas Peters, American Papist)

• Complete text of Dr. Kenneth Howell's email to his students and the text of student complaint about Dr. Kenneth Howell's email that resulted in his dismissal from UI.

• Revealing background on the firing of Ken Howell from the author of Cosmos, Liturgy, Sex, who once taught at the same university:

  Of the two classes evaluated, one was on Vatican I and the Church’s response to Liberalism. The other was on the background leading up to the calling of the Second Vatican Council. While I think I was fair, I clearly laid these issues out from an interior Catholic perspective trying to explain the Catholic worldview and how this led to the events we were studying. A few days later, I was called in to Robert McKim’s office. He informed me that the “star chamber” had decided that I was not appropriate to teach within the Program. He said that he could not share with me their deliberations and that the decision was final. He did indicate to me that in general, the feeling was that I came across too much as though I believed what I was teaching. McKim is one (perhaps the only one in what is now a Department) who thinks that students should not know what the professor thinks about what he teaches, presuming that this is the only way to be “objective.”

  With my departure, this left finding a way to eliminate Ken Howell as the final step in a battle that had begun nearly 60 years prior, that is to eliminate people of faith from teaching subjects having to do with their faith. To be fair, there are others who practice their faith who teach about their faith. Conspicuously missing are those of the Judeo-Christian traditions.

• Dr. Jeff Mirus asks "Is Academic Freedom Merely Academic?" (Catholic Culture July 12, 2010):

  One must seriously question the notion—apparently endorsed at both universities—that a professor can contribute to public discourse only by affirming whatever his students wish to hear. But even worse is the idea that a professor must never teach things that a student might find offensive. Surely this robs the university of any possibility of moral seriousness.

• Donald R. McClarey (American Catholic) reports that a faculty group at the University of Illinois’ flagship campus will review the University's decision.
• Dr. Kenneth Howell Update Compiled by Donald R. McClarey. American Catholic July 26, 2010.

Update!

• Faculty Committee Finds That Dr. Howell’s Academic Due Process Rights Were Denied - Update from Donald R. McClarey American Catholic. October 21, 2010.