RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/04/09/trans-ideology-is-destroying-the-university/

Academia is now hostile to free thought – especially when it comes to the trans debate. Few cases demonstrate this as clearly as that of London-based sociologist Dr Laura Favaro.

Last week, Favaro started a crowdfunding campaign to help her take her employer – City, University of London – to an employment tribunal. Favaro claims she was ostracised and ultimately dismissed by her university after writing about some of her research findings, which showed that gender-critical academics are terrified of openly expressing their views.

In 2020, Favaro joined City as a postdoctoral research fellow, where her main topic of study was the debate surrounding sex and gender. As part of her research, Favaro conducted interviews with 50 gender-studies academics on both sides of the trans debate, across multiple disciplines and universities. The gender-critical feminists she interviewed told her they face unrelenting harassment and intimidation. Some even claimed that their career progression had been blocked because of their views. Last year, Favaro wrote up some of these findings in Times Higher Education. Her research left her ‘in no doubt that a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold across universities in England and many countries beyond’.

Favaro was warned by her interviewees that her research could get her into serious trouble. It was not uncommon, Favaro said, for participants to tell her that ‘everybody is going to hate you’ for talking openly about the culture of silence around sex and gender in universities. After her THE piece was published, those warnings quickly came true.

Favaro claims on her crowdfunding page that City was bombarded with vexatious complaints, which branded her research ‘unethical’. An investigation by City found these claims to be baseless. Nevertheless, she says she was ostracised and frozen out by her department. She claims she faced bullying and harassment from a senior colleague. She also alleges there were attempts to persuade her to destroy interview transcripts. Eventually, she was dismissed, despite being on a fixed-term contract. City is then alleged to have prevented her from accessing the data she collected, and to have locked the email account she had used to communicate with participants in her study. In short, Favaro allegedly faced exactly the kind of hostile treatment that her research was trying to draw attention to.

There is now a long line of academics who have been attacked and censored for speaking out against trans orthodoxy. Philosophy professor Kathleen Stock, author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, was infamously hounded out of her role at the University of Sussex in 2021, after students waged a relentless campaign against her. In 2018, Rosa Freedman at the University of Reading found her door covered in urine after she spoke out against gender self-identification. Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at Oxford University, revealed in 2020 that she needs bodyguards to accompany her to lectures. The list goes on.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/09/stanford-and-yale-are-elite-no-more/

Once among the West’s most prestigious institutions, Stanford and Yale are now beset with addicts of ideology who bring them to shame. Recent crises there are vivid episodes in the decline of Western institutions, which now face a choice: Will they, like libertine scions, insist every hungover morning that their namesakes hide their spreading notoriety? Or will they sober up?

At Stanford Law School last month, Judge Kyle Duncan of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit came to speak on the rather academic topic of inter-court dialectic. A federal judge of any stripe used to be welcomed on a law-school campus like a legal celebrity. Federal judges have reached the pinnacle of their careers, and learning how they think should be the keen interest of would-be lawyers everywhere because persuading federal judges is how top lawyers get paid top dollar.

But at Stanford, supposedly a top training ground for future lawyers, Judge Duncan was greeted like a nun in a crack house by the school’s Woke cartel.

Students heckled him. “We hope your daughters get raped,” one shouted. Another screamed, “you scumbag!” One stood up and said, “I f— men. I can find the prostate. Why can’t you find the cl–?” Judge Duncan was unable even to begin his remarks before federal marshals had to whisk him off campus.

Before a few years ago, law students almost never acted this way. If they did, they regretted it. At the University of Chicago Law School, one student led the heckling of a speaking event, and he got expelled. But now, at law schools that are supposed to be our nation’s best, heckling is common—while consequences are scarce.

At Yale Law School last year, hundreds of students heckled a panel of Supreme Court lawyers. They raised their middle fingers. They stomped their feet and banged on the walls. One even screamed “b–ch!” None faced discipline.

These are students who have hit rock bottom, and the mark of their rock bottom is the mark of any addict’s, whether of substance or of ideology. It’s angry self-abasement. Their public vulgarity is their point because it’s a revenge they exact at the expense of their own dignity. By covering themselves in muck, they can say to their targets, “welcome to the pig sty: this is where you belong.”