No. It is not necessarily “racist” to warn against abuse of power by outliers within a movement which gains traction with an anti-racist doctrine. This is all I see Ms. Azar doing, and it is not necessarily racist to see her point.
She was a high school student. The school wasn’t surveiling her, the recording was forwarded to school representatives.
…and she wasn’t expelled.
Meanwhile, here in North Carolina, they’re trying to pass a bill that would require teachers to post every single resource they use during the entire year online. (For reference, a single 30-45-minute lesson for me regularly uses 4-5 different resources, and I teach 20 or so such lessons every week in addition to my other duties). It’s being done because our insane lieutenant governor has ginned up outrage that teachers might be indoctrinating students in the dreaded Critical Race Theory, and he and his ilk want to shut teachers down. He also has a form on his website where you can rat out teachers who are teaching forbidden topics.
But sure, the real danger is that college students are objecting to a professor’s racist rant. Yup. Keep your eye on the ball.
Holy frick, that’s terrible. I hope it doesn’t pass.
I read today that it passed in the House but not with a veto-proof majority, and the governor is really unlikely to sign it. Still, though, it’s so insanely awful that a lot of teachers are freaked out.
I can imagine. Even scarier is that the bill in SC is only one battle in the much larger war on education in general and teachers in particular. I’m deeply concerned.
In the case of conservatives, it’s more the enraged wealthy donors who do the demanding.
See, for example, the current Canadian “cancel culture” academic controversy over the rescinding of a job offer by the University of Toronto to a German scholar following complaints about her early writings on the Israeli occupation.
Students? No. But Republican-controlled government bodies? Yup.
There exists no hard line between these two things, though. Ideas are what drive behaviors. If you actually believe something, then you will behave as if you believe it. In fact, that is how you check if someone’s stated beliefs are real—you look at their behaviors to see if they are consistent with their stated beliefs. It is thus entirely expected that ones stated ideas will inform one’s behaviors.
Your example seems intentionally chosen to be innocuous. Disagreeing with an acceptance policy is, on its own, an extremely neutral position. It is possible to have that position without having any animus towards the students who are admitted. As such, there is no inherent reason to believe that anyone would be mistreated.
Racism is different. Racism is a position that comes about due to racial animus, and animus tends to directly fuels behaviors. It seems rather obvious that your two Holocaust denier examples are both antisemitic. Neither were working in their actual academic field, and neither had any actual academic reason to doubt the existing evidence and living witnesses. That ability to deny reality on a subject is an indication of extreme animus towards the group in question. If I were Jewish, I would avoid their classes, even though they were teaching completely unrelated subjects. There’s a reason why, in 2006, Butz was kicked out by his own fellow faculty in his department, saying they would refuse to teach if he wasn’t let go.
As for Akar, she is possibly working in her field, to my surprise. However, the stuff she is publishing is not remotely in an academic style, nor is it being released within academia. (Hence arguments about academic freedom do not make sense.) Her arguments are not only just talking points, but self-contradictory. She attacks all “woke” people and all BLM supporters for the actions of what is at best a small number of people, but then turns around and says it’s wrong to attack all of Islam (which I assume she is more familiar with given her background).
She definitely comes off as someone with racial animus, rather than anyone making some sort of academic argument or trying to change policy. There is every reason to look at what she said and think that her behaviors are likely to correspond. It is entirely understandable that students who know about her blog would now not feel safe around her.
And that’s without getting into whether schools have a reason to want to make sure their faculty actually make rational arguments and don’t come off as someone who might teach rather poorly. I have to say that, if her blog is representative of how she thinks and teaches, I would not want to be in her class, and would be wary of students who had taken that class, as well as the institution that sanctioned that class.
You want your institution of learning to have the best and brightest. Contrary voices are great if they are well backed, but not if they are the sort of thing Akar posts. Heck, there’s the question of what her employment says about the quality of the rest of the teachers there.
Her blog really does come off as that stupid–and I’m not talking about her use of English. (Though surely even an ESL speaker knows that avoiding first person looks cutesy and odd, right?)
My first and second sentences were not meant to be contiguous. She was expelled from the team and sued. I can’t remember if there was any punishment or expulsion from the school as well - I do not prioritize American news as much as Canuckistan. I apologize if mistaken. Thanks for your corrections.
I don’t want to hijack the thread with a poorly written post that was trying to point out that there are several types of academic issues.
? Cite that this professor has been “fired” for her views? AFAICT from reporting on the subject, she is the subject of an investigation following complaints of discriminatory conduct, and has been suspended from teaching.
As usual in these instances of conservative whining about liberal academic “cancel culture”, I’m mystified that the whiners never seem to take into consideration the institutions’ own stated positions and policies regarding anti-racism and other so-called “woke” issues. Just a few seconds’ Googling will lead you to Mt. Allison University’s official policy statement on Racism and Racial Harassment Prevention and Response, which includes the following text:
ISTM that this spells out very clearly that the university takes racist expression seriously as a detriment to their learning environment, and refrains from just reflexively lumping it in with other “diverse points of view” in the open exchange of respectful free speech.
As for whether this professor’s expressed views really are racist, I’m reading her blog posts and trying not to be unduly influenced by her dumbass saccharine writing style of referring to herself in the third person as “Bambi” under a photograph of a cute fawn. I mean, whatever.
But as for the actual content of her posts, such as this one:
Or this one, where she complains about an article criticizing the alt-right movement and white supremacism, and pointing out that they are deeply rooted in the region:
Oh no! A trilingual promotion of a Montreal Football Club presented its text first in… gasp! Mohawk and then in English, leaving French for last! Even though Montreal was chartered as a Francophone city!
Along with masses of Just Asking Questions about reactions to the January 6 assault on the Capitol, and sympathy and praise for Trump, although she disclaims being a Trump supporter.
In short, this blogger claims to be in favor of free speech, but is constantly bitching about other people using their free speech to criticize systemic racism, or to acknowledge historical mistreatement of indigenous people, or to endorse racial diversity. I’m not impressed by either her positions or her logical coherence.
I don’t know whether her university will or should decide that her BLM hatred, for example, rises (sinks?) to the level of actual racism. But I could see why, say, a Black BLM supporter at the university might be concerned about her ability to be respectful and non-racist in her teaching.
I can’t help remembering the words of Dr. Clark Kerr, who was president of UC-Berkeley until Governor Reagan fired him –
“The purpose of the university is to make students safe for ideas, not to make ideas safe for students.”
Do you think a university has to tolerate public expressions of racist rhetoric in order to be sufficiently protective of “ideas”? How about, say, specifically anti-Semitic rhetoric, or anti-Asian rhetoric, or homophobic rhetoric?
I should mention that Kerr was defending civil rights activists and Vietnan protesters. This is how the world has turned an about-face in 50 years – but the same problems have not gone away. The majority still insists on gagging dissent.
As I already asked, do you think that racist rhetoric falls into the category of “dissent” that shouldn’t be “gagged”?
I don’t know whether Dr. Azar’s university will find her conduct to have been racist, but some of it certainly looks unprofessional to me. For instance, calling out the views of students in her classes, by name, on her blog to publicly sneer at them for their alleged “woke” “silliness” is not something that any professor should do, IMHO.
“Some people believe that black people should protest systemic racism and others believe that they should just shut up. Some people believe that trans people should be allowed to live in the way they feel most comfortable and others believe that they should be forced to live as the gender they were born as. Some people believe the Holocaust happened and others don’t. Why are people so determined to stifle the dissenting view?”
Categorizing open bigotry, persecution and toxic disinformation as mere “dissent”, as if it were purely an academic issue, is not a particularly good look.
I think the long term effect of these ongoing disputes about free speech on campuses will, in the end, be the slow demise of the tenure system. Universities are awarding tenure less every year I believe. And with good reason.
Academics are no more immune to corruption than any other group. Imagine for a moment, how other things might go wildly off the rails if the actors were given guaranteed, untouchable ‘jobs for life’. Not unlike cops and priests, they’d be well insulated and nearly impossible to unseat, even in the face of clear evidence.
It may have served it’s purpose once, but more and more it is revealed as an archaic idea now easily exploited, often to the detriment of the institution. There is no regulating body of other tenured profs able to act to protect and defend the system, unfortunately.
I think it’s days are numbered, and people like this woman will keep manifesting until it’s killed off.
There’s a big difference between being gagged, and not being given a platform and credibility of an institution.
She is welcome to spout all the racist bullshit she likes from the streetcorner, no one is going to gag her.
And @k9bfriender has to agree with @Kimstu that posting in the third person alone should be enough to be fired.
I spent a little time the other day, just after you posted, on Dr. Azar’s website/blog. I didn’t respond then because I have several relatives who are recent graduates of Mount Allison. I emailed them to see if they had anything interesting to say about this.
One said she didn’t know Dr. Azar, hadn’t heard about this, and really didn’t feel like looking through it all to see what was up. Another said she thought Dr. Azar was a loon, and that cancel culture sucks. I don’t quite know what to make of that. And another hasn’t responded.
So none of them had anything interesting to say.
That said, it seems to me that your reporting of the incident very much downplays what she was actually writing on her blog. It’s a lot more than “her saying on her personal web site that Black Lives Matter was a radical movement.”
I mean, saying that BLM is radical isn’t even remotely pejorative. Maybe it is radical. What’s wrong with that? Lots of good things are radical. Don’t movements for social change generally start out as radical movements?
But that’s not exactly what she’s saying, is it?
I obviously don’t know Dr. Azar at all. And I don’t doubt your account of your relationship with her and what you’ve come to know about her.
Maybe she’s just one of those natural-born contrarians who likes to play devil’s advocate and stir the pot. I don’t know.
But it’s hard for an outsider to reconcile your statement about her with her own writing.