Musings of an Old Curmudgeon: Weimar Villanova

16 April 2019

Weimar Villanova

And, of course, Villanova is a 'Catholic' university!

From The American Conservative

By Rod Dreher

More decline at Villanova University. This from the school’s events page:

If the print is too small to read, here’s a description of a forthcoming lecture titled, “Reimagining Activism As Combative”:

In this presentation, Dr. Billie Murray will challenge the violence/nonviolence binary that limits our understanding of activist practices. Drawing on examples from her fieldwork with anti-fascist activists, she will argue that we should reimagine activism as combative. Such an expanded understanding will allow us to better discern the efficacy and ethics of combative tactics and how they work in concert with traditional, nonviolent activism. The lecture will be held in Driscoll 134. ACS Approved

It sounds like she is going to give a lecture on why antifa is right to beat people up.

Here’s more about Billie Murray, including some papers she has written, from her Academia.edu page:

Dr. Murray’s current research explores public responses to hate speech and issues of allyship in activist communities as she participates with other activists in counterprotests against white supremacists and other hate groups. She is currently working on a book length project with the University of California Press detailing this work. More generally, Dr. Murray’s research seeks to advance understandings about the relationships between public space and the rhetoric of social protest. Her activist work has focused on human rights and peace organizations and the Occupy movement. Her work has appeared in Argumentation and Advocacy, First Amendment Studies, Western Journal of Communication, and Communication Theory. As a rhetorical activist scholar, Dr. Murray believes that her research should contribute to social justice and the public good. She strives to continuing learning from and contributing to the people who work to make our communities more peaceful and just.

She is a Social Justice Warrior. Says so right in her bio. Late last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education profiled her. Excerpts:

“I am antifa as a set of beliefs and values about the world,” says Murray, who holds a joint appointment in the university’s Center for Peace and Justice Education. “As an activist, I support antiracist action and antifascist organizing, but I draw the line at engaging in violence.” She understands, though, why antifa groups engage in what she calls symbolic violence.

“The way they understand what they do is that lighting a trash can on fire or smashing a Starbucks window encourages a group like the Proud Boys to treat antifa as the enemy rather than going down the street and beating up a Muslim or Jewish person,” she says. The Proud Boys, an all-male organization of self-described “Western chauvinists,” dispute the Southern Poverty Law Center’s characterization of them as a hate group.

Critics accuse antifa protesters of escalating violence and inflaming tensions when their tactics turn destructive. At the University of California at Berkeley last year, dozens of protesters smashed windows and started fires in an effort to stop Milo Yiannopoulos, a onetime Breitbart editor who was on a campus tour, from speaking inside the student union.

Yiannopoulos, who frequently mocked feminists and transgender people, drew particular ire at Berkeley, where he reportedly threatened to publicly identify undocumented students. Berkeley officials blamed the mayhem on black-clad outsiders known as a black-bloc group. The lines between antifa, black-bloc, and anarchist identities are often blurred.

Although Murray sympathizes with the goals of antifa, she says she does not dress in black, destroy property, or punch Nazis, a reference to a blow to the face that a protester landed on Richard B. Spencer, a white-nationalist leader, during Inauguration Day protests in 2017. “I stand back and observe that,” she says. “I don’t need to be in their way.”

In a 2016 lecture delivered days after Donald Trump’s election, Murray denounced the vote results as a manifestation of “hate,” and speculated about whether or not free speech should be respected under the Trumpening.

She appears to have resolved it. In the summer of 2017, VICE News mentioned Murray in a piece about antifa:

Billie Murray is a Villanova professor who’s been focusing on how people should respond to Nazis for her entire career. The academic, who studies community responses to hate speech, says that the events in Charlottesville throw almost all conventional wisdom out the window. She doesn’t buy that “more speech” argument.

Historically, she says, the best response to a white power rally has been to quarantine it and choke it of the attention. After all, attention is the oxygen fringe groups need to survive. But that method only works when the group is small and disorganized. The internet has changed white supremacists’ and neo-Nazis’ ability to organize, and the current administration has emboldened them to to make their views public in a moment that’s completely unprecedented.

Now, Murray says, drastic measures must be taken to stop the far right from metastasizing—even if that means altering the First Amendment.

Any time she’s mentioned banning hate speech, like many European countries do, she’s been trolled. Restrictions on free speech are regarded as anathema to lots of Americans, including powerful advocacy groups like the ACLU. But now, she says we’re at a unique moment in American history. Although even as recently as last week she never would have predicted that the United States might consider banning hate speech, she says that if there was ever a moment that people might get on board, this is it.

“If you’re really interested in free speech, think about who’s free speech is being curtailed by an armed person in the street,” Murray says. “The people who are scared to go [outside.] They’re not being allowed to participate in their democracy.”

Murray claims that she “draws the line at engaging in violence.” But judging from the description of her upcoming Villanova lecture, Murray is going to endorse violence by “challenging the violence/nonviolence binary” and arguing that we “should imagine activism as combative” — this, as a counterpoint to “traditional nonviolent activism.”

If Prof. Murray is not making an argument for beating up political dissidents, and destroying property in the name of left-wing (“social justice”) principles, then what is she doing?

To be sure, Billie Murray has a right to speak her mind. But everybody should know that Villanova University is sponsoring a professor who is going to give a lecture advocating resolving political conflicts through street violence. What if a right-wing professor scheduled a lecture to argue for why right-wingers should beat peaceful left-wing demonstrators up? Imagine that. You can’t imagine it, because it would never happen. Note well that Murray is not just theorizing this as a disinterested professorial contemplative. She repeatedly identifies herself in her public statements and writing as an “activist scholar.”

Consider that Smith College and Mount Holyoke College just put their shared new campus police chief on administrative leave merely for liking a Donald Trump tweet, and one by the NRA.
Smith’s president claims that the action has nothing to do with the chief’s political views. That’s hard to believe, given that those views are behind the campus snowflake blizzard of protest:

Speaking in front of the approximately 500 people gathered, another of the event’s organizers — a sophomore who is undocumented and declined to give her name — said she is fearful. “I shouldn’t be up here,” she said.

“I feel unsafe with Daniel Hect being police chief on this campus,” she continued. As for the group’s broader demands, she said to Smith’s leaders: “I want you to fight for us and care for us, like we deserve.”

Right, Smith isn’t Villanova. So noted. But American higher education in general is overwhelmed by alleged concern for creating “safe spaces,” which is an excuse for policing and suppression dissident thought and expression. Now we have Villanova advertising a lecture on campus by one of its avowed left-wing activist professors, in which she plans to justify left-wing violence against right-wing dissidents.

This is Weimar Republic stuff. One defining aspect of Weimar was the devolution of democracy into street battles between left and right activists. Here we have a professor within a liberal institution, Villanova University, advocating settling political disputes by mob force.

I know what’s coming next. When I pointed out a couple of years ago that a black philosophy professor at Texas A&M, in his public writings and interviews, advocated settling disputes over race and politics through violence against whites — read all those posts here — the educational establishment closed ranks around him. Some rotten white thugs began to threaten the professor, and the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a long piece depicting him as the victim of bullying by me — this, simply for pointing out what Prof. Curry actually said and wrote! Many of these leftist academics want to be able to be super-radical within the academy, but don’t want to be held accountable for what they say. They’re likely to pull the same thing this time, with Billie Murray. I strongly urge people who wish to object to the stance that Murray takes to do so peacefully. Do not do to her what she is pleased to see done to those with whom she disagrees. This matters. This matters a lot.

But do speak out. There is a lot at stake. Princeton’s Robert George writes:

Robert P. George@McCormickProf

1/ We're heading for a bad place. Note a lecture hosted by a "peace and justice" center questioning "the violence/non-violence binary" that "limits our understanding of activist practices." There are folks on the right also "questioning" that "binary." https://go.activecalendar.com/Villanova/event/join-us-for-a-lecture-with-dr-billie-murray-reimagining-activism-as-combative/ …

58

10:50 AM - Apr 16, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

27 people are talking about this

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

You might remember Villanova being mentioned on this blog recently for its administration’s efforts to turn students into monitors of their professors for Wrongthink that violates the canons of inclusive diversity, diverse inclusion, and Social Justice. The academic left is destroying its own institutional standards. I wonder where Father Peter Donohue, Villanova’s president, and Villanova provost Patrick Maggitti, stand on the question of whether or not it is morally acceptable to solve political disputes via mob violence.

Musings of an Old Curmudgeon

16 April 2019

Weimar Villanova

No comments:

Post a Comment