By Steven Yates
January 4, 2024
[Author’s note: the material below represent the conclusions of this author and should not be attributed necessarily to NewsWithViews.com or its editors.]
“It would be my greatest sadness to see Zionists (Jews) do to Palestinian Arabs much of what Nazis did to Jews.” —Albert Einstein
Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) ideology is riddled with inconsistencies and outright hypocrisies. Consider:
Are Palestinians an “Oppressed Group”?
Students educated in the Ivy League DIE environment thought so. This turned out not to be the case, and if one thinks the matter through, it’s not hard to see why not.
The most powerful lobby in the U.S. is AIPAC (acronym for America-Israel Political Action Committee). Many neocons have dual American-Israeli citizenship. For a time they were the Republican Establishment, promoting war in the Middle East on false pretexts (e.g., Iraq, over WMDs that did not exist), and then came to wonder why they aren’t trusted. One of the most powerful watchdog groups is the Anti-Defamation League, founded the same year as the Federal Reserve — 1913 — and ready to accuse any criticism of Israel as a sign of the critic’s “antisemitism.”
Whether anyone is comfortable with the admission or not (and I admit, I am not), Jews are easily the wealthiest and most powerful identifiable group across corporate media, politics, the entertainment industry, and higher education. Less than two percent of the U.S. population controls over 90 percent of these. Even Donald Trump bows before this less-than-two-percent.
One of the unwritten rules of academia, therefore, goes something like: hands off Israel! Never mind the attempts at boycotting the Jewish state, or movements favoring “divestment.”
Ask Steven Salaita, who is part-Palestinian, a scholar with a number of left-leaning works to his credit. He learned this the hard way. Salaita had accepted a teaching position in Native American Studies at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana — presumably a left-leaning institution in a left-leaning state. Following severe criticisms of Israel on Twitter in the wake of Israel’s bombardments of Gaza in 2014, he found his signed contract abruptly withdrawn. He’d already resigned from a previous position and arranged to move to Champagne-Urbana, Ill. with his family.
Salaita filed suit against the university. What came out during the discovery process was that wealthy Jewish donors had threatened to withdraw their donations if Salaita stayed. Money talked.
Salaita found himself jobless. The university settled the lawsuit for $875,000. This did not save his academic career, and he retrained as a bus driver.
Eventually he found a teaching position: overseas, at the American University in Cairo.
Palestinians generally do not appear to count as an “oppressed group” in the American DIE world despite having been kicked violently off their land in the Middle East when (primarily Jewish) global elites created Israel almost three quarters of a century ago and ruthlessly suppressed ever since. Gaza, where over two million Palestinians ended up settling and surviving as best they could, was one of the worst places in the world to live before the recent hostilities began.
Is Israel an “apartheid state”?
Not to Christian Zionists — those who believe present-day Israel is a fulfillment of God’s Old Testament promises, so that present-day Israel has something to do with the Israel of the Old Testament besides geographical location.
A writer whose judgment I’d trusted accused me of falling for “Marxist propaganda” when I invited a number of Christians in my general orbit to consider seriously the apartheid state allegation, in the context of questioning this relationship. But surely the Palestinians have “a few” legitimate gripes — far more, in fact, than American blacks have against American whites, or women against men. There are writers of an intelligent left who have defended the Palestinian cause, but they are few and far between in comparison to those who defend every black cause, every feminist cause, every gay cause, and now every “trans” cause.
The Diversity Most Worth Having …
… is a diversity of ideas, a diversity in thought, not a mere diversity of faces and lifestyles.
However uncomfortable this is. Truth doesn’t have to respect our comfort zones.
We need a diversity of worldviews, as well as political and socioeconomic philosophies, in an environment in which those with differing opinions are encouraged to communicate with one another in a spirit of mutual interest and cooperation, not conflict and hostility.
Critical reflection on our own ideas, and their mutual examination in light of the ideas of other, makes them better. Or shows what is wrong with them and why they ought to be scrapped. Either way, we get better.
This militates in favor of pluralism.
It supports the idea of institutions welcoming both Christianity and alternatives to it, and rejecting the unbridled hostility to everything Christian we see in contemporary academia and culture.
It supports conservatism as well as liberalism and even leftism. It rejects the subtext accompanying every job description such as the one above: no conservatives need apply!
Believe it or not, there are folks out there who self-identify as leftist whom I don’t consider crazy. This is because they get some things right. They have their eyes on power systems, destructive processes, and dysfunctional arrangements. Their criticisms are pragmatic rather than moral. They understand, e.g., that massive and worsening economic inequality is destabilizing if those at the bottom can claim credibly that those at the top “cheated” to get there.
If you need an example of such a thinker, consider Greek author and economist Yanis Varoufakis, best known for his brief stint as Finance Minister with the Syriza Party in 2014. He tried to stand up to the powerful European Central Bank, renegotiate his country’s debt, and work to end the austerity that had impoverished Greece. He’s now an economics professor at the University of Athens and helps head up a pro-democracy organization in Europe (DiEM-25); and yes, he is a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause.
How did I learn of him? Back in 2015 I penned an essay entitled “Technofeudalism Rising.” This essay is no longer available (for whatever reason). A year or so ago, I learned that Varoufakis was working on a book entitled Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, published late last year. Naturally I was more than merely intrigued. But that’s a longer story than I can get into here.
Varoufakis is no Christian. He thinks the EU can be reformed. He has other ideas I can’t countenance. I read him anyway, because (1) he’s a colorful writer who integrates family history and personal experience into his narrative, as I sometimes do, and as opposed to abstract argumentation, and (2) he’s doubtless right that the Anglo-European oligarchic structures of economic power are sweeping us all into a feudal-type order based on what he calls “cloud capital.” In this order “you’ll have no privacy, own nothing, but be happy.”
A close examination of Varoufakis’s narrative and conclusions alongside those of — shall we say — more mainstream economists, would illustrate the kind of diversity I want: a diversity of ideas, of thought, of worldviews.
But where, and how?
We Need New Institutions.
I don’t think American academia is reformable from the inside. Well-publicized horror stories have multiplied over recent years. Nothing here is new. Claudine Gay is just the latest embarrassment, and she continues to have a parade of defenders decrying the “racism” of the “conservative movement” that let to her ouster. You’d almost think conservatives had social power beyond a few think tanks!
Job descriptions such as the one above continue. They are crystal clear about the kind of person they want. No conservatives need apply! I chose that one because in writing DIE directly into the institution’s job requirements, it was unusually explicit.
Trying to reform institutions through what amount to hostile takeovers is not worth it, and not likely to succeed in any event. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tried to do this with New College, located near Sarasota, Fla. Instead of reforms, the institution faced faculty resignations and turned into a war zone. Is this really the sort of environment where quality education in the above sense can ensue? DeSantis, as do so many (and as I did!), underestimated the power of the cultural left, in both woke corporations such as Disney and in academia.
We need new institutions — parallel institutions, as one element of a parallel economy, based on assumptions of the desirability of human freedom (especially freedom of speech and inquiry), free markets instead of corporatism and technocracy, and, I’d argue, a study of those things we did right back in the 1940s and 1950s that made the U.S. economy the strongest in human history — without today’s computing power, mind you! — and set us on track towards even better things. If there’s a role for government in this, then let’s review those areas where government is credited as having helped out in some way and find out, again, what went right and why. Can we do things better the next go round?
Can we circumvent what then threw us off track: e.g., elitist maneuvers that were already paving the way for a more controlled society working especially through public schools (the “progressive education” movement), creeping collectivism more broadly, encroaching secular materialism and the Jacobinism and death culture that invariably comes with that.
To date, we have one institution that fits the bill as the kind of parallel institution I have in mind. It’s called the University of Austin (UATX), based in Austin, Texas, had held a few well-received programs, and plans to admit its first regular class of students fall semester of this year. UATX has received thousands of inquiries from faculty elsewhere. This is a sure indication of the level of discontent that exists within mainstream academia and a sign that one such institution is not enough.
As the slow and painful collapse of DIE-driven institutions continues in the wake of the Claudine Gay debacle, new ones must arise to pick up the ball. Other things being equal, they will cease to be parallel institutions and become a new educational mainstream.
You will know, finally, that if — say — a black woman sits in the president’s chair at one of these institutions, she will be there because of hard, honest work, and not because she checked a box.
*My inversion of DEI to get DIE is deliberate, of course.
© 2023 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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