It is not the time to slack off

I’ve been waiting for a coherent, responsible university policy decision to address the ongoing pandemic (did you know it’s not over?), but generally all we get is minimal effort to muddle along with the status quo. In particular, we’re not demanding that students be vaccinated in order to return to school in the fall, which seems to me to be a really easy requirement to ask for.

Well, some of our faculty are just as disappointed as I am.

In an e-mail to the University of Minnesota community sent on June 14, President Joan Gabel announced that the U will not require students, faculty and staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19 prior to the start of the fall semester. As members of the U community, we are disappointed by this decision.

The U is the flagship educational institution in the state. It boasts the largest medical school, with a faculty of world-class clinicians, educators and researchers; it also serves as a scientific and economic engine to the state. As such, the U should be expected to be a leader in the fight against COVID-19 by supporting science-based policies that create the safest and least-disruptive environment possible.

The U is also a community, comprising thousands of people from across the state, country and world, of all different ages and in all states of health. Its commitment to the community should be the same: to follow the science to create the safest environment possible, especially for its most vulnerable members.

This refusal to insist on the best mechanism we have for dealing with this disease is absurd. When we enroll kids in elementary school, there are requirements for vaccination; they maintain records for that sort of thing, and they’ll send kids home if they don’t meet the requirements. Yet we don’t bother at the college level? Instead, the administration tells us to make accommodations to cope with the effects of the pandemic. So all last year, I happily did what I could. It meant greatly increasing my workload, halving lab size so we could at least give them a taste of lab work, and at the same time, coping with the disruption of students having to go into quarantine or going home for funerals. This was miserable for all concerned. Shouldn’t we do everything we can to end this ugly experience?

You know numbers are currently going up, and new viral variants are killing more people, right?

Unvaccinated people made up all of Maryland’s reported coronavirus deaths last month, as well as the vast majority of new cases and hospitalizations, the state reported Tuesday — data that public health officials say demonstrates the effectiveness of vaccines.

The numbers come as experts try to persuade the vaccine-hesitant to get shots and protect themselves against a virus that has killed more than 22,000 people in the region and nearly 4 million worldwide.

We keep taking every improvement in the situation as an excuse to abandon every policy decision that led to that improvement. Can we please just stick with something until we’ve beat it?

If I had my druthers, here’s what I’d do.

  • Require vaccination for public participation. Everyone should carry proof of vaccination and be ready to show it, or be thrown out.
  • Masks are still required when indoors with other people, like in a classroom.
  • We continue remote instruction, and labs are reduced in size to allow for social distancing.
  • And this is important: we keep in mind that vaccination does not make you totally immune. It improves resistance, but there’s still a chance of infection, especially in the context of new variants that are allowed to proliferate because we’re so slack about maintaining common sense harm reduction.

It’s still time to be aware and cautious!

Hussman, Hussman, Hussman

I do wonder if Walter Hussman was aware of what his $25 million donation to UNC would do to his reputation. He’s standing out as a central villain in the denial of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tenure.

But as news stories revealed the extent of pressure from conservatives, including Arkansas media magnate and UNC mega-donor Walter Hussman, Hannah-Jones said returning to her alma mater to teach seemed less logical.

“Once the news broke and I started to see the extent of the political interference, particularly the reporting on Walter Hussman, it became really clear to me that I just could not work at a school named after Walter Hussman,” Hannah-Jones said. “To be a person who has stood for what I stand for and have any integrity whatsoever, I just couldn’t see how I could do that.”

The journalism school was renamed for Hussman after receiving a $25 million donation from him in 2019. The school also committed to etching what Hussman calls his “core values” into stone on the building. No one, including the school’s dean Susan King, said they foresaw that Hussman would assume the gift granted him far more than naming rights.

When King told Hussman she was pursuing Hannah-Jones for the school’s new Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, he objected. When King stood firm, Hussman peppered Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and Vice Chancellor David Routh, who oversees charitable giving at the school, with emails detailing his opposition. They included complaints about “The 1619 Project,” the award-winning, long-form journalism project originally published in The New York Times and conceived of by Hannah-Jones — she won a Pulitzer in commentary for her opening essay — that’s been the target of criticism from many conservatives. Hussman also personally objected to her views on reparations to Black Americans for slavery. Hussman shared his emails critical of Hannah-Jones’s work with at least one member of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees. The board subsequently decided not to consider her tenure application.

So here’s this rich old fart who smugly assumes that he could buy the curriculum and faculty of a university, and that his one-time major donation made him a permanent consultant in hiring decisions. If anyone wants to donate millions of dollars to my university, we will be grateful and deeply appreciate it, but not if you think it gives you the right to meddle.

It actually makes me think we need to tax the rich more to remove their temptation to think they’ve got the right to own everything.

Tucker Carlson wants to build the Panopticon — in our schools

Yeah, he is really arguing for complete surveillance of every teacher in America to catch them if they dare to teach seditious ideas, like Critical Race Theory, because he thinks that’s what grade school teachers are actually doing. It’s nonsense. You know I’m a big fat flamingly liberal college teacher, and I don’t teach CRT because it’s way out of my discipline and an inappropriate topic for a class on genetics or cell biology, right? So why does he fear a second grade teacher who’s teaching about the times table would sneak in a lesson on racial oppression?

But this teacher lists many good points. Bring it on! For the past year and a half we’ve all been teaching under the lenses of cameras (often purchased with our own money) as we struggle to teach in spite of the pandemic, so this is nothing new. Even before the pandemic, my classes have been pretty much open — I get requests for potential student recruits to sit in, and I always say yes, and I’ve had students bring a friend into the class, and it’s not as if I’d yell “get out!” because they haven’t paid tuition, and there are always a couple of students in the front row with recorders going through the whole lecture. Does Carlson think we’re afraid of people hearing what we teach?

And who is going to review all these classes?

To be honest, I’m fascinated by the logistics of your proposal. In a world where school districts are struggling to recruit and maintain teachers, who is going to man your “citizen review boards” (setting aside the fact that public school teachers already answer to publicly elected school boards)? For instance, in my school district I sense you would need well over 500 cameras going every day. Who watches those 500 screens 10 hours a day (I want you watching my 7 am jazz band and my after school lessons)? What qualifications would these “experts” need to know what they were watching for? What happens when they catch a teacher teaching…let me get this right…”civilization ending poison?” Who do they report that to? I’m also curious who will pay for all of this incredible technology. Maybe I missed it, but can you point me to a K-12 institution where Critical Race Theory is being taught? Hell, can you define Critical Race Theory for all of us? I’m sure you’ve got answers to all of these questions.

If you think spending that much money and time on surveillance is worthwhile, though, maybe you can kick in a few bucks to help those teachers get school supplies. Or give them raises. That would be nice.

For now, though, we can just have fun with the dumbass punching bag who says stupid shit for his stupid audience on television.

Frankly, I’ve never been able to figure out, instead of dreaming up Orwellian plans to have Big Brother in all of our classrooms, why you don’t round up an army of bright young conservatives to actually step up and teach? Is it because teachers work hard, aren’t paid as much as those with similar educational backgrounds, don’t have support from our elected officials, constantly serve as punching bags for those who don’t understand public education, or is it just because it’s easier to throw rocks at a house than to build one?

Here’s the real deal Tuck, I grew up with my mom making me eat your family’s Salisbury Steaks once every couple of weeks (his family makes Swanson TV dinners) for many years. I struggle to take advice on teaching and learning from a guy who makes a steak that, on its best day, tastes like shoe leather that has been left out in a goat pasture for a few weeks. I get that Critical Race Theory is your latest attempt to scare your elderly demographic, but let’s just admit that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

With all of that being said, count me on the cameras Tucky. Like many teachers, I’m in the early stages of understanding Critical Race Theory (most of us hadn’t heard about it until you and your people started crying about it), but if you find me teaching it, have one of the Tucker Youth watching your surveillance devices let me know. If Critical Race Theory involves talking honestly about American history, I’m probably doing that sometimes. I spent much of the last six years advocating for a way for teaching to become more transparent, and in the dumbest way possible, you are joining that crusade. Let’s make this happen TV Dinner Boy.

Man, TV Dinner Boy is an ass.

Don’t you know that denying evolution is the main purpose of Christianity?

In a classic example of confusing belief with historical fact, Kylee Zempel at The Federalist is outraged at the very idea that Christians could be racist. She is so mad that she is going to defend her beliefs by misinterpreting Scientific American.

The Left Wants You To Believe The Bible Is White Supremacist So They Can Force Evolution Down Your Throat
It’s a no-holds-barred attack on Christianity to advance the opposing worldview, and if that means smearing as racist a — *checks notes* — time-tested historical account in which a divine Middle Eastern man is the central figure, so be it.

Can we right away clear up some misconceptions?

  • The Bible itself is a document written by diverse people over a long complex history. In itself it is not “white supremacist” — although you could argue that it promotes a belief in a kind of tribal supremacy.
  • That tribe was not white Europeans.
  • However, while the Bible is not a white supremacist document, your interpretation of the Bible can be.
  • Forcing evolution down people’s throats is not and has never been good pedagogical technique.
  • Your religion, Christianity, is not necessarily opposed to evolution, so teaching evolution is not teaching that Christianity is wrong.

Most importantly, I would point out that waving broadly at a Middle Eastern Jesus does not protect you from accusations of racism, especially when there’s such a long history of your peculiar, particular branch of the Christian religion portraying Jesus as a light-skinned Northern European man. But Zempel’s main point is that her narrow clade of fundamentalist, evolution-denying religion is the entirety of Biblical belief, and therefore supporting evolution is a direct attack on the whole of Christianity, which isn’t true.

“Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy” is Scientific American’s not-so-subtle way of saying this synonymous phrase: “The Bible is racist.”

Oh, that’s a synonymous phrase? Break it down. “Denial of evolution” is a synonym for the Bible? I don’t think so. The Bible contains a half a page of poetry about a creation week that is then denied in the next chapter by a completely different creation story. There is clearly some latitude of interpretation permitted in Genesis. Furthermore, I think most Christians, other than this narrow sect of fundamentalist literalist creeps, would be horrified that you can equate all the complex moral and ethical and historical lessons of their very messy holy book with “denial of evolution”.

Of course, I’d fully agree with the other half of her equation: white supremacy is a synonym for racism.

She rages on a little more.

It would be easy to dismiss the whole article as record-setting idiocy or editorial catfishing. After all, what editor at a magazine with “scientific” in the name green-lights an article arguing that the religion that worships a man born between Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq is “white supremacist”? There’s something more nefarious under the brainlessness, however, and we shouldn’t breeze past it.

This headline is just the latest in the left’s crusade not only to brand everything that challenges their worldview as racist, but also to grant scientific legitimacy to their race-baiting. This time, however, they’re aiming their fire straight at the heart of the scriptures on which Christians base their beliefs — and they aren’t trying to hide the reason why.

So the heart of the scriptures is evolution denial? What did Christians do in the 1800 years before Darwin published The Origin? Let’s take a look at the SciAm article.

I want to unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion…

Wait, stop right there. So one of the arguments is that evolution denial is NOT about religion, and Zempel has distorted this into her view that evolution denial IS her religion? OK.

…and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies. Under the guise of “religious freedom,” the legalistic wing of creationists loudly insists that their point of view deserves equal time in the classroom. Science education in the U.S. is constantly on the defensive against antievolution activists who want biblical stories to be taught as fact. In fact, the first wave of legal fights against evolution was supported by the Klan in the 1920s. Ever since then, entrenched racism and the ban on teaching evolution in the schools have gone hand in hand. In his piece, What We Get Wrong About the Evolution Debate, Adam Shapiro argues that “the history of American controversies over evolution has long been entangled with the history of American educational racism.”

The major point of the article is that the scientific view encompasses the totality of human history, and that humans aren’t always light-skinned, and even modern light-skinned people had darker-skinned ancestors, so what’s with this idea that humans are only 6,000 years old and the different races were established at the time of Noah’s Ark? It doesn’t argue against Christianity at all, but only that one bad idea that creationists strive to get into our educational curriculum, and that historically, creationism has used racial divisions in America to promote itself.

The KKK was and is a white Christian organization. Pointing that out is not the same as saying Christianity and the KKK are synonymous.

Zempel continues on in her naive lumper ways and makes another point that I agree with, but that also undermines her argument.

The complete title of Charles Darwin’s seminal book was “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” In his book “The Descent of Man,” Darwin recorded, “The Western nations of Europe … now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilization,” and said, “The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world.” In other words, Darwin’s white supremacy was underpinned by his evolutionary theory, the same theory Hopper champions.

Darwin’s white supremacist musings weren’t confined to the page. As Phil Moore noted, Darwin’s evolutionary theory influenced racism and genocide the world over. In America, it was used to justify the killing of Native Americans. In Germany, the Holocaust. In the Soviet Union, the murder of non-Russian people. The Serbs used it to rationalize the genocide against Kosovans and Croatians.

Yes! Darwin held racist views, as did many of the promoters of evolution in the 19th and 20th century. The theory has been greatly abused as an endorsement of genocide and oppression. That is entirely true.

But I can also say, in an accurately synonymous way, that Christianity has been greatly abused as an endorsement of genocide and oppression.

That does not imply that the theory or Christianity are necessarily false, or that opposing genocide and oppression are therefore directly opposing the science or the religion. You won’t see many scientists or Christians saying that we can’t condemn King Leopold II’s brutal and inhuman treatment of his African colony, or the slave trade, or the Holocaust, because that would be anti-evolutionary, or anti-Christian. We can oppose the false interpretation of science or religion without being anti-science or anti-faith.

But that’s what the goons at the Federalist want you to believe: by opposing their racism and misogyny and ignorance, we are opposing God himself.

How to shame a mob of racists

Nikole Hannah-Jones has one answer: be so damned good at your job that you can humiliate them by walking away. Read her statement on the chaos caused by the racists who tried to undermine her career at UNC.

“Being asked to return to teach at Carolina had felt like a homecoming; it felt like another way to give back to the institution that had given so much to me. And now I was being told that the Board of Trustees would not vote on my tenure and that the only way for me to come teach in the fall would be for me to sign a five-year contract under which I could be considered for tenure at a later, unspecified date. By that time, I had invested months in the process. I had secured an apartment in North Carolina so that I would be ready to teach that January. My editors at The New York Times had already supplied quotes for the press release of the big announcement. I did not want to face the humiliation of letting everyone know that I would be the first Knight Chair at the university to be denied tenure. I did not want to wage a fight with my alma mater or bring to the school and to my future colleagues the political firestorm that has dogged me since The 1619 Project published. So, crushed, I signed the five-year contract in February, and I did not say a word about it publicly.

“But some of those who had lobbied against me were not satisfied to simply ensure I did not receive tenure. When the announcement of my hire as the Knight Chair came out at the end of April, writers from a North Carolina conservative think tank called the James G. Martin Center railed against the university for subverting the board’s tenure denial and hiring me anyway. The think tank had formerly been named after Art Pope, an influential conservative activist who now serves on the UNC Board of Governors, who had helped birth the center. The article questioned how I had been hired without the Board of Trustees approval, and its writer argued that, because the university hired me anyway after the board stymied my tenure, the Board of Governors “should amend system policies to require every faculty hire to be vetted by each school’s board of trustees.” And yet, when that article was published, it had not been made public that I had been hired without the board approving my tenure or my hire. Even faculty at the journalism school were not aware that I had not been considered for tenure and would not learn this until some days later.

“Nine days after the James G. Martin Center published this piece, reporter Joe Killian at N.C. Policy Watch broke the story that, because of political interference and pressure by conservatives, I had been denied consideration for tenure and instead offered a five-year contract. The story about the denial of consideration went viral, and I was dragged into the very thing that I had tried to avoid as the actions of the Board of Trustees became a national scandal.

I did not know that ironic detail. She’d been willing to quietly accept a compromise until the conservatives themselves balked, and they triggered the whole colossal scandal.

“To this day, no one has ever explained to me why my vote did not occur in November or January, and no one has requested the additional information that a member of the Board of Trustees claimed he was seeking when they refused to take up my tenure. The university’s leadership continues to be dishonest about what happened and patently refuses to acknowledge the truth, to offer any explanation, to own what they did and what they tried to do. Once again, when leadership had the opportunity to stand up, it did not.

“At some point when you have proven yourself and fought your way into institutions that were not built for you, when you’ve proven you can compete and excel at the highest level, you have to decide that you are done forcing yourself in.

“I fought this battle because I know that all across this country Black faculty, and faculty from other marginalized groups, are having their opportunities stifled, and that if political appointees could successfully stop my tenure, then they would only be emboldened to do it to others who do not have my platform. I had to stand up. And, I won the battle for tenure.

“But I also get to decide what battles I continue to fight. And I have decided that instead of fighting to prove I belong at an institution that until 1955 prohibited Black Americans from attending, I am instead going to work in the legacy of a university not built by the enslaved but for those who once were. For too long, Black Americans have been taught that success is defined by gaining entry to and succeeding in historically white institutions. I have done that, and now I am honored and grateful to join the long legacy of Black Americans who have defined success by working to build up their own.

“I will be taking a position as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at Howard University, founded in 1867 to serve the formerly enslaved and their descendants. There, I will be creating a new initiative aimed at training aspiring journalists to cover the crisis of our democracy and bolstering journalism programs at historically Black colleges and universities across the country. I have already helped secure $15 million for this effort, called the Center for Journalism and Democracy, with the generous grants from the Ford, Knight, and MacArthur foundations, and have set a goal of raising $25 million. In the storied tradition of the Black press, the Center for Journalism and Democracy will help produce journalists capable of accurately and urgently covering the perilous challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor, and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism.

I suppose it’s too much to hope that another outcome will be that UNC will repudiated the influence of wealthy bigots like Walter Hussman, everyone at the James G. Martin Center, and certain old rich racists on the UNC Board of Governors. North Carolina has resisted supporting black students and faculty and made life difficult for Hannah-Jones in every step of her career, and she still loves the place despite the actions of the rich and powerful, who have managed to do great harm to the reputation of their school.

How long have queer folk been fighting Nazis?

As long as there have been Nazis. It’s a natural enmity. Today I learned about Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, two non-binary people who battled the Germans in occupied Jersey.

Lucy Schwob is better known by their pseudonym, Claude Cahun, and Suzanne Malherbe by her pseudonym, Marcel Moore. Theirs was a creative partnership, as well as romantic. Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, writer, and sculptor, while Moore was an illustrator and designer.

Cahun is the more renowned of the pair. She used her work to challenge notions of identity and gender with androgynous self-portraits that bring to life an array of characters. In one, she’s a bodybuilder holding barbells and hearts drawn on their cheeks; in another, she’s a lady of the manor swathed in velvet. Her work is a playful clash of the masculine and feminine, but also a critique of the societal norms she spent her life refusing to adhere to.

Cahun believed that gender was transmutable. Assuming different identities was her forte, and she regularly performed in avant-garde theatre in 1920s Paris (experts still refer to her using feminine pronouns, but it is likely she would have identified as non-binary today). Moore would create the costumes that Cahun would wear to tread the boards. A forerunner of the modern artist, Cindy Sherman, she was ahead of her time in more ways than one.

They were also uncommonly brave.

Three years after her arrival, on June 30, 1940, the Germans invaded. The islanders knew early on that Jersey was likely to be occupied – 6,600 fled on evacuation ships – but Cahun and Moore chose to stay. “They’d spent their entire lives resisting authority, so this was an opportunity to be part of the resistance on the island,” says Downie.

Together, the pair created a two-person resistance campaign, with the main focus being what they called their “traps”. Cahun would draft notes addressed to the German troops, which Moore would translate into German, signing them ‘Der Soldat Ohne Namen’ (‘The Soldier Without a Name’).

Their aim was to inspire dissension amongst the troops by pointing out the idiocy of war. Professor Shaw says they would do it in a cryptic way, using poetry, reminiscent of the surrealist sensibility: “It wasn’t like propaganda telling you ‘Here’s what you need to do’, it spurred the soldiers to think their own thoughts about it.” They would catch the bus into St Helier, disguised as old ladies to deliver the messages, placing them on parked cars and inside cigarette packets. They kept as quiet as they could about their resistance – not even their housekeeper suspected them.

Subversive poetry is a perfectly legitimate means of resistance. It bothered the Nazis enough that when they were captured after four years of making nuisances of themselves, they were sentenced to death — they were only spared because the Allies were timely in their liberation of island ports and the French mainland.

Hooray for courageous weirdos!