Academic Anarcho-Authoritarianism In Action

It’s compare and contrast time! First up, this passage from academia’s Ayers apologia:

All citizens, but particularly teachers and scholars, are called upon to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. Without critical dialogue and dissent we would likely be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings to this day. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding— the possibility of change— depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows should be celebrated and nourished rather than crushed. Teachers have a heavy responsibility, a moral obligation, to organize classrooms as sites of open discussion, free of coercion or intimidation.

As witnessed by this moment at Brandeis:

Professor Donald Hindley, on the faculty for 48 years, teaches a course on Latin American politics. Last fall, he described how Mexican migrants to the United States used to be discriminatorily called “wetbacks.” An anonymous student complained to the administration accusing Mr. Hindley of using prejudicial language. It was the first complaint against him in 48 years.

After an investigation, during which Mr. Hindley was not told the nature of the complaint, Brandeis Provost Marty Krauss informed Mr. Hindley that “The University will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct by members of its faculty.” A corollary accusation was that students suffered “significant emotional trauma” when exposed to such a term. An administration monitor was assigned to his class. Threatened with “termination,” Mr. Hindley was ordered to take a sensitivity-training class.

Call it “The Tyranny of Nice“, to coin a phrase.

Or call it Anarcho-Authoritarianism, to borrow from an Fred Siegel’s look at H.L. Mencken from a few years ago in the Weekly Standard, which I flashed back to earlier today, mainly because I was looking for a euphemism for “radical chic” in my post linking to Roger L. Simon’s “Running On Empty” reminiscences on Bernadine Dohrn and her apologists in Hollywood:

The Sage of Baltimore needs to be placed in a broader intellectual context. The man who is still selectively celebrated by people like Rodgers, as if he were nothing more or less than an American iconoclast, was one of a number of anti democratic thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of them, like D.H. Lawrence, were proto-fascists; others, like H.G. Wells, were apologists for Stalin [Wells was no slouch as a proto-fascist himself, either–Ed]. But they all denounced democracy in the name of vitalism, eugenics, and a caste system run by an elite of superior men.

Part of the reason it’s so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that “a marketplace of ideas” (to use Justice Holmes’s term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

That Ayers and Dohrn were consciously or not exploring concepts that were well over 60 years old at the height of their terrorist activities actually isn’t all that surprising. When you’re starting from zero, to borrow Tom Wolfe’s line, it’s easy to forget that you’re also running in place–or at least in circles.