As President Trump wisely uses an executive order to protect free speech against college-campus thought police, news from Cambridge in England reminds us that leftist lunacy isn’t confined just to American universities.
Cambridge University, a pillar of learning for more than 800 years, has rescinded an already accepted offer of a fellowship to Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor from Toronto. Jordan’s sins? Challenging the tenets of political correctness and criticizing an Orwellian proposal by the Canadian government that would criminalize the failure to use bizarre gender-neutral pronouns for those who want them.
In unpacking the multiple elements of this assault on right reason, one hardly knows where to begin. So, let’s posit that Peterson is distinguished in his field, and that he has a huge international following. He dares challenge the speech-controlling merchants of petty grievances who dominate academia, an affront apparently so appalling that critics take to the New York Times to spew breathless prose portraying him as an evil “custodian of the patriarchy.”
And, yes, Canada did institute a law that literally could lead to criminal penalties, including jail time, for repeatedly refusing to use a subject’s preferred pronoun gender or a gender-neutral (non)word such as “ze” and “zir” for “she” and “he.” In a series of lectures, Peterson criticized the proposal, since enacted, as the “dangerous,” “pathological,” freedom-killing abomination that it most undoubtedly is.
Almost as it to prove Peterson’s point that a sort of anti-free thought totalitarianism is on the loose, faculty and students at Cambridge erupted in protest at the idea that a free speech advocate could teach for two months at their bastion of higher thought control. The university caved, and disinvited Peterson from its campus.
Cambridge’s statement explaining its revocation of the already accepted fellowship was the epitome of clueless self-parody:
“[Cambridge] is an inclusive environment and we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our principles. There is no place here for anyone who cannot.”
Read that again. In the very same sentence in which “a spokesman for the university” says Cambridge is “inclusive,” he/she/ze/zir/it says “there is no place here” for someone who disagrees with the school’s “principles.”
Everyone for inclusive exclusivity, step right up! Cambridge is welcome to all, except for those who are unwelcome!
One wonders if Cambridge also is home to minuscule giants, promiscuous virgins, or Churchillian Nazis. Light is dark, heat is cold, and rain is dry.
Alas, this is all too hideous to be funny. And, speaking of which, this is nothing new; it’s just that it’s worse than ever before. It was nearly three-quarters of a century ago, in his novel That Hideous Strength, that C.S. Lewis portrayed a dystopian, English university setting dominated by a Progressive Element (note the capitalizations) which would not allow dissent. Instead, it demanded “obedience to the indwelling ethos or dialectic of the whole” in which anything involving “the verbal interchange of facts would – er, would defeat its own end.” (Italics in the original.)
Unfortunately, the Cambridge University of today is behaving very much like the fictional Bracton College described by Lewis in 1945.
No dissenting views allowed. “No place here” for such things. And a descent into inhumanity and madness, of the sort that develops whenever human thought and conscience are evicted as threats to the established order.
