Very interesting article. I cannot speak to her experiences in the USSR but I have seen how things have changed in the USA in the last 20 plus years or so. I think the stress she is feeling is not limited to academia. I think changes in our country are due to the ubiquity of public forums (twitter, facebook etc.) and the decision by others to quickly make judgements and in many cases take punitive action based on those judgements. They functionally aren’t breaking the law but can have dramatic affects on ones reputation and livelihood just the same. There is no judge or jury to appeal to. You are at the mercy of those who administer “social justice”. Her comparison to the USSR may be accurate but I’m not in the position to confirm her observations.
rule by the mob. yes.
Yes. That leads to greater tribalism as people get nervous associating with others, never sure who is going to out them on social media for an impromptu comment. So they stick only with others they know to be safe and trust.
I find it interesting that the author finds this to be a problem:
But does not find the extensive banning of children’s books because they have men carrying children, same-sex couples, or even biracial couples.
At this point in time, far more books are being banned from schools and libraries because they have representation of Blacks, Hispanics, and LGBTQ people than the number of books which are being banned for being racist. I mean by an order of magnitude.
The author is cherry picking some fringe cases and painting a picture from them, while the banning ofbooks about PoC and LGBTQ people is being determined at the level of state governments. Yet she does not even mention them once. Not even half of a word. Total silence.
Again, if that does not bother the author, but some fringe dude claiming that French food is racist makes her see red, she has deep problems.
I will also say that comparing what he sees to the Soviet Union is interesting.
Mt wife immigrated from the USSR just as it collapsed, so she went through hre entire K-12 education there. She attended a specialized high school for the best and brightest.
The amount of casual racism and misogyny that was a deep part of Russian culture, and still is, would be shocking to most people from the USA. My wife did one semester at St Petersburg State University (it was still Leningrad State University) in 1990, and professors publicly denigrated women, were publicly racist and antisemitic, and still spoke of LGBTQ people in terms that the USA had dropped in the 1950s.
She had a professor gave her a 4/5 on a perfect test because she was a woman. There was nothing she could do, nobody to talk to, because that behavior was perfectly acceptable.
My wife is a rarity among people who grew up in that society in that she has shed all of that. The author of this article has evidently not.
The author is also taking history and twisting it beyond recognition:
That is simply untrue. More correctly, it’s a BIG FAT LIE. They did not want Jews anywhere at all, and everything else was an excuse. She somehow manages to ignore that howling anti semitism and racism of the USSR and pretends that it was some version of CRT.
My wife’s magnet high school had not accepted a Jew for decades, even though Jew represented over 5% of the population served by that school (2% nationwide, but the school represented the Baltic countries, the Leningrad area, into Belarus, all which had large Jewish populations).
This was true of Jewish representation everywhere - if they could, they banned Jews as much as possible. Unless, of course, they were their tame Jews, but that’s a different story.
Overall, minorities were way underrepresented in any positions of influence and power, as well as in the pathways to these positions, and although ethnic Russians were only 52% of the population, they were the large majority of every top positions of power and influence.
In fact, the USSR used the same tactics that the anti diversity people are using. They tried to suppress the different non-Russian cultures and languages, under the pretense that everybody is the same, and by claiming that people should not focus on the differences, all while banning literature in Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, etc.
The Soviet union, like Russian today, engaged in an attempt to maintain the dominance of Russian Culture. They were engaged in constant suppression of cultural and ethnic diversity. Just like so many anti-diversity people who are demanding that schools and colleges go back to an education dominated by the cultures of Britain and Western Europe.
The Soviets were the polar opposite of the pro-diversity people in the USA, despite what she it trying to sell.
I hate that this non-Jew, who didn’t even know about what Jews had to go through until she got into university, and still does not seem to have any idea about the inherent anti semitism of the USSR - an anti-Semitism which it inherited from the Russian Empire.
My wife did suffer the antisemitism, in a close and personal manner - students from her school beat her up because she was Jewish, and the school administration refused to do anything at all. A teacher in the school organized a chapter of the official antisemitic organization, and egged her students to do things like this.
This was an elite high school - one of the six specialized math and science high schools in the USSR (it was a boarding school)
Imagine a school with a teacher who establishes a chapter of the KKK in a high school like IMSA.
THAT was why Jews weren’t allowed in university, not to support representation, but because the authorities were looking to eliminate representation of Jews, as well as of other minorities.
Again, the USSR NEVER tried to “represent the demographic makeup”. All minorities were underrepresented, and ethnic Russians were overrepresented in everything.
They only pulled up “representation” to limit or ban Jews and other small minorities, but never used it to increase the number of any minority in the elite schools, in the colleges, in the high level jobs, promotions, etc.
I find it amusing that she fought for increased representation of women in science, but now when it comes time to fight for other groupe of which she is not a member, she suddenly finds that fighting for representation is “racist”.
The fact that she includes FAIR with the likes of FIRE and AFA tells me that she has no real idea what “freedom of speech” actually means.
I don’t understand how she never came up against the limitations of Jews - I thought that she was Jewish, since she has Israeli Citizenship. Perhaps she married a Jewish man, or her mother was Jewish?
PS. My wife’s high school was one of the six specialized math and physics high schools in the USSR. They were similar to IMSA, but at a regional level, and there were no elite private high schools. These were the academically elite high schools of the USSR.