Jordan B. Peterson
© YouTubeThe fearless Jordan B. Peterson (from his YouTube channel)

"Lock 'em in and burn it down!" says an SJW at Queen's University in Ontario. That's what he jokingly proposes to do to people coming out to hear Jordan Peterson speak. Watch these little fascists in action:

A number of professors on campus have taken a stance against the event, writing an "An Open Letter to Principal Woolf" in response to his statement.

The open letter, signed by professors from several departments, including gender studies, film and media, English and politics, expressed "dismay" with Woolf's statement.

According to these professors' statement, they believe Woolf "mischaracterized" the nature of the problem.

"You fail to acknowledge the members of the Queen's community who are directly targeted by the anti-trans, racist, colonialist, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic bigotry and violence that the speaker and his followers promote," the open letter reads.
[Emphasis mine. - RD]

"The problem created by this lecture is not 'free speech.' The problem is that Queen's is providing a platform to someone who already has extensive access to a range of venues for circulating his odious and ill-informed views," the letter continued.

As of Feb. 26, the open letter has received 113 signatures from various students, faculty and alumni.
Fortunately Principal Woolf has a spine, and stood them down. Good for you, Principal Woolf! That list of faculty signatories is helpful because it tells students which professors to avoid if they want to get an actual education.

Look, though, at one of the SJW thugs banging on stained-glass window, trying to disrupt the speech (to a packed house):

WHERE ARE THE POLICE?! Why are these people not being arrested and charged?! At some point, students are going to get sick and tired of being treated this way by Social Justice Warriors, and are going to start fighting back with their fists and with weapons. If the campus administration and the police will not keep order, then somebody will. You watch.

Meanwhile, Christina Hoff Sommers ran into a buzzsaw of SJW wokeness at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portlandia:



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Radical leftists denounced Sommers in advance as a "known fascist." Lewis & Clark ought to have thrown these disrupters out the minute they opened their mouth. But as the "diversity dean" action indicates, the administration at that college is on the side of the radicals.

A professor at another private college e-mails to me, about the Sommers no-platforming:
Behind every student engaged in such stunts is someone employed by the college encouraging and prompting him or her. In some instances it's a faculty member or group of them, but the truly toxic presence on campuses is the student life division, and they have access to these kids 24/7. It's amazing to me that we have faith and academic responsibility requirements for faculty, and then abrogate those standards when it comes to hiring staff. At [my college], as at most colleges, staff hiring and resources put into ancillary offices are far outpacing faculty hiring (as if there is such a thing any more) and spending on instruction. Student life people are by far the most difficult ideologues on campuses and are the cause of so much trouble. I could tell you a lot of stories about this, but read Benjamin Ginsberg's "Unholy Alliance" in the summer Modern Age to get a feel for it. Faculty are becoming increasingly irrelevant on college campuses, and will do stupid things to make themselves relevant. Even then, they are outmanned.

I have plenty of colleagues who are brutal and noxious ideologues, but they can cause me only so much trouble. 90% of my headaches are caused by low level administrators in our Title IX and HR offices and everyone in the student life division.

The good news is hat students are getting wise to this. There is a backlash coming, but I remain hopeful it's a swing back to sanity. The rabble rousing students get the press, but there are a lot of good, smart, hardworking kids who want an education and are increasingly going to demand it. I think there's something salutary afoot.
Let us hope so. That Benjamin Ginsberg piece is really good. Excerpts:
It is important to understand that such concepts as safe spaces, microaggressions, and trigger warnings are not examples of the hypersensitivity of coddled college students as they are sometimes made out to be by the press. Instead, these ideas are designed to stifle free discussion and to block criticisms of left-liberal dogmas by declaring any and all questions about progressive political beliefs and their adherents to be illegitimate and intolerable. Even the mildest comment presenting a possible challenge to left-liberal orthodoxies will be labeled microaggressive, a threat to the safety of the campus and, accordingly, utterly impermissible. For example, the seemingly innocuous claim that "America is a land of opportunity" has been deemed a microaggressive or a microinvalidative allegation that racial minorities are unable to succeed because of their own shortcomings and not the institutional barriers designed to block their efforts. Hence, say politically progressive groups, the phrase should never be uttered on campus. So much for the idea that colleges are bastions of intellectual freedom.

Most college administrators seem reluctant to criticize left-liberal activists or coalitions of minority students, whatever they may do or say. On a few campuses, most notably the University of Chicago, where administrators recently declared that college should never be an intellectually safe space, college presidents have risen to the defense of intellectual freedom. On many campuses, though, administrators have forged what amount to tactical alliances with local activist groups and are unwilling to take issue with even the most outrageous claims voiced by campus progressives. Note the craven response of Yale's administration to protests on that campus. The administration declined to come to the defense of two faculty members who were hounded by protestors after they had the temerity to speak up for free expression.
And:
The alliance between administrators and campus activists would be a bizarre political curiosity if it were not so damaging to America's colleges and universities. Allowing left-liberal activists to have their way on college campuses threatens to transform an institution that had once stood for free expression and the critical examination of all ideas into a restrictive "safe space" ruled by a new thought police. Allowing administrators to have their way on college campuses is damaging in a slightly different way. When governed by the faculty, colleges tend to develop curricula that are exciting and challenging, as well as research agendas that have changed the world. From the perspective of administrators, however, only the fiscal bottom line matters. The curriculum is evaluated not from an intellectual perspective but from its capacity to bring paying customers to the store. Coming at it from different perspectives, administrators and campus activists seem to have found common ground in the safe space of intellectual mediocrity through consumer sensitivity.

This alliance is unlikely to collapse any time soon. Administrators and campus activists have much to gain from supporting one another. And both can rely on a phalanx of Title IX regulations by the Department of Education to stifle any faculty or student dissent that might arise. Critics can easily find themselves charged with some trumped-up Title IX violation certain to upend their lives for months. At Northwestern, for example, film professor Laura Kipnis was charged with a Title IX violation, namely creating a hostile environment, after a student complained about an article Kipnis published criticizing university policies governing sexual misconduct. Kipnis was cleared, but only after a lengthy hearing and a seventy-two-day investigation by Northwestern authorities. Under the kangaroo-court rules used in Title IX hearings, the accused individual is not entitled to an attorney but may bring a designated "faculty support person." It seems, however, that supporting the accused is as risky as providing legal defense to the regime's opponents in North Korea. The member of the Faculty Senate who attended the hearing to support Kipnis was, as a consequence, charged with a Title IX violation and forced to undergo an investigation for his role in the matter. Apparently only campus activists and their allies are entitled to safe spaces.
Read the whole thing.

What stands a chance of working to bring this tyranny crashing down? The only thing I can think of is what happened at the University of Missouri, when enrollment cratered after the craven administration allowed Social Justice Warriors to dictate campus policy. But let me ask: did that really change anything at Mizzou? Honestly, I don't know; I'm asking you.

When a university administration starts expelling students who disrupt the normal exercise of freedom of speech and association, that's when we'll start seeing these little thugs sorted out.

UPDATE: In this video, Antifa attacks a peaceful discussion at a UK university. It starts around 13:20. The encouraging thing is that some of the students in the audience fight back - with their fists. If university administrators and security personnel refuse to protect from assault peaceful speakers and those who want to hear them, then how, exactly, are law-abiding people not justified in taking matters into their own hands?: