 unbelievably destructive. Just a couple of, you know, quick examples of how this is playing out. This is at universities, so two articles. Now, I've recommended this before. I recommend it again. I hope you guys do something about it. But I recommend signing up for Barry Weiss' sub-stack. It's called Common Sense with Barry Weiss. If you're interested in CRT, if you're interested in equity, if you're interested in what's going on in the world around us, she is the person that keeps track of it, that publishes it, that, you know, and this is two examples. These are two university professors, each with a different story, but the same basic thrust of the struggle that you face. The first one is Gordon Klein, who is teachers at the Anderson School of Business at UCLA. During last summer, he got an email from a student saying, right, saying, you know, that he should grade his black, so this is from a white student, a non-black student at least, that he should grade his black classmates with greater leniency than others in the class. To quote the email, we are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact of this final exam and project, what I have on the mental and physical health of our black classmates. The unjust murder of Aubrey, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violence conducted of the University of California Police Department have led to fear and anxiety, which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to the traumatic circumstances out of their control. So you requested that the final be a no-harm exam, that it could only boost the one grade, it couldn't hurt the grade. The email continues, this is not a joint effort to get finals canceled for non-black students, but rather than ask that you exercise compassion and leniency with black students in our major. Now, this is a pure racism. Black students can cope. They don't have the mental fortitude to cope with problems out there. I mean, students have problems all the time. There's all kinds of stuff going on. But an exam is an exam. Individual students might be able to go and say, look, I've got this trauma going on right now and maybe get a pass or maybe get an extension or maybe get something. But this is treating black students as a monolith and claiming that they're not capable of standing the stress that's involved. Now, this professor was not going to have any of this, right? He says, as he says, I welcome, I celebrate a diversity of opinions and arguments. And to say the least, I believe in making room for anyone with the grades and gumption to study at one of the nation's most competitive universities. But academia has so corrupted the word diversity today that today diversity means ideological homogeneity. And inclusion means the exclusion of some from a taxpayer-supported university to favor others deemed more deserving of an educational springboard to prosperity. So he was shocked by the student's email. And this is what he wrote 20 minutes later. He wrote, quote, are there any students that may be a mixed parentage such as half black, half Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half? He's calling them on the racism thing. What do you suggest I do with respect to them? That's right. Also, do you have any ideas if any students are from Minneapolis? I assume that they're probably especially devastated as well because of the riots at the time. I'm thinking that a white student from there might possibly even more devastated by this, especially because some might think that they're racist even if they're not. So he wrapped or applied by Sidon Martin Luther King's vision of a colorblind world where people are judged solely by the content of their character, making it clear that I had no intention of treating any students differently on the basis of their skin color. Pretty good. Daniel says Iran is pretty NPR-ish today. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? I don't know what to make of it. I like NPR, so maybe it's a good thing. Well, what do you think happened to this professor? Well, by the evening, students were calling for his job. Soon after, they circulated petition demanding I be fired. Within a day or two, nearly 20,000 students had signed. Without knowing anything about me or taking into account, as far as I could tell, the implications of non-colorblind grading. Think about this. We have to grade based on color of skin. I was attacked for being a white man and woefully racist. Again, I quote from the article, on June 5th, three days after I first e-mailed, I was suspended amid a growing online campaign directed at me. It was around that time I started receiving death threats on voicemail and e-mail. One e-mail dated June 11th read, quote, you are typical bigoted, prejudiced and racist, dirty, filthy, crooked, arrogant, juke, kike, mother, whatever, mother, you know what? Too bad Hitler and the Nazis are not around to give you a much-needed zyklon bee shower. End quote. Whoa! About a week after this whole thing first blew up, there were police officers stationed outside my house. It would take UCLA's threat manager another 10 days to check in with me to make sure I was okay. I mean, the university was freaking out. They didn't know what to do. He continues saying Anderson administrators were rattled for good reason. But now because of the fact that my life was now being threatened, the problem was Anderson's reputation. It hadn't granted an African American professor tenure in decades. It had had better handful of tenured Latino professors. Black students make that about 2% of the student body, and men outnumbered women roughly two to one, leading many students to call Anderson the man-descent school of man edgment. So even though the university administrator made it clear the university would not take any action against me, there was no grounds to do so. The dean took it upon himself and he basically was worried about the school's reputation and suspended him from teaching without any deliberations, right? Not just suspended, he was banned from campus. Now this professor sued the university because, well, since then they brought him back and they reinstated him and they never charged him with anything and everything's fine. The fact that he was accused of what he's accused, lost a massive consulting income, massive loss of reputation, and he's suing as he should. The school, acting irresponsibly, not the students, the school for backing them up in the way they did. This is the fear that this equity nonsense has instilled in people. Another professor, Doe and Abbott, non-political, he is a professor at the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. But during the summer of 2020 with the street violence all over Chicago, he recorded some short videos in which he argued for the importance of treating each person as, God forbid, an individual worthy of dignity and respect, giving everyone a fair and equal opportunity when they apply for a position as well as allowing them to express their opinions openly when you disagree with them. He was immediately they attempted to cancel and this was planned and coordinated but they went after him. There was a group of graduate students. This professor, Abbott, wrote an op-ed in Newsweek. We argued that diversity, equity, and inclusion DEI, it violates the ethical and legal principles of equal treatment and treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being. That's excellent. He proposed instead an alternative framework called merit, fairness, and equality whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merits and qualifications alone. Excellent. So then there was, you know, they kept going after him over and over and over again. At some point he was chosen to give the Carson lecture at MIT, very prestigious lecture, major honor in his field and your public talk to a large audience. The topic was climate and the potential for life on other planets. Not exactly a political issue. On September 22nd a new Twitter mob composed of group of MIT students, postdocs, and recent alumni demanded that I be uninvited. It worked. He was uninvited. On September 30th the chairman of the MIT at MIT told me that he would be canceling the Carson lecture for the year in order to avoid controversy. Unbelievable. Now it turns out that he's giving the lecture but a different university is going to do it at Princeton where Robbie George who is a conservative academic runs a James Madison program in American Ideas and Institutions and he's going to have him with the lecture there. But still this is insanity and we can go on and on and on and again if you're interested in these kind of stories you can follow Barry Weiss. She documents the insanity out there on a daily basis. These are mobs and not interested in justice, that aren't interested in right versus wrong. It's complete groupthink. It's complete collectivism. The individual matters not the political statement is everything. But this is where we are to defend individualism, to defend the idea of justice as giving people what they deserve based on merit, based on achievement or failure, desert, justice is considered radical and insane and worthy of being kicked out of university or denied a speech. It's a crazy world out there. Crazy world out there. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com or go to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. 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