ne does not have to be a brilliant observer of human behavior, on the order of, say, the great sociologist Erving goffman in order to see that there are many fundamental respects in which Western culture has changed for the worse.  I am going to offer an explanation for that change that in a very loose way that draws upon the work of both John Stuart Mill and Sigmund Freud, ending with a reference to Aristotle.  I am concerned more with the general framework of each thinker rather than the components with which their theoretical artifice was constructed.  I will further argue that modernity has masterfully exploited the deep, deep vulnerability that has been created. 

First of all, I hold that a great many young people these days are angry.  And I regard anger as a form of pain.  When we are sufficiently pained, then we do not see clearly.  That is, our assessment of reality often misses the mark.  It is generally known that the worse time to make a decision is when one is in the throes of rage, precisely because one’s judgment is apt to be fundamentally flawed.  If this is right, then it follows rather straightforwardly that perpetual rage is problematic precisely because this means that a great many of judgments are apt to be flawed.

The pain of which I speak comes from the systematic failure of so many parents these days to affirm their children, where the affirmation is not about material offerings, but involves an abiding investment of the self of each parent with regard to the psychological well-being of their children. 

I hold with John Bowlby that each child has an ineliminable need for the affirmation that comes only with an abiding emotional affirmation of her or his parents. 

To grow up with out that abiding emotional affirmation from parents is to grow up with an aching sense of emptiness and thus a profound sense of longing.  On my view, this emptiness and longing in a child is what occasions the anger about which I am speaking. 

Naturally, every child makes an attempt to fulfill that emptiness and to speak to the eternal longing.  Every child makes an attempt to abate the rage within.  Some, of course, are more successful at doing so than others.  Some, indeed, are quite successful.  Alas, a great many are not.

Now, the hallmark of modernity is that it is always offering something that is supposed to provide one with enormous satisfaction.  It is just amazing how many things come with the promise of changing one’s very life for the better.  If it is not a cell phone, then it is some alcoholic beverage.  If it is not a digital camera, then it is an Ipod.  And on it goes. 

It is easy enough to think that this is just the hyperbole of advertising.  I think not, though, if only because way too much money is spent cultivating the impression that the items proffered for sale dramatically change one’s life for the better—as opposed to merely satisfying a present desire.  I mean what else can beer do but satisfy a present desire?  To be sure, there is nothing wrong with that.  However, I take it to be not to at all insignificant that millions upon millions of dollars are spent suggesting that beer does much more than quench a present thirst. 

So we have children growing desperately lacking the deep emotional affirmation from their parents that once upon a time was commonplace.  And we have a world that offers these children one thing after another with the promise that they will achieve genuine satisfaction.  Needless to say, this is not a good mix.

Now, another factor is that where we have constant rage, then it will turn out that having sustained self-control is problematic.  And wherever sustained self-control is a problem, the displaying what goes by the name commonsense will also be a problem. 

As I have already indicated, everyone knows that deep rage and pain are utterly cancerous, often inclining us to weigh things in quite inappropriate ways. 

One can no doubt see how Sigmund Freud has influenced my thought.  John Stuart Mill has influenced my thought in the following way.  Mill grasped especially the well the significance of a social climate.  He understood that what makes the difference so often in life when we are weary is that we are in a morally good social climate.  To take a simple example, what my occasion me to be polite when in a moment of great tension is the simple fact that I live in a culture in which politeness is routinely displayed and expected.  By contrast if I am in a culture—say, this one—in which going ballistic is just what one does, then ballistic behavior is precisely what one is likely to get when things have gotten rather tense for me.  Climate makes a difference because (a) it tells us what the norms and what the expectations are and because (b) most of us do not want to find ourselves too far outside of the norm.  The exceptions, and there are those, prove the rule.

If I am right about parenting and children these days, then guess what: Rage has become the norm and the absence of self-control has become the norm.  Or to put the point slightly more hesitatingly, both are increasingly becoming the norm.  So, for instance, many high school teachers these days are often afraid of their students.  I don’t like excursions down memory lane.  Yet, the contrast is ever so pertinent here: Ne’er a teacher in my high school that I attended was afraid of the students. 

On the one hand, the change is certainly not owing to some evolutionary difference between high school students nowadays and those back in the day.  On the other, the change did not just come about.  Something occasioned it.  And it will not do to intone that today’s youth have less respect for their elders and authority.  For the issue, obviously, is not whether today’s youth have less respect, but why that is so.  I have sketched a view that provides an answer. 

We did not just become more bellicose, as if a genetic mutation occurred.  We are more bellicose because the conditions that have kept bellicosity in check have been slowly disappearing.  And it is not just that parents have been steadfastly not providing the kind of emotional affirmation that their children need, it is also the case that parents have not been modeling the kind of behavior that turns children into good citizens.

Like language, much social behavior is learnt imperceptibly as we witness the behavior of our parents.  But parents are not there to provide emotional affirmation, then certainly they are not there to model moral excellence for their children.  This point, of course, comes from Aristotle’s thesis that moral excellence requires habituation.  One might very well note that if the claim held true in Aristotle’s day, then it holds all the more so nowadays, given that there are far more distractions nowadays than in time’s past.

I end with an important illustration.  Time was when a great many parents illustrated the virtue of self-restraint before their children.  Every child saws her or his parents set aside satisfying their desires, on various occasions, in order to what was good for the family.  Such behavior on the part of parents was seen as something that decent and mature parents naturally do—a routine part of parenting well.  But what extraordinary lessons that were being modeled before the children time and time again.  A lesson about self-control.  A lesson about evaluating desires.  Above all, a lesson about not giving into desires in order to do what is right. 

Now, it may or may be not be true that adults should have the right to live their lives as they choose.  And it may or may not be true that no adult should be required to sacrifice her or his own successes for the moral excellence of her or his children.  Just so, there is no gainsaying the reality that parents cannot possibly model moral excellences before their children when they (the parents) are too busy to be present.  Parenting in abstentia is but a form of non-parenting.

The difference between human beings and animals is we who are human beings can affirm our capacity for excellence.  This, alas, cannot be done in absentia.  Unfortunately, so many have of us have managed to convince ourselves otherwise.  A consequence of this ignoble lie—perhaps this deliberate self-deception—is that we find violence and threats of violence where once before nothing of the sort existed.  Something changed.  This blog-entry sketches an account of the way in which that that something is us with regard to parenting.  The question, then is this: Will we have the courage to admit our mistake here?  This is the challenge of modernity.  I would that I were confident that we will meet it.   

f racism is the unwarranted belief in the inferiority of another, whether the inferiority be moral or intellectual: then there is nothing whatsoever that conceptually precludes blacks or Muslim Arabs from being racist.  Indeed, the belief that all whites are racist is, itself, manifestly racist, since the view that all whites are racists is no more tenable than the view that all blacks are just.  Again, the belief that the life of a white person or a Jew is, in virtue of being such, less valuable is manifestly a form of racism.  If this is right, then racism is rampant both among blacks and Muslim Arabs. 

If liberals, I dare suggest, have been unwilling to name the behavior for what it is.  Or, more charitably, liberals initially allowed misplaced compassion to get in the way of naming the racism of blacks and Muslim Arabs for what it is.  And now we have blacks and Muslim Arabs holding the observed view that they cannot be racist.  But even if we conceded that, they most certainly can be murderers; and that, last time I checked, is a much worse moral wrong. 

My reflections on the murder of Illan Halimi in France starts with a poignant truth, namely that the term “racist” has come to be one of the most invidious expressions in modern times.  Whereas the term once signaled genuine wrongdoing, it has essentially become an excuse for wrongdoing.   Blacks in the United States and Muslim Arabs in France use the term as a noose around neck of whites.  A white person who disagrees with a black or Muslim Arab or who criticizes one or the other is automatically deemed a racist. 

I do not know how long this modus operandi will continue.  But one thing that I do know is that this strategy ensures that there will be a lack of respect between blacks and whites or Muslim Arab and whites.  It is just a matter of time before whites simply conclude that enough is enough.  In the absence of mutual respect, there can be no genuine social equality.  And both in France and in the United States, I can sense the resentment growing.  I turn now to France.

A great many Jews in France are Sephardic Jews who hail from North Africa.   Many, in fact, actually speak Arabic.  I am personally acquainted with many Jews who, in terms of appearance, could just as easily Arabic.  For more than a dozen years, I have been close friends with a Jewish family that lives in a neighborhood that has a considerable Muslim Arabic population.  Notwithstanding all of many conversations Jews in France, I have never heard a Jews speak ill of Muslim Arabs.  The only exception has been in the context of fear on the part of Jews for their safety.  Indeed, some members of the French Jewish community, with whom I have a strong friendship, did not seem to think that anti-semitism was on the rise in France, although there appeared to be palpable evidence to that effect all over the place just a few years ago.

What people say when they feel entirely free to speak their mind is a very clear indication of their feelings, fears, and concerns—even their hopes.  So it is hardly trivial that I cannot recall any hostility on the part of Jews towards Muslim Arabs.  The only exception has been the concern on the part of Jews for their safety; and as I have indicated not every Jews expressed that concern, though from where I stood every Jews in France was justified in having that concern a year or so ago. 

Now, the truth of the matter is this.  Were French Jews to express their hostility towards Muslim Arabs, using whatever means available to them to demonize Muslim Arabs, such behavior on the part of Jews would be immediately characterized by Muslim Arabs as racism against Arabic Muslims.  And, of course, if as of tomorrow gangs of Jews were to circulate about in Paris and target single Muslim Arabs, and then torture and kill them, just as the gang of Arabic Muslims tortured and killed Illan Halimi, the outcry of racism would be utterly deafening. 

here ought to be a new moral category—moral profiteering.  We have moral profiteering when a person inappropriately applies excoriating moral labels to a situation.  So we have moral profiteering when a person calls something racist or sexist or homophobic when in truth that this is inappropriate. 

Moral profiteering is exceedingly dangerous.  It is exceedingly malicious.  It is invariably about gaining moral leverage and/or silencing another.  Thus, I show that I am quite the thoughtful male if I refer to a disparity between women and men as sexist when, alas, a bit of reflection reveals otherwise.  Similarly, a person shows that she has the right sensibilities with respect to race when characterizes a differential between whites and non-whites, where the non-whites have the advantage, as racist—though, once more, a quite different explanation presents itself readily enough. 

Recently, I was talking with an individual who thought it racist that a high school teacher recommended that she study French rather than Spanish.  Now, of course, we know that from a practical standpoint Spanish is much more useful in the United States than French.  But for better or worse, it is simply a fact that French was once considered the international language, notwithstanding the fact that Spain was ruled the seas; and we know that in philosophy, for instance, the French language serves a person better than the Spanish language.  With these last two points in mind, a high school teacher could most certainly recommend French over Spanish without being racist.  The teacher could also recommend French or Italian, too—and for just about the same reasons unless, of course, the student is clearly headed for a career in opera.

But, alas, it is so much more chic to make the charge of racist.  If one is white and does this, then quite naturally one thereby gains points for exhibiting moral sensibilities with regard to others.  If, on the other hand, one is a minority and does this, then verbally intimidated non-whites.  After all, what on earth can a non-minority say to the charge of racism, and not be seen as racist, except: “You are absolutely right”.  For the unspoken rule is that a non-minority who challenges the charge of racism is ipso facto racist. 

Here, again, this is to turn the charge of racism or sexism into a kind of performative utterance.  This is bad enough, but the approach also precludes from the conversation very important considerations.  For instance, while something could on the face of it seem sexist or racist, the person who is so accused might very well have a sufficiently complicated intentional-structure that suffices to block the charge. 

I vividly recall a rabbi who was nearly blind, but who had pretty much memorized the pathways of the Oberlin College campus along which he routinely traveled.  So from my perspective, since I barely knew him at the time, it seemed to me that he could see perfectly well.  Moreover, whenever we did talk he was always very warm and friendly.  Accordingly, I was rather stunned that he would all but walk right pass me when we were coming towards one another on the very same sidewalk and he was alone.  I would always speak, but it was very clear that had I not spoken, he would have walked right pass me. 

So there I was faced with two rather incompatible scenarios: a rabbi (no less) who seemed ever so friendly when I talked to him in his office or in the student lounge, but who could manage to walk right pass me when he was walking alone on the sidewalk.

I could have called him names.  Indeed, I could have attributed to him a very subtle form of racism.  What I did, in fact, was ask him why he would all but walk pass me on the sidewalk.  Needless to say, I was absolutely stunned to learn that he legally blind and that he had memorized the pathways that he routinely took.  That possibility never ever crossed my mind. 

The moral of the story is this.  As wrong as racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like might be, I maintain that before we apply labels of to an individual we have an obligation—it is an act of moral decency—to inquire into the nature of a person’s behavior when its idiosyncratic character pulls us in a variety of directions.  Obviously, the possibility to make such an inquiry has to be there. 

The wrong of racism and sexism lies in the willy-nilly application of labels to blacks and women, respectively, notwithstanding the moral complexity of their reality. 

Well, the truth of the matter is that reality is morally complex for all of us.  And it is morally wrong—indeed, it can be downright vicious—not to be mindful of this truth with regard to all human beings. 

Ms. Rachel Collins supposed that my failure to see her point of view has much to do with my being male.  Suppose, though, that I were a white male who had suffered a physical handicap from birth.  I succeeded, let us suppose, because I had managed not to let the routine mockery that came from people get to me.  So my stance might still from the depths of my personal experience, yet my being a white male would not be the decisive factor.  The decisive factor would be that I was born with a defect. 

No decent person is inclined to deny the invidious character of racism and sexism.  But it is a mistake to suppose that genuine moral anguish and hardship are occasioned only by experiences such as these.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  And insofar as this is the implicit assumption of people who invoke the charge of either racism or sexism a most egregious error has been made.

I shall make this point in a very personal way.  To hear some people tell it, those who have had to contend with racism or sexism or both have to contend with so much wrongdoing on so many fronts that only their lives merit admiration.  Kyle Maynard is a white male who was born with truncated limbs on all four accounts.  Needless to say, only a fool would dare maintain that it would be better to born a Kyle Maynard, a white male of all things, than a black or a woman—or even a black woman. 

Women and minorities do not have a monopoly on moral admiration.  And this fact alone makes it abundantly clear that it is a mistake to trivialize the moral complexity of those who are neither women nor minorities. 

I am struck by the fact that there is so much hatred in the world nowadays.  I lay a lot of the blame at the feet of those who engage in what I call moral profiteering.  This is not because I have any desire to reject or minimize the reality of the wrong racism or sexism, but because I think that this endeavor, as laudable as it might be, must not come at the expense of those who are morally innocent.  Claiming that all men are rapist or that all whites are racist is rather like the suicide bomber who claims that little children on a school bus are without innocence.   

Quite simply, moral profiteering is none other than one of the handmaidens of evil.

here is a very real sense in which humanity is worse off now than it was a mere 20 years ago.   And the most obvious question is: How can that be, given that our knowledge has increased exponentially?  My view is that any account of this matter will have to include as an explanation the retreat from moral objectivity.  “It is all good,” as they often say nowadays.  But, of course, if it is all good, then the idea of moral objectivity has been completely eviscerated.

Every now and I thank God that the Civil Rights Movement occurred when it did when appeals to objective morality were an ineliminable part of the argument—appeals which in fact had great moral force.  Back then—a mere 40 or so years ago, (i) the biological equality of all human beings was a decisive reason in favor of the view that (ii) all human beings have the same moral standing.  A person could not assert (i) and, at the same, time reject (ii).  Or so it was if the person wanted to be considered reasonable.

aculty members have set a most despicable moral climate across American college campuses.  And I suggest that the present Facebook.Com fiasco at Syracuse University is a reflection of this general reality.  Thus, I mean to be addressing the question of what factors might have given rise to the behavior the females in the class.

In the inimitable words of Solomon: “To everything there is a season; a time for every purpose under the heaven . . . . A time to rend, a time to sew; a time to keep silent, and a time to speak”.  Oh how, professors need to heed the words of Solomon.  Let me explain.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, faculty members at a great many universities thought absolutely nothing about uttering some of the most vituperative remarks conceivable regarding George Bush.  Nothing whatsoever seems to have been off limits.  And just about anything served as a segue to a nasty remark about George Bush.  If a student commented that she or he had just returned from the funeral of a parent, a professor might very well have uttered in response: “I wish that Bush had died instead of your parents”. 

Of course, Mr. George Bush is open to criticism.  But the point is this: (a) Faculty members generally showed no sense of propriety in criticizing him.  No moment seemed inappropriate, exhibiting vulture-like behavior in their eagerness to do so.  (b) There was no limit at all to the depth of meanness that was displayed.  Indeed, people seemed to have thought that they had a moral duty to lambaste Mr. Bush at every opportunity in the most vicious way possible.

Behold, then, a moral climate that has been set by professors who believe that they are morally entitled to be as hostile as they damn well please when ever they damn well please.  And it is precisely this example that they have set before their students time and time again.  Needless to say, this moral climate reveals itself in other untoward ways, as I shall briefly indicate momentarily.

Now, there is a failure on the part of faculty to model some very important virtues of the self.  First, there is the very important trait of self-restraint.  With adulthood, there is supposed to be a maturity that carries in its wake self-restraint.  Minimally, self-restraint means that one does not act on every feeling that one has and one does not say everything that comes to one’s mind.  The obvious case pertains to physical attraction.  No matter how attractive or, for that matter, unattractive I take a student of mine to be, I utter no such thing to her or him.  The fact that I am absolutely bowled over by a student’s attractiveness or disgusted by a student’s unattractiveness is no excuse. 

Or to take a quite different example: Whatever I may think about any of the monotheistic religions, my job before my students is to keep my opinion to myself.  Respect for religious diversity is impossible in the absence of self-restraint.  Most certainly, I do not, as faculty member, lambaste a student who is a Christian because I have strong objections to the Christian right; for commonsense or the light of reason, or whatever, reveals that Christianity and the Christian right are not, by a long shot, one and the same, no more than Islam and radical Islamic terrorists are.  Yet, I have colleagues who will trip all over themselves making the latter distinction but who turn a deaf ear to the former distinction. 

In addition to self-restraint, there is the related idea of respect for a person as holder of an office or title.  In addressing a priest or a nun, I should pull back on the use of profanity.  This I should do whether I am Catholic or not.  What is more, I can exhibit respect for the role that a person has even as I make it clear that I do not share the person’s views regarding some issue.  For instance, in the highly unlikely event that the Pope and I were to have a conversation about social issues, I might contend that the Church has not done enough to prevent the sexual abuse of children.  This can be done forcefully and respectfully. 

During the 2004 presidential campaign, most college professors exhibited neither self-restraint nor respect for the office of the presidency.  Thus, they modeled before their students a flagrant absence of what Adam Smith referred to as self-command.  This sort of thing happens on a more general level. 

Nowadays, students know perfectly well that with some professors that there is no point in criticizing affirmative action if they (the students) want to receive a passing grade in the course.  But how can that be?  Affirmative action is way too complicated a matter for there not to be decent objections to either side of the practice.  The same holds for abortion.  But one would never know that from the coercion and verbal intimidation that is characteristic of professors in the classroom. 

So what students have leant from many professors is that there is nothing like a good ole-fashion invective to silence a student or someone with an opposing view.  Worse, it is held that such behavior is morally justified in the name of advancing the "chosen" political agenda. 

In general, professors are failing to model self-command in the form of self-restraint and respect for the office or title that a person might have.  So if we apply the principle “As professors do, so should we the students behave”, then the distasteful and mean remarks by students on Facebook.Com are none other than an exemplification of the very model that students see exhibited by their professors time and time again.  Why on earth should the students be expected to exhibit any greater moral excellence than the professor who are instructing them, and so who are modeling the very absence of moral excellence? 

It is both silly and disingenuous for professors to expect their students to exercise marvelous self-command in terms of how they, the students, criticize and comment upon their professors when professors are living example of just the opposite.  So I ask: Why should a professor be shown any more respect than the leader of a country?  If sheer meanness and viciousness is perfectly permissible, morally speaking, in the one case, then why is not just as permissible in the other. 

In the name of their political and social agendas, professors have legitimized meanness and verbal intimidation.  They have licensed venomous caricatures and fulsome analogies.  Accordingly, the absolutely tasteless remarks of the Syracuse University students on Facebook.Com about their writing professor should not surprise us at all.  This is because the students have flawlessly mirrored a lesson that has been well taught in Syracuse University classrooms countless times: Nasty and unquestionably mean-spirited remarks by professors against those who do not share the professor's view of things.  Not to see this is to be more than a little hypocritical.  But then hypocrisy would seem to have become the specialty of college campuses.  No institution on the face of this earth claims to be more open-minded than the university.  None, however, is more at odds with its very own claim in this regard. 

Naturally, I understand all too well that the remarks of a professor in the classroom are protected by free speech.  And I support that.  I also understand that the president of the United States is a public figure with all that this implies, whereas a professor most certainly is not.  But, alas, these considerations serve only to underscore the point regarding the exercise of self-restraint and showing respect for the office that a person has.  For it is surely in the context of freedom that the excellence of self-command is showcased.  Being a professor does not change this moral reality.

Quite simply, then, Syracuse University is demanding a moral excellence—a level of self-command—from its students that it is failing to demand of its faculty.  And that is egregiously misguided.*

_________________

* For the record, let me me explicitly state that I know nothing at all about the views of the writing professor involved in the Facebook.Com fiasco.  I have written about the moral climate generally, which impacts every instructor to some degree or the other.  Finally, it is not my view that bad behavior justifies excuses bad behavior.  Rather, I been concerned to point out the context in which the behavior of the students took place. 

ow we name things is hardly trivial.  I could be merely expressing my informed opinion about something.  Or, I could be launching a full-fledged verbal attack.  Now, what exactly am I doing when I express my disagreement with your views?  Offhand, it would not occur to me to think that I am attaching you.  Although it might be that I am attacking you, that most certainly need not be the case.  Nor am I attacking you if I present arguments and reasons for why I disagree with you.  This is so even if you have counter-arguments to my arguments. 

So it came as quite a surprise to me to run across a blog-entry entitled “When Colleagues Attack!”  In my blog entry, I confined my remarks to the issue; accordingly, it would not have occurred to me to think that I had attacked the writing professor whose students had criticized her on the website Facebook.Com.  I did not call her names.  I did not make allusions to her character.  What I did do, however, was defend the view that the University did not handle the situation properly and that what the students said was protected by the First Amendment as free speech.   Unless I am missing something, this does not constitute attacking her—at least not unless you hold the view that expressing views at odds with hers thereby constitutes an attack. 

Professor Rachel Collins maintains a blog.  I maintain a blog.  She is absolutely entitled to express her opinion about my views regarding the situation.  She has not in fact attacked me.  But just as I do not suppose that she attacked me, I am at a loss as to just how it turns out that I have attacked her—unless disagreement thereby constitutes an attack.  But since I assume that she rejects that view in her own case, I am going to allow myself that possibility in my own case.

Now, I stand by my initial assessment even as I take seriously the difference in standing between me and Ms. Collins.  I am a male; I am a full professor.  She, as the pronoun would suggest, is a female; she is a graduate student.  This is not a trivial difference at all.  And I am quite mindful of the fact that she is vulnerable in ways that I am not.

Let me also be unmistakably clear that I most certainly hold that the remarks made by the students were utterly distasteful.  Many of those remarks were in fact mean-spirited.  Here are four such comments made by students on Facebook.Com:

■I’d rather watch my brother masturbate to midget porn with my mom than go to your class

■I’d rather be eaten out by a monkey than go to your class

■I’d rather eat all the hair stuck in the drain of the showers than go to your class

■I’d rather scrape the discharge off your vagina from your yeast infection than go to your class

Are these remarks utterly vulgar and distasteful?  Absolutely.  Are these remark threatening, harassing, slanderous, and libelous?  I do not see that they are. 

Would it have been better had the students not have made such remarks?  Obviously it would have been better.  I am no fool.  I can see the horrendous indecency of the remarks. 

But the indecency of these remarks is not the issue.  The issue is whether or not these remarks ought to have been protected as a form of free speech; and is it relevant that Ms. Collin’s is a female graduate student. 

Well, I do not see the relevance of being male or female here.  For I can think of equally disgusting sexual allusions that might be said regarding a male. 

I also think it quite interesting that Ms. Collins rather nicely passed over my claim that I accept, in the name of free speech, the right of black students on the Syracuse University campus to regard me as an Uncle Tom.  I have always accepted that view.  I have not always been a full professor with a long list of publications.  Yet, Ms. Collins masterfully passes over that reality. 

Now, calling a black an Uncle Tom is obviously not parallel to making disgusting sexual allusions.  But as far as a black insult goes, the label “Uncle Tom” pretty much defines the nadir of things.  Yet, I accept that black students should be free to have this opinion of me and to express it on a public website such as Facebook.Com.

And if we are going to move into oppressive-trump card mode, let me just say that no non-black on this campus has a clue as to how painful that appellation is.  The depth of alienation that I often feel walking across campus is extraordinary.  I might as well be a spirit or something, as there is an utter sense of invisibility that I have in the eyes of so many black students.  No recognition; no greeting.  Worse, most of my white colleagues and most of my Latino colleagues are utterly oblivious to the depth of that pain.  Nay, I would dare say that some think that I deserve it.   If it were not for my publication record, it is not at all inconceivable to me that many a white and many a non-white on this campus and perhaps among members of the administration would have found a way to dispose of me.   I have dared to have the courage of my convictions.  And liberals on the Syracuse University campus have had more than a little difficulty with that, their undying committment to open-mindedness notwithstanding. 

It would be one thing if I were talking about minority students whom I have taught.  But not so.  I am talking about minority students to whom I have never ever said a word and who have never heard me say anything.  Would things be worse were such opinions of me expressed on a public website?  This is hardly obvious to me. 

So I know something about pain on the Syracuse University campus.  Noting that I am a male, Ms. Collins blithely passed over the issue of pain to which I drew attention.  How is the argument supposed to go?  Is it that tenured males are in no position to say anything about moral pain?  The problem, undoubtedly, is that no one thinks of me as an underdog, though I am visibly and unmistakably black; accordingly, my being considered an Uncle Tom by black students was conveniently passed over. 

This brings me to the issue of status.  It would be bothersome if the amount of free speech which students had turned upon a professor’s status with the university.  This is especially so if an instructor’s actually standing with the university is not impacted by the remarks. 

The truth of the matter is this.  Syracuse University requires anonymous teaching evaluations and it claims to take these very, very, very seriously.  Students are free to give the instructor any ranking that they please.  I could be missing something.  But next to anonymous teaching evaluations, stupid unsavory remarks on Facebook.Com have next to no impact at all upon an instructor’s university standing.  Yet, there is no accountability here at all.  Students can evaluate professors as they please.  And yet, the University trips all over itself attaching importance to teaching evaluations.  Given how the University carries on about them, one would think that teaching evaluations represetend some form of Platonic truth that descended from the heavens. 

So let us see.  On the one hand, we have (a) stupid and nasty and distasteful comments on a public website that the University does not take into account in when assessing an instructor (where no slander or harassment or threat or libel is involved).  On the other, we have (b) anonymous teaching evaluations where, without any accountability at all, students can give a professor any ranking that they please and which are accorded enormous weight by Syracuse University.  Whether one female or female or white or non-white, which leaves one infinitely more vulnerable in terms of one’s university standing?  The answer is too obvious for words: (b).

Given the truth that one’s vulnerability as an untendured instructor lies with (b) and not at all with (a), I can consistently hold that the view that I hold about the ACLU.  I do not deny that the psychic pain of (a).  In fact, I have spoken to the psychic pain quite personally, though that was ignored.  However, I hold that in the absence of very special circumstances psychic pain alone does not suffice to limit free speech, which is why I hold that the ACLU did the right thing in supporting the right of Nazis to march through Skokie (IL), a town with a great many Holocaust survivors. 

Three final comments: (i) The University could have and should have handled the matter in a more constructive manner rather than in the ex post facto and ad hoc manner in which it did.  (ii) I do not mean to discount the psychic pain that Ms. Collins has endured.  I commiserate with her in this regard.  But I consistently hold that psychic pain alone does not warrant limiting free speech.  If I thought for a moment that her standing with Syracuse University would be adversely impacted by those stupid Facebook.Com remarks, I would be an unfailing ally.  There are undoubtedly cases where it is not at all clear whether a person’s university standing will be adversely impacted or not.  Not so in this instance.  I know somethng about being treated unfairly by students.  And it is both that knowledge and pain that informs the position that I have taken in this blog-entry.  (iii) In the oddest of ways, freedom of speech did the professor a favor.  Or so it is, given that the students could have anonymously turned in teaching evaluations that gave her a completely negative rating; and these evaluations would have been taken seriously by Syracuse University.