Amerika

Perhaps the Good Professor had just had enough. Enough of the farce, the Leftist propaganda, the ridiculous, intellectually stifling bias that has turned the modern academy into an absolute joke. Dr. Bruce Gilley had probably built a career out of acceptable, mediocre, moderate liberalism and had parlayed this maundering mental menopause into professional tenure at Portland State University.

But then he snapped and said what he really feels about academic diversity. Perhaps his red-pilling began when he attempted to propose and chair a discussion panel at the 2017 annual conference of the Political Science Association in San Francisco. He proposed a panel on “Viewpoint Diversity in Political Science.” Here’s what he planned on discussing.

My submission featured four of the most prominent political scientists in the country who have written on the issue of political diversity in the field. They included Joshua Dunn, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, whose co-authored 2016 book entitled Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University has been a focus of the national discussion among academics interested in the issue; and April Kelly-Woessner, Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies at Elizabethtown College, whose co-authored 2011 book The Still Divided Academy: How Competing Visions of Power Politics and Diversity Complicate the Mission of Higher Education is the gold standard on how to promote respectful political dialogue on campus.

He hit the open-minded, tolerant, leftist wall.

A total of 11 full panels or roundtables were accepted in the teaching and education sections. Of these, 7 are on mainstream teaching topics. Another 4 were set aside for, shall we say, more politicized topics. One, entitled “Let’s Talk about Sex (and Gender and Sexuality)”, is on how to restructure the classroom around ideas of being “genderfluid, transgender, or gender nonconforming.” Another, on “Tolerance, Diversity, and Assessment” will focus on how to use administrative coercion to enforce various group identity agendas. The third, called “Taking Advantage of Diversity,” will help scholars to understand why their quaint notions of cutting edge knowledge are merely expressions of white identity. Another, “Teaching Trump”, is composed of left-wing feminist scholars.

It turned out that out of 104 different panels that took place at this conference, every one of them dealt with either narrowly technical aspects of teaching Poli-Sci or involves predominantly had leftist politics. The entire Poli-Sci profession essentially claimed only one point of view actually existed. The next question Socrates would ask would be “Why then do we need a science of politics if everybody already agrees?”

He then resigned from the PSA and decided to troll hard with deliberate malice aforethought. He submitted “The case for colonialism” (full article) to The Third World Quarterly and then stood back to admire the positively masterful tornado of turds. The egos and pretensions popped which then precipitated an academic jihad that made a better case for doing something with these people than Dr. Gilley ever could have. The abstract for the aforementioned crimethought paper now reads as follows.

This Viewpoint essay has been withdrawn at the request of the academic journal editor, and in agreement with the author of the essay. Following a number of complaints, Taylor & Francis conducted a thorough investigation into the peer review process on this article. Whilst this clearly demonstrated the essay had undergone double-blind peer review, in line with the journal’s editorial policy, the journal editor has subsequently received serious and credible threats of personal violence. These threats are linked to the publication of this essay. As the publisher, we must take this seriously. Taylor & Francis has a strong and supportive duty of care to all our academic editorial teams, and this is why we are withdrawing this essay.

Having moved three bong hits or so to the left of irony, the “Progressives” brought Change.org to enforce the orthodoxy. Those who dare to disagree must retract and issue immediate apologies. Dr. Farhana Sultana, a professor at Syracuse University and a fellow-PhD. of Gilley’s at Princeton was not satisfied with mere retraction. She encouraged protestors at Portland State to demand his ouster and took to Facebook to call for Dr. Gilley to have his PhD formally revoked.

Meanwhile, fifteen other academics associated with The Third World Quarterly immigrated away by resigning from the editorial board in protest of the offending article being published. Again, they disagree with anyone’s right to disagree. All the while, they talk about loving Free Speech while arguing in favor of censorship.

We all subscribe to the principle of freedom of speech and the value of provocation in order to generate critical debate. However, this cannot be done by means of a piece that fails to meet academic standards of rigour and balance by ignoring all manner of violence, exploitation and harm perpetrated in the name of colonialism (and imperialism) and that causes offence and hurt and thereby clearly violates that very principle of free speech.

So they all condemned Dr. Gilley as a !RACIST! Worse yet, they called him a !FACIST! And as the ne plus ultra, they even claimed he was — get this — a member of the !ALT-RIGHT! I vote to deny he’s Alt-Right. None of us would be caught dead accepting tenure from Portland State University. Even at double the going salary. But that not withstanding, he’s done an awesome job of ripping the lid off of Lefty Academic hell and letting us all stare at the Boschescape and all that crawled around thereupon. Retraction Watch perhaps describes the power washing of his paper out of TWQ as well as anyone else.

I’ve never heard of an academic article prompting credible death threats against the editor of the journal in which it was published, let alone a journal withdrawing an article on the basis of such threats. Have others? This is a disturbing development, which I hope remains, if not unique, highly unusual.

As for Dr. Gilley, he has proven to us all that even Neil Young could accidentally get one right. Gilley is done. He knows he is done. The principals he argued for are like a thing out of season. They are the rains falling on fields already fallow for the season. In his final act of defiance he blazed through the turgid, stifling atmosphere as a a meteorite that slammed into the fetid swamp of progressive intolerance. Far better this man burn out than fade away.

Tags: bruce gilley, political correctness, the third world quarterly