Heterodox at USC Newsletter #10
Professor Strauss cleared; confidence in higher education at an all time low; "mother" is now a stigmatizing word.
In case you missed it, last week’s newsletter contained a recap from the recent Heterodox Academy conference, including tips on writing for the public, instilling tolerance for viewpoint diversity in students, and pushing back against ideological incursions at the university.
This got a mention from Heterodox Academy itself, in their newsletter 🥳
One takeaway from the conference we forgot to mention is the vital role that admissions plays in creating a campus atmosphere of strident activists rather than open-minded and curious undergraduates.
Admissions offices are indicating to students and parents that applications stuffed with activism and pet causes are the ticket to an acceptance letter.
If campuses want a student body that engages in debate, rather than denunciatory demonstrations, they should try admitting students who instead showcase how they’ve engaged with people on the opposite side of their political aisle or possess an enthusiasm for constructive disagreement. Once parents and students catch on that those sorts of activities are preferred, priorities and behavior could shift.
USC News
Professor John Strauss Cleared of Wrongdoing
Economics professor John Strauss has been cleared of all wrongdoing. L.A. Times has a story with additional details. A big thank you to the Academic Freedom Alliance for their invaluable assistance and for supporting Professor Strauss’ free speech rights.
Extensive video footage and eye witness accounts indicate that Professor Strauss neither called for the death of all Palestinians nor did he deliberately step on a list of names memorializing Palestinians killed in the conflict, accusations that were nevertheless repeated endlessly online. They stemmed from selectively edited videos posted by student activists, and elicited enormous outrage, a flood of complaints and reports against him to the university, and resulted in his personal address doxxed on X/Twitter with the poster suggesting people “make him famous.”
So far, we haven’t found a single public apology or retraction from any of the faculty or student groups who spread and amplified the false accusations. There’s also been no statement from the university. A tad ironic, as they just released a story about the anti-censorship art piece on campus devoted to free speech.
More thoughts from Voices Against Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism at USC:
There’s likely going to be more incidents like this as we enter a new school year with a fraught election cycle. We strongly advise waiting until the dust has settled before grabbing a pitchfork over a breaking news/viral campus moment.
Our newsletter wants to cover any campus issues related to academic freedom and free speech issues of all types, so please send tips or concerns to heterodox.usc@gmail.com.
USC Postdoctoral Scholars Unionized
With a vote of 200 to 15, our postdoctoral scholars have decided to form a union, USC Researchers and Fellows United. It will represent about 450 employees, including postdoctoral research associates, fellowship trainees, and teaching fellows.
The union is affiliated with the United Autoworkers Union, whose executive board recently signed onto a call drafted by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union (UE) and UFCW Local 3000 for a ceasefire in Israel and Palestine, although the petition has fallen short by 1,000 signatures.
Coming together to fight for better working conditions is an honorable tradition and there are certainly union supporters in Heterodox at USC. The problem is that unions these days seem to be largely fixated upon increasingly divisive activist causes, which often have little to do with immediate, material working conditions for its members.
This strays far from the ideals of broad-based labor organizing, which is most effective when inclusive of people with a wide range of often conflicting personal, political, and religious views.
These causes also seem to be extremely out of touch with the actual opinions and desires of the working class, or of workers generally. For instance, a recent New York Times poll indicates that 43% of Americans without a bachelor’s degree would vote for Trump if elections were held right now. We imagine that the UAW has quite a few of these voters in its ranks. Less than 1% of these respondents state that the Israel and Gaza conflict is their number one priority in the current election. Less than 5% of bachelors’s degree holders do.
However, both bachelor’s degree holders and those without them agree that the economy and immigration are their top two priorities. We’re confused, therefore, why unions are spending time and energy putting forth petitions on foreign conflicts which more than 95% of their members likely have low to zero day-to-day concern with, and probably hold deeply conflicting opinions about.
Maybe this excessive, far-left political agitation within unions is contributing to the all-time low in union membership, despite the media breathlessly covering online youth enthusiasm for unions?
In any case, we invite this new union to break out of the current ideological conformity and far-left cosplaying and consider focusing on the basics: good pay, benefits, worker safety, and protection of academic freedom for their union members, regardless of a member’s politics.
Do you have your own thoughts or perspectives on this development? Please email us at heterodox.usc@gmail.com to submit your commentary.
Interesting Research and Uplifting News from USC
Study Confirms the Rotation of Earth’s Inner Core Has Slowed
Discovery of vast sex differences in cellular activity has major implications for disease treatment
A New Method to Grow Materials for the Chips of the Future
USC basketball star JuJu Watkins throws a strike at Dodger Stadium
News Beyond USC
A new poll released by FIRE found that confidence in higher education has fallen even further since the campus protests over the past school year. Republicans, conservatives and those without a college degree have already expressed very low levels of trust (there’s not much lower the number can go at this point).
Now, even Democrats, women, and younger Americans are indicating lessening trust in universities. For Democrats, the drop in those who had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence went from 59% to 42%, and for women, from 39% to 29%. This corresponds with a continuing drop in Americans positive views of scientists.
Of course, this drop in trust of scientists and academics has nothing, absolutely nothing to do whatsoever we promise with the rapid spread of “people first” language guidelines such as those quietly released by the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases last Friday afternoon, which informs us that words like “mother” are now a stigmatizing term to be replaced with “birth parent.”
It may be true that not all “pregnant people” want to “identify” as mothers, but all pregnant people simply are mothers because they are women. Only women get pregnant. This is a scientific fact, even if it makes a small number of people exceptionally uncomfortable and others scrambling for obfuscating reams of data on “gender identity” and intersex conditions to try and pretend that sex is not dual or that it can be changed.
The public knows that there are two sexes. They know that sex cannot be changed, even if many are tolerant that a small number of people wish to live life presenting as the opposite sex. Scientists pretending that the duality of the sexes is no longer factual information doesn’t make science “more inclusive” or “updated”, it just makes scientists look stupider to the public.
People do not need medical practitioners condescendingly informing them that uh, aktually, we don’t use the term “mother” anymore, we use “birth parent.” They don’t want forms that ask them if they are currently “chestfeeding” or for someone to call their daughter “a person with child-bearing potential.” They want innovative research that heals and improves medical conditions, affordable drug treatments, and physicians and nurses that actually care about them — who don’t scold and gaslight them for using the word “babies.”
Reading Suggestions
The Hoover Institution has released a free ebook on free speech written by Hoover scholars. This eBook answers the questions: What is free speech? What is it not? What are its value and benefits? What are its recognized boundaries? How do we preserve it?
Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough is an informative and exceptionally entertaining read on the underground, far-leftist groups of the 1970s like The Weather Underground, The Black Liberation Army, The FALN, and much more. These groups spent almost two decades bombing and disrupting major cities. Their legacies have been quietly softened in many ways, and a number of these group’s key participants now occupy academia. Their slogans are eerily similar, if not often totally identical, to those plastered on today’s infographics and campus fliers and shouted at people at city council meetings.
More primary source materials for these groups include Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
If you have suggestions for things you’d like us to cover, feedback on our newsletter, or want to get more involved with Heterodox at USC please contact us at heterodox.usc@gmail.com. Fight On!