It's a new year, and it's time to start thinking about what's in store for our college campuses in 2020. In this episode, we talk with Rob Shimshock of Campus Unmasked about the craziest stories from 2018, and what we might expect in the new year.
00:02:23.360And I'm pleased to say that your videos on our specialty page, campusonmass.com, have been seen, last I checked, over 2 million times cumulatively.
00:02:35.820I don't have the exact number at my fingertips.
00:03:03.380I mean, we here in Canada think that we're really socialist and we're really far gone.
00:03:07.780But some of the craziest campuses are actually in the United States.
00:03:11.820Even though you've got the First Amendment there, even though I think as a country you're more conservative than we are, your campuses are more leading edge.
00:03:19.920I mean, Berkeley has always been insane.
00:03:21.760Is it true that your campuses, you've got the best campuses in the world by some measures, but in terms of the grievance industry and political correctness, would you say America also has the worst in the world?
00:03:36.420Well, and I think no other campus captures this dichotomy more than Harvard University, which has been in the news for perhaps discriminating against Asian-American applicants.
00:03:45.100You have them trying to ban single-gender groups.
00:03:47.820So they've definitely taken a stand against such valued principles as free speech, freedom of association.
00:03:53.880And they're, you know, considered the premier institution worldwide.
00:04:05.700But he, considering he's a PhD professor at U of T and, you know, he's a fairly prestigious guy, he often recommends against people going into the humanities, even though that is where he himself teaches.
00:04:21.760Before we get into you, you've selected three crazy stories that I want to get into.
00:04:26.420We'll play the video clips and I'll ask for your commentary.
00:04:29.020But before we do, would you agree with Jordan Peterson when he encourages young people not to go to university?
00:04:40.140He doesn't say that as a blanket statement.
00:04:41.920I think he still believes in engineering and other practical educations, even career education.
00:04:47.640But just to get $100,000 in debt, to go through four years of grievance studies, would you agree with Jordan Peterson that there's a better way to be a young person?
00:04:57.940Well, I think it all depends on your priorities, Ezra, because, of course, most people, whenever they're going to college and they're making that huge capital and time investment, they're looking for a huge payoff.
00:05:09.200So if you're looking to go into a really lucrative industry, you know, one of the STEM fields perhaps is still not infiltrated by social justice.
00:05:16.640However, we do need people like myself, like other great reporters at Campus Reform and other places for which I've worked to cover these, who perform like a watchdog mission.
00:05:28.480And so I think that that could serve some value if you want to major in the humanities.
00:05:32.100If you find that, you know, writing or some other such skills still suits your purpose, we can definitely use some more watchdogs out there who perform my kind of work and who also keep tabs on other institutions.
00:05:44.860Well, you're so right that we need more watchdogs.
00:05:47.960But just for someone who's not an activist, not a public personality, not someone who wants to have a political mission life, but just, you know, someone turns 18, they graduate from high school, just a normal person who wants to leave a normal life.
00:06:00.140Would you recommend that they go to even an Ivy League school to take a humanities degree?
00:06:05.980Would you still say that's worth them doing?
00:06:10.480And I think it's because I still see some value, you know, like my favorite thing to read in my pastime would probably be Shakespeare or something like that.
00:06:20.900And so I do see some value in getting that kind of just like more of an aesthetic pursuit out of it.
00:06:26.760But I think if you do want to contribute value to the world increasingly so, you can get that same experience through your internships, through actual job experience, being out in the field.
00:06:38.540And in some cases, the technical colleges, which are less expensive and will often take less time to get a degree.
00:06:44.260So definitely there are alternatives depending on, you know, if you want to make a lot of money or if you're particularly passionate about shaping change in a certain part of the world.
00:06:52.940Yeah, you definitely could save yourself a bundle as well.
00:06:55.680Yeah. You know, I remember when I took an English class in my first year university and like you, I loved Shakespeare, couldn't get enough of it.
00:07:05.420I only studied a little bit of in high school. I thought this is going to be wonderful.
00:07:08.360We're going to. So I sign up for an English class at University of Calgary and I was stunned.
00:07:15.180And this is and I'm much older than you. This was 20 more than 20 years ago, almost 30 years ago.
00:07:21.440We didn't study Shakespeare. He was considered a dead white man.
00:07:24.520We didn't even really study true literature. It was all critical theory and a feminist analysis.
00:07:30.060And I was so heartbroken. You know, frankly, I think if you want to learn Shakespeare, you're probably going to do it better online or just with chums than than in some Marxist directed study.
00:07:42.880But listen, I called you on today and I'm so grateful for your time, not just to opine on things, although it's good to catch up.
00:07:49.400But to review, we asked you for three of the craziest stories from 2018 and you selected them.
00:07:57.740I want to start off with the first one. Maybe you can set it up.
00:08:01.440A professor. I mean, a professor who got violent.
00:09:08.920Clanton, who used to teach ethics at Diablo Valley College in California, was facing 11 years in prison for that April 2017 assault and others.
00:09:18.200And guess how much time he'll actually have to serve?
00:09:57.720So earlier in 2017, there were, of course, a few—quite a few showdowns at Berkeley.
00:10:02.520One was in the midst of a planned Milo Yiannopoulos speech back in February 2017.
00:10:07.660During that event, of course, Antifa caused, I believe, $100,000 in damage to the city by bashing ATMs, setting things afire.
00:10:15.900And this was another one of those occasions, and it was in April 2017.
00:10:19.820Now, Eric Clanton was charged with three felony assaults with a deadly weapon.
00:10:25.320He was charged with another felony for causing great bodily injury, I believe, and then two misdemeanors for a simple battery and wearing a mask to avoid getting ID'd upon committing a crime.
00:10:35.220Now, he was able to enter a plea bargain with California in which they dropped all of his felony charges in exchange for Eric pleading no contest to one of the misdemeanors.
00:10:46.100You know, just a few weeks ago, I saw news that a far-right-wing person who was punched in Charlottesville sued the person who punched him and got $1.
00:11:02.400And it's so clear to me that there is a political color to prosecutions like that.
00:11:11.240Like, our politics is so pervasive now.
00:11:14.100And the fact that Eric Clanton, this professor who hit a bunch of people with a bike lock, gets off with no jail time because he cut a deal with, obviously, a Democrat prosecutor for talking about California.
00:11:25.960And I have no sympathy for this far-right guy in Virginia who got punched, but I don't believe we should punch people.
00:11:33.960Well, apparently, the jury or whoever it was thought, well, $1 is enough.
00:11:38.340That's us pretending we care about the law.
00:11:40.380But I find it really troubling that the left these days no longer believes in the rule of law.
00:11:46.320Is this common on campuses or is this so rare that's why it's newsworthy?
00:11:52.860Well, I think this was a particularly egregious instance, of course.
00:11:56.960But you have to remember that it begins not with the actual act of swinging a bike lock, but with the actual ideology that's espoused in the class.
00:12:05.180You definitely do see ideology that leads to this kind of stuff.
00:12:07.960You see misrepresentation of the Israel versus Palestine conflict.
00:12:11.920You see things like this that engender these kinds of false equivalencies wherein, like, hate speech.
00:12:18.260Hate speech is suddenly actual violence.
00:12:20.680And so I think it definitely begins in the classroom.
00:12:23.420One thing back to Eric Clanton that was particularly astounding was I think we can all agree that it was a miscarriage of justice.
00:12:30.880But it was really egregious in this sense because this wasn't a case that was investigated by the police initially, at least.
00:12:38.160This was a case that average citizens on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, 4chan were looking into this professor.
00:12:44.720Concerned citizens did the hard work of identifying this guy, and it was all for naught.
00:12:49.320Yeah, I remember that people sort of used their own online sleuthing to find out who it was.
00:12:55.060You know, you're so right to say that the actual final act of violence, it's the most tangible, obviously, and that's where the crime is committed.
00:13:05.680But the seeds are planted with the normalization of violence against our political opponents.
00:13:11.440And I remember on Donald Trump's inauguration when some liberal walked up to a racist named Richard Spencer and punched him right in the face on the street, broke his eardrum.
00:13:24.240And I have no sympathy for Richard Spencer's views, but I don't believe that any American citizen or any Canadian citizen should simply be punched in the face because of their political views.
00:13:34.480But this punch-a-Nazi thing became so ubiquitous.
00:13:40.020And the trouble with that, Rob, is that there aren't a lot of real Nazis around.
00:13:44.480So what this was is, punch someone you don't like, and then, after the fact, say, oh, well, he's a Nazi, so it's okay.
00:13:51.900And this spread so much that it became cool.
00:13:54.340Here's an awards show in Hollywood where some actor, cool, to the rapturous applause of the Hollywood lovies in the room, shouted,
00:14:08.340it's time to punch some people in the face.
00:14:13.780We will hunt monsters, and when we are at a loss amidst the hypocrisy and the casual violence of certain individuals and institutions,
00:14:23.720we will, as per Chief Jim Hopper, punch some people in the face when they seek to destroy the meat and the disenfranchised and the marginalized.
00:14:36.060This guy's talking about decorum, and he's calling for punching people in the face.
00:14:39.780I think that we have a generation now that says, if you don't like someone, you can punch them in the face, because if you're a Trumpist, well, you must be a Nazi, because Trump is like Nazis, and wouldn't you punch a Nazi?
00:14:52.660I think we've unleashed a dangerous force by saying it's okay to do violence to people you don't like.
00:15:06.020And, you know, one thing that's particularly revealing about this is, as you were asking before, were there other cases in which professors were actually the agents of violence?
00:15:14.600And one thing, of course, you know, I'm covering so many stories a day, I don't remember them right off the bat, but one that I do remember was, this was something, it was the feminist professor, and he attacked someone at a video game convention, and I believe he just, you know, kind of walked away.
00:15:30.200I don't think things were actually, I remember I was trying to get the actual report, the police report filed by the victim, and there were witnesses to this assault.
00:15:37.440But, yeah, I don't remember any repercussions on that one, either.
00:15:41.320Well, you know, and we've seen this spilling out in the streets, very progressive city, Portland, Oregon, Andy Goh, who's a Vietnamese American, so he's a racial minority.
00:15:53.580He covers Antifa thugs, who are invariably white, by the way.
00:15:57.800I've got nothing against white people, I'm just saying, he's the minority, they're the white folks with mask faces.
00:16:02.400They threaten him, they assault other people, and the Portland cops are clearly told to stand down.
00:16:08.100I find it dangerous, but let's move on to the next clip, and this is about a University of Michigan professor, and I find this crazy.
00:16:17.020Now, Michigan has a very high Muslim population, but this is not a Muslim professor.
00:16:23.020His name is John Cheney Lippold, and, well, let me invite you to tell the story, and then we'll play the clip.
00:16:28.280Yes, so there was this professor, John Cheney Lippold, who had agreed to write a recommendation for one of his students to study abroad.
00:16:37.040Now, a couple of weeks later, whenever the student reminded him that he needed his recommendation,
00:16:41.860the professor suddenly reneged on that agreement upon finding out that the student wanted to study abroad in Israel.
00:16:48.300Yeah, well, okay, let's take a look at that clip right now.
00:16:50.860Let me introduce you to Dr. John Cheney Lippold, a professor of American Studies at the University of Michigan.
00:16:57.140His fields of study all end with studies, which has become quite the telltale sign for cultural Marxism in universities.
00:17:05.100And his research areas include gender, race, and identity.
00:17:09.240Cheney Lippold recently agreed to write a recommendation letter for one of his students, Abigail Ingber,
00:17:14.940but then changed his mind after learning that Abigail was going to be studying in Israel.
00:17:19.720He said, as you may know, many university departments have pledged an academic boycott against Israel
00:17:26.060in support of Palestinians living in Palestine.