She wasn't cancelled. She was fired for incompetence. That isn't censorship, that is removed from office for cause. Her job is to be a president. A president says "this is who we are and this is where we are going". And then the president leads. She didn't lead at her school and she didn't communicate the goals of the university to the faculty, students, or to the congressional committee.
It is ludicrous to argue that in the current pervasive culture of DEI in these once great institutions, that anyone can argue “ freely”. A wholesale dismantling of this upside down, morally bankrupt DEI structure must occur. Why this author states that “ she stood up for free expression” and she faces an impossible dilemma that to be fair was not of her own making” are patently false. Calling for “ free expression” only for Jew hatred “ while supporting the “ micro aggressions” and censure or expulsion for “ misgendering “ is not what most sane Americans call free expression. This is what the woke left does. They take vocabulary that already has an accepted definition and misapplies it in an attempt to confuse and obfuscate. It’s a huge CON. McGill would not have been hired for this position If she did not wholly support this DEI nonsense that has close to fully destroyed academia and true scholarship. She is an entrenched part of this crazy ideology and is certainly not the person who will work to dismantle it and restore true FREE SPEECH for all. Neither is Gay or Kornbluth or Salovey ( why has Yale been given a pass here or Princeton etc)
They are all guilty of this fraud and it needs to stop if it already isn’t too late.
Can’t express how sick I am of reading articles like this. Can someone find me a single example of a hard woke leftist publicly apologizing and committing to changing their view for any reason other than the threat of losing their job?
The only progress that’s been made towards rooting out these disgusting ideologies from our institutions has been when people face actual consequences for them. That has only very recently begun to happen, first with bud light boycotts and now with this.
News flash: the cuddly kumbayah approach has failed for years. Let people suffer the consequences of their words now. And no, an overpaid college president losing their diversity hire job because they waffled on calls for actual genocide is not equivalent to a $70k/yr worker getting fired because they don’t think women have penises.
I disagree. When you are doing a bad job, you should be fired or forced to resign. She's demonstrated that she cannot handle a leadership position.
She's still a professor of law at UPenn, she has not been blackballed from working in academia, nor has she been censored on campus or on social media. This is not an example of cancel culture.
A sage philosopher of the 20th century named Yogi Berra (not a guru but a baseball player) said , “in theory there’s no difference in practice and theory, in practice there is”. Such is the case with your argument which is good in theory. In practice she can’t possibly be the one to marshal wholesale changes simply because one million people heard her testify under oath that genocidal language depends on context just like pronouns.
Supporting a declaration of annihilation of any group is not just allowing free speech. It is condoning the implications therein.At some point we have to differentiate free speech from bandwagonning ( my neologism)
Whatever happened to the pledge of allegiance, do they still say it in school? “One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The Ivy universities have removed God, and we see the result. They have divided the indivisible into “affinity groups”. Blacks need separate classroom from whites, less they feel inferior. They have divided our indivisible country into a zillion offended groups vs the evil white male. And liberty and justice for all is fine unless you are Jewish, or a white “oppressor” , or a male, or of European ancestry. By the time they are done, liberty and justice is only for a few “victim” elites. They are not teaching education, they are doing political indoctrination. They should all lose their tax exempt status as required by law.
'I understand why the powers that be wanted her out: she stood up for free expression and, in this case, that meant defending the rights of antisemites.'
Mr. Savodnick, in my view, is slightly wrong here. Magill's gone because she exposed her support of favoured speech, not free speech. Her school, like so many others, loses credibility when everything not Left is censored from speakers to pronouns, but allows demonstrations calling for the eradication of Israel from river to sea to go ahead.
While Mr Savodnik is to be commended for wanting to defend freedom of speech, I think the dismissal of people like Liz Magill is, paradoxically, a crucial step in that defense. The principle of free speech is part of a complex of values that together make up the ethical basis of a free society. I don't think you can run a university or a liberal democracy on neutrality regarding the most important values. If a university like Penn doesn't actively take a stand in favor of the values on which a free and equal society stands then it's condoning the destruction of those values. Magill's behavior was and ought to be repulsive to any person and any institution to whom it is important a) to live in a free society where b) minorities don't have to fear for their lives.
There's more to be done than firing Magill, for sure. The issue is not free speech here, the issue is the glaring and appalling double standard of tolerated, encouraged and compelled speech. I strongly believe that university's should have speech standards. The university's should set a standard for civilized, rational argumentation in the spirit of the Western Enlightenment. University's are there for the purpose of making judgments, they have simply gone off the rails and are making bad judgments. Insults, bigotry and propagandist cant should be exposed, discouraged and even removed from the campus when it is extreme. That is education. That is intellectual inquiry.
Yes she needed to be sent to a "re-education" camp. That is the problem. She had to go, and Gay must go too. We are seeing the end of the DEI model of higher education. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming us. Antisemitism is secondary; this is about the hypocrisy of DEI overreach. Americans have had enough of this hypocritical nonsense, and Jewish people provided the perfect test case. We do not fit the DEI model: we are the invisible color. And Magill's smarmy smirking smug legalism demonstrated the hypocrisy for all the world. Who wants to pay for their kids to get that nonsense? The other two presidents will go too. It is simply bad business to keep the DEI model going when it chases students from Harvard, MIT and Penn into the open arms of Dartmouth and Yale. Perhaps we will even start sending our students to Japanese universities. This is what happened to Detroit. Rather than Datsun it will be Todai University.
You make a great case for firing Magill and most of the rest of her staff and faculty. Does anyone think she is up to dismantling the DEI complex? No. And neither is anyone who has supported microaggressions, snowflakes, racism and antisemitism displayed on campus for years.
Fine, but where is the evidence that Magill would have changed her spots if she'd stayed? A change of leadership might bring another same-old time-server to the top, but it might - and Penn must have a governing body of presumably intelligent people - lead to the appointment of a new broom.
It's a damning indictment of C21 intellectualism that it got itself into this moral morass. But sometimes it needs a train wreck to provide a wake-up call.
We're hostage to feelings. The emotional frailty of a generation of individuals whose whims have seldom been denied. They will soon be in complete control. Meanwhile in the powder kegs of the middle east the inbred muslims are emboldened. Thanks leftists.
Ok...just stop...the majority of Americans have stood by in silence while the Marxist/socialist/leftists have taken over the academy...now that their vile hatred for America and our freedoms have been exposed we are supposed to just look the other way again...NO...it is time for them to suffer consequences for their actions...I don't care one iota if every leftist, DEI administrator, and fake social sciences professor ends up jobless living in a homeless encampment in San Fransisco...they created this situation now live with the consequences...
Making excuses for them and what they have done with malice of forethought is insane...g.
She wasn't cancelled. She was fired for incompetence. That isn't censorship, that is removed from office for cause. Her job is to be a president. A president says "this is who we are and this is where we are going". And then the president leads. She didn't lead at her school and she didn't communicate the goals of the university to the faculty, students, or to the congressional committee.
Liz Magill failed at her job. Fired.
It is ludicrous to argue that in the current pervasive culture of DEI in these once great institutions, that anyone can argue “ freely”. A wholesale dismantling of this upside down, morally bankrupt DEI structure must occur. Why this author states that “ she stood up for free expression” and she faces an impossible dilemma that to be fair was not of her own making” are patently false. Calling for “ free expression” only for Jew hatred “ while supporting the “ micro aggressions” and censure or expulsion for “ misgendering “ is not what most sane Americans call free expression. This is what the woke left does. They take vocabulary that already has an accepted definition and misapplies it in an attempt to confuse and obfuscate. It’s a huge CON. McGill would not have been hired for this position If she did not wholly support this DEI nonsense that has close to fully destroyed academia and true scholarship. She is an entrenched part of this crazy ideology and is certainly not the person who will work to dismantle it and restore true FREE SPEECH for all. Neither is Gay or Kornbluth or Salovey ( why has Yale been given a pass here or Princeton etc)
They are all guilty of this fraud and it needs to stop if it already isn’t too late.
Can’t express how sick I am of reading articles like this. Can someone find me a single example of a hard woke leftist publicly apologizing and committing to changing their view for any reason other than the threat of losing their job?
The only progress that’s been made towards rooting out these disgusting ideologies from our institutions has been when people face actual consequences for them. That has only very recently begun to happen, first with bud light boycotts and now with this.
News flash: the cuddly kumbayah approach has failed for years. Let people suffer the consequences of their words now. And no, an overpaid college president losing their diversity hire job because they waffled on calls for actual genocide is not equivalent to a $70k/yr worker getting fired because they don’t think women have penises.
I disagree. When you are doing a bad job, you should be fired or forced to resign. She's demonstrated that she cannot handle a leadership position.
She's still a professor of law at UPenn, she has not been blackballed from working in academia, nor has she been censored on campus or on social media. This is not an example of cancel culture.
A sage philosopher of the 20th century named Yogi Berra (not a guru but a baseball player) said , “in theory there’s no difference in practice and theory, in practice there is”. Such is the case with your argument which is good in theory. In practice she can’t possibly be the one to marshal wholesale changes simply because one million people heard her testify under oath that genocidal language depends on context just like pronouns.
I enjoy Mr. Savodnik's writing, but this one was so off target.
I could not disagree more.
Voltaire was wrong and so are you.
Supporting a declaration of annihilation of any group is not just allowing free speech. It is condoning the implications therein.At some point we have to differentiate free speech from bandwagonning ( my neologism)
and from incitement to violence.
Whatever happened to the pledge of allegiance, do they still say it in school? “One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The Ivy universities have removed God, and we see the result. They have divided the indivisible into “affinity groups”. Blacks need separate classroom from whites, less they feel inferior. They have divided our indivisible country into a zillion offended groups vs the evil white male. And liberty and justice for all is fine unless you are Jewish, or a white “oppressor” , or a male, or of European ancestry. By the time they are done, liberty and justice is only for a few “victim” elites. They are not teaching education, they are doing political indoctrination. They should all lose their tax exempt status as required by law.
'I understand why the powers that be wanted her out: she stood up for free expression and, in this case, that meant defending the rights of antisemites.'
Mr. Savodnick, in my view, is slightly wrong here. Magill's gone because she exposed her support of favoured speech, not free speech. Her school, like so many others, loses credibility when everything not Left is censored from speakers to pronouns, but allows demonstrations calling for the eradication of Israel from river to sea to go ahead.
While Mr Savodnik is to be commended for wanting to defend freedom of speech, I think the dismissal of people like Liz Magill is, paradoxically, a crucial step in that defense. The principle of free speech is part of a complex of values that together make up the ethical basis of a free society. I don't think you can run a university or a liberal democracy on neutrality regarding the most important values. If a university like Penn doesn't actively take a stand in favor of the values on which a free and equal society stands then it's condoning the destruction of those values. Magill's behavior was and ought to be repulsive to any person and any institution to whom it is important a) to live in a free society where b) minorities don't have to fear for their lives.
There's more to be done than firing Magill, for sure. The issue is not free speech here, the issue is the glaring and appalling double standard of tolerated, encouraged and compelled speech. I strongly believe that university's should have speech standards. The university's should set a standard for civilized, rational argumentation in the spirit of the Western Enlightenment. University's are there for the purpose of making judgments, they have simply gone off the rails and are making bad judgments. Insults, bigotry and propagandist cant should be exposed, discouraged and even removed from the campus when it is extreme. That is education. That is intellectual inquiry.
Yes she needed to be sent to a "re-education" camp. That is the problem. She had to go, and Gay must go too. We are seeing the end of the DEI model of higher education. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming us. Antisemitism is secondary; this is about the hypocrisy of DEI overreach. Americans have had enough of this hypocritical nonsense, and Jewish people provided the perfect test case. We do not fit the DEI model: we are the invisible color. And Magill's smarmy smirking smug legalism demonstrated the hypocrisy for all the world. Who wants to pay for their kids to get that nonsense? The other two presidents will go too. It is simply bad business to keep the DEI model going when it chases students from Harvard, MIT and Penn into the open arms of Dartmouth and Yale. Perhaps we will even start sending our students to Japanese universities. This is what happened to Detroit. Rather than Datsun it will be Todai University.
You make a great case for firing Magill and most of the rest of her staff and faculty. Does anyone think she is up to dismantling the DEI complex? No. And neither is anyone who has supported microaggressions, snowflakes, racism and antisemitism displayed on campus for years.
Fine, but where is the evidence that Magill would have changed her spots if she'd stayed? A change of leadership might bring another same-old time-server to the top, but it might - and Penn must have a governing body of presumably intelligent people - lead to the appointment of a new broom.
It's a damning indictment of C21 intellectualism that it got itself into this moral morass. But sometimes it needs a train wreck to provide a wake-up call.
We're hostage to feelings. The emotional frailty of a generation of individuals whose whims have seldom been denied. They will soon be in complete control. Meanwhile in the powder kegs of the middle east the inbred muslims are emboldened. Thanks leftists.
Ok...just stop...the majority of Americans have stood by in silence while the Marxist/socialist/leftists have taken over the academy...now that their vile hatred for America and our freedoms have been exposed we are supposed to just look the other way again...NO...it is time for them to suffer consequences for their actions...I don't care one iota if every leftist, DEI administrator, and fake social sciences professor ends up jobless living in a homeless encampment in San Fransisco...they created this situation now live with the consequences...
Making excuses for them and what they have done with malice of forethought is insane...g.