The forces of repression and racial animus are running roughshod over America’s colleges and universities. Students and campus bureaucrats silence those who’d dare question academia’s embrace of the doctrine of “systemic racism,” or those who remain skeptical of the racist strategies supposedly required to combat it. For every incident that sees the light of day, there are hundreds of acts of quiet intimidation and self-censorship. Yet much of this phenomenon is not driven by the modest — albeit vocal — number of menacing true believers. Instead, the prevailing forces of campus repression derive from the weak spines of campus leaders, charlatans who see an opportunity to exploit, and the widespread fear among faculty and students of being fed into the maw of the campus thought police.
The price of standing up can be steep: Faculty don’t want to be in the crosshairs, students don’t want to be expelled, and staff need their paychecks. That’s why many concerned faculty will share quiet missives among themselves, even as they remain publicly silent. And that’s what makes Jodi Shaw such an inspiring, important figure. The soft-spoken mother of two burst into the public consciousness last week when the invaluable columnist Bari Weiss shared Shaw’s letter of resignation from her position as a student-support coordinator at tony Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Weiss, herself a refugee from the New York Times, wrote at Substack:
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