A Misbegotten Candidacy for the Yale Corporation
This time, character matters as much as ideology.
I’m very sorry to have to open up a controversy on our class website, but some classmates’ obviously well-intentioned support for Jamie Kirchick’s write-in candidacy to become a trustee of Yale deserves a substantive response.
Exercising my freedom of speech (Remember the Woodward Report?!), I’ll unload a bit here, because I happen to know how dramatically unsuited Kirchick is for membership on Yale Corporation.
I was a lecturer in political science throughout his undergraduate years. (I’m still teaching my seminar on “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy” in the Political Science Department and the Ethics, Politics, & Economics Program again this fall.) Although Kirchick never took my course, I challenged his prowling the campus during the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002 — as a freshman! — “writing up” professors’ anti-war comments, in public campus forums, in order to launch scathing attacks on them on national pro-war websites and even on the Joe Scarborough’s MSNBC show.
Don’t mistake the spectacle of students screaming at a professor as proof that Yale has bowed to snowflakes and cry-bullies
In the ensuing four years, I couldn’t help but note Kirchick’s inextinguishable obsession with parading obscurely bitter resentments as righteous causes — by brow-beating students and faculty who were challenging the impending war; by browbeating Yale’s (heavily African-American) labor unions (which, yes, have their own flaws!) while casting himself as a champion of the Latinos who were among strike-breakers — in other words, by pitting one group sanctimoniously against the other by claiming to defend “people of color”; and — this must be said — by parading his gayness as both a shield and a sword against critics.
Has Kirchick “grown up” since then? Well, since he and others ballyhooed the infamous video of the black student screaming outrageously at Nicholas Christakis (whose supposed martyrdom with his wife Erica on the altar of free speech was almost completely fabricated, aside from the terrible drubbing that Nicholas got on that video) take a look at this video of Kirchick himself confronting the TV network “Russia Today” last year about Putin’s homophobia — a worthy target, to be sure, but ask yourself if this man should be on the Yale Corporation:
Kirchick’s “free speech” campaign is funded lavishly and orchestrated brilliantly by some alums who — with perfectly good intentions in some cases, but with their own obscurely bitter resentments in others — have mistaken the spectacle of a few students screaming at Christakis as proof that Yale has succumbed to snowflakes and cry-bullies — the supposed hordes of fragile but censorious students and junior faculty clamoring for safe spaces and trigger warnings against “offensive ” speech and shutting down speech that the Woodward Report was written to defend. Kirchick is riding the jet-stream of a larger national campaign along these lines, funded by the ultra-conservative Bradley Foundation, the Koch brothers, and others with similar views.
Classmates, whatever your views on the matter, please don’t fall for Kirchick’s candidacy. As the author of Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997), I have body scars to show from taking on the politically correct left. (Anyone who imagines otherwise need only read what I’ve written in praise of John McCain and “old school” virtues, and in praise of Robert Mueller and John Kerry.) I’d call Yale’s Title IX anti-harassment protocols Orwellian, but that would be a compliment because they’re bureaucratically stupid.
But instead of running on any longer here, let me share my essay, “The ‘Blame the Campus Liberals’ Campaign Targets Yale.” Peter Salovey and Jonathan Holloway were grateful for it, and it was read by many on campus.
There’s a lot more where this came from (sigh), including a Sunday Review essay I did for the NY Times and an op ed for the YDN, plus a long piece about the funding and agendas of the national campaign. None of these are about Kirchick, but I’ll send them on an attachment to anyone who’s a glutton for punishment. (Just ask me at jimsleep@aol.com.)
All I really ask is that, whatever you do, and whatever you believe, please don’t sluice it into voting for Jamie Kirchick for the Yale Corporation. Character does count, and you’d be making a mistake on that ground, even if not politically.
Jim, thank you for helping us make a more informed decision on this important matter.
I am the author of the article about Jamie Kirchick on our class website to which you may have been responding. You have provided some insights about Jamie about which I was unaware. Enclosed is a link to a just-published Yale Daily News article which supplements your information about some of his campus activities. The article also reflects the intense personal history that exists between you and Jamie.
http://features.yaledailynews.com/blog/2018/09/16/figure-of-speech-jamie-kirchicks-run-for-the-yale-corporation/
Tom, there’s no “intense” history whatsoever between me and Kirchick, who I’ve met in person only once in my life, in the fall of 2002, and about whom I’ve never written anything before our Class of 1969 website post, with the following exceptions, which I called to the attention of the Yale Daily News reporter when she contacted me and which I’ll tell you about right now.
In 2003, as a lecturer in political science, I wrote a YDN column titled, “Recalling Yale, 1968: Let’s Have That Civility Again,” in response to a number of incidents in which pro Iraq War activists were harassing Yale students and professors who opposed the war. Kirchick and another freshman, Eliana Johnson, had made themselves prominent among the harassers, assiduously caricaturing anti-war professors in heated rhetoric that was posted on national conservative websites. Here is the column I wrote in response I urge you to read it.
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2003/04/14/recalling-yale-in-68-lets-have-that-civility-again/
As you’ll see if you do read it, I expressed respect for conservative causes that i don’t necessarily support, and I did not name either Kirchick or Johnson. Yet from almost the moment the column was published, I was shocked to find myself being attacked furiously by national conservative media – including by Kirchick and Johnson themselves, who showed up, at age 18, on the Joe Scarborough Show a couple of days after the column you’ve just read ran. There I saw my name and words scrolling across the TV screen while I was being described as a bully. And soon after, still without any response from me, I saw Hugh Hewitt of the neoconservative journal The Weekly Standard taking up the cry that I was beating up two brave freshmen. The day after Hewitt’s column ran, I received e-mailed death threats, two of them noting my home address and advising me to look both ways before leaving the house the next morning.
So, pretty much as I’d speculated in my YDN column, these two freshmen had arrived on campus “primed to attack professors in public.” I soon discovered that they were backed and coached by Johnson’s father Scott Johnson, a principal in the national conservative PowerLine blog, and others who’ve sustained much of their work ever since, some of whom are now promoting Kirchick’s bid for a Yale Corporation seat under their usual “free speech” banner.
The Scarborough and Hewitt hits and the firestorm of vitriol and threats they engendered — again, all in response to nothing but the column I’ve just linked — prompted me to publish a second, nastier YDN column, again in 2003, in which I did name Kirchick and Johnson. i don’t regret having done so.
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2003/04/23/the-preaching-of-hate-to-the-already-converted/
The principle that guided me was very simple: Students — especially undergraduates — should be free to disagree with and write critically about and even heckle professors in campus forums. But if they take to the national media and unleash vicious attacks on a professor as a public person, as Kirchick did on the Joe Scarborough Show and via Hugh Hewitt and others, that professor has a perfect right as a citizen to respond as he or she chooses.
That’s the sum total of the supposed “intense personal relationship.” The only intensity since 2003 has been generated solely by Kirchick, whose penchant for generating intense controversies for personal and ideological reasons, under banners of high principle. is really as pathetic as the national conservative noise machine’s making hay out of such efforts. I see that in the YDN he cites the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education as a bulwark of free speech in the tradition of the Woodward Report. Not quite!
http://www.alternet.org/education/what-campus-free-speech-crusade-wont-say-0
Perhaps the biggest irony is that, after writing that second YDN column in 2003, I’ve not written anything about Kirchick or Johnson as such, even though, no longer students, they’ve confirmed my intuitions about where they were coming from and where they were going. I’ve tended to dismiss them as pretty much self-limiting characters, rather like writers for the old Communist Party USA’s newspaper The Daily Worker, who considered themselves deft populists but never quite convinced any but the already converted of their good faith.
Kirchick’s noisy candidacy for a seat on the Yale Corporation is riding a ginned-up agenda that I’ve shown has a lot less to do with the reality at Yale than is imagined by alumni who see and hear only what’s orchestrated for them by the noise machine and the sensation-hungry general media:
http://www.alternet.org/education/blame-campus-liberals-campaign-targets-yale.
That’s what has prompted my note to our Class of 1969 website and my comment to the YDN. And, given Tom Hood’s response, it prompts me again to invite readers to email me at jimsleep@aol.com for the collection of my essays and columns on what has really transpired at Yale.
I’ll end this by citing Kingman Brewster’s observation to us, at our 1965 freshman assembly, that, “To a remarkable extent, this place has detected and rejected the very few who wear the colors of high purpose falsely. This has not been done by administrative edict . . . [but] by a pervasive ethic of student and faculty loyalty and responsibility and mutual regard which lies deep in our origins and traditions.” Brewster, a direct descendant of Plymouth Pilgrims, might as well have been channeling Puritan minister Richard Mather’s admonition of 1657 that “Imposters have but seldom got in and set up among us; and when they have done so, they have made a short blaze and gone out in a snuff.”
Brewster really wanted students to learn how to tell true leadership from false and to understand the consequences for how Americans live, invest, and wage wars. Jamie Kirchick is an imposter wearing the colors of high purpose falsely. Let’s not sow mistrust among one another in an effort to distract Yale from detecting and rejecting his candidacy for the Yale Corporation.
Jim:
Thank you for your lucid explanation of events that otherwise tend to be encapsulated in headlines, tweets, or other catchy but content-light memes. Your comments prompt me to take a look at public traces of Mr. Kirchik’s activities during and after his Yale years. They also prompt questions about the apparent disparity between the image and the reality of Yale student and faculty attitudes on free speech and individual sensibilities. A significant proportion of our Class seems concerned about the direction they believe Yale has taken in recent years – but very few of us have first-hand information or awareness of the context from which those memes emerge. Please keep the comments coming.