Our New Year’s Club Meeting on January 2nd was an exciting and well attended public event featuring three New York college professors who are spearheading the battle against the abuses of the left on college campuses. The meeting topic dealt with anti-American leftwing indoctrination and preserving free speech for all. Here are the videos of the inspiring presentation.
Mitchell Langbert is an Associate Professor of Business at Brooklyn College
Nicholas Giordano is a Professor of Political Science at Suffolk County Community College.
Bob Capano is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at CUNY Colleges.
Installation of 2020 Club Officers and Board Members
This article by Mitchell Langbert, is an opinion piece in The College Fix, a higher-education news website of veteran journalists helping beginning journalists committed to the principles of a free society.
Professor Langbert will be speaking at the QVGOP New Years Club Meeting on Academic Freedom, a free event, open to the public, on Thursday Jan. 2nd. More information.
Editor’s note:Late last year, throngs of angry leftist students and social media warriors demanded that Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, be fired for joking on his personal blog about the Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault allegations. Today his fall 2019 semester classes are overbooked and during the last 10 months he’s juggled several scholarly projects. The effort to ruin him failed. Here’s his story.
‘Indeed, you haven’t lived until you’ve been burned in effigy’
I spent my early life in left-wing neighborhoods in New York City and Woodstock, NY, but by the time I attended Sarah Lawrence College in 1973 I was questioning collectivism. I witnessed one corporate headquarters after another exit New York City because of high taxes and regulation. As well, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago opened my eyes to the blood-drenched shadows of socialism. In my twenties I read all I could about the Austrian economists and the Founding Fathers while I pursued a corporate career that ended because so many New York firms were moving to Atlanta.
So, after nine years in corporate America, I decided to get a Ph.D., but I realized that a career in academia, especially in the Northeast, required strict adherence to left-oriented ideology. Unfortunately, having landed a few academic jobs, I was unsuccessful at cloaking my views.
More recently, having read de Jouvenal’s On Power, I concluded that decentralization of federal power will be crucial to the rejuvenation of individual liberty. One concern is the living Constitution theory. Hence, the appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh last fall was a wonderful, miracle-on-ice moment, courtesy of President Trump. When the left and its media attacked Justice Kavanaugh, I made a joke about the allegations on my blog.
Someone was trolling my blog, and in response, there were campus protests. They also pounced while I was at the podium. The New York City-based newspapers (see here, here, here and here) joined in. I had been receiving publicity for work I had been doing on the absence of Republicans from higher education, but the intense media interest was a surprise. I received about 200 hate emails, including several threats. These were paradoxical because the writers were outraged that I had made light of the Kavanaugh sexual assault allegations, so they threatened me with sexual assault. One leftist named Carol D wrote: “Sir, I relish the thought of a gang of boys becoming men at your assholes expense. History will pull back your lizard skin and your pathetic attempt at being relevant will be exposed as nothing more than a losers fame grab.” The left-wing concern about words that harm is evident in Carol D’s work.
Protesters at Brooklyn College on Thursday demanded that Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business, be fired for his blog post about sexual assault. Photo credit: Holly Pickett for The New York Times
My initial response to the media phone calls and left-wing hate speech was, of course, stress, as well as some fear that I might lose my job. Within a few days, these were alleviated by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which told me that not only do public employees have First Amendment protection but also that any contact from the college, such as an investigation, would justify First Amendment litigation. As well, I was referred to an attorney who told me that I should retain his firm only if the college administration broke the no-contact rule, which it didn’t. There were a couple of additional protections that frustrated protesters: First, the City University of New York has an academic freedom provision in its bylaws. Second, I have academic tenure.
One of the distortions in the media coverage was the implication that a large number of students supported the protests. In fact, only a couple of hundred out of 18,000 students at the college participated in the protests. About two or three percent of the college’s student-and-faculty body signed an online petition to have me fired. The other 97 percent did not spend a minute on the question. Many students were on my side, but because CUNY’s left-wing administration suppresses conservatives, these students were silent.
In thinking about how to respond to authoritarian attacks, practical concerns are important. The best defense against suppression is private resources. Back in the 1970s I knew a couple who had worked at the U.N. but was fired from the U.S. Embassy during the McCarthy era. They took their resources and founded a retail store that built on their international connections. Since I am close to retirement, I was not worried financially. Dissenters in an authoritarian climate need to strategize how to accumulate resources that enable them to remain independent.
I made one major gaffe: an apology. When I wrote the blog, I meant it as humor. A friend convinced me to write that I had meant the blog to be satirical in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” I later discussed this with a libertarian economist who had been attacked in the Las Vegas newspapers, and he agreed that one should never apologize. Apologies give the pro-Antifa media an additional wedge. (See this.) When the mainstream media attacked Stephen Moore in the context of his Fed appointment, he kept apologizing, and I wish he hadn’t.
Survive the attack I did. Within six months a Wall Street Journal editorial cited my work; a Texas public policy foundation hired me to do a study of a back-to-work training program; I continued to work on a project with friends at Heterodox Academy and the University of Maryland; Lou Dobbs of Fox Business put my name on the TV screen when discussing one of my articles on faculty political affiliation; and the National Association of Scholars, for whom I have written in the past, asked me to write an essay about the student protests at Sarah Lawrence College. As well, the Glazov Gang asked me to do a series of podcasts (and here and here), which have each gotten a couple of thousand hits. My classes have filled to the brim for the past two semesters, and this fall semester my courses are overbooked with waiting lists.
There were, of course, some adverse reactions as well. A young representative of a famous conservative foundation said that he did not want to work with me anymore, and a couple of people I had worked with or corresponded with in the past became cool. On the other hand, one of my friends, a well-known Austrian economist, was envious that the students had lumped me in with Kavanaugh and Trump in the protest. Indeed, you haven’t lived until you’ve been burned in effigy. On balance, the event enabled me to separate the cowardly chaff in my network from the imaginative wheat.
Having gone through the experience unscathed and better off, I am concerned that many others who have been outed by the left-wing, authoritarian mob lack defenses. My case is exceptional because of my public university, First Amendment, and tenure protections.
I have contacted a number of leading conservatives and suggested that steps be taken to organize a support-and-activist group. Such a group could include a response group that might overwhelm media and corporate Antifa sympathizers with protest emails as well as an advisory group that could provide guidance to victims. So far, I have heard nothing back. Unfortunately, conservative and libertarian leaders continue to suffer from a political wimpiness that ensures failure. Ultimately, we need to ask whether the moral compass of a media based in New York City is of value or relevance.
Mitchell Langbert is associate professor at Brooklyn College. He lives in West Shokan, New York.
The Queens Village
Republican Club stands with people of all faiths, but now at a time of rampant
anti-Semitic attacks, we stand up in outrage and stand up for justice with the
2 million people of Jewish faith in New York State. Violent anti-Semitic
attacks were committed by perpetrators who were released without bail even
before the new bail reform law kicks in on January 1, 2020. Last night, at a
celebration of the seventh night of Chanukah, we witnessed a bloody
anti-Semitic attack at the home of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg
in Monsey, NY where 5 people were severely wounded. Recently we witnessed
at least 13 vicious anti-Semitic attacks in New York State and many more on
college campuses across the country.
The recent wave of criminal justice activism has gone way too far! Our club is
outraged as we are witnessing the breakdown of law and order due to the
feckless policies of the Democrats running a one-party government in our city
and state. The outcome of Democrat Party rule is that New York City and New
York State are going in the wrong direction. We see the consequences of
bail reform, and radical leftist policies calling for closing Rikers,
freeing 1000’s of inmates, defying ICE, and even abolishing our
police force, where criminals are emboldened to commit atrocious
anti-Semitic acts with impunity and are released without bail.
The left is mobilized and organized, and they have taken every
Democrat elected official hostage. We believe the only way to fight back is to
organize, recruit and register Republicans! We need a strong organization of
Republican county committee activists who can get out the vote to elect
Republicans who can make policy changes in our government that effect our
everyday life. We must turn the tide!
This is the time to act, and we will do so. We ask all our club members and
friends to stand with us and the Jewish people of New York!
Join Professor Langbert, featured speaker at QVGOP’s New Years Club Meeting on Academic Freedom!
THURS. JAN. 2, 2020 at 7:30 PM At: Young Israel of Holliswood – Holliswood Jewish Center 86-25 Francis Lewis Blvd., Holliswood, NY 11427 CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO
I grew up in Long Island City, Queens,
just south of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district. I began my political life as a left-wing
Democrat. In 1972, when I was 18, the
Vietnam War was raging, and anti-war protests were the rage. However, I soon noticed that the left was
more image than substance, more a matter of signaling than of achieving virtue. After I graduated from college in 1975, I
read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, took a corporate job, and watched
Abraham Beame and the Democrats oversee the city’s bankruptcy, which was due
to Beame’s accounting; public sector
unions; Robert Moses’s urban redevelopment policies; and a decades-long
commitment to taxes, regulation and welfare.
Because of the exodus of corporate
headquarters from New York, in 1986 I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in my field, human
resources. The instruction I received at
Columbia Business School was first-rate, but when I entered the professional
academic world at a university in New York’s North Country, I realized that the
march to the left had progressed past the point of no return. Left-wing feminist professors, often based in
“studies” programs (gender studies, ethnic studies), routinely harassed untenured,
conservative professors. A glance across a hallway was a reason for a formal
sexual harassment complaint. Professors who questioned preferential policies
were subject to “investigation” by the college’s human resource
department. Professors who questioned
the official, left-wing narrative were subject to whispering-and-defamation
campaigns.
Because of political harassment, I left
the North Country after two-and-a-half years, and after two brief stints at New
York-area colleges I began a career at Brooklyn College in 1998. During the ensuing 21 years I suffered a
number of left-wing attacks, including a demand that I resign from a departmental
personnel committee because I insisted that job candidates have credentials
relevant to the department’s field (business administration) rather than just have
racial or gender credentials; a formal investigation because I said that
slavery did not contribute to long-term American economic ascendancy (the more
horrific and profitable slavery in the West Indies not having led to economic
success there, for instance); and a national media campaign to fire me, led by
a pro-Antifa professor, because I made light of the accusations against Justice
Brett Kavanaugh.
As I have noted in a recent piece in The
College Fix, the attacks against me failed, and since then my work has been
covered by Lou Dobbs, the New York Post editorial page and elsewhere. Notice, though, that I have tenure, have
favorable student evaluations, and have published 30 academic articles. A more
recent hire would not have been likely to survive. When the New York Sun closed, the
city lost the only newspaper that had paid attention to left-wing academic
abuses.
Meanwhile, I developed an interest in
academic reform. Together with Phil
Orenstein, I campaigned for an academic bill of rights in the early 2000s, and
I began to pursue research on education.
My recent research concerns faculty political
affiliations. The origins of left-only
universities can be traced to two early twentieth century foundations: the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Rockefeller’s General
Education Board. These foundations
provided financial incentives to secularize universities, and the New Deal,
which used universities as left-oriented ideological-mediating institutions,
cemented the incentives. Subsequently,
Democrats and RINOs have provided ongoing moral and financial support to
academic groupthink. At present,
virtually no Republican donors work as professors in the four leading
universities in 30 states that I have recently sampled.
Things are far gone in both higher and K-12 education, but the Department of Education, even under our beloved president, has not done enough to systematically study how far. I am asking Republicans to pressure Betsy DeVos and elected officials to begin to study what can be done. So far, the DOE under Secretary DeVos has implemented Title IX reform, but little more.
Mitchell Langbert is an Associate Professor of Business at Brooklyn College. His research recently has focused on political affiliations of professors and executives. His Blog features insights into politics, current events, the economy and higher education.
