When all you have is a hammer, systems of oppression edition

This is fantastic from Josh Barro, “Identity Politics Meets College Politics With Predictably Stupid, Immoral Results”

On Saturday, before the football game between USC and UC Berkeley, fifteen protesters rushed the field at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley and refused to leave until they were arrested, delaying the start of the game. Some people mistakenly assumed the protest was a demand for a ceasefire in Gaza. The truth was much odder: The protesters, most of them students at UC Berkeley, were demanding the reinstatement of a suspended Berkeley professor. Ivonne del Valle, an associate professor of colonial studies in the Spanish and Portuguese department, is on leave and faces potential termination because multiple investigations have determined that she stalked and harassed Prof. Joshua Clover, a communist poet in the English department at UC Davis…

Del Valle has become a cause célèbre despite having admitted to key aspects of the charges that led to her suspension, including that she keyed Clover’s car; sat outside his apartment and slid threatening notes under the door including “If you make me leave, it’ll be worse. I’ll keep doing this you can be sure of that”; spray painted “here lives a pervert” in the hallway outside his apartment; and dumped chunks of fermented pineapple on his mother’s doorstep. Extensive reports by KQED and the Chronicle of Higher Education, based on Berkeley’s Title IX investigation reports and interviews with del Valle herself, make clear that she was (and is) convinced that Clover, whom she barely knew before these incidents began, had hacked her electronic devices and was using the information he gleaned about her thoughts and actions in order to post coded messages about her on Twitter.1 Frustrated that police and Berkeley administrators did not take her delusional hacking claims seriously, she pursued a direct harassment campaign against her UC colleague, which she continued in violation of orders to stop contacting him. Again, del Valle admits these facts.

So why, in the view of del Valle and her supporters, is her suspension unjust? Well, it starts with the fact that she is a Latina and Clover is a white man…

This story itself — about a far-left-wing humanities professor with obvious mental illness behaving badly toward another far-left-wing humanities professor and receiving a ludicrous, histrionic, and identity-based defense of both her actions and her mental state from some of her students and colleagues3 — is not terribly important. But the manner in which del Valle’s supporters have convinced themselves to stand with her — by looking away from all the facts that conflict with their pristine moral worldview about who’s oppressed and who’s the oppressor — bears resemblance to a much more consequential form of left-wing moral idiocy that we’ve seen on college campuses in recent weeks: the willingness of many students and faculty to excuse (or even in some cases celebrate) Hamas’ terror attack that killed over 1,400 people.

Obsession with structural factors has led people on the identity-obsessed left to discard the idea that people are individual moral actors with responsibility for their actions. Instead, they rely on a moral framework that looks solely at a person’s or group’s position within a hierarchy of oppression, awarding culpability in any conflict to the person who ranks as less oppressed, regardless of actually existing evidence about who did what and why…

In both the globally important case of Hamas and the trivial case of del Valle, left-wing students and faculty have shown an inability to analyze a conflict through any frame other than “systems of oppression.” That is, Hamas is less powerful than Israel, and therefore it cannot be morally culpable for murdering, raping and beheading Israeli civilians (or must not have done so at all); and del Valle is a minority woman, so if she spray painted a white, male professor’s door with a message that he is a “sex addict,” it must be because she didn’t receive adequate support from her employer that a white employee would have…

It is reasonable for people to recoil from a moral framework that purports to judge culpability based on identity rather than actions — even when they suspect the people promoting the framework will lack the power to enact and enforce it, or doubt whether they sincerely believe in it.6 And one of the salutary aspects of the last month’s politics is that a lot of liberals who treated these ideas as a harmless academic diversion are now seeing the perverse moral places they can lead to.

It is perfectly reasonable for policymakers to look to rein in this insanity at universities, which rely extensively on taxpayer largesse and are supposed to serve the public interest but instead often produce a combination of radical politics and useless scholarship, egged on by a non-tenured, easily-firable DEI bureaucracy that seeks to perpetuate exactly this kind of “academic” “study.” Meanwhile, the rest of us need to deal with the fact that this insanity has escaped campuses and embedded itself as an identity-political bureaucracy within all kinds of organizations, while broadly animating the left.