CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
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 |  Subject: Via Anarcho-Capitalists' Forum: Professor Walter Block was accused of racism in class. But he recorded his lectures.  Sun Dec 26, 2021 10:54 pm | |
| Walter Block stands accused of violating the “values, mission and policy” that are “central” to the “Jesuit, Catholic identity” of Loyola University in New Orleans, where he is an economics professor.
That would be more shocking if Block were not an 80-year-old Jewish Libertarian and “devout atheist” from Brooklyn. It was a humorous fate that brought his academic career to its apogee in a Deep South Papal stronghold and extended it into the era of whiny students and the spineless administrators who always seem to side with them.
It hardly ranks as news that some of Block's charges have allegedly been distressed by his “racist, homophobic, transphobic and sexist statements.” It happens so often that university authorities recently subjected him to the exquisite torture of “sensitivity training.”
There was no such thing in the more robust days of his youth.
That fresh accusations have now been leveled against Block does not necessarily mean that trying to re-educate geezers is a waste of time, although it probably was in his case. Block is clearly about as sensitive as he is ever going to get.
But he may not be in hot water again through any fault of his own, for students commonly misconstrue what their professors say, especially if those professors come with a reputation for bigotry.
There is no doubt that Block has frequently been bum-rapped. Students have, for instance, lodged the absurd complaint that he compared Gandhi's successful efforts to free India from the British colonial yoke with Hitler's attempts to exterminate Jewry.
Block can sometimes fail to grasp how delicate young sensibilities can be these days, however. He still does not seem to understand why he was sentenced to sensitivity training after explaining to a class that incomes are determined by productivity. The more cotton you can pick, the more you earn was how he chose to make the point, whereupon a Black student whose forebears labored on a plantation took umbrage.
Block should have seen that coming.
His worst kerfuffle came in 2014, when he was quoted in The New York Times to the effect that “slavery wasn't so bad” because “you could pick cotton, sing songs be fed nice gruel etc.” The “only real problem,” he said was that slaves were denied the right to free association. Block was miffed because the reporters thought he was talking about real slavery when he meant the voluntary kind. Asked where voluntary slaves are to be found, he admitted that they don't exist but explained that, in an attempt to make journalists understand Libertarian principles, he was talking hypothetically. Block is a long-standing advocate of reparations for the descendants of slaves.
The latest complaints against Block, Provost Tanuja Singh explains in a letter to him, arose in the course of an “ongoing investigation into similar alleged conduct.” The charges are that Block averred “women are paid less because they are lazy or incapable,” and that “it's the same with people of color.” Singh warns that Block, tenured though he is, may be subject to “disciplinary proceedings” for creating a “hostile and discriminatory environment.”
Block, who records all his lectures, has asked to be shown where he made those idiotic remarks. He is still waiting to hear back.
He may offend delicate sensibilities when he explains all the possible reasons for economic disparities, for instance, but he'd have to be the world's dumbest professor to condemn women and Black people out of hand.
.https://www.nola.com/opinions/james_gill/article_c522ccd4-62ad-11ec-8f5c-7f919e76095d.html
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