Yale’s finest
Jason Stanley is going all-in on the abuse, not to say libel.
That’s an academic colleague he’s talking to.
Interesting times. Not in a good way.
Updating to add: I see it’s a continuation of his accusations yesterday, which I shared at the time. He’s consistent, at least.
Morality aside, it just doesn’t seem sensible or reasonable or adult to talk this way to a colleague (or anyone else, but administrators could be watching the colleague problem). Bye Felicia at the Washington Post just learned that a couple of days ago.
I think he’s safe. Yes, he’s being an ass, but being an ass in service to the prevailing ideology. He’s reflecting Yale badly but his heart is in the right place.
If Yale has bought in to the dogma, they might not even think he’s reflecting them badly. They may think he’s reflecting them well.
I was an academic on and off for much of my previous career. There were a few occasions when other academics tried to have feuds against me, for some reason. Feuds don’t really work on me, I just more or less ignore them and do whatever I was going to do anyway.
But there was one very concerted effort by a very senior academic to get funding denied for some of my projects and even funding taken away from one big project, solely on the grounds that I was the one who got it funded. I never met this guy or interacted directly with him in any way. To this day I have no idea at all why he did any of those things. Big, fancy prof at Cambridge trying to take projects away from a lowly Research Fellow at Newcastle, presumably because he wanted the money instead.
My point is that academics certainly can be like this. While, in my experience, most drift along having fun, the ones who get political become either brilliant and necessary administrators or absolute bellends. But in my admittedly out-of-date experience, that kind of bellendary was always about the money.
Always about money and not about things people say on fucking Twitter.
Well, except that one time.
I just don’t think this guy’s reputation can survive this. If he moves into a more media-facing role in the next few months then I won’t be at all surprised. Perhaps media and academia are the same thing, these days. I wouldn’t be surprised.