UNDEFENDABLE IN NEW ORLEANS.

Years ago, Loyola of New Orleans economist Walter Block published Defending the Undefendable: The Pimp, Prostitute, Slumlord, Libeler, Moneylender, and Other Scapegoats in the Rogue's Gallery of American Society.  That Goodreads page provides the expected range of reactions to the deliberately provocative title.  The book might be an example of being outrageous to make a point.  There is evidently a sequel.

Professor Block is still teaching at Loyola, and the call-out crowd has come for his version of outrageousness.

Loyola University New Orleans has spent the last two and a half years subjecting professor Walter Block to investigations and sanctions for his protected speech. The university has targeted Block for everything from his teaching of particular economic theories to his classroom discussion of Gandhi and Hitler. Yet all of the speech in question is squarely protected by Loyola’s strong promises of free speech and academic freedom.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is on the Cold Spring Shops "nice" list for charitable giving, is giving the Diversity Weenies grief for their undefendable, or is it indefensible, assaults on academic inquiry, which have been going on for a while.

Block’s trouble began in June 2020 when students created and circulated a change.org petition calling for his termination. The students accused Block of holding “racist and sexist” beliefs, exemplified, they claimed, by some of Block’s alleged statements on slavery, the gender wage gap, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A group of students sent a letter to then-university president Tania Tetlow calling for action against Block, citing a New York Times article that quoted Block as saying slavery was “not so bad.” (The accusations ignored that Block received a settlement in a defamation suit against the Times in which he claimed the paper had taken his words out of context.) Tetlow acknowledged the students’ concerns, but admirably stood by the university’s promises of academic freedom in explaining the decision not to punish Block.

However, the administration would not have Block’s back for very long. In April 2021, Loyola determined various comments Block made in his Intermediate Microeconomics course — including his use of the word “Oriental,” his teaching of the “marital asymmetry hypothesis” as an explanation for the gender wage gap, and his reference to slave owners in a discussion about authoritarianism — had created a hostile learning environment. The university required Block to complete diversity, equity, and inclusion training.

And Block continued to face sanctions and investigations throughout 2021. In July he was sanctioned for discussing wages and productivity in his Principles of Microeconomics class after he used a hypothetical premise in which he and two students — one of whom was a student of color — picked cotton at different speeds to explain that employers pay the highest wage to the most productive workers. A student also complained about another of Block’s illustrations of worker productivity, asserting that he invoked stereotypes about Asians and Harvard graduates not being good at basketball to explain why the New York Knicks did not accurately estimate the ability of Taiwanese-American player Jeremy Lin. Loyola forced Block to apologize to the student and imposed a mandatory review of his syllabus before each semester.

I bet that "out of context" reference involving slavery is a reference to Time on the Cross, a much-misunderstood, particularly in passing use, economic history of slavery, and I suppose we should be grateful that the professor, who is in his ninth decade, is not being offered the Socrates choice of ostracism or a cup of hemlock.

Next, in October, Vice Provost Uriel Quesada emailed Block to inform him of a complaint concerning comments and readings from his Law and Economics course. The allegations included Block’s use of the terms “Oriental” and “atta girl,” although Block used them in the context of explaining he had “just turned 80, and my language skills are sort of embedded in me based on past experience, so if I say something that is problematic, just let me know, and I will apologize for it and we will go on and I’ll try not to.”

That's apparently no longer good enough, although the Foundation staff are still on the case.  Those latter-day inquisitors at the Loyola that is not a basketball school have to be disciplined, or perhaps persuaded to step out of line and pursue their hobbies, if they have any.