Public Unreason: I think Josh Barro has it right with respect to this particular issue ongoing at Berkeley right now. I do not endorse all of his generalizations from this issue to the general shape of the Cosmic All, but I hesitate to disagree with him, because he is as smart and, in this set of issues, more perceptive than I am:
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… delaying the start of the game… demanding the reinstatement of… Ivonne del Valle… [who] stalked and harassed Prof. Joshua Clover, a communist poet in the English department at UC Davis… having admitted… 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…. Holly McDede describes a conversation with one of del Valle’s supporters, a graduate student named Alejandra Decker… “[who said] she… still stand[s] by del Valle, and that it’s not her place to judge a woman’s actions when in turmoil and isolated. ‘Those reports—anyone who reads them, I think we can all admit that they are difficult to read because they paint Professor Ivonne in a way that personally I’ve never seen’, Decker said. ‘It’s a woman’s actions in her biggest moments of survival’…
It seems to me that Professor del Valle ought to admit to a serious mental health problem and seek an accomodation under the ADA. But it looks like she is not sane enough to do that.
