ASU Professors Discuss With Students “Dismantling Capitalism” And “Electing A Female President”
By Matthew Holloway |
Multiple sources have confirmed that two professors at Arizona State University, Dr. Angela Lober and Jenny Irish, spent an hour discussing with students “dismantling capitalism and electing a female president to restore reproductive rights.” They also asserted that, as Lober claimed, “the United States hates women and everything the female body does.”
The program in question: “Jenny Irish’s HATCH: A Speculative Future for Reproductive Rights,” was offered by the university through ASU Events on the website. The event was described as a workshop where, “Professor Irish will give a reading from Hatch, after which she’ll be joined in conversation by Dr. Angela Lober, Clinical Associate Professor and Director of the Academy of Lactation Programs at the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation. Come ready with your own questions and comments about the future of reproductive health in the face of climate change, misinformation, and other problems facing our present and our future.”
Hatch is a collection of prose poems from English Professor Jenny Irish. ASU described Hatch as, “This apocalyptic vision engages with the most pressing concerns of this contemporary sociopolitical moment: reproductive rights, climate crises, and mass extinction; gender and racial bias in healthcare and technology; disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience; and the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence.”
The event, co-hosted by the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, took a decidedly apocalyptic turn according to College Fix, with Irish warning of a dystopian future for the United States complete with “cannibalism,” and “forced breeding camps.”
“So much of our reality points toward those futures,” she told attendees. Lober added, “The balance between hope and despair is an everyday experience for me.” She explained, “A couple years ago I never thought Roe v. Wade would be overturned. How could we possibly do that?”
Irish also made an ardent defense of transgenderism and claimed an “all-out assault on the trans community and people’s ability to self-identify,” exists in the U.S. She added, “It is disgusting, immoral, and wrong.” Per the Arizona Sun Times, the professors took about 15 questions via Zoom and when asked about the well-published decline in global birth rates, Lober said it doesn’t “bother” her, claiming “we are overpopulated.”
Coordinator of the ASU event, Karina Fitzgerald, told College Fix, the goal of the event was to “encourage students that are following creative pursuits or other types of worldbuilding to simply explore other elements that they haven’t thought of before in their writing, or other ways to challenge themselves in creative processes.” She described the “element of worldbuilding” for creating “fictional stories” as “a good exercise for students to get in the practice of.”
However, ASU Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Theology Dr. Owen Anderson offered a different perspective in a comment to AZ Free News. He starkly criticized his colleagues’ openly political statements that move beyond the “fictional stories.”
Dr. Anderson wrote, “ASU professors are not to use university resources to tell students how to vote in an election. Not only that, professors are to be examples of clear thinking. Instead, these professors are using cheap scare tactics and logical fallacies to try and influence students. It is a misuse of their position and creates an unfair power dynamic for students. When will ASU hold such professors accountable?”
The Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, Dr. Jonathan Turley, while noting the professors “have every right to espouse these views and it is good for students to have a wide variety of viewpoints on campus,” took note of the “hyperbolic rhetoric,” renewing his objection that conservative, moderate, and libertarian faculty have been purged from academia.
Specifically, Turley pointed to the staunchly one-sided, anti-capitalist nature of the event’s rhetoric writing, “The ASU event captures a rising call for dismantling an economic system that helped drive industrial innovation and massive wealth creation. It has also left great wealth disparities. We have sought to address poverty with social programs that offer greater opportunity for those who have not been able to escape cycles of poverty. We have much work to be done. However, the anti-capitalist movement often offers few specifics on the alternatives, as at the ASU event.”
He concluded, “This is a debate that should be welcomed but not in this type of one-sided, jingoistic presentation. Imagine how much more substantive this panel would have been with an alternative viewpoint. Let’s have a discussion on the merits of capitalism and the record of alternative systems. That would offer educational and not merely emotive benefits to our academic community.”
Matthew Holloway is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow him on X for his latest stories, or email tips to Matthew@azfreenews.com.