National Association of Scholars Pushes Back on Cancel Culture

The National Association of Scholars was founded and funded by conservatives back in 1987, long before Trump hijacked what was left of the traditional conservative movement. Despite its conservative origins and leanings, the Mission Statement of NAS is one that I can generally support. I don't consider myself to be a "conversative" or "liberal."  I consider my positions on each political issue separately, a la carte. Party politics has no bearing on what I think about an issue. I am writing about NAS because I believe it is offering important information and narratives to the public.  In this article, NAS expresses its grave concern that Cancel Culture is chilling speech at the academy, which clashes with what is arguably the prime directive of education.

NAS has taken a strong stance in opposition to Cancel Culture and in favor of open and vigorous discussion of issues at universities. NAS is also compiling a chart of numerous incidents involving teachers who have been disciplined or fired for expressing their opinions (and sometimes for expressing facts) both in the classroom and outside of the classroom.  This list includes summaries of the incidents. I have reviewed independent detailed reports about some of these cases, so that I know that some of the NAS summaries seem fair, but I do not claim to be independently informed about the facts of most of the cases on the list.

All organizations that stand up for the importance of free speech recognize that protected speech is not always easy to protect. For instance consider the position of the ACLU, which famously represented nazis on a free speech in the Skokie case:

Protecting free speech means protecting a free press, the democratic process, diversity of thought, and so much more. The ACLU has worked since 1920 to ensure that freedom of speech is protected for everyone.

It is important to protect speech for the greater long-term good, even when some infringements involve speech that is unpopular, wrong-headed or seemingly deplorable. NAS makes this explicitly clear:

To be sure, some of the aforementioned statements are unsavory and may be worthy of institutional discipline. But the vast majority are not. And yet, woke higher education bureaucrats show an eager willingness to placate the angry students and professors insisting that “justice” be served. Meanwhile, “cancelees” have their professional reputations permanently sullied and, in many cases, ruined.

Here are the stated aims of NAS:

Our Mission The National Association of Scholars upholds the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.

Our Ideals The standards of a liberal arts education that the NAS upholds include reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges and universities; and individual merit in academic and scholarly endeavor. We expect that ideas be judged on their merits; that scholars engage in the disinterested pursuit of the truth; and that colleges and universities provide for fair and judicial examination of contending views.

We expect colleges to offer coherent curricula and programs of study. We uphold a view of institutional integrity that includes financial probity as well as transparency in the curriculum and classroom. We uphold the principles of academic freedom that include faculty members’ and students’ freedom to pursue academic research; their freedom to question and to think for themselves; and their freedom from ideological imposition.

We expect colleges and universities to prioritize education as academia’s main purpose. And we understand education in our time and place to entail providing students with a breadth of understanding of core subjects including Western civilization and American history. We recognize that the vitality of American education arises in large part out of the freedom of colleges and universities to experiment and to offer diverse curricula. That robust diversity, however, must be anchored in respect for the abiding ideals of the pursuit of the truth and the cultivation of virtuous citizenship.

I invite you to Google the facts of some of these cases on the NAS list to see whether you are also concerned that speech is being chilled in classroom such that the overall mission of colleges and universities is being threatened.

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Fairy Tale Week

Last week I found a big book of Grimm's Fairy Tales in my basement. Out of curiosity, I've been reading a few Grimm's Fairy tales each day for the past several days. More than a few of these stories involve people being desperately hungry or poor. On a regular basis, the wonderful ending is that the people end up with a comfortable house that includes a magic pantry that never runs out of food. These stories must have been written in desperate times. Reading them has reminded me how lucky most of us are that we are not chronically hungry and homeless.

Many of these fairy tales also seem bizarre, involving men actively coveting other mens wives, women treated like property, and families putting their kids to cruel tests. Reading these tales has reminded me that one of my daughters attended a Waldorf School in St. Louis County about 15 years ago. The teachers repeatedly told me that the ONLY thing I should ever read to my daughters, at least until 3rd grade, was Grimm's Fairy Tales. I refused to follow that advice. It strikes me as bizarre today as it did back then, and it was a factor in pulling her out of that school and enrolling her in a much better school. I suspect that they were expecting us to cherry pick for better quality fairy tales, avoiding the bizarre and pointless stories. Cherry picking is common, of course. I'm reminded of the many people who have insisted that I should read the Bible, focusing on the "good parts," not on the bizarre stories, such as the time God sent bears to kill 42 children for making fun of Elisha because he was bald. (2 Kings 2:23-25).

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Reductionism vs. Complexity in the United States on the Issue of Race

The United States has an undeniably serious problem with racism. No doubt about that. We've seen this with more clarity since the election of Donald Trump, as the bigots among us have been more ever more willing to openly judge others based on physical appearance. It has been distressing to see this. We need to shame these people and prosecute them to the extent that they break the law. To the extent that governments and their agents act with bigotry, including police officers, we need to push back with even more vigor.

But the United States is an extremely complex case, so it would be wrong to judge the U.S. on any one of its many dimensions as a proxy for all of its many dimensions. Andrew Sullivan reminds us of both this reductionism and this complexity in "Is There Still Room For Debate?" Here is an excerpt:

That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start . . . This is an argument that deserves to be aired openly in a liberal society, especially one with such racial terror and darkness in its past and inequality in the present. But it is an argument that equally deserves to be engaged, challenged, questioned, interrogated. There is truth in it, truth that it’s incumbent on us to understand more deeply and empathize with more thoroughly. But there is also an awful amount of truth it ignores or elides or simply denies. It sees America as in its essence not about freedom but oppression . . . This view of the world certainly has “moral clarity.” What it lacks is moral complexity. No country can be so reduced to one single prism and damned because of it. American society has far more complexity and history has far more contingency than can be jammed into this rubric. No racial group is homogeneous, and every individual has agency. No one is entirely a victim or entirely privileged. And we are not defined by black and white any longer; we are home to every race and ethnicity, from Asia through Africa to Europe and South America.

And a country that actively seeks immigrants who are now 82 percent nonwhite is not primarily defined by white supremacy. Nor is a country that has seen the historic growth of a black middle and upper class, increasing gains for black women in education and the workplace, a revered two-term black president, a thriving black intelligentsia, successful black mayors and governors and members of Congress, and popular and high culture strongly defined by the African-American experience. Nor is a country where nonwhite immigrants are fast catching up with whites in income and where some minority groups now outearn whites. And yet this crude hyperbole remains . . .

The crudeness and certainty of this analysis is quite something. It’s an obvious rebuke to Barack Obama’s story of America as an imperfect but inspiring work-in-progress, gradually including everyone in opportunity, and binding races together, rather than polarizing them. In fact, there is more dogmatism in this ideology than in most of contemporary American Catholicism. And more intolerance. Question any significant part of this, and your moral integrity as a human being is called into question. There is little or no liberal space in this revolutionary movement for genuine, respectful disagreement, regardless of one’s identity, or even open-minded exploration.

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The United States: The Land of Ever-Moving Goal-Posts re COVID 19 . . . and Everything Else.

We should enact a law that when people using social media make bold predictions that turn out to be untrue, they should be required to publicly own their mistakes on social media as loudly and brashly as they originally announced their predictions.

And if they CHANGE their predictions, they will be required to loudly announce that their original prediction was incorrect and that they are changing it. And they will be required to keep a running tab online showing others how often they have been incorrect in their predictions.

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