E-Pluribus | July 10, 2023
The American Woke Invasion; the classics are classics for good reasons; and higher education is still missing the diversity boat.
A round-up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Tunku Varadarajan: American Wokeness Invades Britain’s Schools
Talk of the “trade deficit” isn’t nearly as common as it used to be, but Varadarajan writes at the Wall Street Journal that America’s exports of wokeness are way up. Varadarajan describes the experiences of Katharine Birbalsingh in Great Britain, fighting what she sees as the malign influences from our side of the pond on British education.
British educator Katharine Birbalsingh used to look to America for inspiration. Now she sees the U.S. as a threat to schools in her own land. American ideas on race and identity are making “alarming inroads” in British education, she says, with activists demanding that “white privilege” be rooted out of the curriculum, the teaching of history be “decolonized,” and “systemic racism” be acknowledged as the primary cause when minority students fail. “Black Lives Matter” has become a raucous leitmotif among Britain’s youth. “You see protests with people saying ‘Don’t shoot,’ when our policemen don’t carry guns,” Ms. Birbalsingh says. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
What Ms. Birbalsingh describes as woke American cultural imperialism is warping Britain’s way of life and its educational system. “We are,” she says, “just lapping up all these bad ideas from America.” In New York to observe and help a new charter school in the Bronx, she also expresses fears for the future of American education. Charter schools, she says, have “lost their way,” beset by the “social and political forces unleashed by the killing of George Floyd.”
Ms. Birbalsingh, 49, is the irrepressible principal of the Michaela Community School in the northwest London neighborhood of Wembley. She founded Michaela in 2014, as a “free school,” a type of institution that came into being through British school reforms in 2010. Free schools are akin to U.S. charter schools: public schools (in the American sense of that term), free from the baleful influence of teachers unions, that hire their own staff and set their own disciplinary rules and curriculum. Although Michaela’s teachers “tend to be white British,” Ms. Birbalsingh says, the students are almost entirely from ethnic minorities, including “Afro-Caribbean, African, Indian, Pakistani, Arab” as well as Eastern Europeans. Ms. Birbalsingh herself is of mixed heritage, with an Indian-Guyanese father and an Afro-Jamaican mother.
The British media never tires of calling her “Britain’s Strictest Headmistress”—the title of a friendly ITV documentary—sometimes with the peculiar affection that the British reserve for women who wield a firm hand, but usually as a way of marking her out as a prickly anachronism of whom you should be wary. She started Michaela four years after she was run out of a state school for making a brief speech at the annual Conservative Party Conference, in which she said that Britain’s school system “is broken, because it keeps poor children poor.” As she sums up her argument in our interview, it is that “black children fail because of what white liberals do and think.”
Read it all here.
Christian Alejandro Gonzalez: Why We Should Read Great Books
In May, President of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology Richard Hanania wrote an essay at his Substack questioning the value of reading texts that are centuries (or millennia) old. Now Christian Alejandro Gonzalez of Heterodox Academy sticks up for the classics, writing that given the timelessness of the issues involved, there’s no need to reinvent the intellectual and philosophical wheel.
[Richard] Hanania is skeptical about the value of reading old books primarily on the grounds that human thought has made progress over time and thereby rendered many of the arguments of the past irrelevant for the modern world. He sees human thought as having progressed along two axes: (1) We today have access to far more empirical data than premodern people, and (2) we have access to better modes of thinking, such as the scientific method, which had not been discovered in premodern times. Thus, Hanania writes, “one might read old books for historical interest, but the idea that someone writing more than say four hundred years ago could have deep insights into modern issues strikes me as farcical.”
[ . . . ]
I do not think the premise of Hanania’s argument is true. Although we now have a vast number of theories that purport to explain human behavior, we cannot in seriousness claim that we have entirely figured out how humans work. It’s not as if the social sciences provide us with clear and unambiguous causal accounts about the actions of individuals or the outcomes we observe in society. Instead, the social sciences are rife with disagreements, not just about fundamental questions such as “What are the ultimate causes of human behavior?” but even with more mundane, practical questions like “Which government programs do best at reducing poverty?” To a significant degree, human social life remains mysterious to us, and we cannot be certain about our explanations of it.
[ . . . ]
The canonical normative theories almost never depend on precise empirical claims that, if proven wrong, would discredit the entire argument. Indeed, certain texts have persisted as long as they have precisely because their normative claims don’t rest on a lot of empirical observation. Canonical texts get much of the staying power from the fact that they address questions that all human beings as such have to confront.
What are some examples of such perennial questions? Here are a few. What sort of argument might succeed in justifying the power some humans hold over others? Does objective moral truth exist, and if so, how might we go about discovering it? How are we supposed to act when our obligations conflict with each other—when, for instance, our religion tells us to do one thing, our family tells us to do another, our country demands a third thing, and our conscience a fourth? How should society handle inconvenient truths—truths that may undermine the stability of the social order?
Read the whole thing.
Aiden Stretch: Higher Education Fails to Honor Diversity of Opinion on Affirmative Action
Post-mortems on affirmative action are plentiful here in the days following the recent Supreme Court decision, and at National Review, Aiden Stretch writes that higher education’s reaction to the decision mirrors its lack of concern for ideological diversity that characterized admissions practices during the era of affirmative action.
These [elite] universities explain their support for affirmative action in an amicus brief filed in the Supreme Court last fall. Race-conscious admissions policies, the schools argue, are essential to preserving diversity — not for diversity’s own sake but because “diversity fosters a more robust spirit of free inquiry and encourages dialogue that sparks new insights.” Protecting this diverse intellectual environment is a noble pursuit, but school administrators have been shortsighted in their approach. By supporting one-sided, pro-affirmative-action activism, they undermine the free inquiry and dialogue they supposedly seek to achieve.
Protests sponsored by academic institutions is not new. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last spring, students took to the streets with their universities behind them. At Dartmouth and Yale, faculty joined student protests and applauded their efforts to protect abortion access. At the University of California and the University of Michigan, the administrations released statements expressing “grave concern” about the decision. At Harvard’s Kennedy School, eight professors explained why the decision was wrong and how it might endanger civil rights.
[ . . . ]
Last fall, the New York Times asked a diverse group of twelve college students whether they supported affirmative action. In responses that surprised their surveyors, minority students worried that their peers “assume they are on campus only because of affirmative action.” Others expressed concern that affirmative action exacerbated racial tensions on campus. As affirmative action returns to the national spotlight, diverse opinions, including those, need to be voiced. Free inquiry and expression at universities depends on it. But that will not be possible if students with unpopular views watch their professors and administrators fund more protests, release more condemnations, and continue to amplify loud, persistent, one-sided student activism.
University faculties and administrators should keep any further views on affirmative action out of campus discourse and let students come to their own conclusions on the Supreme Court’s decision. In their amicus brief filed in support of affirmative action last fall, various universities claimed to believe in the “robust spirit of free inquiry” and in “dialogue that sparks new insights.” Releasing one-sided statements instead of facilitating open dialogue has done a disservice to those values. But when students return in the fall, universities across the country will have another opportunity to let their actions speak louder than their words.
Read it all.
Around Twitter
Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and attorney Erich Vieth on the strange new deference from law professors and commentators for government regulation of speech:
Via the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, former Penn State professor De Piero is suing the school for hounding him out of his job. Some excerpts from a FAIR thread on the situation are below:
And finally, out of Ireland, an effigy-burning is being investigated as a “hate crime”:
someone somewhere on the planet just expressed a thought that counters the Official Narrative...we will be investigating it as a hate crime.