E-Pluribus | March 14, 2024
New Hampshire rights a wrong; Harvard fires the wrong person; and why 'intellectual diversity' might not be all it's cracked up to be.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Tim Rosenberger, Nicole Stelle Garnett: New Hampshire’s Religious Freedom Revival
There are plenty of laws on the books that are no longer enforced. But Tim Rosenberger and Nicole Stelle Garnett report for City Journal that New Hampshire is eliminating outdated, unconstitutional restrictions religious freedom. The two write that even small changes are significant given current events.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, some voters and elected officials feared that rising Catholic immigration would transform American Catholicism from a small minority faith, with adherents largely confined to Maryland and Louisiana, into a nationwide political force. Nativists, seeking to “Americanize” Catholics, tried to amend the U.S. Constitution to mandate nationwide free public schools and ban public funding of faith-based schools. Supporters of the amendment sought to undermine Catholic, or what they called “sectarian,” schools. The amendment, proposed in a speech by President Ulysses S. Grant and championed by Congressman James Blaine, quickly passed the House before failing narrowly in the Senate.
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A recent series of Supreme Court rulings have deemed Blaine Amendments, and states’ efforts to penalize faith-based organizations, unconstitutional. Yet many of these historic anti-Catholic laws remain on the books. Too few states have taken appropriate action to ensure that their laws and public programs eliminate the vestiges of our nation’s history of anti-Catholicism and conform to the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause.
One state, however, has proved an exception: New Hampshire. The Granite State’s legislature recently enacted legislation that removed the words “sectarian” and “nonsectarian” from its lawbooks and, in so doing, largely eliminated laws that unconstitutionally discriminate against religious organizations. By removing the requirement that services provided in public programs be “nonsectarian,” New Hampshire has broadened the opportunities for the state to cooperate with faith-based organizations and brought its law in line with current First Amendment doctrine. These efforts signal the state’s desire to honor the Free Exercise Clause and ensure that its laws conform to constitutional principles.
New Hampshire’s efforts are both politically prudent and morally justified. First, the reforms lessen the state’s exposure to expensive lawsuits. In recent years, the Supreme Court has often sided with faith-based organizations that challenge discriminatory state laws. Proactively rectifying unconstitutional aspects of New Hampshire law saves state resources that might otherwise be deployed to defending or settling doomed lawsuits.
Second, these reforms acknowledge the venerable history of faith-based organizations in America. Such groups have for centuries served as social escalators and safety nets, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, educating the young, and caring for the infirm.
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Third and finally, New Hampshire is abiding by and promoting the rule of law. America’s fragile union depends on agreeing to live by shared constitutional norms, even when those norms are inconsistent with local policy preferences.
Read it all.
Vinay Prasad: Martin Kulldorff was wrongly fired from Harvard Medical School
Harvard’s leadership continue to serve as the Keystone Cops of the Ivy League. Writing at his Substack Sensible Medicine, Dr. Vinay Prasad decries the school’s mistreatment of Martin Kulldorff for his anti-establishment COVID views.
Martin Kulldorff was a professor at Harvard Medical School who argued during the pandemic that school closure was misguided policy, lockdowns were inappropriate and draconian, vaccine mandates were unjust, natural immunity conferred protection against subsequent severe disease, kids did not need to be vaccinated, and that two year old children should not wear cloth masks in daycare.
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[R]ecently Martin wrote a staggering essay where he describes how his unpopular opinions left him ostracized at Harvard Medical School.
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[E]ven if you disagree with Martin on COVID-19 views, and even if you think he should have been vaccinated, can we at least agree that it is incredibly poor form and a threat to Academic Freedom to fire doctors and professors who disagree? What message does this send to faculty?
The academy is full of people who declined vaccines — mostly with dubious exemptions — and yet Harvard fires the one professor who happens to speak out against Government policies. It looks like Harvard has weaponized its policies and selectively enforces them.
Worse, this sends a chilling message that you can’t speak out against policy — even if it is in your wheelhouse — at times of crisis. Of course, Universities are full of petty rules, and can find that you violated one or the other. They will selectively enforce these and fire you. Tenure be damned.
Read it all here.
Keith E. Whittington: Why ‘Intellectual Diversity’ Requirements on Campus Won’t Work
Opponents of DEI often cite “intellectual diversity” as the type of diversity universities should strive for. While Keith Whittington is no fan of DEI, he suggests at The Dispatch that simply substituting one set of diversity requirements for another raises a whole new set of problems for freedom on campus.
Ever since the Trump administration issued an executive order barring federal agencies from holding diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops, Republican state legislatures have explored ways to rein in “divisive concepts” within their jurisdictions. Some legislatures have sought to ban state university professors from requiring that students “believe” such divisive concepts.
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Indiana Senate Bill 202 has passed the state legislature and now awaits the governor’s signature. The bill has several components, some more controversial than others. It directs boards of trustees to create “diversity committees” focused on “cultural and intellectual diversity issues” and to expand the mission of diversity offices to include intellectual diversity. It bans politicized diversity statements for admission and hiring, and directs universities to adopt a policy of institutional neutrality on matters of public controversy.
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. . .SB 202 marks a substantial departure from conventional tenure policies. Both private and public universities across the country often have a process for granting tenure to members of the faculty after a lengthy probationary period. Moreover, a substantial review process generally focuses on the quality of a faculty member’s teaching, research, and service to the department, university, and profession.
Indiana’s proposal, by contrast, would add a much more specific set of criteria to evaluating faculty performance. While universities are beginning to explicitly reward teaching, research, and service that advances the goals of diversity and inclusion, the Indiana proposal would add a similar component to tenure standards with a decidedly right-leaning twist. It’s not enough for the Indiana bill that teaching and scholarship be good in the eyes of a professor’s peers; it must also advance “intellectual diversity.”
These requirements, however, are not all that different from what we’ve come to expect from DEI contribution requirements. Both impinge on the freedom of teachers and scholars to structure their courses and research according to their professional judgment. Both keep academics from pursuing inquiry and advancing the truth without set end goals. Indeed, they redefine the mission of the university away from one of advancing knowledge.
Rather than being a realistic way to advance “intellectual diversity” on campus, the Indiana bill reflects a distrust of faculty that is now endemic on the political right.
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Variety is surely appropriate and useful sometimes. A survey of modern political theory that excluded liberalism or Marxism would hardly be worthy of the name. Could no course, however, be taught simply on “radical political thought” or “conservative political thought”? Can a course be offered on “liberalism,” or must it only be “liberalism and its critics”? If a law school class on “originalism” (never mind the critics) incorporated readings from liberal originalists, libertarian originalists, democratic originalists, and Burkean originalists, would that check the box for variety?
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Mandating that individual professors and individual classes themselves prioritize “diversity” and “variety” over truth is a step in the wrong direction. Universities should be internally diverse and pluralistic, but individual scholars need the freedom to pursue the truth as best they can and as they best understand it. They need the freedom to prioritize questions and perspectives that they think are most helpful to advancing human understanding, but also the humility and the open-mindedness to admit that they themselves might not have a perfect grasp on the truth.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
The Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression recounts a recent example of a successful heckler’s veto at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:
Colin Wright takes a science journal to task for its utterly unscientific take on sex.
And finally, John McWhorter on “lived experience.”