E-Pluribus | May 14, 2021

Banning ideas is not the right path, the end of Wokeness, and the unintended consequences of student demands.

May 14, 2021

A round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Frank Furedi: Why critical race theory must not be banned

As wrong or harmful as critical race theory may be, Frank Furedi warns than simply banning its teaching would be counterproductive. Seeking to quash an idea via legislation or other high pressure tactics smacks of illiberalism and is anathema to a free and open society. Rather, critical race theory should be defeated on the merits, or lack thereof.

Many conservatives in the United States, and throughout the Anglo-American world, believe that banning CRT is essential for the preservation of public life. Christopher Rufo, a contributing editor at City Journal, writes that Senator Cotton’s bill is ‘desperately needed’. In the UK, Conservative politicians have gone on record as being ‘unequivocally against’ CRT. Numerous commentators in the British conservative media have warned about the ‘insidious march’ of CRT in schools.

The hostility provoked by CRT is not surprising. Although it masquerades as a form of anti-racism, CRT actually expands racial thinking into new domains of everyday life – associating ‘whiteness’ with fragility and privilege. This endows white people with the status of moral inferiority. In some schools white children are being made to feel ashamed about who they are. In one school in Evanston, Illinois, administrators instructed teachers to treat students differently based on race and publicly humiliated white pupils. According to one report in the Atlantic, parents felt terrified to speak out about this.

But while the backlash to CRT is understandable, we should not ban it. It is wrong to ban any theory or ideology on the grounds that its content is objectionable. A tolerant society does not criminalise thought and beliefs even when they are utterly misguided and corrosive of the public good. The ideal of tolerance allows for the free expression of such ideas, while demanding that they be ferociously fought with enlightened, democratic views.
What’s more, banning CRT would be a huge tactical error. CRT supporters are at the forefront of promoting cancel culture and calling for the censorship of their opponents. Their adversaries should not play the same game. Otherwise they surrender the moral high ground on free speech. They would be better off trying to get to grips with what CRT is, so that they can more effectively challenge it.
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CRT is explicitly hostile to ‘the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law’. In place of equality, it favours diversity and difference. And instead of the neutral application of the law, it supports differential treatment based on race. These sentiments are essential to maintaining the privileged moral status of the victim identity and the notion that racism is omnipresent.

Read the whole thing at Spiked.

David Brooks: This Is How Wokeness Ends

While giving wokeness its due, David Brooks of the New York Times is more sanguine than most about the ability of meritocracy to overcome the worst aspects of woke culture. As Frank Furedi argues in the item above, Brooks believes the more extreme progressive ideas can be faced down on the intellectual field of play.

The thing we call wokeness contains many elements. At its core is an honest and good-faith effort to grapple with the legacies of racism. In 2021, this element of wokeness has produced more understanding, inclusion and racial progress than we’ve seen in over 50 years. This part of wokeness is great.

But wokeness gets weirder when it’s entangled in the perversities of our meritocracy, when it involves demonstrating one’s enlightenment by using language — “problematize,” “heteronormativity,” “cisgender,” “intersectionality” — inculcated in elite schools or with difficult texts.
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The meritocracy at this level is very competitive. Performing the discourse by canceling and shaming becomes a way of establishing your status and power as an enlightened person. It becomes a way of showing — despite your secret self-doubts — that you really belong. It also becomes a way of showing the world that you are anti-elite, even though you work, study and live in circles that are extremely elite.

Read it all.

Amna Khalid: How Students Are Furthering Academe’s Corporatization

At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Amna Khalid makes the case that student-led crusades at colleges and universities for “mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training” have often resulted in self-propagating layers of bureaucracy that raise costs and gum up the works, but do little to solve problems. Khalid details the lengths and expense some schools have gone to in order to satiate their own students’ appetite for the appearance of addressing their concerns.

Demands for diversity training and other DEI initiatives such as bias-response teams have been central to student protests against racial injustice since 2015 and have only proliferated in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Many student demands have been framed in terms of resisting capitalism, corporate logic,and labor exploitation. The Core Strike Collective called out Bryn Mawr as “a corporation that poses itself as an educational institution.” Indeed, the University of Virginia scholars Rose Cole and Walter Heinecke applaud recent student activism as a “site of resistance to the neoliberalization of higher education” that offers a “blueprint for a new social imaginary in higher education.”
But this assessment gets things backward. By insisting on bureaucratic solutions to execute their vision, replete with bullet-pointed action items and measurable outcomes, student activists are only strengthening the neoliberal “all-administrative university” — a model of higher education that privileges market relationships, treats students as consumers and faculty as service providers, all under the umbrella of an ever-expanding regime of bureaucratization. Fulfilling student DEI demands will weaken academe, including, ironically, undermining more meaningful diversity efforts.
The rampant growth of the administration over the years at the expense of faculty has been well documented. From 1987 to 2012 the number of administrators doubled relative to academic faculty. A 2014 Delta Cost Project report noted that between 1990 and 2012, the number of faculty and staff per administrator declined by roughly 40 percent. This administrative bloat has helped usher in a more corporate mind-set throughout academe, including the increased willingness to exploit low-paid and vulnerable adjuncts for teaching, and the eagerness to slash budgets and eliminate academic departments not considered marketable enough.
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Instead of tackling those challenges, institutions can rally behind quixotic rhetorical goals such as eradicating systemic and structural racism on campuses. They can, as Portland State University has done, pledge to apply “an antiracist lens to every signal we send, every model we create, and every policy we enact.” Or, like the University of Louisville has done, they can announce their aspiration of becoming “a premier anti-racist metropolitan university.”
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To be clear, student concerns about inequities are genuine and important. But instead of asking for bureaucratic solutions such as trainings, students would be better served if they insisted that colleges redirect resources towards things such as increasing financial aid, providing better academic support systems for underrepresented students, and instituting educational initiatives.