FAIR Weekly Roundup
December 19th, 2021
This week on our Fair for All Substack, FAIR’s Grayson Slover wrote a case study on Mystic Valley Regional Charter School (MVRCS), located in Malden, Massachusetts, about the lawsuit they filed against the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), and Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education.
The lawsuit alleged that DESE’s new evaluation criteria surrounding “culturally responsive teaching” amounts to an “unlawful censoring of [MVRCS’s] educational mission and repudiation of its charter.” Specifically, DESE requires that schools view “education as a pathway to liberation from systems of oppression.” But MVRCS explicitly roots it’s educational philosophy according to the “principles laid out in America’s founding documents,” and thus reject the notion that America consists of such “systems of oppression.” According to Slover:
MVRCS believes that oppression, where it does exist in America, is best opposed through a closer adherence to America’s founding ideals. By contrast, DESE directs educators and students to work to liberate themselves from systems of oppression that, in this view, are upheld by these same ideals.
Read the full article here.
Last week, we published the first of our “FAIR Advisor Spotlight” series written by journalist Sophie Lee, which features FAIR Advisor Michael Shermer. The biographical piece traces Shermer’s history as he went from a kid with a “religious bent” to an atheist and world-renowned skeptic. When asked to define “skepticism,” Shermer explained that:
“Skepticism is just the default, null hypothesis position of science. That is, your claim isn't true until you prove otherwise, because everybody can think of half a dozen great ideas before breakfast, but so what? It doesn't mean they're true,” he explains. “Therefore skepticism is simply just science, writ large. We're applying those tools of rationality and empiricism to any claim: religious, political, economic.”
Recently, Shermer has launched his own Substack—Skeptic—which will “serve as a revival of his former Scientific American column that ran from 2001 to 2019,” though he will also use it to write skeptical commentary on “social, political, cultural, economic issues, ideological issues” and various movements.
Read the full article here.
For Daily Mail, FAIR Advisor Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote about the Jussie Smollette trial, the way overly credulous media outlets and politicians handled the case, and a recent statement from the Black Lives Matter organization supporting Smollette following his guilty conviction for staging a fake hate crime against himself.
According to Ungar-Sargon, BLM’s statement that “we can never believe police” was a “bridge too far,” and “revealed something deeper at work in our culture on the Left when it comes to the relationship between race and the criminal justice system.” She explained that:
The moral force of Black Lives Matter comes from the way the movement pointed to a standard of justice that is still not being met for black Americans… But in their support for Jussie Smollett, BLM betrayed that cause, demanding that Smollett be held to a lower standard of justice because he is ‘a Black man.’
Ungar-Sargon is worried that some segments of society have now “abandoned a worldview based on right vs. wrong for a worldview based on powerful vs. powerless, and then superimposed a racial binary onto it.”
Read the full article here.
For The Spectator, FAIR Advisor Douglas Murray wrote about the tendency for people living in the modern era to “make judgments over everyone in the past” given the benefits of hindsight. This privileged perspective wrongfully makes people believe they are “better than” historical figures, and causes us to naively assume that we would never have made such mistakes. According to Murray:
The most obvious example is that every-one now knows which side they would have been on during the second world war. In large part because we know how history went. Yet history is less clear as you are living through it.
Murray is worried “that we seem to have a growing unwillingness to understand the past,” and points to the recent removal of a Thomas Jefferson statue in New York City Hall because the Founding Father apparently did not “represent our contemporary values.”
Additionally, our tendency to be “more concerned about safety than liberty” during the COVID pandemic, according to Murray, has given him “a little taster of how people in history must have felt.” He is concerned that there may be truth to the saying “a right once given up is never returned.”
Read the full article here.
For Quillette, Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman wrote about the troubling “intrusion of illiberal thought into science and education.” Last June, one of the authors (Krylov) published a letter in The Journal of Physical Chemistry describing the parallels she sees in academia regarding “forbidden” ideas and names, to her experience growing up in the USSR where “ideology permeated all aspects of life, and survival required strict adherence to the party line and enthusiastic displays of ideologically proper behavior.”
While Krylov expected to be “viciously mobbed, and possibly cancelled” for her comparison, she was was pleasantly surprised at the “flood of encouraging emails” from other academics sharing her concern that “radical political doctrines are being injected into STEM pedagogy” and are corrupting “objective science.” These positive responses gave her hope that “the silent liberal majority within STEM may (eventually) prevail over the forces of illiberalism.”
The article goes on to share comments from many of the responding scientists who “possessed a historical understanding of this kind of ideological movement.”
Read those fascinating comments here.
For Reason, Greg Lukianoff wrote about the fall of “political correctness” in the mid-90s when PCU, a movie about a rebellious fraternity, openly mocked “P.C.” culture. This was around the time when many speech codes on college campuses were being struck down, such as the overbroad speech code at Stanford Law School banning “speech or other expression…intended to insult or stigmatize.”
According to Lukianoff, these events “marked the end of the First Great Age of Political Correctness.” But it had not been permanently extinguished; instead, it “gathered strength over the next two decades, rooting itself in university hiring practices and speech policing, until it became what people now refer to as ‘wokeness’ or the much-abused term ‘cancel culture.’” According to Lukianoff:
Political correctness didn't decline and fall. It went underground and then rose again. If anything, it's stronger than ever today. Yet some influential figures on the left still downplay the problem, going so far as to pretend that the increase in even tenured professors being fired for off-limits speech is a sign of a healthy campus.
Lukianoff believes we have now entered into the Second Great Age of Political Correctness, and spends the rest of the piece giving contemporary examples of P.C. culture run amok. Ultimately, he believes we need more than to simply “reform” current institutions—we need alternatives, too.
Read the full article here.
For Counterweight, Pierre Gaite wrote about society’s past and present “skirmishes” with the so-called “Critical Social Justice” movement, and encourages us not to “abandon hope,” since its influence “may be readily dispelled with a dose of courage and a word of truth.”
Gaite described how he became aware of the issue of Critical Social Justice, and the moment it entered his workplace—through mandatory “anti-racism” diversity training. After the “patronising and specious” training sessions, he decided to be straightforward and honest with his coworkers about his feelings about it. According to Gaite:
Their response was vindicating. One of my colleagues had finished watching the video and admitted that it filled her with a similar repugnance–and that she wouldn’t have been comfortable admitting it if I had not declared my own position so emphatically. As a team, we had a cathartic discussion about race, racism and the complexities of individual identity.
Gaite believes that the perceived influence of Critical Social Justice on those around you “may be just an illusion,” and urges you to “stand up” and “speak out,” because that’s the only way some will discover they’re actually part of the silent majority and be emboldened to speak up.
Read the full article here.
For the Cornell Chronicle, Linda B. Glaser reported on new research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences modeling political “tipping points”—the threshold of political polarization beyond which it becomes impossible to curtail. According to the researchers:
We found that polarization increases incrementally only up to a point. Above this point, there is a sudden change in the very fabric of the institution, like the change from water to steam when the temperature exceeds the boiling point.
These “tipping points” are identified in part by the degree to which certain stressful events either bring a society together or further tear it apart. According to Boleslaw Szymanski, one of the study’s co-authors:
We see this very disturbing pattern in which a shock brings people a little bit closer initially, but if polarization is too extreme, eventually the effects of a shared fate are swamped by the existing divisions and people become divided even on the shock issue… If we reach that point, we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change, pandemics, or other challenges to the survival of our society.
The study’s lead author, Michael Macy, likened voters to “nuclear technicians” whose job it is to “bring the political temperature back down” before we reach the point of no return and have a political meltdown.
Read the full article here.
Join the FAIR Community
Become a FAIR volunteer or to join a FAIR chapter.
Join a Welcome to FAIR Zoom information session to learn more about our mission, or watch a previously recorded session in the Members section of www.fairforall.org.
Take the Pro-Human Pledge and help promote a common culture based on fairness, understanding, and humanity.
Join the FAIR community to connect and share information with other members.
Share your reviews and incident reports on our FAIR Transparency website.
Part of the problem is that the politics of personal identity and its successors such as CRT, Feminist Theory and Queer Theory and more all divide the world into good guys and bad guys. For many academics from their modern perch, and knowing little about the past, insist on passing moral and even practical judgement on people of the past. They also like to ignore who really helped change the world in a direction more to their liking.