Weekly Roundup
Reading, watching, & listening list
The Conservatory That Couldn't Handle a Conversation
For FAIR’s Substack, Martin Speake writes about his experience being cast out after 35 years in music education for raising questions the institution didn’t want answered.
My situation is emblematic of a broader cultural malaise—a warning of what can happen when open dialogue is replaced by dogma. The arts, particularly jazz, have always been a conduit for challenging the status quo, pushing boundaries, and fostering understanding across divides. Yet, when the very essence of artistic expression is threatened by a culture of censorship, we risk losing not only the art itself but the lessons it imparts.
DEI’s Beleaguered True Believers, in Their Own Words
For Quillette, FAIR Advisor Jonathan Kay writes about the fallout of the DEI industry and those who refuse to adapt their approach to changing attitudes.
What we are likely witnessing now isn’t the full rollback of the DEI industry, but rather its gradual reversion to the more pragmatic, less ideological mission that Silveira describes. No organisation is free of internal conflict, and so good workplace coaches will always be in demand. But the same isn’t true of priests, whose services become unnecessary once their parishioners abandon the underlying faith.
Dr Erec Smith on DEI: Race is a Distraction, Using Black Kids as Marxist Foot Soliders
For the Open Therapy Podcast series, Dr. Andrew Hartz and Leslie Elliot Boyce talk with FAIR Advisor Dr. Erec Smith about his work in clarifying DEI and promoting civil discourse.
How to Spot ‘Toxic Femininity’
For National Review, FAIR Advisor Wilfred Reilly writes about toxic femininity.
The point of all this is not that “women are bad.” Men do still commit most of the serious felonies, start almost all of the wars, and so forth. Rather, it is that women are . . . people. As more XX citizens become leaders, it is becoming radically obvious that there are usually female-coded traits that we should watch for, just as there are weaknesses that are more common for boss-men. A “female future,” it now seems evident, would not look like utopia.
When it comes to picking leaders, of either sex, we should probably focus on the level occupied by that smallest and most persecuted of minorities — the individual.
Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?
For Quillette, Ellie Avishai writes about encountering ideological litmus tests at the University of Austin.
For my own part, I tried to remain open-minded. Starting a university, I reasoned, is a complex undertaking, and so it was expected that all would not go exactly to plan. Yes, it disturbed me that some colleagues used “party horn” emojis on Slack when responding to circulated articles describing political hardships at other universities—as if we were in a zero-sum battle with the rest of academia. But I did my best to ignore such episodes.
It turned out that what I was observing was symptomatic of the larger ideological tension developing within UATX between two camps—those specifically championing an unabashedly “anti-woke” conservative agenda, and those (such as myself) prioritising academic freedom more generally.
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