Weekly Roundup
Reading, watching, & listening list
Free Speech on Campus and FAIR’s Commitment to Civil Disagreement
FAIR executive director Monica Harris writes about disagreements within the FAIR community and why they're valuable.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously warned that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." As we navigate this challenging new landscape, let us carry in our hearts a willingness to hold those we support and those we oppose, to the same standards. The values we hold dear cannot possibly endure if we choose to adhere to them selectively.
FAIR will continue to publish diverse perspectives on challenging issues. We'll continue to advocate for policies that treat people as individuals rather than primarily as members of identity groups. And we'll continue to model civil disagreement as an alternative to both enforced conformity and unproductive polarization.
Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes
For Quillette, FAIR Advisor Erec Smith writes a review of The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed by Jason L. Riley.
Riley maintains that affirmative action has failed to benefit blacks. But as the subtitle of his book indicates, he is not even convinced that it was ever necessary in the first place. It persists today even so, he argues, because its advocates are more interested in defending a narrative than they are in solving a problem.
Riley’s case against affirmative action is broken into five parts: the condition of black America before and after affirmative action; the stigma placed on black students and professionals by racial preferences; the importance of rebuilding the black family as a preemptive alternative to affirmative action; the problem with the case for reparations; and the tactical use of falsehoods to defend what most people now accept is an indefensible policy. The upshot is a work that offers a bracing overview of the distortions still plaguing America’s racial discourse.
Five Dating Tips You Won’t Hear From Red-Pillers
For Queer Majority, FAIR Advisor Wilfred Reilly offers some common sense dating advice.
In the very significant majority of historical societies, including quite “feminist” ones like the Iroquois, couples resolved this issue by sending males out to do the majority of the hunting and aggressive trading while women ran the home front. Not only was this arrangement not invented by “sexist white men” in the recent past, it wasn’t even invented by humans: we see similar role divisions among monkeys and even among wolves on a more temporary basis. While working this out comes down to each couple, the ancient breakdown of “labor” hardly makes less sense under modern capitalism, when paying a nanny to come in, watch one child well, and clean the house costs about as much as a typical office email job pays.
Diversity Is Good, Actually
For The Dispatch, Angel Eduardo writes about the noble ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
That’s why the DEI sales pitch was convincing to so many of those who adopted and implemented these programs: The values actually do—and should—matter to them. Diversity—actively seeking and incorporating people of varying perspectives, backgrounds, and social contexts—is a good thing. Equity—being fair and impartial, and affording people the resources and opportunities they need to succeed—is a good thing. Inclusion—not making people’s ethnic backgrounds, identity characteristics, and socioeconomic status barriers to entry—is a good thing.
Our Universities Need Diverse Ideas, Not Ideological Auditors
For the Wall Street Journal, Michael S. Roth writes about how left-wing orthodoxy has stifled campus debate, but replacing it with right-wing litmus tests wouldn’t be an improvement.
But doubling down on ideology is not the only choice left to those of us committed to the vitality of American higher education. Our professional ethos demands that we be more open-minded and more attentive to a variety of intellectual traditions, but we do not require ideological auditors.
We must continue to insist that the most meaningful conversations are those in which the participants have different points of view and different life experiences. That’s why we are teaching our students to seek out interlocutors whose ideologies and beliefs are different from our own. In the classroom, we must encourage them to see that there are no simple answers to complex, enduring questions. That’s a key lesson of my “Virtue and Vice” class, whether we are discussing Aristotle, Jane Austen or the political theorist Danielle Allen.
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Great suggested reading, but why are you linking an article that is behind a paywall
("Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes" Quillette).