A collection of “And More” content from Summer 2023.

Racket News

An important piece by Matt Taibbi on free speech, “a horror story that concerns people from all countries.” Taibbi goes beyond typical discussions of censorship to the causes and agents behind our Orwellian times. It is ”the institutionalization of orthodoxy, a vast, organized effort to narrow our intellectual horizons… This is more than a speech crisis. It’s a humanity crisis.”

A collection of “And More” content from Spring 2023

Executive Order

On February 16th, the President of the U.S. issued an Executive Order to advance racial equity through the federal government with a goal to ensure equal outcomes. Following the lead of DEI officers and departments at universities, the federal government will now mandate equity enforcement through agencies nationally with a goal “to advance an ambitious, whole-of-government approach to racial equity…and to continuously embed equity into all aspects of Federal decision-making.”

A collection of additional articles/content of interest from Winter/Spring 2023.

New York Times

Jesse Singal writes that “the specific type of diversity training that is currently in vogue — mandatory training that blames dominant groups for D.E.I. problems — may well have a net negative effect on the outcomes managers claim to care about… And they’re generating exactly the sort of backlash that research predicts.”

WSJ

A important reminder that freedom is not free, and that courageous individuals such as Apple Daily and Next Media’s Jimmy Lai, a Chinese sweatshop-to-riches billionaire who has chosen to fight for freedom over safety and comfort, is now on trial in Hong Kong. “Those of us in the American press like to use the cliché of speaking truth to power… But truth be told, we have it easy... We have little chance of suffering for our work, and we congratulate ourselves with prizes—often with more self-regard than we deserve.”

Tablet

Forget Democrats and Republicans. Tablet Editor-in-Chief Alena Newhouse makes the convincing case that the dividing lines are between those who remain committed to existing institutions—education, arts, politics—and those who think our institutions are fundamentally broken and need to be rebuilt. “The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it’s an emergency, and those who do not.”

Atlantic

An excellent piece by HBS and HKS Professor Arthur Brooks who believes “the happiness crisis in America is at its core a crisis of our personal and shared sense of meaning.” He writes why the pursuit of happiness is getting harder, how we need a sense of meaning in our lives and shared sense of meaning as a country, and how we, as a country, can (and must) correct course now.

A collection of additional content of interest from Fall 2022.

HKS’s Education Next

Executive editor of HKS’s Education Next, Frederick Hess responds to a recent RAND survey revealing K-12 educators’ lack of concern around civics education, an issue former ACLU president and fellow Harvard alum Nadine Strossen claims is the reason students show up to college wholly unprepared for civil discourse. “I was gobsmacked by the results,” Hess writes. “I mean, I’ve always thought it fairly uncontroversial to assume that students need to know how judges get appointed or how Congress works if we expect them to be informed, engaged citizens.”

Tablet

A persuasive, expansive piece detailing “how the major institutions of American society all came to sing in the woke chorus, and what can be done about it.” Lind traces woke infusion into every institution, attributing the tactic to “entryism,” often associated with Trotsky. The tactic is infiltration— using the freedoms and deregulation of the private sector to capture American society without the consent of the governed. The solution? The “expansion of democratically accountable government.”

A collection of additional content of interest from August 2022.

Academic Freedom Alliance

An excellent interview with Nadine Strossen (AB ‘72, JD ‘75), former ACLU president, Harvard alum and author. Strossen discusses why college students aren’t to blame for their close-mindedness, the importance of humility, how today’s censorship is worse than during the McCarthy era, why protection from harmful speech does more harm than activists believe it does, and how our system of justice is imperiled by law school students who refuse to take the other side of an argument.

Atlantic

Caitlin Flanagan argues that freedom of expression isn’t the tool of the powerful; it’s the tool of the powerless. With biting wit, she skewers America’s free speech frenemies before throwing a dire warning shot across the bow of the entire country, coming to the conclusion that “Whenever a society collapses in on itself, free speech is the first thing to go. That’s how you know we’re in the process of closing up shop…You might want to look into relocating to one of the other countries shaped by the principles of the American Revolution. They aren’t hard to find. Just go to Google and type in the free world.”

American Institute for Economic Research

AIER covers the American Historical Association’s recent tangle with progressivism’s “presentism.” AHA president Sweet published a piece critical of presentism in historical studies after which he was swiftly attacked online with calls for his resignation. “The frenzy further exposed the very same problems in the profession that Sweet’s essay cautioned against.” Instead of standing up for his views, however, Sweet apologized with a letter that “reads like a ‘struggle session’ for academic wrongthink.”

Persuasion

Cancel culture is not limited to shutting down people publicly; it’s about the untold number of unseen and unheard cancellations along the way explains Ted Balaker, filmmaker and former network news producer. “The greatest impact often falls on those far removed from the original scene of the outrage.” The impact, he argues, runs deep— “Even when cancel culture’s most obvious side doesn’t show itself, those involved still feel its chill… Each impact may be small, but imagine them multiplying.” In other words, when it becomes systemic.

The Good Fight/Persuasion

An excellent discussion on free speech with Yacha Mounk and Brown University professor Corey Brettschneider. They discuss the role of the government in speech, the necessity of free speech in a democracy, and the vital need for courage, especially among those in academia privileged to have a podium.

New York Times

Eight NYT opinion columnists reflect on their mistakes. “In our age of hyperpartisanship and polarization, when social media echo chambers incentivize digging in and doubling down, it’s not easy to admit you got something wrong….It’s not necessarily easy for Times Opinion columnists to engage in public self-reproach, but we hope that in doing so, they can be models of how valuable it can be to admit when you get things wrong.” Eight NYT’s opinion columnists reflect on their mistakes.

Quillette

Shuichi Tezuka (pseudonym), documents a trend in Wikipedia articles related to human intelligence “to become steadily more divorced from its source material.” The author provides numerous examples of changes that flout scientific research in order to promulgate a certain narrative, discredit and/or disappear ideas. “The original purpose of Wikipedia was to reflect the current understanding of the topics that it covers, not to exert an influence over fields to enact social change.”