RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/when-antiracist-manifestos-become-antiracist-wrecking-balls/617841/

After George Floyd’s killing last spring, protests have flowered on many campuses, and so have manifestos demanding that the schools fully commit themselves to an anti-racist agenda. More are likely as the school restarts and we move into spring. Some may feel that the enlightened course is to simply satisfy these demands out of a commitment to America’s ongoing racial reckoning. However, just as many will see a mismatch between actual conditions on these campuses and the nature and tone of the manifestos, as well as the protest actions usually accompanying them. Administrations must decide where racial reckoning becomes racial wrecking ball, even amid a sincere commitment to addressing racism both open and systemic.

At Princeton last summer, 350 faculty members signed an anti-racist manifesto that described the school as founded upon the pillars of its oppressive past, requiring an overhaul of faculty, curriculum, and admissions procedures to fumigate the campus of an all-permeating racism. Its nearly 50 demands included “exponentially” increasing the number of faculty of color; mandatory anti-racist training focused on identifying participants’ “vulnerability” and fostering “productive discomfort”; rewarding the “invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary;” and most controversially, the formation of “a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty.”

At Bryn Mawr College, anti-racist activists accused of intimidating students and faculty not actively involved in the protest essentially shut down the school last semester. Here, the claim was that Bryn Mawr is infested with a climate of racism that threatens Black students’ survival, and the “strikers,” as they titled themselves, demanded additional funding for the Black student center, a halt to evidently systemic “violence” against disabled students, and payment (as well as grade forgiveness) for protesters’ anti-racist “work” during the “strike.” President Kim Cassidy gave the “strikers” leeway, allowing some professors to cancel their classes or reformulate them into tutorials on anti-racism. Cassidy apologized for characterizing the strikers and their actions in a negative light.

At New York City’s Dalton School, an elite private K–12 prep school traditionally a conduit to the Ivies, 129 faculty and staff members this summer signed a letter circulated among faculty, staff, and parents that was later leaked to the Naked Dollar blog. The letter recommends, among other things, redirecting 50 percent of donations to New York City public schools; the hiring of 12 full-time diversity officers, as well as a full-time supporter of Black students with complaints; the elimination of tracked courses by 2023 if Black students don’t perform as well in them as white students; public anti-racism statements from all employees; and an overhaul of the entire curriculum to reflect diversity narratives.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private-schools-are-indefensible/618078/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

This article was published online on March 11, 2021.

Updated at 7:42 p.m. ET on March 26, 2021.

Dalton is one of the most selective private schools in Manhattan, in part because it knows the answer to an important question: What do hedge-funders want?

They want what no one else has. At Dalton, that means an “archaeologist in residence,” a teaching kitchen, a rooftop greenhouse, and a theater proscenium lovingly restored after it was “destroyed by a previous renovation.”

“Next it’ll be a heliport,” said a member of the local land-use committee after the school’s most recent remodel, which added two floors—and 12,000 square feet—to one of its four buildings, in order to better prepare students “for the exciting world they will inherit.” Today Dalton; tomorrow the world itself.

So it was a misstep when Jim Best, the head of school—relatively new, and with a salary of $700,000—said that Dalton parents couldn’t have something they wanted. The school would not hold in-person classes in the fall. This might have gone over better if the other elite Manhattan schools were doing the same. But Trinity was opening. Ditto the fearsome girls’ schools: Brearley, Nightingale-Bamford, Chapin, Spence.

How long could the Dalton parent—the $54,000-a-kid Dalton parent—watch her children slip behind their co-equals? More to the point, how long could she be expected to open The New York Times and see articles about one of the coronavirus pandemic’s most savage inequalities: that private schools were allowed to open when so many public schools were closed, their students withering in front of computer screens and suffering all manner of neglect?

The Dalton parent is not supposed to be on the wrong side of a savage inequality. She is supposed to care about savage inequalities; she is supposed to murmur sympathetically about savage inequalities while scanning the news, her gentle concern muffled by the jet-engine roar of her morning blowout. But she isn’t supposed to fall victim to one.

In early October, stern emails began arriving in Best’s inbox. A group of 20 physicians with children at the school wrote that they were “frustrated and confused and better hope to understand the school’s thought processes behind the virtual model it has adopted.” This was not a group with a high tolerance for frustration. “Please tell us what are the criteria for re-opening fully in person,” they wrote. And they dropped heavy artillery: “From our understanding, several of our peer schools are not just surviving but thriving.”

Shortly after the physicians weighed in, more than 70 parents with children at the lower school signed a petition asking for the school to open. “Our children are sad, confused and isolated,” they wrote, as though describing the charges of a Victorian orphanage. They were questioning why “everyone around them gets to go to school when they do not.”

Parents at elite private schools sometimes grumble about taking nothing from public schools yet having to support them via their tax dollars. But the reverse proposition is a more compelling argument. Why should public-school parents—why should anyone—be expected to support private schools? Exeter has 1,100 students and a $1.3 billion endowment. Andover, which has 1,150 students, is on track to take in $400 million in its current capital campaign. And all of this cash, glorious cash, comes pouring into the countinghouse 100 percent tax-free.

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/34/2/social-justice-101-intro-to-cancel-culture

The term “cancel culture” has hurtled into popular use as a way of identifying instances of social justice mobbing—essentially, the attack on a person, place, or thing that is perceived as inconsonant with “woke” ideological narratives. When a “cancel culture” event takes place the complainants demand—and often get—offenders fired, shut down, silenced, or otherwise removed from the public eye.

The students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for example, are calling for the removal of a statue of President Lincoln for his apparent mistreatment of Native Americans.1 The San Francisco public school board is making the same accusations against Lincoln, and are attempting to expunge his name from any of their school buildings.2 A long list of examples of cancel culture on campus—the epicenter of the mobbing maelstrom—is provided in Campus Reform’s “Burned: ‘cancel culture’ claims multiple victims in 2020.”

So what’s driving this cultural movement? Where has this new ethic and sense of morality come from? Almost all the modern iterations of leftist ideology we are dealing with in the present come from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who once conveniently summarized the essence of his thought:

The fundamental principle of all morality, upon which I have reasoned in all my writings and which I developed with all the clarity of which I am capable is that man is a being who is naturally good, loving justice and order; that there is no original perversity in the human heart, and the first movements of nature are always good.3

The most important clause to this quotation is “that there is no original perversity in the human heart.” The word original is an allusion to the concept of “original sin,” derived from the biblical Adam and Eve, who committed the first sin by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil against God’s instructions, thus staining all of humanity thereafter from the moment of conception. Rousseau doesn’t just invalidate original sin, he attributes natural goodness to all human beings, affirming “that man is a being who is naturally good,” that human beings are born pure and are corrupted by society.

By dovetailing the invalidation of original sin with the natural goodness of man corrupted by society, Rousseau created a new ethic for interpreting right and wrong, moving responsibility for evil from the individual to society. As Irving Babbitt, a critic of Rousseau, once explained:

The old dualism put the conflict between good and evil in the breast of the individual, with evil so predominant since the Fall that it behooves man to be humble; with Rousseau, this conflict is transferred from the individual to society.4

Rousseau’s transfer of the struggle for good and evil from the individual to society creates an interesting wrinkle in liberal thought: perfectibility. Man’s flaws and fallen nature are removed and no longer a limitation. Arthur Melzer, a scholar of Rousseau, asserts that because evil comes from without and not from within, “then perhaps it could be overcome by reordering society. In principle, Rousseau opens up radical new hopes for politics . . . that it can transform the human condition, bring secular salvation, make all men healthy and happy.”5 Now that man is devoid of any evil inclination, “the appropriate manipulation of environmental factors can lead to human perfectibility,” and the perfectibility of society as well.6