Suchergebnisse

Here is a photo-essay showcasing Taiwan's 21st Gay Pride event in Taipei, also known as Asia's largest visibility event for the LGBTQ+ community, with about 170,000 participants this year.

Louisiana State University System President William
Tate IV, on the eve of a change in gubernatorial administrations to one which
he doesn't see eye-to-eye, is saying the right things. Still, he needs to put
his money where his mouth is on others.

With the cocoon in which higher education exists catching
out some prominent university leaders recently over their schools'
reactions to anti-Semitic activities, Tate has avoided any such problems with a
very sensible attitude that should
be made official policy at all Louisiana public institutions: the Kalven
Principle of university neutrality regarding public issues. Recently,
he spoke to his faculty members at the Louisiana State University campus about
how he'll not comment on political controversies but then try to defend faculty
and student commentary.

It shows he's come a long way from almost
three decades ago when his academic publications complained about how math education,
an allegedly white-created/"Eurocentric" pedagogical environment, stultified and
misjudged black children's learning, as well as missed opportunities to become
an agent of social change. With a woke worldview dimly looked upon by incoming governor
Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry, in his over two years leading the system Tate
hasn't publicly articulated an opinion for any agenda related to his past
published views or any others, including his silence
over a measure that failed this year in the Legislature for a report about "diversity,
equity, and inclusion" efforts in state higher education criticized by two
other system heads.

But Tate's defense of free expression and inquiry
is in part only lip service because of LSU's uneven record in fulfilling that,
even today. That's the conclusion gleaned from the leading interest group defending
free expression in academia, the Foundation
for Individual Rights and Expression. Annually it evaluates and ranks
larger institutions for their adherence to principles maximizing constitutional
free expression, derived by media reports, active litigation, and student surveys.

The 2024
report gives LSU a dismal below average score putting it 140th,
worse than more than half of the field. There are bright spots, ranking 29th
for speaker tolerance and credits Tate's administration by ranking it 27th
for student perception of administrator support of free speech. But students
also rank the school lowly on their comfort in expressing views in class, in
assignments, and to other students and faculty members, at 238th, and
even lower at 240th for perceptions about their ability to discuss
controversial matters on campus.

Yet perhaps the most disappointing are several expression
policies that, depending upon application, violate constitutional speech
protections, and one that is unambiguously facially unconstitutional. That one,
which deals with prohibitions against electronic dissemination of "material
that is defamatory, obscene, fraudulent, harassing (including uninvited amorous
or sexual messages), threatening, incites violence, or contains slurs,
epithets, or anything that may be reasonably construed as harassment or
disparagement based on race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation,
age, disability, or religion or to access, send, receive, or solicit sexually
oriented messages or images or any other communication prohibited by law or
other University directive," sequesters LSU along with a minority of other
public institutions with such restrictive speech codes.

This actually marks an improvement for LSU, which three
years ago ranked second-from-last among the largest and most prominent
institutions with largely the same strengths and weaknesses. And, FIRE
lauds LSU for the system adopting a measure relating to the Kalven Principle,
the Chicago
Statement of Free Speech (something the Legislature required all systems to
do in principle five years ago) that emphasizes robust freedom of expression
standards at institutions of higher learning, although aspects of its speech code
that intertwines among university and system policy statements and permanent
memoranda certainly contradicts that.

With Landry as governor and not keen about
politicization within academia and especially infused into instruction, Tate
and other system leaders will have to toe the line as the new governor
gradually through his appointment powers reshapes the various governing boards,
as well as the Board of Regents. He, and they, can start by making constitutional
the expression policies of the schools in their systems consistent with the Chicago Statement – among state schools with at least 10,000 students enrolled
only McNeese State receives an all-clear grade from FIRE – as part of a broader
effort to ensure robust discussion takes place without institutions favoring certain
viewpoints that subverts their academic missions by replacing that with indoctrination.

A group of faculty at Penn have written A Vision for a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania at https://pennforward.com/.  They encourage signatures, even if you're not associated with Penn. I signed. Big picture: Universities stand at a crossroads. Do universities choose pursuit of knowledge, the robust open and uncomfortable debate that requires; excellence and meritocracy, even if as in the past that has meant admitting socially disfavored groups? Or do universities exist to advance, advocate for, and inculcate a particular political agenda? Choose.  Returning to the former will require structural changes, and founding documents are an important part of that rebuilding effort.  For example, Penn and Stanford are searching for new presidents. A joint statement by board and president that this document will guide rebuilding efforts could be quite useful in guiding that search and the new Presidents' house-cleaning. There is some danger in excerpting such a document, but here are a few tasty morsels: Principles:Penn's sole aim going forward will be to foster excellence in research and education.Specifics:Intellectual diversity and openness of thought.  The University of Pennsylvania's core mission is the pursuit, enhancement, and dissemination of knowledge and of the free exchange of ideas that is necessary to that goal.....Civil discourse.  The University of Pennsylvania ... acknowledges that no party possesses the moral authority to monopolize the truth or censor opponents and that incorrect hypotheses are rejected only by argument and persuasion, logic and evidence, not suppression or ad-hominen attacks. Political neutrality at the level of administration.  ... In their capacity as university representatives, administrators will abstain from commenting on societal and political events...The University must remain neutral to scientific investigation, respect the scientific method, and strive to include many and varied approaches in its research orientation.Admissions, hiring, promotion ... No factor such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, or religious associations shall be considered over merit in any decision related to the appointment, advancement, or reappointment of academic, administrative, or support staff at any level. Excellence in research, teaching, and service shall drive every appointment, advancement, reappointment, or hiring decision.no factor such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, or religious associations shall be considered in any decision related to student admission and aid. Faculty committed to academic excellence must have a supervisory role in the admission process of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Admission policies should prioritize the fair treatment of each individual applicant, and criteria must be objective, transparent, and clearly communicated to all community members. Faculty have outsourced admissions to bureaucrats. While the cats are away, the mice play. Faculty complain the students are dumb snowflakes. Well, read some files. And no more "bad personality" scores for asians. Education:A central goal of education is to train students to be critical thinkers, virtuous citizens, and ethical participants in free and open but civilized and respectful debate that produces, refines, and transmits knowledge. Competition:as Penn's competitors struggle to define their mission and lose their focus on this manner of excellence, Penn has a unique opportunity to emerge as a globally leading academic institution in an ever more competitive international landscape....An unconditional commitment to academic excellence will become Penn's key comparative advantage in the decades to come. As many other universities in Europe and the U.S. compromise their hiring decisions by including other non-academic criteria, Penn will be able to hire outstanding talent that otherwise would have been hard to attract. I have been puzzled that the self-immolation of (formerly) elite universities has not led to a dash for quality in the second ranks. There is a lot of great talent for sale cheap. But many second rank schools seem to have bought in to The Agenda even more strongly than the elite. I guess they used to copy the elite desire for research, and now they copy the elite desire for fashionable politics. Or perhaps donors government, alumni or whatever it is that universities compete for  also are more interested in the size of the DEI bureaucracy than the research accomplishments and teaching quality of the faculty or the competence of the students. Clearly, the writers of this document think in the long run competition will return to the production and dissemination of knowledge, and that universities that reform first will win.  

Gene Healy


"The library looms as the next big confrontation in the culture war," the Atlantic reports, and President Biden, our Culture‐​Warrior‐​in‐​Chief, is itching for the fight. "The president signaled a new approach in his late‐​April announcement video, when he cited book bans as evidence for his accusation that Republicans in the Donald Trump era are targeting Americans' 'personal freedom.'"
Not today, Satan—not on Joe Biden's watch. "We're taking on these civil rights violations, because that's what they are," Biden told the crowd at the White House Pride Celebration in June: "book bans may violate the federal civil rights laws when they target LGBTQ students or students of color and create hostile classroom environments."
When that happens, local school districts will face the wrath of the new federal Czar of the Middle‐​School Library. "Students have a right to learn free from discrimination," the president's top domestic policy advisor, Neera Tanden, explains, but "across the country, our nation faces a dangerous spike in book bans [targeting] LGBTQI+ communities." Accordingly, the administration is appointing a new "coordinator" in the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights who'll bring the full force of the federal government to bear in this fight.
I wrote recently that Biden's new Title IX edicts make him "Commander‐​in‐​Chief of the Girls' Room"; with this latest move, he can add "Boss of the Bookmobile" to his collection of extraconstitutional titles. It's an absurd power‐​grab based on the flimsiest of pretexts—and it's certain to make America's cultural conflicts worse.







The White House, like much of the press, has been cagey and duplicitious when it comes to what the "book‐​banning" controversy is really about. In Biden's reelection video, for example, while the president rails against "MAGA extremists… banning books," the camera shows a stack of titles including Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Atticus Finch in the dock? Maybe in a few notorious MAGA strongholds like, er, Los Angeles and Seattle, where Lee's novel has been pulled from the curriculum for its insensitive "white‐​savior" storyline. But the real school‐​library fight centers on a quite different class of books.
In both the PEN America and American Library Association "most banned" lists, number one by a wide margin is Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer, a "graphic novel" that's decidedly Not Safe For Work and—arguably!—inappropriate for a grammar‐​school library.
Others in the ALA's top 10 include:
All Boys Aren't Blue (#2), (depictions of underage cousin‐​incest)
Lawn Boy (#7), "which describes 10‐​year‐​old boys performing oral sex on each other"; and
This Book Is Gay (#10), which includes advice on mutual masturbation—"something they don't teach you in school"(!)—and "instructions on how to use Grindr to find sex partners.")
The ACLU and former president Barack Obama have recently encouraged public‐​spirited Americans to start Banned Books clubs. I'd love to see the face of any earnest suburban liberal who signs up expecting a refresher course in Vonnegut and Steinbeck. In any event, if you'd like a clearer picture of what some parents are objecting to, in their new study, "The Book Ban Mirage," AEI's Max Eden and Heritage's Jay P. Greene and Madison Marino helpfully screenshot many of the offending passages.
As for the supposed "dangerous spike in book bans," Eden, Greene, and Marino show that activists are playing fast and loose with the term "banned." PEN America's definition is broad enough to include "any action taken against a book" that leads to "restricted" or "diminished" access for any period of time. Temporarily removed then reshelved after review? "Banned." Moved from the middle‐​school library to the high‐​school shelves? "Banned." Removed from a recommended reading list but still on the library shelves? "Banned."
In fact, when Eden et al. decided to check online school library catalogs against the PEN index of "banned" books, they found that:
"74 percent of the books that PEN America lists as banned are listed as available in the same districts from which PEN America says those books were banned."

Still, the authors managed to find a few localities where kids can no longer check out some of the spicier tomes on PEN's List. So what? There are over 13,000 school districts in the United States; are we supposed to think Our Democracy is imperiled because a couple dozen of them took Gender Queer off their library shelves?
Reports of a wave of book‐​banning Babbittry have been greatly exaggerated. But to be fair to PEN America, the organization does document some serious cases of legislative overreach by Red‐​state politicians claiming to speak for concerned parents. Last year, for example, Missouri made it a misdemeanor offense, carrying possible jail time, for librarians to provide "explicit sexual material" to students. That's nutty: decisions about what goes on school‐​library shelves should be made at the local level, not forcibly dictated from the state house.
Still less should those decisions be dictated from Washington, D.C.: if the taxpayers in a local school district don't want Gender Queer or This Book Is Gay in their kids' library, it's none of Joe Biden's business.
That's not how Biden sees things, unfortunately; in the president's view, it's his right and duty to make a federal case out of how school libraries stock their shelves.
In January, according to the Washington Post, the Biden administration embarked on its "first test of a new legal argument that failing to represent students in school books can constitute discrimination."
In early 2022, the Granbury Independent School District in North Texas removed multiple LGBTQ‐​focused books from its libraries for review, ultimately deciding to return most of them to the shelves. Only three books, including This Book Is Gay (the one "that teaches kids about anal sex, oral sex, and hookup apps"), were permanently removed. The ACLU hit back with a federal civil rights complaint charging that the district had "actively facilitated discrimination and hateful rhetoric" in violation of Title IX. As the Post noted:
"If the government finds in the ACLU's favor, the determination could have implications for schools nationwide, experts said, forcing libraries to stock more books about LGBTQ individuals and… ensur[e] student access to books that some Americans, especially right‐​leaning parents, deem unacceptable.

The Granbury investigation is still in progress, but in May, OCR reached a settlement in a similar case involving a suburban Atlanta school system. Here, the Biden administration advanced the novel theory that, even if the school district itself doesn't discriminate, it can be held accountable for a "hostile environment" created by parents' comments at a school board meeting.
The Forsyth County School District's trouble started in January 2022, when it temporarily removed eight books following parent complaints. After review, they returned seven of eight to the library shelves, excluding only one, the aforementioned All Boys Aren't Blue. FCS soon found itself subject to a federal civil rights investigation into whether the removal of those books created a "racially and sexually hostile environment for students."
In its May 19 letter announcing the resolution of that case, the Office for Civil Rights admits that Forsyth County wasn't engaged in an anti‐​gay book purge: it had "limited its book screening process to sexually explicit material." "Nonetheless," OCR chides, "communications at board meetings conveyed the impression that books were being screened to exclude diverse authors and characters, including people who are LGBTQI+ and authors who are not white, leading to increased fears and possibly harassment." OCR found it troubling that during a February 15 board meeting:
"some [parents'] comments focused on removing books for reasons related to gender identity or sexual orientation. Also some parents made negative comments about diversity and inclusion or critical race theory."

The OCR letter doesn't specify what those comments were, but according to press coverage of the Board meeting, they included statements like
"Do you think it's healthy for 8‑year‐​olds to be exposed to books which encourage transgenderism, sexualization and masturbation?"

and
"CRT, DEI, SEL, or any other name you give it is not harmless…. No more lies, such as 'DEI's purpose is to teach children that there are different cultures that eat different foods. Really?"

Scandalous wrongthink—and in the presence of children, no less! According to OCR, parents' statements at the board meeting contributed to a potential "racially and sexually hostile environment," which the district failed to adequately address with "supportive measures" for afflicted students.
To get the feds off their back, Forsyth County Schools had to agree to a number of humiliating terms. Per the Resolution Agreement, FCS must:
Publicly Pledge Fealty to DEI Thought: "in locations readily available to the District's middle and high school students," FCS shall post a statement affirming that "the District strives to provide a global perspective and promote diversity by including in school libraries materials about and by authors and illustrators of all cultures";
Help Aggrieved Students Sic the Feds on Their School: that statement will also provide "any student who feels impacted by the environment surrounding the removal of books" with "information about how to file a complaint about discrimination or harassment" under Title IX and Title VI;
Take a Long, Hard Look in the Mirror: "The District will administer a school climate survey" on the prevalence of book‐​related and other harassment in its middle and high schools; and "assess whether any additional student or other training is needed to further improve the climate." Look, this is a wealthy school district with plenty of tax dollars to go around: why shouldn't the DEI‐​consultant industry get a taste?
…all this because school officials took a book featuring underage cousin‐​incest off their middle‐​school library shelves.
As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression notes, OCR's strong‐​arm tactics succeeded here despite the fact that
"there is no legal authority that [says] failure to 'promote diversity' violates federal anti‐​discrimination law. If OCR thinks it can require schools to affirmatively 'promote diversity'— a term left undefined — what else does the agency think it can get away with?"

I suppose we'll find out as Biden's new school‐​library czar gets to work.

The next issue of "Constellations" (vol. 40, no. 4) features articles on The Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt am Main) and the Frankfurt School:"The Institute for Social Research at 100: Continuity and Transformation"Eleven articles are now available online:* Axel Honneth - "The Institute for Social Research on its 100th birthday. A former director's perspective"Excerpt: "There are deeper, less superficial reasons for being skeptical today with regard to the potential of this tradition to guide us in our social–theoretical attempts to comprehend the present situation in a fruitful way, both philosophically sound and empirically productive. In the following, I want to discuss three challenges resulting from structural changes in our social and intellectual environment that make it more and more difficult to preview a fruitful, productive, and energizing future for Critical Theory in its traditional form. These three challenges stem from (1) the growing awareness of the endurance of the colonial past of Western societies, (2) the unmistakable importance of the ecological question, and, finally, (3) the growing uncertainties about the exact format and arrangement of interdisciplinary research."* Rainer Forst: "The rational critique of social unreason. On critical theory in the Frankfurt tradition"  [open access]Excerpt: "In my view, then, critical theory must be reconfigured as a critique of relations of justification. This calls, on the one hand, for a critical social scientific analysis of social and political relations of domination that includes cultural and, not least, economic structures and relationships. In this regard, two dimensions of domination must be distinguished: subjugation to unjustifiable norms and institutions, and subjugation to conditions that prevent practices of justification. Such critical analysis must be combined with a discourse-theoretical, genealogical critique of the justifications and justification narratives that confer legitimacy on unjustifiable relations. On the other hand, we must pose the constructive question of how a "basic structure of justification" can be conceived as a requirement of fundamental justice and be realized in social practice - not as an ideal or a model to be imposed on societies, but as a normative order to be developed autonomously. Essentially, a theory we call critical ought to be based on the principle of criticism itself. Its medium is reason striving for practices of autonomous justification among equals."* Alessandro Ferrara - "If Foucault, why not Rawls? On enlarging the critical tent"Excerpt: "It is undeniably among the aims of critical theory to envisage a society in which diversity can exist in the absence of oppression. Now, it's all too easy to merely invoke the ideal of equals living together with their diversity (ethnic, ethical, religious, cultural, or of gender, lifestyle, sexual preference) and without oppression. Deconstructionists, post-colonial theorists, and theorists of recognition often emphatically do so. However, when it comes to specifying concretely which institutions should form the basic structure of such a society, how they should relate to one other, what rights and liberties (and how limited and balanced) citizens should have, and what democratic legitimacy means, it is a whole different story.On the nuts and bolts of an oppression-free society the entire first generation had little to offer, to say nothing of the cauldron of the "verwaltete Welt" (Adorno). Habermas has quite a lot to say, in Between Facts and Norms and in his exchange with Rawls. Among the younger critical theorists who long for reviving the earlier program of the Frankfurt School, few even attempt to say anything. This is the problem, instead, on which [John Rawls's] Political Liberalism, not A Theory of Justice, offers an elaborate theory unmatched by any other to date (....) Critical theory can only gain from enlarging its tent to include also some of Rawls's concepts - reasonability, civility, reciprocity - and from launching empirical research on the conditions of the possibility for them to maintain traction in the challenging decades ahead of us."* Maeve Cooke - "Social theory as critical theory: Horkheimer's program and its relevance today"Excerpt: "Since formalist models of politics abstain from critique of the prevailing deep-seated ethical-existential values and from recommendation of alternatives, they are conducive toward unquestioning acceptance of the ethical-existential values undergirding the established political procedures, facilitating the reproduction of the political status quo. Against this, I take the view that contemporary critical theory must engage with ethical-existential questions, not least if it is to meet the challenges posed by our disastrous ecological situation. This requires it, in turn, to engage with the question of ethical-existential validity. Given the challenge of value pluralism, therefore, a key task for contemporary critical theory is to elaborate a conception of ethical validity that is at once universalist and attentive to the plurality of ethical values and worldviews."* Samuel Moyn - "Critical theory's generational predicament" [Link]Excerpt: "(....) it seems clear that the principal cause of the lack of interest in critical theory for younger generations - the lack of zeal to perpetuate or even study it - is that the votaries of the tradition conformed unreflectively to "the end of history" in the 1990s. They had essentially nothing to say about American unipolarity and the militarism that has so clearly accompanied it. Worse, for one-time Marxists, they never formulated an analysis or critique of economic neoliberalism. Yet these are the causes at the center of the activism and theorizing of many who lived through the past decade and forging a critical perspective on their times."* Martin Saar - "Rethinking Critique and Theory" [open access]Excerpt: "Benjamin's partisanship for the perspective of the defeated in historiography, Adorno's and Horkheimer's insistence on the deep ambivalence of enlightenment ideals, and Marcuse's clear-sighted perception of the central role of the excluded and marginalized, whom the capitalist system cannot even properly exploit, are starting points for a radical self-critique of the Western liberation movements, which have yet to admit their own entanglement in domination elsewhere and thus should actually make way for an even more radical, decentered enlightenment and liberation."* Frank I. Michelman - "Totality, morality, and social philosophy"Excerpt: "We thus see the Institute for Social Research, at a signal moment in its early history, posing for itself the dialectic of human individual agency and environing social totality - with neither element placed at the other's disposal - as a main topic for pursuit by social philosophy and its connected program of social research. It is by pursuit of that topic that the Institute's engagements over the decades of my own academic career have figured, importantly for me, in my work (not generally classified as "Frankfurt School") on liberal constitutional theory. Most pointedly it has done so in undertakings by Jürgen Habermas to explicate a moral point of view from which citizens in a political society encounter one another as each a free and equal person commanding full respect as such - but to explicate that morality, as I have sought to explain, not as a view "that philosophy independently discovers," but rather as one that lies embedded in a historically particular social totality."* Cristina Lafont - "The return of the critique of ideologies" [open access]Excerpt: "(....) I shall focus on just one issue: the recent revival in critiques of ideology. In my view, this type of critique is an important task of critical theory and remains one of its most significant legacies. Yet, if one focuses on the work of critical theorists over the past decades, this statement is far from obvious. In fact, the second generation of the Frankfurt school,most notably Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action, explicitly rejects ideology critique as obsolete in the context of contemporary societies. Even though in the 1960s and 1970s, he had embraced the classicalMarxist approach to ideology critique, he ultimately rejected it. It was the explicit attempt to rebut objections that had plagued this approach that brought about the so-called "democratic turn" of critical theory characteristic of Habermas's work from the 1980s onward and in which the critique of ideologies no longer plays a role."* Christopher F. Zurn -  "We're not special: Congratulations!"Excerpt: "It is fine, then, to get right to work on current social movements - Occupy Wall Street and other Square movements, Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise and Third Act movements, MeToo, the Arab Spring, or the Mahsa Amini protests - and on pressing contemporary social problems - climate change and human adaptation, deepening material inequality, the erosion of constitutional democracy, artificial intelligence and human de-skilling, global migration and refugee waves, the transformation of the Westphalian international order, the resilience and resurgence of patriarchy, and so on - without worrying how to fit these movements and problems into the architectonic of Dialectic of Enlightenment or Theory of Communicative Action. To be sure, we need not ignore the conceptual resources and insights of our tradition when they are relevant and enlightening. But we need to take interdisciplinarity seriously by looking to the much broader currents of critical thought on social formations and the changing horizons of human emancipation."* Peter E. Gordon - "The animating impulses of critical theory"Excerpt: "For some readers, this generational shift - between the first and second generations of critical theory - is overdramatized into a stark contrast between totalizing negativism and restorationist optimism, both of which seem to hover at too great an altitude above social reality. Needless to say, this contrast does an injustice to both parties. Adorno and Horkheimer are far more committed to reason's self-reflective possibilities, while Habermas remains far more attentive to reason's systemic distortion. They converge at a point of dialectical mediation, whereas neither pure negativism nor pure idealism would serve as a viable groundwork for critical theory. In what follows I wish to suggest that Horkheimer's original model of social philosophy, as animated by a rational but materialist ideal of emancipation, still has enduring merit."* William E. Scheuerman - "Horkheimer's unrealized vision"Excerpt: "Horkheimer's idea of a mutually constructive exchange between philosophy and critical social science has too often been rare and ephemeral. And this should worry us if you believe, as this author does, that Horkheimer was right to see such an exchange as indispensable to critical theory. (....) Only in 1962 did Habermas, in an appropriately interdisciplinary study that relied heavily on research from legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists, begin to revitalize Frankfurt critical theory. Not only did his landmark Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere take the social sciences seriously, but its young author seems to have implicitly grasped that critical theory could only flourish on the basis of an authentically cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. Horkheimer's original interdisciplinary vision clearly inspired the young Habermas. When properly reconstructed, it should inspire us today as well."