Name: Michael Powell on Race, Class, and Free Speech
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Michael Powell on Race, Class, and Free Speech

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SubscribeSign inShare this post🎧 Michael Powell on Race, Class, and Free Speechwww.persuasion.communityCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailNov 20, 2021 • 44MNov 20, 2021Share this post🎧 Michael Powell on Race, Class, and Free Speechwww.persuasion.communityCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmail&nbsp;1.0×0:00-44:03);Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.The New York TimesIn this week’s conversation, Michael Powell and Yascha Mounk discuss whether the left has cooled on free speech, what’s lost in the national discussion about critical race theory, and how establishment institutions across the United States are being transformed.This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: Michael Powell:Mounk: Powell:Times TimesMounk: Powell:I've talked with a lot of teachers down here—public school, high school, middle school, social studies teachers, mainly—and they say if you're going to talk about history (let's put CRT just off to the side for now), if you're going to wrestle with history in all of its glories and unpleasantness and messiness, you run the imminent risk that you're going to make a student uncomfortable or upset—not personally, but because it's difficult stuff to handle. Right now, theoretically, a teacher who does that—and if a couple of students or parents were to complain—literally could run the risk of losing their teacher's license. Similarly, you have librarians who are very worried. This is not in the law, but there have been a couple of legislators who put out these very long lists of books on all manner of things from race to the Holocaust. People are just very, very worried. It's a bad place for free inquiry right now.Mounk:Powell:Now, as it turns out, he was not the most exceptional teacher. But I thought it was useful for him to get exposed to that. Having said all of this, I also think that there is some sleight-of-hand that journalists, teachers, and liberals sometimes use around CRT. It is certainly true that no one is teaching CRT to a seventh grade social studies class. It is also true that, to some extent, a number of the teaching colleges are very much influenced by what we might call a sort of anti-racism, in everything from long-standing pedagogy, to popularizers like Ibram X. Kendi, to CRT. Those are threads that run through many of our teaching colleges. To some extent, you get teachers who are very much dipped in those intellectual waters. I'm looking for how they apply those lessons. I think it is fair to say that these are important intellectual currents right now in liberal-left circles, and it would be rather strange if it weren’t having some impact on teachers.Mounk: Powell:In fact, in California—the prototypical blue state—voters in the last election turned down an effort to reinstate affirmative action in the University of California system. And that was a strong majority of Asians and apparently a majority of Latinos as well, who voted against reinstating it. Abbot is not somebody who holds extreme right-wing views. Whatever one makes of his views, they're—not to insult him—unremarkable. But when it was announced that he was going to give a speech at MIT, faculty and STEM grad students, really across the United States, reacted with outrage and peppered MIT—one of the highest churches of science education in the world, really—with all sorts of objections: “How can you have this man? You have a DEI policy. It's hypocritical to invite him. This is going to be damaging. This creates harm.” And MIT, I think, rather remarkably, backed down and decided they weren't going to do the lecture this year, and said he can come and address the faculty at some later point in time, but not in this prestigious lecture.I talked to several faculty who had gone on Twitter to denounce Abbot and say that MIT should cancel his speech, and they were remarkably strong in simply saying that they believe in free speech, but also believe in consequences for free speech; that it doesn't give you a right to talk wherever you want. Perhaps I'm dating myself, but I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a very liberal neighborhood, and free speech was a kind of holy of holies. It was seen as the founding stone of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement. It's been quite striking to hear very liberal-left professors saying freedom of expression is a value that's predominantly been exercised by white men. You do hear similar sentiments quite often now, especially if you choose to hang around the disreputable neighborhood of Twitter.There was a coda to that, which was that a very prominent physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, went to his colleagues and said, “Well, this is an important moment in free speech and science. We need to invite Abbot out here to talk to us, to essentially make a statement of where we stand,” and apparently a reasonable number of these colleagues said, “Pass. We're not going to do that.” And this professor, David Romps, who headed up a rather prestigious center there, ended up resigning not as a professor, but from the center.Mounk:Powell:sine qua nonMounk: Powell: Manchild in the Promised LandMounk: Powell:Mounk: To be clear, some version of that is in fact happening at a substantial number of private elite schools around the country now?Powell:Mounk: Powell:Mounk: Powell:And I definitely suggest that this may be a path to cultural hegemony, but is not necessarily the path to political hegemony, and can in fact prove perilous. But I don't know where it’s heading.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.Email: podcast@persuasion.community&nbsp;Podcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan RuberryConnect with us!Twitter:&nbsp;Youtube:&nbsp;LinkedIn:&nbsp;Like this postShare this post🎧 Michael Powell on Race, Class, and Free Speechwww.persuasion.communityCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailNo posts© 2022 Persuasion ∙ ∙ &nbsp;is the home for great writingThis site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please or unblock scripts

SubscribeSign inShare this post🎧 Michael Powell on Race, Class, and Free Speechwww.persuasion.communityCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailNov 20, 2021 • 44MNov 20, 2021Share this post🎧 Michael Powell on Race, Class, and Free Speechwww.persuasion.communityCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmail&nbsp;1.0×0:00-44:03);Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.The New York TimesIn this week’s conversation, Michael Powell and Yascha Mounk discuss whether the left has cooled on free speech, what’s lost in the national discussion about critical race theory, and how establishment institutions...

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