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reaction to "
Silencing Sommers," my last piece for NRO, has been overwhelming.
This story of Christina Hoff Sommers, a nationally respected critic
of feminist excess, being silenced, grossly insulted, and effectively
ejected from a government conference at which she had been invited
to speak, has been posted and reposted — with outraged commentary
— all over the web.
The National Association of Scholars has issued a statement
condemning the treatment of Sommers, and many people are asking
what can be done to redress this wrong. This incident seems to have
crystallized the widespread feeling that both free speech and academic
standards have been sacrificed to multiculturalist and feminist
orthodoxies, not only in academia, but in all of our ruling institutions.
The uproar
over the silencing of Christina Hoff Sommers has been such that
Charles G. Curie, the Bush administration's newly appointed administrator
of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
(SAMHSA) in the Department of Health and Human Services has sent
a letter to National Review Online formally responding to the controversy.
That letter contains much that deserves praise. Yet Curie's response
to the Sommers incident raises warning flags as well.
To his great
credit, Charles Curie says that he was appalled to learn what happened
to Christina Hoff Sommers, and forthrightly acknowledges that she
was both "censored" and "silenced" by government
officials. Curie also lets it be known that he has personally apologized
to Sommers for the behavior of his agency. For all of this, Curie
deserves praise. It's a rare day indeed when a victim of "political
correctness," however egregious, receives a formal public apology
and an admission of guilt. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Curie
is a brand-new Bush appointee, now forced to deal with the misbehavior
of the Clinton-appointed officials who have been running his agency.
But Curie's
letter also raises the disturbing prospect that those who have perpetrated
this outrage will get away with a mere slap on the wrist, and that
the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP), (the division
of SAMHSA whose shoddy programs Sommers was criticizing — and
whose managers silenced her) will continue to waste literally hundreds
of millions of taxpayer dollars on silly, unproven — and even
counterproductive — ideologically driven programs.
In his letter,
Curie says that "corrective action is being taken in this case,"
but fails to specify what that action is. True, Curie says that
he has "made it clear to the staff involved in the incident
that I expect them to treat all guests with dignity and respect,
and ensure comity among meeting participants." But that hardly
rises to the level of what is needed to redress the egregious wrongs
of this case. More important, Curie bemoans the fact that "incidents
such as this can overshadow the valuable work being accomplished
at SAMHSA."
It may well
be that valuable work in stemming the tide of drug abuse is being
accomplished at SAMHSA, but the truth is that the CSAP division
of SAMHSA (the division where Sommers was silenced) is a disaster
and ought to be abolished. At a minimum, CSAP's current administrators
must be replaced, and rigorous procedures for evaluating program
effectiveness need to be instituted. If NRO readers want to know
how they can help to right the wrong that was visited upon Sommers,
convincing the Bush administration to abolish CSAP is the way.
Last Friday,
in response to the Sommers incident, Sally Satel, (author of the
recent and important critique of political correctness in medicine,
P.C.
M.D.) published a piece called, "The
Sorry CSAP Flap: It's Worse Than It Looks." Satel's article
exposes the sham of an agency that CSAP has become. Serious academicians,
Satel says, regard the CSAP as a laughing stock — both for
the scientific illiteracy of its administrators and for the agency's
refusal to seriously evaluate its own programs. Many scholars avoid
projects sponsored by CSAP, just because they don't want to be tarred
by its third-rate intellectual reputation. Projects can consume
thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours without ever seeing the
light of day, and other programs actively avoid gathering data that
would permit an evaluation of their effectiveness.
Worse, CSAP's
projects are guided by a highly questionable multiculturalist orthodoxy,
deeply hostile to the very idea of science. Satel tells of a million
dollar project meant to stem the tide of drug addiction in African-American
youth. In addition to transmitting to African-American boys a series
of extremely contestable claims about the origins of Western intellectual
and cultural traditions in Africa, the program's evaluation was
written at the level of a high school science project — without
the pre-tests or post-tests that would have made it possible to
judge whether an Afrocentric curriculum actually does reduce drug
abuse among African-American boys.
But the most
revealing thing about this CSAP boondoggle (the "Rights of
Passage Primary Prevention Program") is its claim that "scientific
colonialism" is part of what is responsible for oppressing
African American men to the point where they must turn to drugs.
Not coincidentally, as Christina Hoff Sommers was put upon by the
crowd at the CSAP conference (most of whom were CSAP agency, staff,
invited consultants, and CSAP grantees) the charge hurled against
her was that her demand for scientific studies of CSAP program effectiveness
was racially insensitive. So the Sommers affair is not a single
isolated incident of misbehavior. It is part and parcel of the ideology
that governs CSAP — merely a symptom of the profound intellectual
and ideological rot at the agency. It is high time that the Center
for Substance Abuse and Prevention was abolished. CSAP is, even
now, wasting $484 million dollars of the taxpayers money on useless,
quite possibly counterproductive, programs that have little or nothing
to do with drug use and everything to do with indoctrinating America's
youth with multiculturalist and feminist orthodoxies. Whatever is
of worth at CSAP can easily be transferred directly to SAMHSA. The
rest must go. Charles Curie's forthright apology and public admission
of agency wrongdoing in the Sommers affair is praiseworthy indeed,
but an apology and a slap on the wrist to the administrators in
question doesn't begin to get at the problem.
The newest spin on the war against terrorism is that it is restoring
America's faith in government. To a degree, I am sympathetic to
that view. When it comes to combating terrorism at home and rooting
it out abroad, aggressive and well-financed government action is
necessary. I have even broken with some conservatives in giving
qualified support to the President's faith-based initiative. To
a degree, we need to acknowledge that government is larger now than
in decades past. If we allow it to subsidize secular radicals without
also aiding cultural traditionalists, we will simply be institutionalizing
the immense financial advantage currently enjoyed by the cultural
left.
Yet having
said all that, we need to remember the power of the conservative
critique of big government-even in the midst of this war. The Sommers
affair is a salutary reminder of exactly that. Here, under the guise
of preventing drug addiction, a government agency is doling out
literally hundreds of millions of dollars, simply to purvey the
highly contested and questionable cultural ideologies of Afrocentrism
and androgyny. No wonder the public doesn't trust the government.
The truth is, the public is in fact being lied to. Ideologically
driven bureaucrats are hiding their tendentious cultural agendas
behind uncontroversial public rationales-spending our money to indoctrinate
America's youth in the left's favorite orthodoxies. And as scholars
like Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel have long documented,
the problem is pervasive at both HHS and at the Department of Education.
The days of calling for the abolition of the Department of Education
may be gone, but surely we can demand that irredeemable agencies
like CSAP be done away with.
In the wake
of the Sommers incident, many have asked what they can do to help.
Some are apparently writing to Fordham University to protest the
outrageous conduct of Professor Jay Wade, who publicly insulted
and silenced Sommers at the CSAP conference on "Boy Talk."
So long as the protests remain forceful, but also within the bounds
of civility, that's all to the good. But to really stop this sort
of incident from happening again, people need to contact the Bush
administration itself. Charles G. Curie, the new Director of SAMHSA
(which includes CSAP) can be reached here.
Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services, can be reached
here. The
White House can be reached here.
This campaign
is anything but a shoe-in. Just this Thanksgiving, Tommy Thompson
announced
major new initiatives in the Girl Power! program. Obviously,
whether he realizes it or not, Secretary Thompson has already been
captured by the feminist ideologues at CSAP. The harsh truth is
that, if something like the Sommers incident cannot bring about
the abolition of Girl Power!, CSAP, and allied government programs
— under a Republican administration, no less — then conservatives
will never be able to rein in intrusive and culturally tendentious
government boondoggles at all. So this is a test of our mettle.
Let our rallying cry be, "Abolish CSAP!"
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