Academic Freedom for Me, But Not for Thee

In a report on a pair of Republican anti-CRT bills, re-introduced by Congressman Dan Bishop (R., N.C.) and Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) today, I wrote: “With a Democratic Senate majority, to say nothing of an octogenarian president whose administration has a bottomless appetite for anti-American racialism, the odds of the aforementioned Republican bills passing this session are about as good as those of a blizzard slamming Death Valley.”

But that doesn’t mean that so-called “messaging bills” are useless. For one, “they rally a disorganized and internally divided Republican Party around a specific set of priorities” and “forge the outlines of a new Republican agenda.”

And “they also set the tone,” I wrote:

Legacy media have consistently sounded the alarm about the “chilling effect” that state-level anti-CRT laws inflict on teachers. But that’s a feature, rather than a bug, of these efforts — a “chilling effect” on the proliferation of CRT means that the bans are having their intended effect. Republicans at every level of government should be seeking to put the CRT regime on notice. Gone are the days when taxpayer-funded progressive activism can persist without meaningful resistance from the Right. One way or another, this country is headed for a reckoning over the corruption of its education system.

Liberal education writer Jeffrey Sachs, a self-styled defender of “academic freedom” — a term that, in Sachs’s usage, usually only seems to apply when the Right is the alleged villain — sounded the alarm:

First of all, the idea that the Claremont Review of Books essay I wrote was about “how little I value academic freedom” is ridiculous. My impression is that Sachs isn’t a stupid man; he either didn’t really read the essay, or he’s intentionally mischaracterizing it to try to make me sound like a scary right-wing authoritarian.

But read the CRB piece, titled “What Academic Freedom is For,” for yourself.

Here’s a taste:

A conservative academic freedom understands itself as contingent upon the human capacity to reason, which reflects the coherent and knowable natural order. The existence of truth remains the only legitimate basis for free inquiry—in the words of Pope John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae, academic freedom’s purpose is that “of proclaiming the meaning of truth, that fundamental value without which freedom, justice and human dignity are extinguished.” The best defenses of academic freedom in the American conservative tradition affirm the principle’s crucial importance, while also emphasizing its rootedness as a means by which to apprehend the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Does that sound like the work of a writer who sees no value in academic freedom? I’ll let the readers decide.

But in any event, Sachs’s more immediate charge is that there’s something sinister about my desire to see anti-CRT bills discourage the teaching of CRT. To that, I don’t know what to say. Yes, I sincerely hope that bans on CRT make schools less likely to teach CRT. Presumably, most supporters of said bans do, too. Sachs presents this as a damning revelation. I’m not sure what he thought the point of anti-CRT bills was; either they discourage the teaching of CRT, or they don’t. I, for one, would prefer that they do.

Finally, Sachs, noting that the anti-CRT bills I wrote about this morning cut funding for private and public schools that teach CRT, writes: “You might ask, ‘If this passes, what’s to stop Dems from passing a bill that cuts federal $ to private schools/universities that promote anti-LGBTQ ideas?’ Nothing (except for double standards, of course.).”

Well, let’s see: Last year, the Biden administration tried “to deny free school lunch funding from a Florida Christian school that refuses to comply with the administration’s LGBT mandates, despite the school’s qualification for a religious exemption,” as the Washington Free Beacon reported at the time.

Democrats at the state level have routinely broadcast their desires to do exactly what Sachs is suggesting, from California to New York. Sachs argues that this is largely irrelevant, given that those initiatives didn’t always make it into law. But he routinely uses bills that don’t pass as evidence of the Republican education agenda. “Double standards,” indeed.