In the current divisive political climate, Whittington shows why safeguarding the civil exchange of diverse ideas is an...
A timely defense of intellectual debate and critical thinking.
“The ultimate goal of a university community is to foster an environment in which competing perspectives can be laid bare, heard, and assessed,” writes Whittington (Politics/Princeton Univ.; American Political Thought, 2016, etc.) in his cogent—and likely to be controversial—argument for the crucial importance of free speech in academia. A spirited exchange of ideas contributes to the university’s mission “of advancing and disseminating knowledge.” Administrators “cannot be selective in what arguments and perspectives they are willing to let in” and should not give in to any pressure to suppress “forms of expression that they find immoral, embarrassing, offensive, indecent, misguided, or simply unpopular and inconvenient.” Considering students’ demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings, the author acknowledges that in some specifically diagnosed illnesses—PTSD, for example—students can justifiably seek protection from stimuli that might exacerbate symptoms. But in most cases, he has found, students identify as a trigger “anything that happens to remind the individual of a specific past trauma,” and “the insistence on trigger warnings becomes more about the performance of victimhood than a meaningful effort to help actual victims.” Similarly, he concedes that designated spaces where community members find support and affirmation are important, but an academic community as a whole should be a safe space that “emphasizes civility, respect, and acceptance for all members of community.” Citing many recent examples of student protests against speakers such as Charles Murray, at Middlebury; philosopher Peter Singer, at the University of Victoria in Australia; and Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley, Whittington argues that obstructionist protesters are not exercising “a protected right to free speech.” Rather, they are shutting down the free exchange of ideas, just as if they were agents of government oppression. The author defends hiring faculty and awarding tenure on the basis of scholarly achievement; “unorthodox, controversial, and even wild-eyed professors” should be valued as “a sign of institutional health.”
In the current divisive political climate, Whittington shows why safeguarding the civil exchange of diverse ideas is an urgent need.Pub Date: April 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-18160-8
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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