On Our Desks
A curated look at what the Salient team found interesting this month.
Managing one’s “news diet” is becoming increasingly difficult. As a new feature here on Substack, we are excited to offer you some articles, essays, and headlines that recently piqued our team’s interest. Let us know if you enjoyed this post in the comments!
Editor’s note: The articles below do not necessarily reflect the views of the Salient.
RealClearDefense | Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin Must Resign by Joe Buccino
The decline of American institutions isn’t limited to her universities. Early this month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was hospitalized for weeks for what we now know were complications relating to prostate cancer. While we wish the Secretary a speedy recovery, he apparently declined to tell anyone—not the White House, not Congress, not even his own deputy—that he was temporarily incapable of exercising his office. As retired colonel Joe Buccino points out in RealClearDefense, America’s global defense commitments mean the public deserves to know who is calling the shots on defense policy. Unsurprisingly, however, Biden has yet to remove Austin from his post. Accountability, it seems, doesn’t start at the top.
IM—1776 | The New Right Activism by Christopher Rufo
Christopher Rufo isn’t done with DEI. Fresh off his successful effort to oust ex-President Gay, Rufo offers “a manifesto for the counterrevolution”—in other words, an explanation of what American conservatism ought to look like today. While his ideological guideposts, like “Aristotle’s eudaimonia [and] Jefferson’s Declaration,” are familiar, Rufo challenges the supposed neutrality of classical liberalism. Of particular interest is his analysis of the power of language. We must win the argument, but that is not enough; winning the culture war also requires reclaiming the institutions through which our ideas can be implemented. While a few of his conceptual leaps go too far, the essay should not be ignored by any would-be conservative activist.
Harvard University | Email by SEAS Dean David Parkes
Someone is eventually going to call Harvard’s bluff. On January 10th, Dean David Parkes of the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) offered his take on President Gay’s resignation in an email to all SEAS staff and students. In that email, he claimed that SEAS’s “faculty and student body is disproportionately white and male… we are leaving too many voices out of the conversation – and keeping too many individuals capable of enriching our intellectual endeavors out.” If any of those individuals sue the university for discrimination on the basis of Parkes’s comments, he’ll have only himself to blame. Read the rest of Parkes’s message about Gay in the footnotes.1
Other reads that we enjoyed…
The New Yorker | Could a Trump Win Put his Running Mate in Office? by Jeannie Suk Gersen
“Trump’s former Solicitor General, Senate Republicans, and prominent, highly credentialed, conservative lawyers are foregrounding a scenario wherein Trump’s running mate acts as the President on Day One…”
The Free Press | Where Free Speech Ends and Lawbreaking Begins by Ilya Shapiro
“We shouldn’t weaken speech protections, which have made America not only the freest country in the world, but the most tolerant. But sometimes ‘speech’ isn’t speech. Sometimes it rises to the level of conduct that prevents others from being able to live their lives. Right now we need people to discern the difference.”
Compact | A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell by Vincent Lloyd
“During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy.”
The Free Press | They’re Black Democrats. And They’re Suing Chicago Over Migrants by Olivia Reingold
“Although critics often claim that only ‘extreme MAGA Republicans’ oppose the record influx of migrants into the U.S., if you visit Chicago like I did earlier this month, you’ll see that these plaintiffs are not motivated by bigotry. Instead, most of them are minorities who feel their communities are getting the short end of the stick.”
SEAS Dean David Parkes’ January 10th email to students and faculty:
“Last week, President Gay announced her decision to step down, and the Harvard Corporation named Provost Alan Garber as Interim President. The tumultuous events leading up to this outcome, including the outsized scrutiny on Harvard, have been very difficult.
I am personally sad that Claudine Gay’s presidency has come to such an abrupt end. I have seen President Gay’s strength and commitment to our mission up close and I am grateful for her leadership of this university.
Commenting on President Gay’s departure, the conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens opined that “the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts…blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.”
I think this analysis offers a false dichotomy. I firmly believe that both models can and must coexist in higher education today. At SEAS, we strive for excellence in everything we do in the classroom and in the lab. But we also acknowledge that representation at the highest levels of engineering and applied sciences, including in our faculty and student body, is disproportionately white and male. Since talent is equally distributed, even if opportunities are not, this means that we are leaving too many voices out of the conversation – and keeping too many individuals capable of enriching our intellectual endeavors out of SEAS.
Finally, this leads me to the question of how we grapple with difficult topics. In her message to the Harvard community, President Gay spoke of the need to “create a learning environment in which we respect each other’s dignity and treat one another with compassion, and to affirm our enduring commitment to open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth.” In his message earlier this week, Interim President Garber implored each of us to have “a willingness to approach each other in a spirit of goodwill, with an eagerness to listen as well as to speak, and with an appreciation of our common humanity when we encounter passionately held but opposing convictions.”
If we are to realize our greatest potential, we must all work proactively to make SEAS such a place.
With all best wishes for a fruitful spring semester,
David C. Parkes”
A great idea! Let us know what conservative students think are important issues!
Also, if it’s easier to get a Harvard degree in Gender/Racial Studies than Applied Sciences, could that be the reason for fewer female/POC applicants? Are Asians and Indians considered minorities in this calculation?
Even if talent is equally distributed among various demographic groups, skill is not. The disciplines of higher education require adequate threshold skills. The various distributions of such skills are a product of all manner of real world conditions, especially culture.