To the editor:
In a salvo revealed within the normally even-handed Within Upper Ed, “Variety Statements Are the New Religion Statements,” an emergent risk to instructional freedom and mental honesty emerges. Professor of philosophy at small, highly-localized liberal arts Citadel Lewis School in Durango, Colorado, Justin P. McBrayer may be a “writing fellow” at Heterodox Academy (HxA). On this observation, he contradicts respected philosophers and truthful proponents of educational freedom and unfastened speech.
Because it manufacturers itself on its web site, HxA is neither heterodox nor an academy. It’s an orthodoxy suffering to emerge to the best of conventional conservatism. It’s the university-based an identical of FIRE (Basis for Person Rights in Schooling), the defender of “unfastened speech” for best the ones with whom best it concurs. This isn’t Loose Speech because the First Modification of the U.S. Charter, the AAUP, the ACLU, or maximum universities and schools outline it. (I refer readers to HxA’s web site and scan its weblog posts. They don’t learn like a scholarly staff.)
Whilst serving as “writing fellow” of HxA, in keeping with his non-public web site, McBrayer may be a dean of liberal arts and an trainer in philosophy, together with good judgment, ethics, and epistemology. His “new e book” seems to be his best e book. It’s not a piece of philosophy.
In spite of his vital feedback on spiritual establishments’ “statements of religion,” his time at Citadel Lewis School is inseparable from non-public {and professional} spiritual actions together with carrier at the Govt Committee of the Society of Christian Philosophers. The School web site lists him as affiliate dean now not dean.
As “writing fellow,” McBrayer items himself as a consultant of HxA. He’s a promoter who violates permitted practices of philosophical approach, logical interpretation and research, norms of rhetorical observe, makes use of of proof, and scholarly honesty. On this, he speaks on behalf of the professed radical and anti-intellectual orthodoxy of HxA.
From the phrases of his name, McBrayer violates the fundamental tenets of accountable mental lifestyles. No longer best are the big variety of various types of “range statements” now not a unmarried or easy generalizable unit, however they aren’t synonymous with “statements of religion.” That statement can best be complicated by means of ignoring all dependable proof, enticing in false equivalencies and illogic, and committing a roster of unacceptable rhetorical methods. To all intents and functions, this is McBrayer’s and HxA modus operandi, a redefinition of philosophy: a jump from good judgment, medical approach, and epistemology, to radical metaphysics and a brand new outdated orthodoxy hardly ever heard within the halls of first rate upper training. It bears no dating to permitted practices of educational freedom or unfastened speech.
Returning to HxA’s platform for the politics of falsity, one undefined generalization follows every other, by no means with systematic proof or research. Rhetoric levels from “When I used to be in graduate faculty and making use of…. My packages fell into two piles….” He falsely distinguishes “spiritual” from “secular” establishments with out defining both or noting their many permutations. He then utterly erases all distinctions. Those are rhetorical video games now not philosophical arguments.
McBrayer gives 4 brief snippets from process descriptions with best extremely selective, very brief bits of quotations, two from non-public and two from public establishments. This does isn’t a basis for generalization. The proof and the snippets many times contradict every different. This isn’t philosophy practiced as applicable instructional habits.
In spite of everything, McBrayer means that readers will have to settle for his illogical, undocumented rhetorical “statements of religion” on not more than religion. This best half-nod to systematic knowledge is one connection with an American Endeavor Institute “document on DEI statements.” On its own, that can’t be taken on both religion or as proof about DEI.
Justin McBrayer, the place is your truth seeker’s, methodologist’s, or undeniable textual content reader’s lens? “Variety statements” don’t “serve as like religion statements…. they” don’t “serve as in an identical tactics and feature structurally an identical results.” No longer even the AEI “document” makes that argument.
You fill a complete web page with self-contradictory and evidence-free assertions about “all types of claims” with neither anecdotal nor extra essential systematic proof, transparent rhetoric of argumentation, and consciousness of the elemental norms of scholarship and educational speech itself.
Or am I misreading you? Are you making an attempt a poorly carried out parody? Drawing by yourself rhetoric, would possibly I borrow your “canine whistle” to invite “eminently” the solution to this semi-serious query?
–Harvey J. Graff
Professor Emeritus of English and Historical past and Ohio Eminent Student
Ohio State College
