From IL NAS affiliate

Dear NAS colleagues:

The National Association has kindly announced my reinterpretation of race and immigration at http://nas.org/polDoc.cfm?Doc_Id=960  (“Illinois affiliate president publishes new book”). The direct link to the full announcement is http://www.nas.org/documents/BeanBook.pdf

If you are tired of the Left-versus-Right rehash of our race and immigration history, Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader is designed for general readers and classroom adoption.

By “race,” I mean all races–black, white ethnics, Chinese, Japanese, and American Indians. This book offers a classical liberal reinterpretation of the subject. Race and Liberty is available for only $22 at Amazon. You can also buy at http://www.independent.org/store/book_detail.asp?bookID=80   
The reader rediscovers an anti-racist tradition that is neither Left nor Right. The collection goes beyond black-white relations to include immigration, Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, advocates of Jewish
immigration during the Nazi era, and much more. For advance blurbs, check out the NAS announcement here (with “advance praise” from Stephen Thernstrom, Juan Williams, Shelby Steele, and many others).
 
Related to the book, I have written an op-ed on William Wilberforce, U.S. News & World Report op-ed on the NAACP centennial  and an op-ed on Frederick Douglass’s Fourth of July oration Douglass is the pivotal figure in the anti-racist, classical liberal tradition of civil rights and immigration. While Douglass is well-known, you might be surprised at some of the other forgotten figures included in The Essential Reader.

FYI for teachers: We’ve targeted (and priced) the book for classroom use as well as general readership.Course adoption would be great! (I plan on creating a web site based on the book and if you alert me I will put you on an email list). Please let me know what classes you teach — the book goes beyond “black and white” and includes white ethnics (Catholics and Jews were once considered “inferior races”), Chinese, Japanese, and immigration.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Bean
President, Illinois Association of Scholars, an affiliate of the National   Association of Scholars
Professor of History
Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, IL 62901
618-453-7872; jonbean@siu.edu

It’s a good time to watch Ch 6 – I will be on discussing www.RIstimuluswatch.org and the RI Tea Party will be updating on the Parade issue.

Would you like to help us by providing feedback on stimulus projects in your back yard? Visit www.ristimulus.org and find the projects proposed by your town and school

How right they were, how wrong we are

Brown Graduate and NAS member, George Seaver, wrote an excellent piece on “diversity” and the shift from a “melting pot” culture America was created to be to the “salad bowl” culture destroying us from within.

The Paradox of Constitutional and Post-1965 Civil Rights

June 15, 2009 By George Seaver

From time to time the NAS invites our members and other guests to write articles for NAS.org. The opinions expressed therein do not necessarily reflect the official position of the National Association of Scholars.

The National Association of Scholars has been concerned with the conflict between equality and diversity in higher education for much of its existence; included in the first 400 articles at the NAS website, 11 articles were specifically on diversity and 8 specifically on racial preferences. Social justice, also a frequent topic at NAS, is directly dependent on how you define equality, and is embedded throughout higher education. On May 21, 2009, addressing these concerns among others, Peter Wood wrote an essay entitled “Where do we start? Reforming American Education.” In it he stated that “[the NAS] opposes…racial preferences,” but it also “favors…scholarly inquiry founded on reason and civil debate.” He expanded on this: 

It doesn’t hurt to have a debate over whether America should stick with its Jeffersonian ideal of ‘All men are created equal’, or switch to the new concept of ‘diversity’, in which the conception that ‘All groups are inherently different’, takes precedence…We might benefit as well from a good debate over the essential characteristics of our civilization. Has it on the whole provided a successful path for human flourishing or is it mainly a legacy of various kinds of oppression?⁰

 

This essay is intended to contribute to that debate, a debate between classical liberalism and postmodernism.

 

The above conflict over equality set out by Dr. Wood is part of the greater paradox between the policies and legislation that came out of the post-1965 civil rights movement and the equality and liberty concepts developed during the 1760 to 1776 period that became the U.S. Constitution. This paradox is frequently revealed in the conflicting opinions of cultural critics and observers when they comment on civil rights next to Constitutional concepts. A few examples will serve to ring this out.

Continue reading HERE.

 

At least they aren’t doomed to repeat it

h/t ACTA Blog

As someone who took introductory history courses in 1981-82 and again in 2000-01, I can attest to the fact that “history” isn’t what it used to be.

Now a college in nearby NH is offering history as a major and history only. Maybe they will get back to the basics.

A non-traditional and sometimes iconoclastic law school has announced plans to create a new kind of undergraduate college — one focused on history.

The new college will offer only the junior and senior years of instruction, will operate in a no-frills manner to keep costs down, and will offer the single major of history. The American College of History and Legal Studies will start offering classes in August 2010 and has been licensed to operate in Salem, N.H. — just seven miles from the Andover, Mass., campus of the Massachusetts School of Law. While the law school and the history college will be independent of one another in a legal sense, with their own boards, many trustees are expected to serve on both boards, and the two institutions will start with overlapping administrations.

For those of us in RI, where “consolidation” is the buzzword, this collaboration with an emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness, with a singularity of purpose, is an interesting idea.

The harder they try,,,

David French, senior legal council at the Alliance Defense Fund (and former superhero at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education where we first met), comments on a study showing a dramatic increase in campus drinking.

Inside Higher Ed reports today on the “surprising finding” that despite university efforts to decrease binge drinking and other risky behaviors, the number of drinking-related deaths of college-age young people rose substantially between 1998 and 2005. At the same time, the rate of binge drinking itself rose from 41.7 percent to 44.7 percent.  

While there is (justifiably) much hand-wringing about these stats, very few people seem to understand the ultimate cause. Colleges say they need more money and resources to educate students as to the consequences of excessive drinking. Commenters blame parents who “demonize” alcohol consumption. (Yes, that’s our problem — excessive parental disapproval of alcohol — when almost any high-school principal can tell you legions of tales of parent-hosted drinking parties.)

The real culprit, of course, is culture. Colleges have developed a culture of nearly unrestrained hedonism. Binge drinking isn’t an accident, it’s the entire point of the Thursday (or is it now Wednesday?) to Sunday party circuit. For the college hedonist, binge drinking facilitates the so-called “hookup culture.” And when it comes to sex, the university message is, shall we say, mixed. Do it! (but safely) is the college theme. One university, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, apparently believes that providing student-fee funding to the Roman Catholic Foundation somehow threatens the Republic, yet will throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at a student group called “Sex Out Loud.”

Do it! (but safely) is a losing message, especially when combined with a concerted effort to demonize those private religious voices that may offer alternatives to a culture that dominates campus. From the more “staid” schools like Harvard to the national champions of the party lifestyle at Florida, “do it” dominates “safely,” and the one ultimate answer — a different moral code — is simply not an option. After all, some of the same people arguing for a better path may — in their heart of hearts — not support same-sex marriage. And we can’t have that kind of voice on campus, can we?

If David ever visits RI we should drive through Barrington and see if parents are still protecting student parties, after we see the Brown University ” Sex, Power, God” party, of course.

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