In “The Indispensable Right,” I discuss how academics are now leading an anti-free speech movement on campuses that challenges the centrality (or even the necessity) of free speech protections in higher education. The latest such argument appeared this month in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Two Arizona State University professors — Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell — wrote that free speech concerns yield too much to the “right wing” and that free speech should not be given the protection currently afforded by universities and colleges. Indeed, they argue that free speech may be harming higher education by fostering “unworthy” ideas.
Amesbury teaches religious studies and O’Donnell teaches history at ASU. They wrote an article titled “Dear Administrators: Enough with the Free Speech Rhetoric! It Concedes Too Much to the Right-Wing Agenda.”
The two academics challenge the long-held view of the centrality of free speech and intellectual diversity to higher education. Notably, many of us have been alarmed by the erosion of both values on our campuses, but Amesbury and O’Donnell seem to worry that there is still too much protection for opposing views. Worse yet, they suggest that the free speech objections are often part of a right-wing funded agenda.
In fairness, to the two professors, they do not reject the overall value of free speech and refer to free speech as among the important values to be balanced in the academic setting. While referring to free speech as “essential,” we clearly differ on what that means. They are less supportive of intellectual diversity.
The authors challenge “the assumptions that free speech is a cardinal virtue of higher education, and that colleges should aspire to a diversity of opinions.” They insist that higher education is about finding truth and that means that false ideas are inimical to our mission as educators. Indeed, they question the need for “intellectual diversity”:
Our contention is that calls for greater freedom of speech on campuses, however well-intentioned, risk undermining colleges’ central purpose, namely, the production of expert knowledge and understanding, in the sense of disciplinarily warranted opinion. Expertise requires freedom of speech, but it is the result of a process of winnowing and refinement that is premised on the understanding that not all opinions are equally valid. Efforts to “democratize” opinion are antithetical to the role colleges play in educating the public and informing democratic debate. We urge administrators toward caution before uncritically endorsing calls for intellectual diversity in place of academic expertise…
A diversity of opinion — “intellectual diversity” — isn’t itself the goal; rather, it is of value only insofar as it serves the goal of producing knowledge. On most unanswered questions, there is, at least initially, a range of plausible opinions, but answering questions requires the vetting of opinions. As some opinions are found wanting, the range of opinion deserving of continued consideration narrows.
We have already seen faculties purged of conservative and libertarian colleagues. We previously discussed how surveys at universities show a virtual purging of conservative and Republican faculty members. For example, last year, the Harvard Crimson noted that the university had virtually eliminated Republicans from most departments but that the lack of diversity was not a problem. Now, a new survey conducted by the Harvard Crimson shows that more than three-quarters of Harvard Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences faculty respondents identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Only 2.5% identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4% as “very conservative.”
Likewise, a study by Georgetown University’s Kevin Tobia and MIT’s Eric Martinez found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools. Notably, a 2017 study found 15 percent of faculties were conservative. Another study found that 33 out of 65 departments lacked a single conservative faculty member.
Compare that to a recent Gallup poll stating, “roughly equal proportions of U.S. adults identified as conservative (36%) and moderate (35%) in Gallup polling throughout 2022, while about a quarter identified as liberal (26%).”
Even with this purging of departments, Amesbury and O’Donnell still worry that intellectual diversity could be maintained as a goal in higher education. They are not alone in this view. As we have previously discussed, some professors reject the notion that campuses should protect the free speech rights of those who are . . . well . . . wrong.
For example, after many of us expressed disgust at the treatment of a federal judge shouted down by Stanford law students, Professor Jennifer Ruth wrote a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education heralding their actions. It is an extension of her book It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (with Penn State Music Professor Michael Bérubé) declaring certain views as advancing “theories of white supremacy” and thus having “no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever.” Once declared as harmful, it is no longer free speech and therefore worthy of censorship or cancellation. It is that easy.
These academics reject the long-held view that higher education rests on the preservation of intellectual diversity, as discussed in the famous Kalven Report.
In 1967, the University of Chicago assembled a committee to study academic freedom and free speech that would become one of the most important projects in modern higher education. It became known as the “Kalven Committee” after its chair, the great law scholar Harry Kalven, Jr. The report contained an eloquent and profound defense of diversity of thought and expression that seems utterly abandoned by many today. It was cited by the Stanford Law Dean in her letter to the law students and stated in part:
“From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.”
Amesbury and O’Donnell reject the precept that departments should foster intellectual diversity since “accepting this role for the humanities and social sciences, however, means that their faculties risk losing the ability to judge any ideas (or proposed curricula or public programming) unworthy of sponsorship.”
It is a rationalization for the current echo chamber of higher education. Of course, many of these academics would be outraged if conservatives were to take hold of faculties and start to exclude their views as “unworthy.” Indeed, that was once the response to far left professors like critical legal scholars and socialists. Now, however, the left has control of these departments and has declared opposing views to be unworthy of protection.
One can certainly understand the appeal of this argument to many faculty and publications like the Journal of Higher Education. By simply declaring opposing views “unworthy” or wrong, you relieve yourself of any obligation to allow such opposing views on faculties or in publications.
We saw the impact of this orthodoxy during the pandemic.
For example, the media, academic departments, and government agencies allied to treat anyone raising a lab theory as one of three possibilities: conspiracy theorist or racists or racist conspiracy theorists. Academics joined this chorus in marginalizing anyone raising the theory. One study cited the theory as an example of “anti-Chinese racism” and “toxic white masculinity.”
As late as May 2021, the New York Times’ Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli was calling any mention of the lab theory as “racist.” Conversely, one former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade chastised his former colleagues for ignoring the obvious evidence supporting a lab theory as well as Chinese efforts to arrest scientists and destroy evidence that could establish the origin.
Others in academia quickly joined the bandwagon to assure the public that there is no scientific basis for their theory, leaving only racism or politics as the motivation behind the theory. In early 2020, with little available evidence, two op-eds in The Lancet in February and Nature Medicine went all-in on the denial front.
The Lancet op-ed stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”
No reference to the lab theory was to be tolerated. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) merely mentioned the possibility in 2020, he was set upon by the usual flash media mob. The Washington Post ridiculed him for repeating a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.”
In September 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a virologist and former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong, dared to repeat the theory on Fox News, saying, “I can present solid scientific evidence . . . [that] it is a man-made virus created in the lab.” The left-leaning PolitiFact slammed her and gave her a “pants on fire rating.”
Academics were stripped of their positions on leading boards and suspended from social media, including professors who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration. The Declaration advocated for a more focused Covid response that targeted the most vulnerable population rather than widespread lockdowns and mandates. Many are now recognizing the basis for those views and questioning the efficacy and cost of the massive lockdowns as well as the efficacy of masks or the rejection of natural immunities as an alternative to vaccination. Federal agencies now accept the lab origin theory. Yet, these experts and others were attacked for such views just a couple years ago and their views were deemed “unworthy” by many for schools or publications.
The problem with rejecting or devaluing intellectual diversity in higher education is that it fosters orthodoxy and ignorance. Rejecting opposing views certainly can advance careers. There are more opportunities for the compliant or the orthodox. Professors face less challenge or contradiction in their own writings. Promotions, speaking engagements, and publishing opportunities are certainly enhanced with the elimination of colleagues with opposing views.
However, the result is the gradual death of higher education. It is evident in the rising intolerance shown on our campuses for opposing views and increasing demands for censorship and blacklisting. It is the triumph of the majority, but it looks more like an academic mob. Once all of the “unworthy” thoughts and faculty are purged, what is left appears more like indoctrination than education.
Update:
Professor O’Donnell has responded to this column and I appreciate her willingness engage us on the blog. I would that all of our readers will show the same civility and respect as does Professor O’Donnell. I also wanted to share a response to her arguments.
Here is her comment:
“I appreciate your attention to the piece Richard and I recently wrote. Our argument is not that free speech is unimportant. Nor do we argue against a diversity of ideas. And we certainly never suggest that ideas should go unquestioned: to the contrary, we make the same point that you do, which is that ideas must face scrutiny, competition, and skepticism if knowledge is to advance. Our argument is two-fold. First, that universities should have a more modest sense of their role in society. Free speech is important, we argue, for a vibrant public sphere. The distinguishing value of higher education, however, is academic freedom – the freedom to participate without hindrance in the disciplinary processes by means of which knowledge can be sifted from mere opinion.
This means that rather than seeking to be an all-encompassing speech forum, universities should instead embrace their limited role as places of scholarship, learning, and teaching, with the pursuit of truth at their core. Second, we argue that “free speech” and “intellectual diversity” – exactly because one is so easily chastised for questioning them – have become gates through which unexamined orthodoxies, buoyed by government or donor influence, enter universities and take root. Imperfect as academia is, we’ve found that our critics come up with examples of how, when disciplinary processes are pursued, knowledge does advance. You observed that legal theories that were once absent from academia entered the mainstream; new legal theories will emerge to displace those now at center stage if disciplines undertake their role of questioning and vetting. That displacement can’t happen if their adherents can simply appeal to “intellectual diversity” for their protection. Another critic pointed out that eugenics was once important to some university departments. Precisely, we say. Scholarship informed by the tragic moral understanding that followed WWII, eventually displaced eugenic pseudoscience. Eugenics could now be reinserted into universities under the banner of free speech or intellectual diversity. We can all surely agree that this is not desirable. And if we agree to that, perhaps we can move past the assertion that the mere invocation of free speech and intellectual diversity must always capture the moral and intellectual high ground.”
I must confess that I remain skeptical. Professor O’Donnell explains that “[t]his means that rather than seeking to be an all-encompassing speech forum, universities should instead embrace their limited role as places of scholarship, learning, and teaching, with the pursuit of truth at their core.”
This is a common defense against academic diversity. No one is seriously questioning the role of universities as places of scholarship or learning. The issue is the dramatic reduction of conservative, libertarian, or even dissenting faculty at many schools. While raising such concerns can be dismissed as “a right-wing agenda,” there are a host of polls and surveys showing students and faculty are reporting a lack of tolerance or diversity of thought in classrooms. When these concerns are raised, the mantra is that we have not hired conservative or libertarian scholars because their views lack merit or intellectual vigor.
For example, Above the Law Senior Editor Joe Patrice defended “predominantly liberal faculties” and argued that hiring a conservative professor is akin to allowing a believer in geocentrism to teach.
Professor O’Donnell also notes that “we argue that ‘free speech’ and ‘intellectual diversity’ … have become gates through which unexamined orthodoxies, buoyed by government or donor influence, enter universities and take root.” The dominance of the left found in these surveys is not due to “unexamined orthodoxies.” It is due to the dismissal of opposing views as “unworthy” and not “intellectually rigorous.” That rationale has been used to purge faculties of most conservatives. Most faculties run from the left to the far left. There is no explanation other than to claim that no sufficiently qualified conservative, libertarian, or dissenting candidates applied. Years go by for many schools without a single qualified candidate with conservative or dissenting views on major issues. In the meantime, states are expected to continue to fund schools that often exclude the values and views of the majority of the taxpayers.
The disconnect defies logic. For example, half of the judges and roughly half of the populace hold fairly conservative views on constitutional issues. Half of Congress hold such views. However, only a small percentage of conservative faculty (if any) can be found at most law schools. That is not due to these views being “unexamined.” Likewise, it is relatively rare to have opposing views on gender identity, climate control, abortion, social justice issues found on many campuses. Indeed, faculty with such views have been subject to cancel campaigns and university investigations.
Professor O’Donnell adds that “You observed that legal theories that were once absent from academia entered the mainstream; new legal theories will emerge to displace those now at center stage if disciplines undertake their role of questioning and vetting.” However, this blog is full of accounts of dissenting faculty being removed from publications, societies, and faculties. The political orthodoxy that has taken hold of our campuses has made it far less likely that such views can be fairly presented.
None of this is, as claimed, is offered to use of free speech or intellectual diversity to push a “right-wing agenda.” These are questions that have long been raised and remain, even after this column, unanswered.
Second update:
I was distressed to hear from the authors that they have been subject to hateful messages. While other sites also covered this story, I hope that our discussion has not fueled such disgraceful conduct. This is a free speech forum that values a diversity of opinions, including those of these authors who are thoughtful academics. I have been the subject of threats against myself and my family for years. I would not want to contribute to such attacks against others. This column is discussing a fundamental debate on the essential elements to higher education. It is a worthy debate to have in a civil and respectful manner. For those who use this as a license to vent their rage, this is not the blog for you.
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/letters/colleges-need-the-backbones-of-freedom-and-liberty
My response would have had more substance had I not been limited to 350 words.
“This means that rather than seeking to be an all-encompassing speech forum, universities should instead embrace their limited role as places of scholarship, learning, and teaching, with the pursuit of truth at their core.” If I, as a student or faculty member say on or off campus that there are only two sexes, or that skin does not make one racist, or that there are plenty of scientists that disagree in varying ways with popular climate change scenarios, I’ll likely get reprimanded, dismissed, or attacked in the hallways by angry contrarians. Yet, these are all facts. So, they are more trying to gain the monopoly on the term ‘truth’ and how it applies – and its obviously not to facts that are inconvenient. It certainly doesn’t reflect a “limited role” to qualify fact and truth by layers of acceptability. So, they’re not really teaching, they’re steering, and to their own preferred narratives rather than letting fact and truth decide. Possibly because fact and truth are often alone amidst a thousand falsehoods, and often not well accepted by the many. And they don’t want to be the one standing alone on a limb. Who was it that said the earth wasn’t the center of the universe ? What nearly happened to him ? Nonetheless, paradigms and trendy dogma are no substitute for an unapologetically solid education.
Even Amesbury and O’Donnell’s argument about eugenics fails. The reason that such pseudoscience was rejected is that those who had other views were able to voice them. Amesbury and O’Donnell would not have allows views against eugenics to have had a hearing as it differed from the academic orthodoxy of the day.; Had Charles Van Hise, Woodrow Wilson and the rest of the Ivory Tower know-it-alls of the day had their way, faculty opposing eugenics would have been canceled and run out of the university. So their argument fails on that level as well.
Eugenics is not a “pseudoscience”. We’ve been practicing eugenics on animals for at least 10,000 years with very visible and undeniable results.
Predictably emblematic and typical of the modern totalitarian left – dissenting opinions not allowed.
Because both of these “professors” are public employees, lawsuits against them and ASU should be brought, with their goal of termination of these 2 charlatans.
For Godsake…PROOFREAD YOUR ARTICLES BEFORE PUBLICATION!!! Your voice is an important one that needs to be heard, but your writings are often riddled with ridiculous errors! It’s so disheartening…
What a coincidence! Not just that they’re your fellow Democrats, Mr. Turley.
They’re also the same police state fascists waging an unending war against the Second Amendment with “reasonable limits on the Second Amendment”. You share their sentiments on the Second Amendment, I presume?
“Only 2.5% identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4% as “very conservative.”
This will only change if conservatives actually start expressing an interest in an intellectual life. I know precious few conservatives or even moderates who are interested in learning, reading academic/intellectual books, or knowing much of anything outside of conservative/Republicans talking points, sports, or things having to do with business/the economy. Wrestling with ideas or having a store of knowledge to draw upon in conversation is not of interest to far too many conservatives, as far as I can tell.
Would be nice if more conservatives cared about conserving the great ideas and great works of art and literature and working to conserve the best parts of our great institutions, wresting it away from radicals of any stripe be it blue or red, for the nenefit of future generations.
Conservatives have veered too far towards a Don’t Tread On Me that is non-participatory, anti-intellectual, and ignores the future of our society at our peril.
http://milesresearch.com/tns/press.htm
People with high IQs (FWIW) tend to be libertarian, not liberal.
Then libertarians need to get a little more in touch with their conservative side–the side that wants to conserve the great ideas and great works of art and literature and the best parts of our great institutions for the benefit of future generations.
Don’t Tread On Me libertarians will get trodden upon along with everyone else if they stick to the isolationist independence interpretation of that statement. Don’t Tread on Me requires participation in self-governance, to wrestle with the issues at hand to protect and promote freedom. Everyone is getting quietly trodden upon in the halls of government as they fail to observe and respond to the slow erosion of freedom. Having a perspective and philosophy of what constitutes a free people and what is needed for building and maintaining this status is crucial in order to prevent the slow walk into tyranny.
Quote: “This will only change if conservatives actually start expressing an interest in an intellectual life. I know precious few conservatives or even moderates who are interested in learning, reading academic/intellectual books, or knowing much of anything outside of conservative/Republicans talking points, sports, or things having to do with business/the economy. Wrestling with ideas or having a store of knowledge to draw upon in conversation is not of interest…”
I think you are expecting Conservatives (not the Neocons, not Rs in Congress) to just read already slanted intellectual books. What are those “intellectual books” about? The reason so few inhabit academia has been the progressive march to scandalize anyone who dare oppose them. I am not a registered academic. I look at a variety of topics in medical to the geopolitical arenas. I read up on historians that produce evidence of their research in their tomes. I notice the left self-reinforces bad techniques statistically, bad ideas, bad historical analysis, et al. When you find out the source of lies, the funding (grants and governments alike), and the usual circle jerk (same people publishing in near lockstep) to get into the public eye (like Bernays did with Freud), it is THAT which conservatives and other labeled, “non progressives”. have to face and win against.
Throwing sports in there reflects a very limited audience you know.
Business & economy – back when people had rational conversations – are at the pinnacle of what this country and world need a discussion about. Instead, there are NO LEADERS. And just criminals and conceited money printers that are wrecking towards the final days of US as the world’s reserve currency. Frankly, we did ourselves dirty for 50 years – we bailed out criminal bankers , allowed our manufacturing to disappear and financialize everything – and “academics” print their fluff pieces (stuff that Austan Goolsbee would write or MMT’s Stephanie Kelton crackpot) that are delusional.
The LEFT gets away with this because: Ponzi schemes based off fiat money. To keep this short: The CCP bought Hunter Biden for was to be $30M for 3 years. Hunter has zero appreciable skills but for Joe Biden’s rolodex that is filled to the hilt with DC intel, justice, congressional big hitters and the US Media. That is what the CCP leveraged.
Here is a book you won’t read or buy, but you should: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJDM8XHG LNG Deal.
That was a cheap buy — now Joe is POTUS, but can’t tell you what he had for breakfast. Everyone in DC is getting their last GRIFT completed, while the DOJ/FBI targets enemies and covers ass for their CROOK-IN-CHIEF.
If one thinks Russia & China don’t have mountains of INTEL on all your “Elite” of them committing crimes from adultery, bribery, conspiracy, coups, forgery, mass murder, pedophilia, rape, sex trafficking to wars w/o legality, then you don’t know these enemies.
They LAUGH at USA. (We did it to ourselves… we were bought out for pennies on the dollar.)
Because all this liberty and democracy and republic talk is all a sham and is about about to blow up in a way, no LEFTY academic is ever going to accurately write about.
The rare people who will give a fair account are NOT in ACADEMIA. They have to do their work the legit way – and also: seek more truth in just a day, than an ACADEMIC will in a year.
Jason T. Powers,
Thank you for the thoughtful response.
“I think you are expecting Conservatives (not the Neocons, not Rs in Congress) to just read already slanted intellectual books. What are those “intellectual books” about?”
Why do you think I’m expecting that?
The books I’d like them to read are not particularly contemporary. I’d like people to read books that would have informed our Founders, for instance–Montesquieu, Cicero, Frederick the Great, Thomas Jefferson himself on education, John Locke, Cicero, Seneca, Plato, etc. Perhaps, too, others, like D’Tocqueville, Sophocles, Shakespeare, etc. Somewhat contemporary writers would include Neil Postman and Mortimer Adler. The books are about philosophy, governance, and the deepest parts of humanity.
“The reason so few inhabit academia has been the progressive march…”
“it is THAT which conservatives and other labeled, “non progressives”. have to face and win against.”
I’m not convinced these are the only reasons so few Conservatives are in academia or apparently interested in intellectual discourse and books. There seems to be a disinterestedness or perhaps it is a prejudice due to a mistaken association that intellectual things are only the province of hoity-toity liberal elites. Or maybe it’s a personality thing–low openness ends up unfortunately including a low openness to the Great Works and the Great Ideas.
“Throwing sports in there reflects a very limited audience you know.”
Yes, it does. But as far as I can tell this is mainstream and typical. Would love it if I discovered I was mistaken.
“I am not a registered academic.”
What is a “registered” academic?
“Business & economy – back when people had rational conversations – are at the pinnacle of what this country and world need a discussion about.”
There are some aspects of this I agree we should discuss. What in particular do you think we should be discussing?
“Instead, there are NO LEADERS.”
Not even Trump? Rand Paul?
What would you like to see for leaders/leadership?
“And just criminals and conceited money printers that are wrecking towards the final days of US as the world’s reserve currency. Frankly, we did ourselves dirty for 50 years – we bailed out criminal bankers , allowed our manufacturing to disappear and financialize everything – and “academics” print their fluff pieces…that are delusional.”
I am inclined to agree with you on these points.
“The LEFT gets away with this because: Ponzi schemes based off fiat money.”
I am inclined to agree, except, it isn’t just the Left. The Right is just as guilty. They have their own games to play. Both are catching crawdads, playing two sides against the middle.
“To keep this short: The CCP bought Hunter Biden for was to be $30M for 3 years. Hunter has zero appreciable skills but for Joe Biden’s rolodex that is filled to the hilt with DC intel, justice, congressional big hitters and the US Media. That is what the CCP leveraged.
Here is a book you won’t read or buy, but you should: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJDM8XHG LNG Deal.
That was a cheap buy — now Joe is POTUS, but can’t tell you what he had for breakfast.”
Thank you for the recommendation.
“Everyone in DC is getting their last GRIFT completed”
What do you mean?
“If one thinks Russia & China don’t have mountains of INTEL on all your “Elite” of them committing crimes from adultery, bribery, conspiracy, coups, forgery, mass murder, pedophilia, rape, sex trafficking to wars w/o legality, then you don’t know these enemies. They LAUGH at USA. ”
Not sure where this comment is coming from or why. Interesting turns of phrase in there.
“(We did it to ourselves… we were bought out for pennies on the dollar.)”
I’m inclined to agree.
“Because all this liberty and democracy and republic talk is all a sham and is about about to blow up in a way, no LEFTY academic is ever going to accurately write about.”
Could you elaborate?
And, why do you consider it a sham?
“The rare people who will give a fair account are NOT in ACADEMIA. They have to do their work the legit way – and also: seek more truth in just a day, than an ACADEMIC will in a year.”
This could be true. I fear it could also be an account, a narrative some people want to be believed rather than necessarily what is.
I do hope there are those who will give a fair account.
“Because all this liberty and democracy and republic talk is all a sham and is about about to blow up”
Why do that?
Is the talk of such things the sham, or, those things themselves?
Observe the arrogance and blindness of these two academics. First of all, they have apparently never heard of the basis of learning that goes back to the Greeks, i.e. the Socratic method. Under their proposed speech criteria, there would be no need for a Socratic method. Second of all, the main justification for tenure, (which many times allows lazy incompetents to linger at institutions) is that there should be academic freedom. In other words, if you were say Professor Copernicus, and proposed the ridiculous idea that the sun was the center of the universe, your career would be safe thanks to tenure. These complete idiots want just the opposite. They probably would have shunned Copernicus and driven him out of ASU
Original: “Professors: Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity are Not Essential to Higher Education”
Corrected: “So-called Professors: Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity are Antithetical to the Agenda of Leftist Indoctrination Entities, aka LIES”
There; fixed it! Now you have an accurate headline.
Yep, after doing twenty working years at CSUS it’s the same. Much of todays faculty are some of the smartest stupid people you will ever meet.
Will, what about scratching the word ‘smartest’, change it to ‘most educated’?
Dear Administrators: Enough with the Free Speech Rhetoric! It Concedes Too Much to the Right-Wing Agenda.”
Catherine O’Donnell has written, according to her CV, on luminaries such as Archbishop John Carroll and Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. Abp Carroll was a Jesuit, was the first Catholic bishop in America for the first Catholic diocese in America (Baltimore – Boston – Philly- NY), founded Georgetown University and ran in the same circles as members of the early Continental Congress considering his cousin was a delegate. Abp. Carroll and Ben Franklin were peers.
It is surreal that O’Donnell, a PhD level historian, would demonstrate such polemics considering Abp John Carroll and St Elizabeth Ann Seton all encountered visceral polemics precisely because they were staunch Catholics, aka “right wing” in today’s political polarization.
Then I read a piece by O’Donnell on St Elizabeth Ann Seton that explained her deep animus towards people different from her, nay her animus towards God. To wit,
Guest Post: Elizabeth Seton and Me: Or, How I Almost Wrote a Book about a Saint Without Mentioning God
But Seton’s raw need for a sense of God’s presence? Her belief that loving God taught her the skill of loving others? Only after more than a year of drafting did I begin to write about those things. One reason I finally did so was that Sisters’ and Daughters’ generations of social labor were clearly animated by Seton’s spirituality; unless I wrote about Seton’s experience of faith, I could not write meaningfully about the institutions she created. There was a starker reason I at last wrote what a friend of mine calls “the God-y bits”: they were in the sources. Reading letters and journals, holding delicate, two-hundred-year-old sketches up to the light, going through financial receipts from the sisterhood at Emmitsburg, I saw a life and a world that was incomprehensible if I refused to explore Seton’s complicated and passionate relationship with God. As an historian I feared writing about the experience and texture of faith. As an historian, I had to.
https://earlyamericanists.com/2018/09/07/guest-post-elizabeth-seton-and-me-or-how-i-almost-wrote-a-book-about-a-saint-without-mentioning-god/
My Jesuit high school teachers and college professors entertained all types of input from students and also from atheist visiting speakers, even if the Early Church Fathers, Saint Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas et al, had proven the existence of God.
Shame on you O’Donnell. You really do not understand history nor for that matter your professed CV subject matter of St Elizabeth Ann Seton, Abp. Carroll nor the Jesuits.
Hello, Mr. Estovir. I appreciate that you admire some of the same people I do, and it sounds like your knowledge runs deeper than mine in some regards. I just want to make one thing clear. In the passage you quote, I was explaining that I hesitated to write about Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton’s faith not because I thought it was unimportant, but because I had some imperfect sense of just how important it was. My own skills are just as an historian, not as a spiritual person, and I also had enormous respect for the people who kept Seton’s archive and who were and are also motivated by faith. It’s impossible to express how humbling that is and how much I hesitated to describe this kind of faith. But, as I wrote, her life makes no sense without her faith and so I eventually did the best I could.
I hope you feel free to reply or contact me. I don’t mind being misunderstood (and our piece on education was not actually a polemic, but a call for universities to have a more modest sense of their role in society and to avoid setting themselves up as the ultimate free speech arena, when there are many other arenas and we should focus on scholarship and teaching). But I would be truly sorry to think that anything I’d written left you with the impression that I do not respect people I wrote about and the people who helped me to write.
If I may but in, Prof O’Donnell, I wish to respond to your comment to Prof. Turley. You seem to see your role as an academic as erecting barriers to the introduction into Colleges “wrong orthodoxies” such as eugenics. But you know this is a straw man argument. I know of no conservatives now, or even earlier, who pushed eugenics. Conservatives have been excluded from universities because they oppose: identity politics, or critical race theory, or the idea that men can become women and vice versa, or that there is such a thing as “white supremacy”, or that capitalism has been harmful to mankind, or that “global warming” is established science, or Americans should feel shame in their country’s role in history, etc. This is where the real dividing line between Left and Right in our time exists. The door to the academy is barred to potential applicants who dissent on THESE established left-wing orthodoxies. And, if someone with unkosher opinions slips through your safety net, he/she will be found out and then denounced and harassed ouf of the college. That is the reality that Prof Turley has documented over and over again. Your role is simply to crush dissent, as all censors in the past have done.
Edwardmahl, your comment was thoughtful, intelligent, right on point, impossible to rebut and just…perfect,
My career is in medicine and medical research, principally on immigrants and the uninsured poor, in the setting of HIV Cardiology. I meet people in clinic at their worst moments in life, and it never ever crosses my mind to assess them before seeing them face to face in clinic as left wing, right wing, Muslim, Christian, black, white, etc. They are people, as St Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it, they are the suffering Christ. Are they mistaken about some topics? Are they Imperfect? Hard headed? Aren’t we all? Every morning I spend time in mystical prayer as the Jesuits teach, and I walk away with the same 2 truths: give thanks to God for my many blessings and be a pencil in God’s hands to write on peoples hearts. St Elizabeth Ann Seton did not follow her path out of a whim but rather under the same conviction that drove Abp John Carroll, Mother Theresa of Calcutta, St Ignatius of Loyola founder of the Jesuits, St Katharine Drexel (founder of schools of Native Americans and Blacks) and millions of forgotten people. You can not write about the history of these individuals if you do not write about their first love.
We are a terribly polarized nation. Anita Bryant, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Swalwell, Jim Bakker, the “Moral Majority” of the 1970/80s were judgmental, holier than thou figures, hypocrites who are rivaled today by the Left wing judgmental, holier than thou figures, hypocrites. An eye for an eye had made us blind to each other. Better to follow the example of historical figures like Abp. Carroll and St Elizabeth Ann Seton
If you are unfamiliar with the history of St Katharine Drexel, you might want to read about her. Her life was as privileged, pristine, lily white as they come. And yet she launched the first religious order to care for Native Americans and Blacks by establishing schools for these groups.
https://www.katharinedrexel.org/st_katharine_drexel_overview/
I hope you and yours have a safe and memorable holiday
Video of St Katharine Drexel