Everything National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood writes is worth reading. Among his many books, for example, I would point to 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project and Diversity: The Invention of a Concept. All his books — his Encounter Books page is here — are of interest.
In the June issue of The Spectator’s World edition he has the essay “The Trump administration is giving us excellence, not equity” (behind the Spectator paywall). He draws on his work on “diversity” and his related opposition to DEI. Here is the opening of his essay (links omitted):
Americans are not a naturally gloomy people. We don’t necessarily expect things to go our way, but when they don’t, we can laugh it off. In my part of Vermont there’s a place called Hateful Hill, for example, so-named by stagecoach drivers who had a tough time with the steep road. But Hateful Hill is also a beautiful elevation.
Today, even those who don’t “get” Donald Trump need to start seeing the upside. He doesn’t always get his way, which is probably a good thing, but he is leading a long-overdue revival of the American spirit and allowing for the return of optimism and the pursuit of excellence.
Among the 130 executive orders (EOs) Trump has issued so far are eight that pick away at the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) regime that had settled on the American psyche like volcanic ash. One of those EOs, #14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government Programs and Preferencing,” directs federal agencies to terminate grants and contracts for programs that advance DEI. That includes universities that have entangled their research with the ideology that science, along with everything else, is riddled with “systemic racism.”
EO #14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” bans DEI efforts in the federal government and among federal contractors, e.g. universities. EO #14190, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” ends federal funding for schools that teach DEI and calls instead for programs that “instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand.”
Executive orders are not magic wands that instantly transform reality. Schools, colleges and associations that are committed to DEI fight back. But the EOs have galvanized a broad swath of Americans who detest the DEI regime but until now have felt helpless to fight against it.
In higher education, my professional area, colleges and universities are in a fit of distemper because President Trump has come down on them hard for their coddling campus Hamas activists and their recently exposed institutional anti-Semitism.
Trump has successfully linked their anti-Semitism to their neo-racist DEI programs, the politicization of their curricula and various forms of duplicity. The volume of wailing that we hear from Harvard and the 200 or so university presidents who have joined in chorus sounds as though all the residents of Brimstone Corners and Misery Lanes have united in anguish.
Don’t be misled by that institutional chorus. Americans are generally smiling at this drama. We know that Trump doesn’t intend to plow Harvard back to the colonial cow pasture it once was. His “war on Harvard” is, in fact, rather a sunny fable about the usurpers facing an overdue reckoning.
Whole thing here.
