Just as today debate rages over lockdowns, therapies, and vaccines to combat the COVID-19 epidemic, so too in the Boston of Benjamin Franklin’s youth Smallpox inoculation was the subject of contentious public discussion. The argument was dominated, politically if not numerically, by the proponents of inoculation. Prominent physician Zabdiel Boylston, The Mathers (Boston’s preeminent political […]
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Ideological Diversity and the “Wide” History of the Civil Rights Movement
“Ideological diversity” is a controversial term. Much like free speech, it has been weaponized in our fractious political culture – and injected into our ongoing culture wars. Also referred to as “viewpoint diversity,” the concept has been deployed as a cudgel against political foes to depict them as obsessed with a version of diversity based […]
From the Editor: A Primer on Constitutional Rights During Crises
If the state may conscript its citizens into military service and send them to war, may it do anything short of that? This question has taken on a new relevance in the age of COVID-19. State and local shelter-in-place orders have told residents, under penalty of law, that they cannot travel, cannot assemble peacefully in […]
Socrates Doubts Zoom: The Temptation and Risk of Online Learning in the Liberal Arts
As professors and students valiantly adapt to the virtualization of campus life, administrative pressures to expand online learning will likely intensify once the COVID-19 crisis abates. Of course, we need to make the best of our sub-optimal circumstances and embrace online learning during these strange times. However, its utility during the crisis does not prove […]
The System of Natural Liberty, Revisited
The perennial vilification of ever-sinister capitalism by progressives in the academy and the media, who in turn extol the virtues of utopian socialism, has led to a war not so much of ideas as of expletives. Before the accumulated debris of connotations all but obliterates rational discourse, a conceptual reboot must be performed before the […]
