The Yglesias Award

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all the people all the time. ~ Abraham Lincoln

This race is not about winning, because winning isn't enough nowadays. Winning without dignity, winning it without honor, winning without authenticity and truth is not winning at all, and we're not in it for that. - Michelle Obama, referring to Hillary's "I'm in it to win it."

We will not be serving our students well if we insist on teaching them what is factually incorrect, even if we imagine that it would be better for them if we did so. - Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out Of Africa

According to an influential blog, The Daily Dish, "the Matthew Yglesias Award is for writers, politicians, columnists or pundits who actually criticise their own side, make enemies among political allies, and generally risk something for the sake of saying what they believe."

Here's why. In Conservatives' Phantom Marriage Agenda Yglesias wrote:

One answer that Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam sort of walked up to in their book Grand New Party from several years back is that we ought to return to cruelly shunning single mothers and their children. Treat them really, really, really poorly like we would have 50 years ago. Call them "illegitimate" and rather than try to ameliorate the problems of being raised in a one-adult household, go out of our way to exacerbate them. Make life as awful as possible for single parents and their kids, and in the future you probably will see fewer single parents. The big problem with this idea, however, is that it involves deliberate cruelty to innocent people, which is morally wrong. So wrong that you never see conservatives explicitly avow it. Because it's really obviously wrong to be deliberately cruel to innocent people.

Did you ever wonder what simple transparent honesty (doing good with simplicity) would look like? These words are an example.


In "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed, this blog previously cited Yglesias:

At no point in the films is there any suggestion that one ought to put an abstract ideological or ethical commitment above a specific obligation to family.
Sociologically speaking, this is a classic moral outlook of a low-trust society . . .  - Matthew Yglesias

Postscript: In Not Out Of Africa: How "Afrocentrism" Became An Excuse To Teach Myth As History, Professor Mary Lefkowitz wrote extensively about honesty as contrasted with committed academic practice:

Discussions about evidence is what scholarship used to be about, and I would argue that we must return to debates about the evidence. p. 160

There are of course many possible interpretations of the truth, but some things simply are not true. It is not true that there was no Holocaust. There was a Holocaust, although we may disagree about the numbers of people killed. [...]

Not all bias amounts to distortion or is equivalent to indoctrination. If I am aware that I am likely to be biased for any number of reasons, and try to compensate for my bias, the result should be very different in quality and character from what I would say if I were consciously setting about to achieve a particular political goal. [...]

Drawing a clear distinction between motivations and evidence has a direct bearing on the question of academic freedom. p. 161

When it comes to deciding what one can or cannot say in class, the question of ethnicity or of motivations, whether personal or cultural, is or ought to be irrelevant. What matters is whether what one says is supported by facts and evidence, texts or formulae. [...]

Are there, can there be, multiple, diverse "truths?" If there are, which "truth" should win? The one that is most loudly argued, or most persuasively phrased? Diverse "truths" are possible only if "truth" is understood to mean something like "point of view." But even then not every point of view, no matter how persuasively it is put across, or with what intensity it is argued, can be equally valid. I may sincerely believe that Plato studied with Moses [...] but that will not mean that what I say corresponds to any known facts. Moses lived (if indeed he lived at all) centuries before Plato [...] In order to be true, my assertion about Plato would need to be supported by warranted evidence. And it cannot be. The notion of diversity does not extend to truth. p. 162

It is not possible for the same thing to be at once false and true. p. 163

Courses that are designed to conceal a considerable body of evidence, or that are intended to instill resentment and distrust in place of open discussion, have no place in the curriculum. p. 164

I was trying to draw attention to the differences between freedom of speech and academic freedom. Freedom of speech gives me the right to say that Aristotle stole his philosophy from Egypt, provided that it is clear that what I am expressing is my opinion, and that I do not pretend or assert that it is factually accurate and true in every respect. One can say many outrageous, untrue, and cruel things in this country, and on the whole it is better to have such license than to restrict free expression.

Whether freedom of speech extends to the classroom is another question. Academic freedom and tenure are not intended to protect the expression of uninformed or frivolous opinions. p. 165

There are many valid ways to read a literary text, although here again one expects instructors to have professional credentials, to be able to provide an argument for their way of reading the works of literature that they profess, and to show that they know its basic content (Hamlet is not the hero of Macbeth, for example).

But in certain subject areas motivation and identity have been taken as the equivalent of professional credentials. For example, does being a woman automatically guarantee knowledge of Women's Studies? p. 166

We will not be serving our students well if we insist on teaching them what is factually incorrect, even if we imagine that it would be better for them if we did so. If some students were comforted by being taught that the world was flat, would that justify the inclusion of Flat Earth Theory in the curriculum. Shouldn't we object if a geographer repeatedly taught that the world was flat, and did not mention that most other geographers happened to disagree with her, or describe fairly the reasons why they did so? p. 167

Academic freedom is the right to profess a discipline according to its recognized content and procedures, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that discipline. p. 170