Months earlier, at Governor Ronald Reagan’s behest, the University of California, Los Angeles, had dismissed her from the philosophy faculty for being affiliated with the Communist Party. When the Supreme Court of California ruled that a professor could not be banned for party affiliation, the university regents declined to renew her appointment, this time claiming that remarks she made in speeches were politically incendiary.
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Some executives were beginning to exhibit the sort of personal leadership and commitment to change that I sought.
I needed, though, to provide support and encouragement for these risk takers. They were still surrounded by a lot of Bolsheviks who longed for the old system.
12. Boxing the Champ In
A different reporter asked Bernstein what he thought might be the implications of signing up a convicted felon, which Ali was at that point, for a book deal with such a high payout. Having anticipated the question, Bernstein pulled his pipe from his mouth, leaned across the table toward the microphone, and replied that the day publishers refused to publish controversial books would be a bad day for democracy. Random house was no stranger to controversial authors.
1. Engineers vs. Lawyers
Looking at these two countries, I came to realize the inadequacy of twentieth-century labels like capitalist, socialist, or, worst of all, neoliberal. They are no longer up to the task of helping us understand the world, if they ever were. Capitalist America intrudes upon the free market with a dense program of regulation and taxation while providing substantial (albeit imperfect) redistributive policies. Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist.
There’s no question that Xi has tightened the country’s already limited space for free speech. Free thought is essential for the humanities and the social sciences. But I’m not so sure that it’s a necessary condition for the natural sciences, for very little in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and engineering is innately political.
Yet shown in the Stephens research described in chapter 6, welcomes can go wrong: they can alienate people, even if inadvertently, as well as welcome them. Recall the finding: When a welcome letter ostensibly written by a college president emphasized independence, finding one’s own passion, and working independently, working-class students were affected enough that they performed worse than non-working-class students on a subsequent verbal reasoning test. And at orientation, when independence was emphasized but no mention was made of communication values, working-class students got lower grades than other students on a subsequent test. These were students whose admission credentials and high school grades were on par with those of everyone else participating in the experiment. There’s a lesson in these findings: When bringing a diversity of people into a setting, it’s especially important that welcoming be inclusive. When it’s not— again, even inadvertently so— it can have serious consequences.