Wow. "Anti-Wokeism" is tearing itself apart with tone policing, ideological purity tests, and cancellation
who could have seen this coming from people who think scanning texts for "postmodern" vocabulary is intelligent criticism
Anyway Young does indeed appear more concerned with Conversationalist James's hectoring tone and pandering manner than with the fact that he is a fraud who makes things up, so a plague on both your houses, etc, etc
The last point is key and often gets lost. Running universities as brands first and academic institutions second will *always* mean sacrificing academic freedom to PR.
"Running it like a business" is antithetical to running it like a university.
Gauging concern about how and in what interests universities are actually run (as opposed to safe spaces, trigger warnings, etc) is, in my experience, a good way to tell who is concerned about academic freedom and who just wants to find the quickest way to shut other people up.
it's like watching someone turn into James Lindsay by choice
step 1: define your political opponent as bad, make up a term for them that underlines the imputed badness, but let the idea that the term is a neutral analytical one persist
step 2: appeal to common sense/intuition/reasoning as fact (without any real work to show why the point is in fact intuitive or reasonable, let alone factual)
Introductions and summaries have their place but "don't try to read the primary texts, you won't understand them and it will frustrate you," besides being patronizing, is bad advice.
Reading widely and talking with other people, formally or informally, is often a good idea.
Part of the value of primary texts is that they have been and still are open to different readings. Substituting a summary -- as opposed to using one as a help -- closes off that engagement. If you are curious about the ideas in the first place, why would you want to do that?
I also find that moving from incomprehension to (greater) understanding by working through texts or other primary material -- with helps, by all means! -- is a good part of the value of reading and indeed of education in general. Why would I want to short-circuit that?
So, in sum, a school district made material available and Counterweight helped get it removed and replaced. "Extreme" is vague rhetorical garnish.
I don't see how this is more than an ideological pressure group -- which is fine, but has nothing to do with protecting free speech.
I mean, the whole point is explicitly to make things they don't agree with harder for people to access. The comments congratulate them on rolling back CRT "implementation", but that's a red herring -- by their own account, the only "implementation" was making material available.
Again -- if you want to be an ideological pressure group that agitates for school boards to replace things you don't like for ideological reasons with things you do, OK. That's your right. But to pretend this is about promoting free speech or debate is silly. It's clearly not.