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Dec. 7, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
04:43
1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project
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Peter Wood, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
It's so nice of you to have me.
Where do you live, by the way?
Where am I talking to?
I live and work in New York City.
You're talking to me in my office on Madison Avenue, which is the boarded-up center of town.
It's still boarded up?
Well, parts of it are.
I can look out my window here and see storefronts that are boarded up and places that are closed and will never reopen.
I always ask people who are not on the left and who live in New York City, why do you live there?
Well, I live here because I moved the National Association of Scholars here ten years ago in order to be closer to both the news outlets and to transportation.
We were in Princeton before.
And it has turned out to be a good place for the National Association of Scholars to operate.
There are, believe it or not, quite a few conservative scholars in the universities in the New York area, and I've made good friends here.
It seems to me to be a commodious place to work as long as one doesn't get too bothered by the 60 or 70 percent of the people who hate you.
That was well said, sir.
I was waiting for the punchline.
Anyway, it's a delight.
Getting to your book in one moment, explain to people what the National Association of Scholars is.
Well, we're a membership organization of scholars, as the name suggests.
We were started back in the mid-1980s when the camel's nose of political correctness was getting well under the flap of the tent.
And there were scholars at the time, most of them Democrats, liberals, who just thought that...
These radicals needed a gentle push away and things would get better.
That hypothesis turned out not to be true, and we found ourselves with an agenda which at the time was considered liberal and soon became defined as conservative and then far-right-wing, all without changing our principles in the least.
We're in favor of intellectual freedom and teaching a curriculum that leads to Students becoming pretty well enlightened citizens of a self-governing republic.
We favor intellectual exchange and a willingness to tolerate views that disagree with your own.
You proceed with arguments by means of rational argument and good evidence, and everything is open to further discussion until we reach an agreement as to what the fundamentals are.
How many members do you have?
At this moment, we have 3,450, about.
Are they all academics?
No, about 92 or 3% of them are academics, and we have a certain number of people who are just strong supporters of the car.
All right, so that means, forgive me for interrupting, I just want to get you to the book as soon as I can, but I want to understand this.
About 90% of the 3,000 members are academics?
Yes.
So that's about 2,500 college, is it all college academics?
All colleges, universities, yes.
Yes, not high school teachers or elementary school teachers.
So that's the distinction I was drawing.
Right.
So there are literally thousands of professors who are signed up with an organization that is for academic openness?
Yes.
Astonishing, isn't it?
Yes.
In fact, if there were a word stronger than astonishing, I would use that.
Well, the hitch here is that when they join, we promise that we will not divulge their identity publicly.
Tell me that that is not a sign of our times.
It is very much a sign of our times.
And there are many others who say they would join us, but that they dare not for fear that someone will figure it out.
I'm quiet because I'm letting this terrible realization sink in that in the United States of America in the year 2020, thousands of professors are afraid to have their name listed in an organization of scholars of thousands of other scholars devoted to academic freedom.
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