https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/22/panic-at-st-vincent/
On April 9-11, the Center for Political and Economic Thought (CPET) at St. Vincent College held a conference on “Panic, Policy, and Politics.” I was an invited speaker.
When I first read the proposed schedule, I saw that nearly half the presentations focused on the panicked response to COVID. That made sense, and was a welcome correction to the one-sided embrace of COVID policy in academia and the media. My own talk was on financial panic, of the sort that hit the United States in 2008. Other presentations addressed information manipulation, Big Tech, and education in the context of madness and hatred.
I did wonder at one title, that of David Azerrad’s talk: “Black Privilege: Racial Hysteria in Contemporary America.” Black privilege, in the form of racial preferences in education, employment, and even speech, seemed to me the product of purposeful thought, activism, and indoctrination over decades, not panic. How would this talk fit within the conference theme?
As things turned out, it fit extraordinarily well. Azerrad’s talk was the only one that generated something like panic.
St. Vincent’s administration sent an armed guard to Azerrad’s presentation, and only his. After the talk, the administration hastily forbade CPET from publishing the videos of all the presentations. They relented a few days later in the face of outcries over academic freedom. Still, the college dean was required to publish a Soviet-style “regret” that more or less labeled Prof. Azerrad a bigot. One of the college’s trustees gave an interview to the local paper calling the talk “rage-inducing.”