By David Pan · Wednesday, November 2, 2022 After decades of contention, most observers agree that affirmative action in the form of racial preferences in college admissions will be declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. There are indeed few arguments left to support it. A supermajority of Americans opposes it, with 74 percent of Americans, including 58 percent of Blacks, indicating in the most recent Pew Research poll that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions. Racial preferences do not help the disadvantaged. As even a supporter of affirmative action writes: “Seventy-one percent of Harvard’s Black and Hispanic students come from wealthy backgrounds. A tiny fraction attended underperforming public high schools. First- and second-generation African immigrants, despite constituting only about 10 percent of the U.S. Black population, make up about 41 percent of all Black students in the Ivy League, and Black immigrants are wealthier and better educated than many native-born Black Americans.” As these statistics indicate, the racial categories do not correlate with disadvantaged status. They are even more problematic as a proxy for diversity. It is not clear why some markers of identity such as race and ethnicity should be considered significant for viewpoint diversity while others, such as religion, should not. Politically, university faculty have become much less diverse in terms of party affiliation over the last several decades of affirmative action policy, with a documented 11.5 to 1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans at leading universities in 2016. Moreover, because the defense of affirmative action has become a marker of anti-racism, the university support for the policy has suppressed opposing viewpoints by branding them as racist or sexist and not worthy of discussion, thus further reducing viewpoint diversity by encouraging pervasive self-censorship.
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By David Pan · Monday, October 24, 2022 Volodymyr Zelensky has virtually single-handedly demonstrated the world-historical importance of sovereignty and its mechanisms. Before his courageous insistence on Ukrainian sovereignty, the world—including the United States, with its offer of a helicopter ride for Zelensky out of Kyiv—was already treating the Russian subjugation of Ukraine as a fait accompli and the continuation of business as usual. Russia was using in Ukraine the methods that it had already successfully practiced in Chechnya, Syria, and Belarus while the rest of the world stood by to allow such methods to become normalized. By taking his stand in Kyiv, Zelensky was declaring to the Ukrainian people and the rest of the world that Russia’s invasion was in fact not a normal action that had to be accepted. Suddenly, Russia’s years-long undermining of the idea of popular sovereignty in different parts of the world had been called out as a transgression, leading to global insights about recent history and our role in its development. The nations of Europe above all, but also the United States, have had to face the extent to which their energy policies were contributing to Russia’s reshaping of global norms. Zelensky has forced us to take a stand one way or the other in deciding the political shape of the world for the foreseeable future.
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By Saladdin Ahmed · Monday, October 3, 2022 On September 16, 2022, Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, died in captivity three days after she was abducted by “morality police” in Tehran for allegedly breaking the dress code imposed by the Iranian ruling regime. Almost immediately protests broke out across the country. As of the time of writing these lines, a week after Mahsa Amini’s death, the popular protests are only intensifying and thereby insisting on the revolutionary event-ness (per Badiou) of the historical moment. What instigated the protests is not the exceptionality of the incident but rather the commonality of what it represents in terms of legalized violence against the doubly and triply marginalized.
In all societies that live under oppressive regimes, revolt takes place regularly and in various individual and collective forms. Once in a while, an incident would have a domino effect triggering a simultaneous, unplanned, popular uprising that overwhelms the police apparatuses for a few days, weeks, or more. Sometimes the protested regime would not get a chance to resume its totalitarian grip on power, which may result in the ultimate collapse of the police state altogether. While the Arab Spring movements successfully brought down several oppressive regimes, the Islamist movements hijacked almost every popular uprising, which resulted in widespread disbelief in the democratic plausibility and strategic effectiveness of uprisings. However, what happened in the Arab Spring is something Iranians already experienced in the 1979 revolution when Khomeini’s followers hijacked the revolution. While this Iranian uprising, like the uprisings of the Arab Spring, might suffer from the absence of a revolutionary agenda for establishing a new social and political order, it will nonetheless be immune to at least one type of counterrevolutionary infection, which is Islamism. This protest movement’s spontaneous adoption of the Rojava-Bakur revolution’s motto, “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi,” “Women, Life, Freedom,” is a promising sign in terms of the prospects of moving beyond not only religious fundamentalism but also other forms of male-chauvinism and nationalism.
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By David Pan · Monday, October 3, 2022 Telos 200 (Fall 2022): The Place of Truth at the University is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 The place of truth at the university has always been elsewhere. Scientific conclusions are after all hypotheses, subject to continuing examination and critique in a process that forever defers the arrival at a final truth. In addition to this unbridgeable temporal distance from truth, there is a spatial distance to the extent that the university is subject to a larger purposive context that stands outside of scientific activity itself. A researcher can be objective by being non-prejudicial in collecting facts and weighing arguments but can never be neutral in terms of the goals of the research, which must always be established before the research begins and from outside of the research project itself.[1] Research cannot begin until an interest in some question has been expressed, and such an interest has generally not been up to the researcher to decide. Whether the goal of medical research will be to protect humans from a virus or attack humans with a virus will be determined by the sponsor of the research rather than the researcher, who at best may decline to take part in some forms of research. If the determiners of the goals of the university are not the professors themselves but the society that sponsors their work, it is within this external values framework that the truth of the university must be found.
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By David Pan · Monday, September 26, 2022  By appealing to our common humanity, the idea of human rights and the idea of a “community of common destiny for mankind” promoted by the Chinese Communist Party seem to be referring to the same thing. Yet the two ideas are clearly opposed to each other, since the goal of the second idea is to supplant the first one. By opposing the idea of human rights and an existing international order that values the autonomy of nation-states and the rule of law, the Chinese Communist Party’s version of common humanity envisions a subordination of international order to Chinese power. One response to these opposing views of the meaning of common humanity would be to deny that such an idea might have any legitimacy at all and to then conclude that the only commonality we share would be a will to power. This stance, by denying the possibility of a common set of values, would undermine attempts at cultural exchange and comparison, as well as the legitimacy of any critique. The human rights ideal, by contrast, begins with recognizing, at a minimum, those transgressions that all humans seek to avoid, including torture, genocide, and enslavement. Such agreement provides the first step for a cultural comparison, which cannot begin until we define a common value. By defining such a value, it becomes possible to compare different manifestations of that value as well as to formulate a critique. In a follow-up to last week’s podcast with Sijia Yao, this week’s podcast with Xudong Zhang addresses the role of the idea of a common humanity for establishing the parameters of a cultural comparison between China and the West.
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By Telos Press · Monday, September 26, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Xudong Zhang about his article “China and the West: Methodologies for Comparison,” from Telos 199 (Summer 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss how the specific comparison between China and the West leads to new methodologies of comparison; how a thematic mode of comparison works to bring China and the West in relation to each other; how the need for both a closed horizon, indicating a kind of self-isolation, and a common humanity relate to one another; how comparison can be framed within a context of both movement and action; and how comparison links the particular to the universal. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are available for purchase in our online store.
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