I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Steven Yates 391
and therefore to be discounted rather than responded to. Critics of affirmative action found
themselves shouted down. The attacks on white males and on “Western, white maledominated
culture” rapidly snowballed during the early 1990s. Jesse Jackson’s “Hey, hey,
ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” has become legendary.
I first did a policy study for a Chicago-based think tank, and then prepared a longer
essay on affirmative action, much of it written in a kind of white heat. At least one established
scholar who knew what I was up to warned me, “The left will eat you alive.” But I
couldn’t stop. The truth had to be told! The essay kept expanding until it reached booklength
proportions. One day I awakened with the title Civil Wrongs on my lips, attached it
to the manuscript and began to seek a publisher. Civil Wrongs was rejected by something
like 80 publishers until ICS Press accepted it (under the condition that I rewrite it for a
more policy-minded and less academic audience, a condition I happily accepted since it
was already clear that few academic philosophers would be interested).
The book came out in November of 1994. By that time I was no longer teaching in
a philosophy department whose senior people were mostly sympathetic to the libertarian
premises that underwrote my particular critique of affirmative action. It was official
policy at Auburn University that tenure decisions had to be unanimous among senior
faculty, and one senior person had blocked my promotion to a tenure line. The person
hadn’t given a reason—and had even concealed his identity from me until I was out of
the picture. I ended up at a more typically leftist department (at the University of South
Carolina) under a fairly left-of-center administration. This department had needed
someone at the last minute. The appearance of Civil Wrongs—particularly as it received
a certain amount of local media coverage and was prominently displayed in the front
window of an independent bookstore in downtown Columbia—turned out to be a kiss
of death, so far as my remaining there or pursuing a tenure-track position in a philosophy
department went. Part of no longer pursuing such was admittedly my own decision. I
had had enough experiences with academic philosophy that I was less impressed by it
with each passing year. I had also discovered the hard way that those few senior-level
colleagues I could trust generally had no power in their departments. So I although I
enjoyed teaching university undergraduates, I took an early retirement from the profession
that was only partly voluntary at best.
Horrible experiences with philosophy departments had not taken away my interest in
ideas, and I continued to write whenever possible despite the need to undertake “odd jobs”
to survive. These included, at different times, clerical work as a “temp” in a state office, an
assortment of technical-writing contract jobs, some ghostwriting, a stint in a health education
department and later a consulting firm, and later as an obituary writer for the city
newspaper. During this period—the mid-1990s and shortly thereafter—I occasionally did
philosophical work with research institutes such as the Acton Institute for the Study of
Religion and Liberty. I had minimal contact with academia but kept in touch with the
folks at the Mises Institute, attending the occasional Austrian Scholars Conference where
I could interact with like-minded individuals. But during this period, something was happening.
The fact that my involvement with the folks at the Acton Institute created no
cognitive dissonance offered an important clue.