Ostracizing Claremont

The American Political Science Association (APSA) is the main professional organization for academics who work, teach, and research in the area of political science. It hosts an annual meeting that draws thousands of academics, students, journalists, editors, and authors. APSA is the umbrella organization of hundreds of smaller groups with a dizzying breadth of interests and subjects, which in turn organize the various panels, roundtables, and workshops that take place over the four full days of the annual meeting. In addition to serving as a locus for academics to exchange ideas and research, the annual meeting is the most important professional networking gathering of the profession. APSA’s annual meeting is the place where many young academics first meet the eminent faculty they admire, where aspiring faculty make connections that will help them gain a foothold in the profession, where aspiring authors pitch book ideas to editors in academic and trade presses, and where many interviews for academic jobs take place.

APSA claims to be a non-partisan organization whose main purpose is to advance the academic study of politics. Given the inherent contentiousness of its subject, for many decades it has been—for the most part—admirably open to the variety of approaches and perspectives that the study of politics inevitably attracts. However, in the wake of the Trump years and the rise of “cancel culture,” the organization recently made a decision that bodes ill for the integrity of the academic study of politics. Bowing to the demands of a small but vocal number of political scientists, APSA effectively banned the Claremont Institute—a right-liberal (by the light of the profession, “conservative”) organization, some of whose members had expressed support for Donald Trump—from hosting its section’s panels at the most recent APSA meeting, just concluded this past weekend in Seattle.

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