FIRE’s 2022 List of Worst Colleges for Free Speech

You would think colleges and universities would "get" the importance of free speech, especially given that they are so top-heavy with administrators who could study these sorts of things (Yale has 6,000 undergrads but more than 6,000 administrators). Further, many of these universities have law programs. Couldn't the administrators walk across campus and make sure they aren't acting unconstitutionally?

This excerpt is from FIRE's annual list of failing colleges. FIRE is a non-partisan organization dedicated to defending free speech at colleges and universities:

"There’s no shortage of colleges and universities that will go to great lengths to stifle free speech. Some institutions are worse than others, which is why each year for over a decade, FIRE compiles a list of the worst-of-the-worst.

Since our first list in 2011, FIRE has named and shamed 80 institutions in 33 states for actively working to shut down student and faculty speech rights."

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Andrew Sullivan: The Political Right’s Ill-Thought Efforts to Fight Illiberal Woke Indoctrination with School Censorship

In response to the illiberal political Left attempts to mangle history, statistics and science in classrooms, we increasingly see the political Right attempting to ban books, courses and ideas in school, often through ill-considered legislation. The ability of children to learn is being damaged by both of these groups. Andrew Sullivan suggests a way forward in his Substack article, "The Right's Ugly War On Woke Schooling: There is a better way to defeat left indoctrination than banning books." Here is an excerpt:

The trouble is that banning courses restricts discourse, and does not expand it. It gives woke racialist theories the sheen of “forbidden knowledge.” It removes the moral high-ground from those seeking to defend liberal learning from ideologues of any variety. And it sets an early lesson for kids that the right response to bad arguments is to gets authorities to suppress them — exactly what the woke believe — and not to marshal arguments that refute them. Greg Lukianoff calls this “unlearning liberty.” If want to end an American education like that, don’t copy it!

And these kinds of laws have to be vague and thereby overreach, or be very specific and permit clever ways to get around them. The woke love manipulating language to deconstruct society. Look how they took the word “racist” and redefined it. Look at how they’ve deployed a word like “equity.” Ban words? They redefine them. Ban courses? They’ll call them something else. If a social justice warrior teacher is teaching genetics, they can always stealthily introduce trans ideology — and only the kids would know.

A better way is to insist that any course or lesson that involves critical theory must include an alternative counterpoint. If you have to teach Nikole Hannah-Jones, add a section on Zora Neale Hurston; for every Kendi tract, add McWhorter; for every Michael Eric Dyson screed, offer a Glenn Loury lecture. Same elsewhere. No gender studies course without a course on biological sex and gender-critical viewpoints. No “queer theory” class without texts from non-leftists, who are not falsifying history or asserting that homosexuality is socially constructed all the way down. This strategy doesn’t ban anything; it adds something. It demands that schools make sure they’re helping kids think for themselves.

If your kid, black or white, is treated differently by a school or a teacher in class because of his or her race, there is already a remedy: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If your child is forced to sit in a section designated for one oppressive or oppressed race, sue. If your son is told he is inherently toxic because he is a boy, or straight, sue. If an Asian or white kid is told she bears responsibility for the long effects of slavery because of her race, sue. This way, we are not banning anything, and we are defending civil rights.

Then we need transparency. Public schools should have their curricula and lesson plans posted online. And no state public school funds should be spent on the equity industrial complex: defund equity consultants, DEI conferences and struggle sessions for either teachers or students. If teachers want to bone up on Judith Butler or Robin DiAngelo, they can do it on their own dime. If this sounds harsh, so be it. Critical theory should be treated more like creationism in public schools than scholarship: an unfalsifiable form of religion, preferably banned outright, but if not, always accompanied by Darwin.

Continue ReadingAndrew Sullivan: The Political Right’s Ill-Thought Efforts to Fight Illiberal Woke Indoctrination with School Censorship

The Re-Emergence of Politically Correct Culture on Campus

Greg Lukianoff (President of FIRE and co-author with Jonathan Haidt of "The Coddling of the American Mind") is delivering the bad news: Politically Correct culture went underground where it gained substantial followings and it has now re-emerged, led by an army of college administrators, many of whom come from colleges of education.  His article includes a lot of doom and gloom, but also offers hope. The title to Lukianoff's article at Reason is "The Second Great Age of Political Correctness: The P.C. culture of the '80s and '90s didn't decline and fall. It just went underground. Now it's back."

Amid the Second Great Age of Political Correctness, American higher education has become too expensive, too illiberal, and too conformist. It has descended into a period of profound crisis wrought by shifts in hiring, student development, and politically charged speech codes developed during the Ignored Years, when too few were paying attention. American campuses should be bastions of free expression and academic freedom. Instead, both are in decline. We cannot afford to just give up on higher ed. College and university presidents can and should do the following five things:

1. Immediately dump all speech codes.

2. Adopt a statement specifically identifying free speech as essential to the core purpose of a university and committing the university to free speech values.

3. Defend the free speech rights of their students and faculty loudly, clearly, and early.

4. Teach free speech, the philosophy of free inquiry, and academic freedom from Day One.

5. Collect data and open their campuses to research on the climate for debate, discussion, and dissent.

Those who donate to colleges should refuse to do so without demanding these changes.

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Princeton University Gets an Education: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”

Sixty Princeton Students have carefully responded to the declaration of Princeton Dean Amaney Jamal decrying Kyle Rittenhouse’s not-guilty verdict. Here is an excerpt from "Let Students Think for Themselves," published by The National Review:

[Jamal] lamented with a heavy heart the “incomprehensib[ility] . . . of a minor vigilante carrying a semi-automatic rifle across state lines, killing two people, and being declared innocent by the U.S. justice system.” Furthermore, she situated the verdict within the context of the racism embedded “without a doubt . . . in nearly every strand of the American fabric,” thus implying that defenders of a not-guilty verdict are defenders of racism.

Along with 60 of our peers, we sent a letter of concern to the university president, Christopher Eisgruber. We criticized neither the embarrassing factual errors polluting Jamal’s statement nor her position on the trial’s outcome. Rather, we vehemently objected to the fact that she took advantage of her official position to broadcast her own stance on a controversial public issue — a maneuver that can only harm, not aid, a culture of bold, open truth-seeking.

An academic institution committed to truth-seeking and open inquiry should foster an environment in which students feel welcome — even encouraged — to speak up on controversial issues about which reasonable people of goodwill disagree. But as Princeton students and frequent critics of the ideological orthodoxy that pervades our campus, we’ve witnessed our peers retreat from conversations, opportunities, and even friendships out of fear that their deeply held beliefs will cost them academically, socially, and professionally.

A university hinders its truth-seeking mission when it — unintentionally or otherwise — prompts students to think twice before expressing unpopular but reasonable points of view. This can occur when officials violate the basic institutional neutrality required for the university to be a home for the free marketplace of ideas. When an educational institution adopts official stances on controversial issues not directly connected to its core mission, it suggests parameters around an otherwise liberated discourse. This effect is enhanced when such pronouncements are morally tinged; in these cases, the university would appear to have decided that such parameters are morally requisite. By implication, those who defy them are morally suspect.

The “basic neutrality” ideal isn’t new. The most famous defense of the principle was offered by faculty at the University of Chicago during the height of the Vietnam War. Chicago’s Kalven Committee made the point succinctly: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” The Kalven Report, long celebrated, is still operative at the University of Chicago. Universities everywhere should consider adopting the report’s guidance, as well as the university’s famed Free Speech Principles, which Princeton formally did in 2015.

Continue ReadingPrinceton University Gets an Education: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”

Niall Ferguson Explains Why He is Helping to Create a New College

Niall Ferguson's article at Bloomberg is titled, "I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken: Institutions dedicated to the search for truth have ossified into havens for liberal intolerance and administrative overreach."

In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented them from saying things they believed, up from 55% in 2019, while 41% were reluctant to discuss politics in a classroom, up from 32% in 2019. Some 60% of students said they were reluctant to speak up in class because they were concerned other students would criticize their views as being offensive.

Such anxieties are far from groundless. According to a nationwide survey of a thousand undergraduates by the Challey Institute for Global Innovation, 85% of self-described liberal students would report a professor to the university if the professor said something that they found offensive, while 76% would report another student.

. . . . The number of scholars targeted for their speech has risen dramatically since 2015, according to research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE has logged 426 incidents since 2015. Just under three-quarters of them resulted in some kind of sanction — including an investigation alone or voluntary resignation — against the scholar. Such efforts to restrict free speech usually originate with “progressive” student groups, but often find support from left-leaning faculty members and are encouraged by college administrators, who tend (as Sam Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College demonstrated, and as his own subsequent experience confirmed) to be even further to the left than professors. There are also attacks on academic freedom from the right, which FIRE challenges.

Continue ReadingNiall Ferguson Explains Why He is Helping to Create a New College