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."

Continue ReadingFIRE’s 2022 List of Worst Colleges for Free Speech

The Moment of Institutional Capture: ADL

Andrew Sullivan points out ADL's decision to take a reasonably clear and understandable definition of racism, replacing it with Woke mush that invites eternal confusion and strife:

I spotted Sullivan's tweet the day after Joe Biden promised that his nominee for the next Justice of the Supreme Court would be a black women. Hmmm. That's the equivalent of telling all highly qualified Asian-American, Latina-Americans and many other highly qualified potential candidates that they will categorically not be considered for this upcoming job opening because of their race, color . . . sex, or national origin.

Oh, one more thing. In this country it is

an unlawful employment practice for an employer -(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
42 U.S. Code § 2000e–2 - Unlawful employment practices. In my opinion, it would be a wonderful thing to have a black woman Justice on SCOTUS. That person should be appointed for only one reason, however: Because they would make an excellent judge. Their skin color is irrelevant to me and it should be irrelevant to any person filling any job in the United States.

It is sad and destructive that so many people in the U.S. are working so hard to roll back the clock to earlier destructive times when we should pay attention to a person's skin color. I look forward to the day when a person's skin color is arguably the least interesting thing about them.

Looking forward, it will be crystal clear that the person who gets Biden's appointment was chosen because she was a woman and because she was black. Colin Wright is spot on:

Continue ReadingThe Moment of Institutional Capture: ADL

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

FIRE Defends Law Professor Forced to Attend Hypocritical Re-Education Camp

Law professor Jason Kilborn is forging ahead in the battle to vindicate academic freedom rights at University of Illinois Chicago, which punished him for a test question that included two redacted slurs.

- University forces professor into sensitivity course that uses the exact same redacted slur in the training materials.

- UIC’s level of hypocrisy and cluelessness boggles the mind.

“UIC crucifies Kilborn for using a redacted slur, then turns around and forces him into anti-racism training that uses that same slur,” said Ronnie London, head of FIRE’s Faculty Legal Defense Fund. “Kilborn is effectively showing up to re-education and being handed his own text.”

The Mission of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE):

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s mission is to defend and sustain the individual rights of students and faculty members at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates students, faculty, alumni, trustees, and the public about the threats to these rights on our campuses, and provides the means to preserve them.

Continue ReadingFIRE Defends Law Professor Forced to Attend Hypocritical Re-Education Camp

Matt Taibbi’s Indictment of our COVID Official Sources

Why do so many people distrust the authorities, our "leaders," regarding COVID? Here are some of the reasons collected by Matt Taibbi:

If the fact-checkers are themselves untrustworthy, and you can’t get around the fact-checkers, that’s when you’re really screwed.

This puts the issue of the reliability of authorities front and center, which is the main problem with pandemic messaging. One does not need to be a medical expert to see that the FDA, CDC, the NIH, as well as the White House (both under Biden and Trump) have all been untruthful, or wrong, or inconsistent, about a spectacular range of issues in the last two years.

NIAID director Anthony Fauci has told three different stories about masks, including an episode in which he essentially claimed to have lied to us for our own good, in order to preserve masks for frontline workers — what Slate called one of the “Noble lies about Covid-19.” Officials turned out to be wrong about cloth masks anyway. Here is Fauci again on the issue of what to tell the public about how many people would need to be vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity,” casually explaining the logic of lying to the public for its sake:

When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85.

We’ve seen sudden changes in official positions on the efficacy of ventilators and lockdowns, on the dangers (or lack thereof) of opening schools, and on the risks, however small, of vaccine side effects like myocarditis. The CDC also just released data showing natural immunity to be more effective in preventing hospitalization and in preventing infection than vaccination. The government had previously said, over and over, that vaccination is preferable to natural immunity (here’s NIH director Francis Collins telling that to Bret Baier unequivocally in August). This was apparently another “noble lie,” designed to inspire people to get vaccinated, that mostly just convinced people to wonder if any official statements can be trusted.

To me, the story most illustrative of the problem inherent in policing “Covid misinformation” involves a town hall by Joe Biden from July 21 of last year. In it, the president said bluntly, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” pretty much the definition of Covid misinformation:

It was bad enough when, a month later, the CDC released figures showing 25% of a sample of 43,000 Covid cases involved fully vaccinated people. Far worse was a fact-check by Politifact, which judged Biden’s clearly wrong statement “half true.”

“It is rare for people who are fully vaccinated to contract COVID-19, but it does happen,” the site wrote. They then cited CDC data as backup. “The data that the CDC collected before May 1 show that, of 101 million people vaccinated in the U.S., 10,262 (0.01%) experienced breakthrough cases.” Politifact’s “bottom line”: Biden “exaggerated,” but “cases are rare.”

Anyone paying attention to that story will now distrust the president, the CDC, and “reputable” mainstream fact-checkers like the Pew Center’s Politifact. These are the exact sort of authorities whose guidance sites like the Center for Countering Digital Hate will rely upon when trying to pressure companies like Substack to remove certain voices.

This is the central problem of any “content moderation” scheme: somebody has to do the judging. The only thing worse than a landscape that contains misinformation is a landscape where misinformation is mandatory, and the only antidote for the latter is allowing all criticism, mistakes included. This is especially the case in a situation like the present, where the two-year clown show of lies and shifting positions by officials and media scolds has created a groundswell of mistrust that’s a far bigger threat to public health than a literal handful of Substack writers.

Could some of this problem be lessened if our "Leaders" are required to also state their confidence level whenever they make future statements about COVID?

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi’s Indictment of our COVID Official Sources