New College Crest

Warrior Blogger Discusses Campus Free Speech

Alan Dershowitz: Hard Left Biggest Danger

“My biggest enemies are the hard left,” says @AlanDersh “In 50 years of teaching at Harvard, Stanford, NYU, Hebrew University, you name it — I have never met a group of less courageous people in my whole life than tenured Harvard, and tenured other, professors.” @No_Safe_Spaces pic.twitter.com/PU61IkMd1Z

— nwsltr (@nwsltrMe) February 13, 2018

College Students: Intolerant of Free Speech

From the (liberal) Brookings Institution, a national sample of college students on their attitudes toward free speech on campus.

College students’ views of the First Amendment are of profound importance for multiple reasons. First, colleges and universities are places where intellectual debate should flourish. That can only occur if campuses are places where viewpoint diversity is celebrated, and where the First Amendment is honored in practice and not only in theory. Second, what happens on campuses often foreshadows broader societal trends. Today’s college students are tomorrow’s attorneys, teachers, professors, policymakers, legislators, and judges. If, for example, a large fraction of college students believe, however incorrectly, that offensive speech is unprotected by the First Amendment, that view will inform the decisions they make as they move into positions of increasing authority later in their careers.

Clearly true.

To explore the critical issue of the First Amendment on college campuses, during the second half of August I conducted a national survey of 1,500 current undergraduate students at U.S. four-year colleges and universities. The survey population was geographically diverse, with respondents from 49 states and the District of Columbia.

The survey results establish with data what has been clear anecdotally to anyone who has been observing campus dynamics in recent years: Freedom of expression is deeply imperiled on U.S. campuses. In fact, despite protestations to the contrary (often with statements like “we fully support the First Amendment, but…), freedom of expression is clearly not, in practice, available on many campuses, including many public campuses that have First Amendment obligations.

How to the specifics:

First, a question asked:

Does the First Amendment protect “hate speech”?

Of course, the First Amendment does protect “hate speech,” even aside from the question of who has the right to decide what is “hate speech” which must be shut up. But less than half of college students believe that:


Another question asked:

A public university invites a very controversial speaker to an on-campus event. The speaker is known for making offensive and hurtful statements.

A student group opposed to the speaker disrupts the speech by loudly and repeatedly shouting so that the audience cannot hear the speaker. Do you agree or disagree that the student group’s actions are acceptable?

This tactic, quite simply, is fascist, yet a narrow majority of students agree it is acceptable.

Then, another question is asked about the “controversial speaker:”

A student group opposed to the speaker uses violence to prevent the speaker from speaking. Do you agree or disagree that the student group’s actions are acceptable?

It might seem nice that this is only a small minority, but as the author of the study notes, “Any number significantly above zero is concerning.” Indeed.

The survey asked one more question about a controversial speaker:

Consider an event, hosted at a public U.S. university by an on-campus organization, featuring a speaker known for making statements that many students consider to be offensive and hurtful. A student group opposed to the speaker issues a statement saying that, under the First Amendment, the on-campus organization hosting the event is legally required to ensure that the event includes not only the offensive speaker but also a speaker who presents an opposing view. What is your view on the student group’s statement?

While presenting alternative viewpoints is typically good, in practice the “controversial speaker” will always be the conservative one, and leftist speakers like communist Angela Davis (who spoke at Marquette) will be considered uncontroversial, and allowed to speak with no opposing viewpoint presented.

Further, this imposes on conservative groups the burden of booking at least two speakers for any event they wish to hold. To burden speech is to restrict speech.

How Does One View Education

Finally, students are given a choice between two educational philosophies:

If you had to choose one of the options below, which do you think it is more important for colleges to do?

Option 1: create a positive learning environment for all students by prohibiting certain speech or expression of viewpoints that are offensive or biased against certain groups of people

Option 2: create an open learning environment where students are exposed to all types of speech and viewpoints, even if it means allowing speech that is offensive or biased against certain groups of people?

Of course, one cannot discuss any serious issue without some viewpoints being considered “offensive” or “biased” by some group. Feminists are offended when anybody expresses opposition to abortion. A lot of blacks get “offended” by a discussion of out of wedlock births and dependency in the black community. Defending police against charges that they constantly gun down innocent blacks is offensive to the politically correct.

This notion gives politically correct groups a veto power over any ideas they dislike.

Conclusion

Of course, not every student who gives an intolerant answer will necessarily act intolerantly. Many are probably giving what they think is the “socially acceptable” answer. They wouldn’t shout down a speaker, and in fact wouldn’t care one way or the other that the speaker was on campus. But what does it mean that shutting up speech on a university campus is the socially acceptable response?

While the intolerance of many college faculties is well known, probably more attention needs to be paid to indoctrination in middle and high schools. How much is identity politics turning students into little social justice warriors who believe that “marginalized groups” have a right to be protected from any speech that offends their tender sensibilities.

Doctoral Thesis About . . . Well, You Figure it Out!

From New Real Peer Review, the abstract of a Ph.D. thesis:

Self-Storying to (De)Construct Compulsory Heterosexuality: A Feminist Poststructural Autoethnography of a Self-Wedding Ritual

Written from the perspective of a white-settler, obese, bisexual, middle class cisfemale graduate student in Canada, the wedding ritual and bride are explored as sites of ideal female/feminine formation of the subject. Compulsory heterosexuality is implicated. “Single” and “married,” like “woman,” are constituted in discourses. The author explores ways that she, as an unmarried and therefore “single” woman has been positioned as personally deficient as single-ness is produced as an illegitimate and undesirable position for female/feminine subjects to take up. This research uses an autoethnographic methodological frame augmented by feminist poststructural epistemology to open up, trouble, disrupt and interrupt the figuring of the bride in hopes of (re)signification and new practices of the female and feminine self for the writer. The writer privileges story in the forms of narrative, poetry, theatrical vignette and photography; theoretical literature provides context and a methodological framework and adds a supplemental layer of analysis. The story is told from various temporal positions including past, present, and future, blurring the idea of chronological age. Practices of self and the limits of agency and resistance to dominant discourses are explored. Many accounts of a feminist self-wedding are presented to illustrate the opportunities for resistance, disruption and deconstruction of sociohistoric subjects and discourse, in this case, the heterosexual bride.

Social Justice Warriors at Evergreen State College

Credible reports protestors w/ bats roaming campus for 2 days. People hit, won't report. @heathereheying students & I warned @GovInslee 5/25 pic.twitter.com/soH4djQigc

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) June 5, 2017

Campus Version of Miranda

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Indoctrination on Wage Gap: Feminist Instructor Tells Student to Use Only Feminist Sources

The full story about this can be found on the Toronto Sun website. This might seem to be merely one example of intolerant feminist indoctrination. Unfortunately, it’s utterly typical.

Former Stanford Provost: Intolerance a Threat to Higher Education

Former Stanford Provost John Etchemendy, and a speech to the Stanford Board of Trustees, talked about threats to higher education. After briefly discussing threats from outside the academy, he turned to the “The threat from within.”

But I’m actually more worried about the threat from within. Over the years, I have watched a growing intolerance at universities in this country – not intolerance along racial or ethnic or gender lines – there, we have made laudable progress. Rather, a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for. It manifests itself in many ways: in the intellectual monocultures that have taken over certain disciplines; in the demands to disinvite speakers and outlaw groups whose views we find offensive; in constant calls for the university itself to take political stands. We decry certain news outlets as echo chambers, while we fail to notice the echo chamber we’ve built around ourselves.

This results in a kind of intellectual blindness that will, in the long run, be more damaging to universities than cuts in federal funding or ill-conceived constraints on immigration. It will be more damaging because we won’t even see it: We will write off those with opposing views as evil or ignorant or stupid, rather than as interlocutors worthy of consideration. We succumb to the all-purpose ad hominem because it is easier and more comforting than rational argument. But when we do, we abandon what is great about this institution we serve.

It will not be easy to resist this current. As an institution, we are continually pressed by faculty and students to take political stands, and any failure to do so is perceived as a lack of courage. But at universities today, the easiest thing to do is to succumb to that pressure. What requires real courage is to resist it. Yet when those making the demands can only imagine ignorance and stupidity on the other side, any resistance will be similarly impugned.

The university is not a megaphone to amplify this or that political view, and when it does it violates a core mission. Universities must remain open forums for contentious debate, and they cannot do so while officially espousing one side of that debate.

But we must do more. We need to encourage real diversity of thought in the professoriate, and that will be even harder to achieve. It is hard for anyone to acknowledge high-quality work when that work is at odds, perhaps opposed, to one’s own deeply held beliefs. But we all need worthy opponents to challenge us in our search for truth. It is absolutely essential to the quality of our enterprise.

I fear that the next few years will be difficult to navigate. We need to resist the external threats to our mission, but in this, we have many friends outside the university willing and able to help. But to stem or dial back our academic parochialism, we are pretty much on our own. The first step is to remind our students and colleagues that those who hold views contrary to one’s own are rarely evil or stupid, and may know or understand things that we do not. It is only when we start with this assumption that rational discourse can begin, and that the winds of freedom can blow.

Nice words, and when Etchemendy was actually serving as Provost, he made some comments that, in context, have to be interpreted as chastising the politically correct leftists on campus.

Unfortunately, your average university President / Provost / Chancellor is craven in the face of demands from intolerant leftists, or Federal bureaucrats demanding that speech be silenced as “harassment” or that males accused of sexual assault be convicted by kangaroo court proceedings. We are not aware that Etchemendy was any better than other university bureaucrats on these issues.

Not a Good Place for That

The Politically Correct Version of Tolerance

Claiming “Free Speech” as an Excuse to Censor

From the Wall Street Journal:

Higher education’s suppression of speech is well-publicized. But in an odder and less well-known twist, campuses are increasingly co-opting the language of free speech and using it to justify censorship. One example: The designated “free speech zones” that exist on roughly 1 in 10 U.S. college campuses, according to a report released last month by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The very existence of a “free speech zone” suggests that students’ expression is limited elsewhere on campus. And even in the “free” zones, administrators often restrict who can speak, when and for how long.

Dozens of universities have also used the language of free speech to justify trendy “Language Matters” or “Inclusive Language” campaigns. The point of these programs is to condition students to wince away from words and phrases deemed offensive, instead using politically correct substitutes.

Among the campaigns’ common targets are “hey guys” and “man up” (too gendered), as well as “crazy” (inconsiderate of people with mental illness) and “lame” (disrespectful to the disabled). Ironically—and insidiously—these “inclusive” language campaigns seek to exclude opposing political or cultural viewpoints. It’s an attempt to ban not only words but also thoughts.

The University of Northern Colorado’s “Language Matters” campaign last year warned students not to say “All lives matter.” The dean of students, Katrina Rodriguez, defended the program in an email last June to Heat Street, where I am political editor, saying it was “about being mindful about how words can affect others and the conversations provide an opportunity for individuals to understand why particular language may be hurtful to someone else in our community of learners.”

She continued: “We believe that fostering dialogue on a college campus so that multiple perspectives are explored and debated is the essence of free speech.”

The inclusive-language campaigns at the University of Wisconsin’s campuses in Milwaukee and River Falls have also discouraged students from saying “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien,” because either term “fixates on legal status instead of people as individuals” and “asserts that only certain groups belong in the U.S.”

UW-Milwaukee even included “politically correct” on its list of disfavored terms, arguing that it “has become a way to deflect, say that people are being too ‘sensitive’ and police language.”

Which brings us to the warped idea that by suppressing “dominant” voices, universities actually further free speech. Katherine Kvellestad, a University of Pennsylvania student, recently used a version of this argument to defend students who wanted a portrait of Shakespeare removed from the English department. The students also pushed for an English curriculum with fewer white, male writers.

“I think, in a way, the whole PC culture idea can almost promote free speech because there are a lot of people who have been marginalized in the past,” Ms. Kvellestad told Heat Street during a phone interview in December. “So it’s kind of free speech in a different sense, that we’re giving credence and voices to voices that we were not hearing.”

One of Ms. Kvellestad’s fellow Penn students made a related argument in a Jan. 11 op-ed in the student newspaper, claiming that his white professors’ refusal to censor class content had hindered his ability to learn. Sophomore James Fisher described how one Penn professor showed depictions of slavery and let students make comments Mr. Fisher considered “ignorant.” He told the professor that “what he was doing was traumatic to me . . . [so] I would not allow him to continue.”

The professor, Mr. Fisher wrote, “then used the argument that, in order to make the class a ‘safe space,’ he had to protect the voice of all students in class. . . . So, because my professor wanted to protect the voices of the white students who benefit from black oppression, the oppression unfortunately continued.”

In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell describes how the misuse of language can lead to messy thinking—and how, even worse, intentionally imprecise language can soften or obscure abhorrent ideas. He anticipated a world in which administrators, professors and students demand the right to act as censors even as they claim to venerate the right to unrestricted expression.

The writer, Jillian Kay Melchior, is an Political Editor at Heat Street, which does an excellent job of reporting on censorship on college campuses.

Social Science and “Microaggressions”

High on the list of concepts used to censor speech is the “microaggression.” As is the case of so many other politically correct initiatives on college campuses, the jihad against this supposed plague is based on weak (and sometimes nonexistent) empirical evidence.

Now, a scholarly article reviews the evidence and takes on the concept. The conclusions:

The microaggression concept has recently galvanized public discussion and spread to numerous college campuses and businesses. I argue that the microaggression research program (MRP) rests on five core premises, namely, that microaggressions (1) are operationalized with sufficient clarity and consensus to afford rigorous scientific investigation; (2) are interpreted negatively by most or all minority group members; (3) reflect implicitly prejudicial and implicitly aggressive motives; (4) can be validly assessed using only respondents’ subjective reports; and (5) exert an adverse impact on recipients’ mental health. A review of the literature reveals negligible support for all five suppositions. More broadly, the MRP has been marked by an absence of connectivity to key domains of psychological science, including psychometrics, social cognition, cognitive-behavioral therapy, behavior genetics, and personality, health, and industrial-organizational psychology. Although the MRP has been fruitful in drawing the field’s attention to subtle forms of prejudice, it is far too underdeveloped on the conceptual and methodological fronts to warrant real-world application. I conclude with 18 suggestions for advancing the scientific status of the MRP, recommend abandonment of the term “microaggression,” and call for a moratorium on microaggression training programs and publicly distributed microaggression lists pending research to address the MRP’s scientific limitations.

Of course, it is possible to say dumb and thoughtless things that demean (say) blacks or women or gays. But it’s also possible to do the same for Christians, or men, or whites, or Trump voters. The politically correct crowd that wants to protect politically correct groups are usually the same people who demean (macro aggress) against those latter groups.

Further, the concept is used to silence perfectly legitimate statements that people have a right to make which some politically correct victim group is assumed to resent. At the University of California, an official list of microaggressions outlaws saying “There is only one race, the human race.” A sappy statement (although the sort one would expect from an old-fashioned liberal), but aggressive?

Likewise “America is a melting pot,” and “America is the land of opportunity.”

Aggrieved minorities, if they object to these statements, are free to argue with them. But if they demand they should be punished, they should be told to pound sand.

But on a university campus, with a swarm of bureaucrats committed to petting and pandering to the most aggrieved of politically favored groups, that’s not going to happen.

Marquette Near Bottom in College Ranking on Free Expression

Heterodox Academy describes itself as follows:

We are a politically diverse group of social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and other scholars who want to improve our academic disciplines and universities.

We share a concern about a growing problem: the loss or lack of “viewpoint diversity.” When nearly everyone in a field shares the same political orientation, certain ideas become orthodoxy, dissent is discouraged, and errors can go unchallenged.

To reverse this process, we have come together to advocate for a more intellectually diverse and heterodox academy.

“Politically diverse” here doubtless means conservatives, libertarians, and old-style liberals and leftists. Remember, it was once liberals and leftists who espoused free expression and a “free market of ideas.” Those days are over, but some of the old-style liberals and leftists are still around, and a few younger liberals and leftists continue to favor free speech.

The organization rates schools on “viewpoint diversity.” In practice this means that conservative and libertarian ideas can be expressed on campus. The expression of politically correct leftist ideas is never in doubt, at least not among the schools rated (which are the top 150 colleges and universities as ranked by U.S. News and World Report).

Guess where Marquette ends up? That’s right. Near the very bottom. You can search for Marquette here.

Rankings like this are hardly perfect. The people who put it together may not know that Marquette students are, on net, pretty moderate. But on the other hand, they may not know that Marquette has a Bias Incident Reporting System which means that any even mildly politically incorrect statement by a student may result in a meeting with an administrator. Even if the student is not formally punished, the process is the punishment.

Likewise, the people who put together the list apparently don’t know that feminist students on campus were free to vandalize an anti-abortion display, with no apparent disciplinary consequences.

Thus Marquette fully deserves its low ranking. This supposed “Catholic university” is not merely a secular university, it’s a rather intolerant secular university.

McAdams’ Law of Political Correctness

Brown University: Politically Correct Hellhole

But not, unfortunately, that much different from academia generally.

Secular Activists Trying to Suppress Christian Schools

From The Federalist, an essay titled “The Other Campus Free-Speech Problem No One’s Talking About.” Some key points:

During the past few years, responding to ever-more draconian codes on secular campuses aimed at constraining free speech, dissenting voices have been raised here and there across the political spectrum, defending free expression and free association for all. This addition of conscientious objection outside conservative and religious ranks is a welcome development. It also brings us to one other large threat to free speech in education these days—one that’s still in the closet.

Secularist progressivism claims to champion diversity, but its activists today do not tolerate genuine diversity, including and es­pecially in the realm of ideas, as revealed by today’s legal and other attacks on Christian colleges, Christian associations and clubs, Christian schools, Christian students, and Christian homeschooling.

These are bellwether ideological campaigns that have yet to gar­ner the attention they deserve outside religious circles. Their logical conclusion is to interfere with and shut down Christian education itself—from elementary school on up to religious colleges and uni­versities.

It’s Not An Education If It Includes Christian Ideas?

Consider a few particulars. The Christian college club Intervarsity has had its credentials questioned on secular campuses around the country. So have other student groups including Chi Alpha and the Christian Legal Society, the focus of Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), which found that Hastings College had not violated the First Amendment in forcing the CLS to accept members who violated its Christian moral code. During the past ten years, two high-profile Christian colleges—The King’s College in New York, and Gordon College in Massachusetts—have been subjected to accreditation battles. Meanwhile, home-schooling remains an object of attack by leftish pundits, New Atheists, the National Education Association, and other progressive standard-bearers.

Still other authorities want to discredit religious higher education altogether. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2014, a professor at the Uni­versity of Pennsylvania called accreditation for any Christian col­lege a “scandal,” adding that “[p]roviding accreditation to colleges like [evangelical Protestant] Wheaton [College] makes a mockery of whatever academic and intellectual standards the process of ac­creditation is supposed to uphold.” Trinity Western University in Canada has likewise been embroiled for years in a battle to keep its accreditation—because its community members pledge not to have sex outside traditional marriage.

Let’s ask the obvious question: exactly whose schools are being at­tacked as unworthy, substandard, and undeserving of recognition? Christians’ schools, that’s whose—not progressive flagships like Bennington, Middlebury, or Sarah Lawrence. If religious tradi­tionalists were fanning out to campaign against schools dominated by other canons, cacophony would resound from Cupertino to Ban­gor. But because the prejudice propelling these attacks has Christi­anity in its sights, no one outside religious circles objects.

These efforts to impede religious education are also part of an ongoing paradox. It is not Christian colleges that have made a habit of ha­rassing and intimidating speakers who represent different points of view; it is nonreligious campuses. When socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders gave a speech in September 2015 at Liberty University, media accounts, including in The New York Times, took note of how courteous and polite the student body was, and how they unfailingly applauded a speaker who acknowledged at the outset profoundly disagreeing with their views.

Contrast their civility with the hostile reception certain other thinkers are guaranteed these days, just by setting foot on secular campuses. Followers of the Cross, especially, are often greeted by an especially bilious class of protester. Thus, for example, University of Tulsa students protested a former self-professed lesbian turned Christian—on the grounds that calling something “sinful” is “thinly veiled hate speech,” as one leader of the protest explained.

Simi­larly, when Jennifer Roback Morse—a former Ivy League professor and head of the Ruth Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to traditional Christian teaching—appeared at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 20 students interrupted her talk with chants, waving signs inscribed with various obscenities. When Christian speaker Ravi Zacharias spoke at the University of Pennsylvania, a local athe­ist group handed out bingo-style cards mocking the speaker to every student who entered the hall. The list could go on.

Read the entire essay.

At Marquette

One might believe that Marquette, a “Catholic” university, would at least be tolerant of Christian teachings about sexuality.

But to believe that, one would have to believe Marquette is really a Catholic university.

At Marquette, the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship was threatened with being kicked off campus for canning an officer who was engaged in a homosexual affair. He made it clear he did not accept Christian teaching about homosexuality, and would continue the affair. Under pressure from alumni, Marquette relented.

This was in 2011. Would Marquette back off today? We doubt it, given that the institution seems to seek out every way possible to pander to the campus gay lobby.

All of this, of course, represents the glaring hypocrisy of the Orwellian phrase “diversity and inclusion.” “Diversity” is interpreted to exclude a large body of ideas, including the ideas that Christians have about sexuality and the ideas that all civilizations have had about marriage until very recently.  “Inclusion” means intolerant and exclusionary conduct toward Christians and others who hold to these ideas.

Yet More Examples of Academic Intolerance / Harvard this Time

Perhaps the most significant statement of the student is that much of the politically correct intimidation comes from students. While the media have paid a lot of attention to intolerance in colleges, a lot of students come to college thoroughly indoctrinated as social justice warriors, keen to shut up ideas they dislike.

Such students don’t have to be a majority of entering freshmen. A minority that is aggressive and intolerant can poison the entire atmosphere.

Campus Free Speech Discussed at CPAC

An interesting panel, hosted by Milwukee’s Charlie Sykes, about free speech on campus, at the meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

And yes, we make a very brief cameo appearance.

George Will: What an Honest Commencement Address Would Sound Like