The sins of the past

Posted on June 28, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s assault on higher education threatens to repeat them — or worse

Jefferson looks over his university; source: PresidentsUSA.net

Founded by slaveholder Thomas Jefferson in a state where 20 percent of the population is now Black, the University of Virginia might reasonably be a place that owes the state’s minority population something. And yet, only a fraction of the undergraduate UVA student body is Black (variously reported as 6.2 percent or 8 percent). And, after other minorities are counted, nearly 57 percent of undergrads are white, College Factual reports.

Diversity has been even more of a nonstarter among the faculty at Mr. Jefferson’s university. More than 82 percent of the faculty are white, according to College Factual, with the share of Black faculty variously reported as 5 percent or 9.8 percent.

So, it’s not terribly surprising that James E. Ryan, a UVA Law graduate, saw a need to boost diversity, equity and inclusion efforts when he took over as the school’s president in 2018. In his inauguration speech, Ryan committed to redressing UVA’s longstanding racial imbalances.

As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, he said the campus community should “acknowledge the sins of our past,” including slavery, eugenics, and the exclusion of Blacks and women well into the 20th century. The university needed to recognize both Jefferson’s “brilliance and his brutality,” he argued.

Ryan also praised that fact that most UVA students at the time were women (a demographic reality at many campuses) and spoke highly about hundreds being among the first in their families to attend college. He warmed to the idea that the freshman class then was the most diverse in the university’s history.

As might be expected, this all didn’t sit well with some alums. A couple of the good ol’ boys in 2020 co-founded the Jefferson Council, an advocacy group that the Chronicle described as “committed to reducing the influence of progressive students, faculty, and staff, and restoring a more traditional UVa.”

The alums involved saw the university’s investment in DEI as wasteful, the news outlet reported, and they argued that it forced leftist dogma down the throats of Wahoos, as UVA students are known. They lambasted efforts to rename buildings, diversify admissions, and spend millions on DEI-focused administrators. Through blogs and social-media posts, they documented what they saw as the university’s mistaken priorities, and they put New Jersey-born Ryan into their gunsights.

With Donald J. Trump leaning on the school, the good ol’ boys have now won. Ryan quit after Trump’s Justice Department bridled at his refusal to dismantle the DEI programs and demanded his scalp, according to The New York Times. He stepped down rather than having the school risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds, as other universities have.

“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in an email to the school community, The Wall Street Journal reported. “To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”

Of course, this is just the latest university administrator’s head Trump or his supporters can claim. Their trophies now include Katrina Armstrong, driven out at Columbia in March after Minouche Shafik was forced out last August; and M. Elizabeth Magill, ousted at the University of Pennsylvania in December 2023, just a short time before Claudine Gay was driven out at Harvard. A fifth university chief, Martha E. Pollack surprised the Cornell University community in May by stepping down amid a threatened $1 billion in funding cuts.

Trump has put some $9 billion at risk at Harvard, with another $3 billion or so at risk at those above and other prominent schools. Those under the gun also include Princeton, Brown and Northwestern, as well as Johns Hopkins, a research gem where $800 million in cuts have led to hefty layoffs and where up to $4.2 billion in federal support is in danger.

The attacks are personal to a degree – Trump has a particular animus to Columbia, which once refused a $400 million land purchase he tried to foist on it (it’s not accidental that he cut $400 million from the university, or that the money hasn’t been restored even as Columbia largely capitulated to his demands). Also, recall that Trump himself was a middling transfer student into the University of Pennsylvania, where a professor of his said “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!’”

But the assaults also reflect the longstanding hostility rightists have had against the academic world, dating back at least to the days of Richard Nixon. Recall that Nixon famously said, “the professors are the enemy,” a phrase JD Vance reprised in late 2020 at a National Conservatism Conference.

Recall racist Gov. George Wallace’s assault on “pointy headed intellectuals,” which was mirrored decades later by Trump’s attack on “those stupid people they call themselves the elite.” The attack played well with Wallace’s undereducated followers back then and still resounds with Trump’s underschooled loyalists now.

It’s all something of a replay, though those earlier assaults had none of the teeth Trump’s latest ones have. The broad-gauge attack the president and his acolytes have mounted has been enormously costly. Consider what The Atlantic reported at the end of March:

“But college life as we know it may soon come to an end,” the magazine reported. “Since January, the Trump administration has frozen, canceled, or substantially cut billions of dollars in federal grants to universities. Johns Hopkins has had to fire more than 2,000 workers. The University of California has frozen staff hiring across all 10 of its campuses. Many other schools have cut back on graduate admissions. And international students and faculty have been placed at such high risk of detainment, deportation, or imprisonment that Brown University advised its own to avoid any travel outside the country for the foreseeable future.

“Higher education is in chaos, and professors and administrators are sounding the alarm. The targeting of Columbia University, where $400 million in federal grants and contracts have been canceled in retribution for its failure to address campus anti-Semitism and unruly protests against the war in Gaza, has inspired particular distress. Such blunt coercion, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, amounts to ‘the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare.’ In The New York Times, the Yale English professor Meghan O’Rourke called it and related policies ‘an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist.’”

The administration’s twin rallying cries are fighting anti-Semitism and killing DEI. The former, of course, is just a fig leaf, a handy excuse for bludgeoning administrators because some students angry about the Gaza War misbehaved in the school year before last. Those protests were usually handled, if not always well, and mostly didn’t recur in the year just ended. Still, they are bogeymen the rightists can invoke as example of dissent they just can’t tolerate.

The DEI assault is more substantial. White Trumpians angry about minorities becoming more prominent feel disadvantaged, as they have ever since affirmative action began in 1965. Back then, President Johnson issued an executive order requiring federal contractors to take affirmative action to ensure equality of employment opportunity without regard to race, religion and national origin. Ever since then, any steps to give disadvantaged groups a leg up – and to adapt to our increasing national diversity – have been castigated by angry whites as unfair.

So, it’s no surprise that at UVA some white alums have resented the modest advances Blacks and other minorities have made and DEI efforts to help them. To them, 57 percent is apparently not a high enough share of whites among students; nor is 82 percent of faculty.

A third rallying cry among the Trumpians is intellectual diversity in the college communities. What that means is that professors are just too damn liberal — another longstanding canard — and they should be driven out in favor of rightists. That is taking root in some places. Just look at what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has done with the New College of Florida in Sarasota, where ideologues have marched in, particularly as scholars in residence. The right sees this is as a model for remaking universities nationwide.

Judging from my days as a student and more recently as a professor, there are indeed plenty of liberals on faculties. That’s likely because liberals generally tend to be more adaptive to social change than conservatives, almost by definition, and being attuned to such change is natural in the academy. Still, there also are plenty of conservatives, and not only in economics departments and business schools. And is the liberal-conservative split even an issue in the sciences, tech and ag areas, for instance?

There are lots of scary elements about the changes Trump and his minions are enacting. One is a very conservative idea — that the drive amounts to social engineering by an elite in Washington — a Trumpian elite — not change coming from the grassroots. It is one thing if spontaneous change is demanded by the public around the country, in various states where legislatures fund education; another if it is directed by federal authorities.

Another troublesome factor is that many of the changes now being forced on private institutions are moving into the public ones. UVA is an example, but not the only one. We’ll likely see more such state universities in the dock going forward. More university presidents are likely to be driven out or quit under the pressure.

And where will this all leave students? Well, federal funding cuts will leave them with fewer intellectual opportunities as programs disappear. What’s more, in some states dominated by Trumpian rightists such cuts are being amplified by stinginess in state funding. As a result, many students are paying more for less.

In Nebraska, where I taught for 14 years, the state government’s contribution to the university system will rise roughly 0.6 percent in the coming year, far below the 3.5 percent increase that the Board of Regents had sought to account for inflation. The Trumpian Gov. Jim Pillen, who wanted the state to have “the courage to say no, and to focus on needs, not wants,” had originally pushed for a 2 percent cut, The New York Times reported.

“We will need to continue to reduce spending and make increasingly difficult choices to ensure fiscal discipline,” Jeffrey P. Gold, the University of Nebraska’s president, said before the regents voted to impose cuts and increase tuition. Students at the flagship campus in Lincoln will pay about 5 percent more.

It took many decades for higher education at both private schools and top-tier public ones, such as UVA, to develop into an international bragging point for the United States, a magnet for the world. That system, moreover, has long been the engine of American economic growth. Tragically, all that is under siege and it’s not clear how or when the damage we’ll see in the coming three and a half years can be undone.

Failing grades

Posted on April 23, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump is setting us back with his war on education

Over the last 14 years, folks in China have welcomed me to teach fairly often. Whether they were graduate students at Tsinghua University or undergraduates at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, the students I was privileged to teach were smart and hardworking. Some even asked for extra homework, a request I never got at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, even from some outstanding students there.

That’s why a new report from Bloomberg News is alarming. Headlined “Why US Men Think College Isn’t Worth It Anymore,” the piece bemoans the erosion of working-class men’s status and prospects in the U.S. In that decline, a turn away from schooling is key.

“As U.S. men forgo higher education, the demographic group as a whole has lost ground in other areas too,” the piece reports. “Working-class men today are less likely to be employed than they were four decades ago, their inflation-adjusted wages have barely budged in more than 50 years, they’re less prone to get married or have children, and an increasing number report having no close friends. Men are also four times more likely than women to die by suicide. Data show that men age 18-30 spent an average of 6.6 nonsleeping hours alone each day in 2023, 18 percent more than they did in 2019 and over an hour more than women did, according to a report by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.”

The suggestion, of course, is that a college education can boost earning power, aid in social mobility and status, and lead to better health and wellbeing. All those things are backed up by data. A wealth of it shows that more schooling drives such benefits.

Perhaps not surprisingly, higher education also increases one’s ability to think critically and, in theory, spawns smarter political decision-making. The disproportionate support Donald J. Trump has enjoyed among the less schooled, the so-called diploma divide, suggests as much. Dumb voters vote dumbly, it seems.

But perpetuating ignorance may be why so many on the right decry higher education and why President Trump is leading a war on it. He just launched his newest volley in an executive order attempting to reshape the college accrediting process.

The order asks the secretary of education to “hold higher education accreditors accountable including through denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination for poor performance or violations to the federal Civil Rights Act,” a White House official told CNN.

As the news outlet reported, the order also “directs the attorney general and the secretary of education to investigate and terminate unlawful discrimination by American higher education institutions, including law schools and medical schools,” the official said.

Trump’s order would shake up the arcane but pivotal world of college accreditation, a move Trump has called his “secret weapon” in his bid to remake higher education, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The order aims to use the accrediting system to combat what Trump views as discriminatory practices and “ideological overreach” on college campuses, the Journal reported. It would put a greater focus on intellectual diversity among faculty — presumably putting more conservative ideologues in the teacher’s lounge — and on student success. It also would make it easier for schools to switch accreditors and for new accreditors to gain federal approval.

As the newspaper reported, accreditors set standards that must be met to access federal financial aid. The federal government gave $120.8 billion in loans, grants and work-study funds to more than 9.9 million students in the year ended last September. To earn an accreditor’s seal of approval, higher-education institutions must prove they meet standards covering everything from their mission and admissions policies to the quality of their faculty and programming.

“Revoking accreditation is an existential threat for these universities,” Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, told the paper. “If you lose Pell grants and lose student loans, for most colleges that means you’re done.”

The effort mirrors Trump’s slash and burn approach to education. As the Journal reported, proposed cuts to National Institutes of Health funding, currently being fought over in court, have driven universities to freeze hiring, rescind graduate student offers and pause research. The White House has targeted several Ivy League schools, including Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Brown, with federal grant cuts or freezes, citing antisemitism concerns.

Trump, of course, has particularly attacked efforts to promote diversity on campus, echoing the themes of far-right extremists. Such rightists amplify a national undercurrent of dissatisfaction with schooling.

“Similar messaging has come from activists such as Charlie Kirk, who traveled to more than two dozen colleges before the 2024 election on what he called the ‘You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,’ to try to get more members of Generation Z to cast a vote for Trump,” the Bloomberg piece notes. “Almost one-third of U.S. adults said they have little or no confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in June 2024—before Trump’s latest tirades against academia. In 2020, 41 percent of young men aged 18-29 voted for Trump; that number jumped to 56 percent in the 2024 election.”

Should this worry us all? Unquestionably.

Trump’s demagogic promises of restoring a 1950s culture in which a high school degree and a well-paying assembly line job guarantee the American Dream seem as fictional as his vows to cut grocery prices and scale back inflation. The sepia-toned nostalgia he trades in is nonsense in the 21st century.

That brings me back to China. In the current great power competition, the country has some key edges over the United States. Start with the population disparity: 1.4 billion compared with 342 million. Then move onto governmental systems, where one prizes stability and competence and the other lately has been erratic and unpredictable. But most of all, consider education, where China graduates nearly 4 million college students year, nearly double the U.S. tally.

For educators, of course, the last category is the most unsettling, especially since so many Chinese are drawn to science and technology. As MSNBC reported, China graduates almost twice as many STEM-oriented Ph.D.s than the U.S., an estimated 77,000 versus 40,000, according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Exclude international students from that count and China outpaces the U.S. 3 to 1.

The Chinese students I taught were representative. They worked like demons and were respectful of knowledge and education, realizing that school was their ticket upward in society. And, simply put, if these edges continue, the Chinese are going to beat the pants off us.

Meanwhile, our president would take us on sorry steps backwards. Yes, globalization driven by trade liberalization from the Reagan years onward has hollowed out American manufacturing, driving lower-skilled work overseas. And, yes, this has eroded the American Dream for many, at least for those who thought assembly-line jobs were the smartest route upward.

But is the answer really a return to such low-skilled work, the sort that Chinese meme-makers are satirizing? Is the answer a remaking of education to suit the political whims of some fantasists who momentarily are in power? Is the answer not, instead, a ramping up in university education, a stepping up that would better equip the U.S. to compete globally?

The multiple tragedies now unfolding in Washington and spreading, cancer-like, across the nation’s campuses are quite a partisan matter — one in which the Democrats have ceded far too much ground. Ever since at least the Clinton Administration, Democrats have lost the working class, particularly men.

Just recall how President Bill Clinton championed higher education as a sensible response to economic change. Consider his message in his 1998 State of the Union address:

“I have something to say to every family listening to us tonight: Your children can go on to college,” Clinton said. “If you know a child from a poor family, tell her not to give up-she can go on to college. If you know a young couple struggling with bills, worried they won’t be able to send their children to college, tell them not to give up-their children can go on to college. If you know somebody who’s caught in a dead-end job and afraid he can’t afford the classes necessary to get better jobs for the rest of his life, tell him not to give up-he can go on to college. Because of the things that have been done, we can make college as universal in the 21st century as high school is today. And, my friends, that will change the face and future of America.”

Of course, since then, college has grown out of reach for many — or just something they feel they can’t or don’t want to achieve. Recall that less than less than 38 percent of American adults have bachelor’s degree to higher.

And that proportion may shrink, as college costs soar and state support shrinks in many places. As the Bloomberg piece notes, sticker prices in the Ivy League are near $100,000 a year, while public in-state schools cost about $25,000 annually, according to the College Board. “These costs also disadvantage lower-income women and girls, but it’s boys and men who are more often taught (consciously or not) the value of starting to collect a paycheck as soon as possible,” the report says.

Indeed, given such costs, it may be reasonable for many to forgo pricey schooling to instead seek a trade-school salary. And many may be more suited to that than to computer science or, heaven help us, the humanities.

But where does that short-sighted approach leave American society overall? Will there really be enough jobs for the underschooled? Is it really smart for our society generally to underfund higher education?

And, longer term, what road does that approach put our politics on? Does it blaze a path to enduring demagoguery, a country in which people unequipped to think critically can repeatedly be suckered by slick salesmen who make unfulfillable promises?

Some highly competitive and smart folks China would love just such a result. For the rest of us, however, the answers will earn us a dismally failing grade.

Higher Ed aims lower these days

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Joe Weber

Have the pols lost sight of the value of education in Nebraska?

Back in 2009, when I joined the journalism faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, all arrows were pointing upward for the university. Enrollments were growing, buildings were rising, and graduates were going on to healthy careers in newswriting and other things. The state legislature and good citizens of the state realized that education was important, and they funded it, accordingly.

Even the Huskers won far more than they lost. The state’s football team racked up a 10-4 season that year, leading the Big 12 Northern Division and ranking 14^th best in the national AP poll.

My, how things have changed.

Overall enrollment at the flagship Lincoln campus has slipped from 24,100 back then to 23,600 now. Journalism is on the run, with graduates finding fewer opportunities in newspapers and other news operations. And the legislature and governor, engaged in ideological warfare with educators, seem to have forgotten that education both matters and costs.

As for the Huskers, the team seems emblematic of the university’s decline. After several pricey coach and athletic director departures, Big Red eked out a 5-7 season last year, a middling result in the Big 10 West (albeit better than the 4-8 record of the prior year). The university appears to be scrambling to avoid being kicked out of the Big 10, a lingering fear because UNL is the only conference member that doesn’t belong to the 71-member Assoc. of American Universities (the university was tossed by the AAU in 2011 over research funding issues and is trying to rejoin it).

Ameer Abdullah rushes in 2012; Source: Aaron Babcock

But now the ideologues who’ve seized most of the levers of power in the state are busy chipping away at the university’s hopes and ambitions. As a former student of mine, Zach Wendling, reported for the Nebraska Examiner, the regents just approved a $1.1 billion state-aided budget for fiscal year 2025 that will require campus leaders to scrape away another $11.8 million from their budgets in the next year, after they cut about $30 million in the past two fiscal years

While that one-year 1% cut seems like a pittance, it will bite. The earlier cuts did so, with some of the most visible trims being reduced library hours and fewer graduate teaching assistants and student workers. Plans were made last fall for deep cuts in the diversity, equity and inclusion office, undergrad ed and student success programming and non-specific operational efficiency improvements.

I’m reminded of a dark joke an economist colleague at BusinessWeek once told me. “If you cut the feed of a fine thoroughbred racehorse just a little bit each month or so to save money, what do you wind up with?” The answer: “a dead horse.”

In the case of UNL, it more likely will be a hobbled one, but one that limps along, nonetheless. The new round of cuts will involve an elaborate consultation approach with faculty and administrators, so it’s not clear now where they will come from. “As we begin this work, we will utilize shared governance processes to move forward in an engaged and thoughtful way,” Chancellor Rodney D. Bennett said in a message from his office.

But cutting majors and departments with little enrollment has been vaunted as one possible approach, along with eliminating staff jobs. That has been a popular tack at several schools, including the University of North Carolina Greensboro. The University of New Hampshire, as it trims 75 staff jobs, is shutting it art museum. And closer to home, at the University of Nebraska’s Kearney campus, bachelor’s degrees in areas such as geography, recreation management and theater are slated for elimination.

At UNL, just how much university-wide consultation versus administrative fiat will be involved will be difficult to say. When the chancellor last fall proposed a 46% cut from the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and Office of Academic Success and Intercultural Services – some $800,000 – he triggered passionate objections from a good number of faculty and others. But he was pleasing the regents who had hired him last year.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

The university’s DEI efforts – like similar programs around the country – have been hot-button matters for many on the right. Indeed, the chair of the regents opposed the budget in the June 20 5-2 vote, arguing that no diversity, equity or inclusion initiatives or programs should be funded.

“We need to recruit and have folks — diversity — here, but we shouldn’t be using tax dollars to fund and promote certain races or genders above others,” said regent chair Rob Schafer. “It ought to be a fair and level and equal playing field for all.”

Asked whether he’s seen the promotion of one race or gender at NU campuses – i.e., evidence of a problem — Schafer offered a, well, incomprehensible reply. “Just the fact that we have funding and we’re promoting different things, I think there’s some things that we could just do better,” journalist Wendling reported.

While enrollments continue to be under pressure, in part because the numbers of teens in the state have been stuck at between 129,000 and 142,000 for the last dozen years, the regents seem to be operating at cross-purposes by making the school more costly. They voted to hike tuition between 3.2% and 3.4% across the system’s several campuses, on top of a 3.5% across-the-board hike they okayed last year.

Despite that, Chancellor Bennett pointed to enrollment growth this past spring. Going forward, though, it’s not clear how making something more costly will draw more customers. Perhaps the regents and administrators haven’t consulted the folks in the economics department.

The tuition hikes drew the other no vote on the budget from Kathy Wilmot, who won her elected post as regent in 2022 in part by attacking “liberal leaning” courses at the university and venting about “indoctrination” at UNL. Now, as she bemoans the planned tuition hikes, she doesn’t seem to be urging more funding from the legislature to make those hikes unnecessary.

“To me, the families have already chipped in because they’re paying the taxes and things that we turn to the Legislature and everybody for,” Wilmot said, according to Wendling. “Then, when we ask those students from those families to chip in again, I feel that’s somewhat of a double hit.”

Back in the late 1960s, when the university was forming its four-campus system and the legislature generously funded the effort, a rising Republican star with a lot of influence in the state named Clayton Yeutter argued passionately for education. The schooling he got at Nebraska – including an undergrad degree, a Ph.D and a law school degree – led him from a small family farm to high levels in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including serving as Secretary of Agriculture, U.S. Trade Representative and head of the Republican National Committee. Trained in economics, the late Yeutter understood that quality costs.

Somehow, in these polarized times, the overwhelmingly Republican leaders in Nebraska have lost sight of that. Yeutter, whose statue graces the campus, would likely be disgusted by their approaches now.

Hamas and Columbia — Part 4

Posted on April 28, 2024 by Joe Weber

How should the student protestors be dealt with?

Khymani James, source: The New York Times

Khymani James, one of the student leaders in the anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, turns out to be a rather confused and angry young man.

Apparently uncertain about his gender (preferring “they” to “he”), James once acknowledged hating white people, has called for the deaths of Zionists and suggested university officials should be thankful he was not murdering any. Earlier, as a student at the prestigious Boston Latin School, the now 20-year-old James quit a city high school student advisory group in Boston, citing “adultist rhetoric.”

So, is he the perfect face of the Columbia protests? Well, James has certainly been its major voice at times. In a video shot by student journalist Jessica Schwalb, he leads students in the encampment as they face down Schwalb and others they label as Zionists, moving forward in lockstep, seemingly to drive out the interlopers. He leads the protestors in various chants as they repeat them after him in sheeplike fashion.

Barred from the campus now, however, and apparently facing disciplinary action for his rhetoric, James has since apologized and has not been seen at the demonstration. When he made the statement that Zionists didn’t deserve to live, he says now, it was because “an online mob targeted me because I am visibly queer and Black,” Newsweek reported.

And, despite the threatening steps forward against students named as Zionists, Schwalb, a reporter for Columbia Spectator, said she never felt in danger. After all, these were Columbia students, whom she told The Atlantic were “too nerdy and too worried about their futures to hurt us.”

There are plenty of lessons in the James situation, not least of which is that university administrators should remember who they are dealing with in many of the students – at least the undergrads. While teaching such young people for 14 years, I learned that many of them are essentially still children. Their worldviews are malleable and changeable and their maturity levels – especially among young men – are pretty low. And they are often captive to fads and peer pressure.

And this is not just me talking. The Center for Law, Brain and Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital reported: “Scientists know that the adolescent brain is still developing, that it is highly subject to reward- and peer-influence, and its rate of development varies widely across the population…” The center used insights from studies on the point to argue for cautious and specific treatment of teens and people in their early 20s in the justice system.

I referred to the center’s work in my book “Divided Loyalities,” which charted the paths and fates of a group of young men in Minnesota who joined or attempted to join ISIS in Syria in and around 2014. The federal court dealt severely with the men, sentencing one 22-year-old to 35 years in prison, two others to 30 years each, and still others to sentences of 10 years or less. Essentially, they had ruined their lives and the court showed little mercy.

So, how severely should Columbia deal with James and his fellow travelers? Would suspension or even expulsion be appropriate for those who violated university policies against antisemitism? More than 100 have been arrested, so should criminal charges be pressed, giving them records for life?

One general approach, suitable for all, I believe, is that if they are allowed to stay in school they should be required to take a special semester-long or yearlong course in Israel-Palestine history and relations. Such a course would be developed with scholars on or off campus who are committed to peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. Dartmouth has had great success with such a class.

I suggest that the class include being required to watch the video produced about the Hamas savagery of Oct. 7. The students should be required, too, to read the report from the UN about the sexual violence in that assault, and similar materials. They should be required to learn about lives and fates of the hostages the terrorists took and still hold.

With their chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” the support some show for the murderous and suicidal Hamas, and their “anti-colonial” and anti-Zionist pablum, it seems clear that most of the students know precious little about Israel and the Palestinians. Instead, sheeplike, they parrot the nonsense they hear from peers and others (perhaps even including some dimmer faculty members).

Beyond that, the approach will have to vary by individual student. There needs to be a distinction drawn between graduate students, who generally are older and should know better, and the undergrads. One of the student leaders, for instance, is Mahmoud Khalil, a former political affairs officer with the widely discredited United National Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) who earned an undergraduate degree in Beirut, according to the New York Post. Another is Aidan Parisi, a 27-year-old postgrad whom the paper reported was suspended for his activities in the incendiary Columbia Apartheid Divest Group. “Que viva la intifada,” Parisi wrote in an Instagram post addressing his original suspension — “long live the rebellion.” And “Good night. Fuck israel,” Parisi wrote on X.

It’s not clear whether education will make a difference with such older students, though all should be required to take and pass the course I mention. But education is what a university is about, after all. Such a class would also provide a forum where all views — respectfully delivered or the students would be expelled — could be aired.

Would such schooling make a dent in the antisemitism that underlay at least some of the protests? That’s not clear. The student protestors seem mainly motivated by revulsion at the losses of life in the horrific war in Gaza. Just why they aren’t motivated by the horrors of Hamas to oppose its terrorism is a mystery, but that may be rooted in the simplistic oppressor/oppressed binary lens through which some of them – particularly the less mature ones — may see the world. In such a worldview, today’s Jews cannot be seen as victims, irrespective of the history of the Holocaust.

But in the face of widespread and growing antisemitism, especially among the young, a fuller understanding of Jewish history and the challenges Israel contends with seems essential for Columbia students such as James and many others. Along with generally being bright, the Columbia students should be educable. And testing just how much they can learn would be a start.

Can Noise Give Way to Civility?

Posted on February 21, 2024 by Joe Weber

An exploration of the limits of free speech

One my favorite legalistic maxims goes like this: my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. The idea, of course, is that we all have a marvelous amount of freedom in the U.S. – much more than in many other countries — but we also must live amongst others. And that “living amongst” part means our individual freedoms go only so far; they are not unlimited.

In physical terms, the limits are easy to define. Along with not having the unfettered ability to toss our hands about, we can’t drive the wrong way down a one-way street. We can’t run naked through our neighborhood, no matter how entertaining that might be for some folks. No matter how much we like the Stones, we can’t blast loud music at all hours in most communities. And we can’t, of course, shout fire in a crowded theater.

But when the subject is intellectual freedom, what are the boundaries? When does one’s ability to argue, to question or to demonstrate cross a line into harassment or intimidation? And what ideas or values are simply beyond the pale, too extreme to tolerate even on a college campus dedicated to academic freedom? When do noxious notions become the equivalent of shouting fire?

Since the atrocities of October 7^th in Israel, we have heard much shouting, particularly by pro-Palestinian groups at campuses nationwide. We have also seen efforts to suppress or to contain such outpourings, in part because administrators fear violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires schools to provide all students an environment free from discrimination based on race, color, national origin or shared ancestry.

The noise has grown since the federal Department of Education on Nov. 7 issued a letter reminding schools of their obligations under the law. The DOE has also launched a bevy of investigations, including into a slew of K-12 districts around the country and at least 44 universities and colleges for alleged violations of that law. The allegations include incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia, often as a result of demonstrations that make Jews or Arabs feel threatened.

Indeed, at Harvard dueling investigations have been spurred by students or alumni who feel aggrieved. The DOE on Feb. 6 announced an investigation into whether the university failed to protect Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and their supporters from harassment, threats and intimidation. This came on the heels of probe announced in November alleging that the school failed to respond to antisemitism on campus.

The Muslim Legal Fund of America filed the complaint that generated the early February inquest on behalf of more than a dozen anonymous students. A lawyer for the group told The Harvard Crimson that the students complained of “negative treatment by both the administration and Harvard officials as well as fellow students on campus.” The most common complaint was that students were verbally abused for wearing a keffiyeh, a scarf that has become a symbol of advocacy for Palestinians.

“When they simply walk around campus wearing the keffiyeh, they have been verbally attacked, they have had things thrown at them,” the lawyer said. “They have had students and others accuse them of being terrorists for what they’re wearing.”

On the flip side, the department’s investigation begun in the fall followed a complaint by several alumni that Harvard failed to protect students from antisemitism. And separately, a group of students at the school sued on Jan. 30 in federal court, alleging that Harvard “has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.”

As the lawsuit describes it, Harvard seems like a hellish place.

“Mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty have marched by the hundreds through Harvard’s campus, shouting vile antisemitic slogans and calling for death to Jews and Israel,” the suit says. “Those mobs have occupied buildings, classrooms, libraries, student lounges, plazas, and study halls, often for days or weeks at a time, promoting violence against Jews and harassing and assaulting them on campus. Jewish students have been attacked on social media, and Harvard faculty members have promulgated antisemitism in their courses and dismissed and intimidated students who object.”

While the lawsuit maintains that Harvard refused to “lift a finger to stop and deter this outrageous antisemitic conduct and penalize the students and faculty who perpetrate it,” in fact Harvard has created two presidential task forces to combat Islamophobia and antisemitism on campus. In a wrinkle curious because of its academic freedom overtones, one task force is co-chaired by Derek J. Penslar, who heads the school’s Center for Jewish Studies and who became a lightning rod for critics who damn him as too critical of Israel. Ironically, Penslar’s book “Zionism: An Emotional State,” was named a finalist for the 2023 National Jewish Book Award by the Jewish Book Council, and he was widely defended by scholars and rabbis.

Setting up task forces to develop policies to curb Islamophobia and antisemitism has become a common first step at several campuses. But some schools have also taken aggressive action — action that troubles free-speech advocates.

As reported by Inside Higher Ed, MIT, Stanford and Brown, for instance, have all cracked down on pro-Palestinian actions that they said flouted university rules. MIT, along with several other schools, recently suspended student groups for failing to follow rules about protests and Stanford quashed a 120-day sit-in on a campus plaza by first threatening disciplinary action and then by agreeing to talk over the student concerns. At Brown, 19 students taking part in a weeklong hunger strike for Palestine claimed that university officials removed “memorial flags” and washed away chalk messages at recent gatherings as they urged the university to divest its endowment from arms manufacturers.

The question this raises is: just what is acceptable speech and action on campuses? Where does one draw the line?

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression takes a maximalist view: “The mere expression of an opinion — however repugnant — is always protected. The authority to regulate ‘hate speech’ — an inherently vague and subjective label — is a gift to those who want an excuse to stamp out views they personally detest. FIRE knows from its long history defending free speech on campus how often both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian debate face censorship under this rationale. The target simply depends on who holds power at a given time and place.”

But when does free expression slip into harassment and intimidation? Some cases seem clear. For instance, at the University of Denver, religious items affixed to student doorposts – mezuzahs – were recently torn down from couple dorm rooms and one was defaced. Those are incidents of vandalism, not matters of acceptable expression, and the school administration deplored them. At one dorm there, moreover, pork, which observant Jews shun, was left at a student’s door – a clear case of harassment, it would seem.

Is that the same, however, as people marching and carrying banners that decry the deaths of members of various groups, whether Jews or Palestinians? Should it be illegal to stand up for one’s group, even loudly? And if those marches make members of one group or another feel threatened, should such feelings be the test? Is the freedom to speak one’s mind in an academic setting a value to be protected, regardless of whether it discomfits some students?

Surely, some expression can go over the line. For instance, would any responsible university tolerate students marching with Nazi banners? Indeed, would any tolerate marches with explicitly pro-Hamas or pro-ISIS imagery? The advocates for Palestinians seem mostly to avoid such sentiments as they instead protest “genocide” or call for ceasefires or an end to the killing in the Israel-Hamas war. Sadly, they often seem ignorant, though, about how phrases such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are calls for the eradication of Israel.

As Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University, contended in a recent U.S. News and World Report commentary, “Students can and should debate important matters like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ethics of war in civilian areas.” Disagreeing, protesting and robustly exchanging ideas are appropriate, he suggested.

Still, as Rabbi Dr. Berman also noted, it would be useful to have “moral clarity” about the war on the agenda at campuses all across the U.S. Making his point, he argued that those who protest for a “free Gaza” should also want it free of Hamas. “In fact, being clear about this distinction could actually help calm campus waters and enable more productive conversations,” he maintained.

Certainly, defenders of Israel will agree that the nation has the right to quash a terrorist group whose barbarism is on par with that of ISIS or other similar groups. Indeed, that may be where well-informed faculty need to step up and educate those who are doing much of the shouting.

Of course, such schooling won’t end disagreements. If education could “calm campus waters” such that civil discussion can replace shouting, we’d all be better off. Sadly, however, at a time when many are dying, emotions are understandably running hot. And that makes free speech difficult.

“People are unrealistic when they say, ‘We want free speech, we want debate, we want difficult conversations,’” legal scholar Randall Kennedy recently told The New York Times. “But then we want all smiles.”

Indeed, the arguments over free speech are slipping into debates over academic freedom, which has come under threat from conservative politicians such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. As the Times noted, DeSantis “has led the passage of laws that restrict what can be taught and spearheaded efforts to reshape whole institutions.”

As the newspaper reported, the Israel-Hamas War has upended longstanding campus arguments over whether conservative voices and ideas were being suppressed. Now, it seems, liberal defenders of Palestinians are making the case that they are being muzzled.

“Some ask why, after years of restricting speech that makes some members of certain minority groups feel ‘unsafe,’ administrators are suddenly defending the right to speech that some Jewish students find threatening,” the paper wrote. “Others accuse longtime opponents of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts of cynically weaponizing those principles to suppress pro-Palestinian views.”

Still, academic freedom, too, must have limits. Such freedom, some note, depends on expertise and judgment – and is not just the right to say whatever one wants. As legal scholar Robert C. Post put it, free academic inquiry depends on the notion that “there are true ideas and false ideas,” and that it is the job of scholars to distinguish them.

The protests and, perhaps, the counterprotests will continue. Arguments over Islamophobia and antisemitism will rage, too, perhaps to be clarified by lawsuits and policies that various task forces can develop. One hopes that amid all the noise, education about truth and falsity can emerge.

Higher Ed Under High Stress

Posted on October 6, 2023 by Joe Weber

Schools feel the pressures of politics, economics and demographics

West Virginia University made national headlines in September when its board agreed to cut 28 academic majors (8%) and 143 faculty positions (5%). One-third of education department faculty and the entire world language department will be eliminated, according to the Associated Press.

And those trims come atop cuts made last June, when the board approved slashing 132 positions and cutting 12 graduate and doctorate programs, even while okaying a 3% tuition hike. Impassioned protests notwithstanding, the school will be a smaller place going forward and not only in terms of the 10% enrollment drop it has sustained since 2015.

Like so many other such institutions, WVU is caught in a vise that seems to make the move mandatory: declining enrollment on the demand side and deep trims in state funding on supply side. The cuts fell heavily in liberal arts, as university president E. Gordon Gee said the school needed to refocus to meet job requirements in the future. His argument: “aligning majors with future careers is a necessity in today’s world.”

This is a familiar tune that, sadly, is being replayed all over the country. Four-year state-funded schools are being squeezed on the one side by legislatures keen to cut taxes and on the other by enrollment declines driven by demographics and high tuitions and costs. Such high tabs for students often make two-year schools more attractive.

In Nebraska, for instance, the four-campus university system faces an estimated $58 million shortfall by the end of the 2024-25 fiscal year, “a gap brought on by inflation, muted revenue growth and enrollment declines,” as a report from the university’s Omaha campus explained. Times are tough for Huskers both on and off the football field.

University of Nebraska at Kearney, source: Nebraska Examiner

While officials will step up recruitment to try to boost enrollments, program cuts seem inevitable. According to the Nebraska Examiner, administrators at the university’s Kearney campus have proposed to cut 30 faculty jobs in 14 departments, eliminating the departments of geography, philosophy and theater and killing degree programs in areas including journalism and some languages. So far, it’s not clear what cuts are planned for the flagship campus in Lincoln or in Omaha.

Private schools are feeling the pressure, too. Marymount University, a small Catholic school in northern Virginia, is phasing out majors in English, history and several other areas where student demand has lagged, for example. As The Washington Post reported, art, mathematics, philosophy, secondary education, sociology, and theology and religious studies all are being chopped, along with a master’s program in English and the humanities.

Indeed, some institutions have had to close altogether. The King’s College, a Christian liberal arts school located a block from the New York Stock Exchange, this year laid off its entire faculty and halted classes after a couple years of tumult, for instance. Even support from the DeVos family (famous for former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos) couldn’t spare it from what administrators hope will be a temporary closure. To read more about it, check out the richly detailed report by journalism students there, “Inside Story of The King’s College Death Spiral of 2023.”

Distressingly, permanent school shutdowns have become common. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 296 four-year schools closed between the 2015-16 academic year and 2020-21, the most recent year with data available. That compares with just 32 in the prior five-year period. And in the latest half-decade stretch these closures included 71 nonprofit institutions, up from just 16 in the prior period, along with a bevy of for-profit schools. The situation has grown so worrisome nationally that U.S. News & World Report published a piece in 2021 counseling students on what to do if their schools shuttered.

Certainly, particular pressures on the for-profit schools account for most of the shutdowns, which included 224 such four-year schools in the latest five-year period. Headlines about so-called “predatory” institutions have hit them hard, and deservedly so. Indeed, only three four-year public universities or colleges have been forced to close since 2010-11.

Nonetheless, program trims seem all too common among both state and private schools, and they appear to be accelerating. Inside Higher Ed just reported on such cuts at the 150-year-old Christian Brothers University in Tennessee, which plans to “reallocate” its programs; at Delta State University in Mississippi, where a 48% decline in enrollment over the last 15 years is leading to plans to slash the annual $51 million budget to $40 million; and at Miami University of Ohio, which has told faculty members in 17 academic departments that they must merge, reorganize or close. The publication details still other schools in similar straits.

From a hard-headed economic viewpoint, many such retrenchments seem necessary. In the non-academic world, when demand for a product or service slows or disappears, companies drop the lines and often furlough people. Plant closings are not uncommon. So, why shouldn’t higher education behave in the same way? To keep their product lines – i.e., academic offerings – fresh, they should be able to shrink or eliminate some, and to grow others.

Indeed, one could argue that more such flexibility at universities would force them to innovate more to serve changing needs. On an individual level, professors would be required to update their curricula to keep up with the times (something we in journalism have had to do regularly as our industry changed). Even profs teaching, say, classics, history or literature would need to adapt to make their course offerings relevant to the lives of students as their lives, mores and challenges changed. Few if any teachers could simply recycle the lectures they’ve long used.

But in so many ways higher education doesn’t operate like the business world – and that’s mostly a good thing. Tenure, for instance, protects faculty members’ ability to speak and teach as they see fit (not as administrators or, worse, politicians, would dictate — Florida notwithstanding). On the flip side, state funding is notoriously subject to the whims of politicians, many of whom lately seem to be ratcheting up longstanding attacks on academia and who are all too glad to cut budgets.

Moreover, higher education in the United States long has been a magnet for foreign students. Schools in relatively few nations can match American university training, so much so that such education is one of the nation’s biggest service “exports.” That has been changing in recent years, due to Covid and the growth of solid programs in some other countries. Indeed, enrollment of foreign students peaked in the 2018-19 school year at 1.1 million, according to National Public Radio.

Happily, such enrollment seems to be clawing its way back, even as it remains prey to everything from geopolitics to fears of crime and concerns about immigration. China, for instance, has been the largest source of foreign-student enrollment and uncertainties abound about whether Chinese students will return in large numbers.

The bottom line, however, is that after decades of expansion it seems that higher education is hardly a growth industry overall anymore. Until and unless the numbers of high school students rebound and the political climates in varous states change, and until and unless universities can figure out how to deliver more for less money, dark clouds will hang over much of the sector. Painful as it is, the current shakeout seems like an unavoidable and in some ways necessary rebalancing.

The dominance of dumbness

Posted on September 11, 2023 by Joe Weber

Anti-intellectualism has a long history in American culture

A friend set me to thinking about the long and unsavory history of anti-intellectualism in American life. This strand of our culture didn’t begin with Trumpism, of course, though the anti-science and anti-elites chords the former president strikes so powerfully are exceptional examples of it. Indeed, it’s not by accident that Donald Trump in 2016 singled out the group he had most affection for, saying: “We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

Nor has this phenomenon been exclusively a province of the right, which boasts of many ignorant folks but also the likes of the brilliant (if often distasteful) William F. Buckley. In fact, a most intriguing commentary on the phenomenon came in 2001 from conservative economist Thomas Sowell in “The Quest for Cosmic Justice,” where he wrote:

“From its colonial beginnings, American society was a ‘decapitated’ society—largely lacking the top-most social layers of European society. The highest elites and the titled aristocracies had little reason to risk their lives crossing the Atlantic, and then face the perils of pioneering. Most of the white population of colonial America arrived as indentured servants and the black population as slaves. Later waves of immigrants were disproportionately peasants and proletarians, even when they came from Western Europe … The rise of American society to pre-eminence, as an economic, political, and military power, was thus the triumph of the common man, and a slap across the face to the presumptions of the arrogant, whether an elite of blood or books.”

As a trip through Wikipedia reveals, there is much support for Sowell’s view. A minister in 1843 wrote about frontier Indiana (one of our most undereducated states): “We always preferred an ignorant, bad man to a talented one, and, hence, attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since, unhappily, smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and [like-wise] incompetence and goodness.”

Such views have long infused our politics, sometimes with well-schooled leaders who either demagogued on this stream of thought or just warmed to it. Consider the 1912 thoughts of Woodrow Wilson, who, despite his doctorate from Johns Hopkins, said: “What I fear is a government of experts. God forbid that, in a democratic country, we should resign the task and give the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job?”

American historian, author, and Columbia University professor Richard Hofstadter (1916 – 1970) poses for a portrait, New York, 1970. Two of his most important works are ‘Anti-Intellectualism in American Life’ (1963) and ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ (1964). (Photo by Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images)

A thorough discussion of this trend came in 1963 from Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter. In “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” he argued that anti-intellectualism was how the middle-class showed its feelings for political elites. As that group developed political power, he contended, it held up the ideal candidate for office as the self-made man, not a well-educated man born to wealth.

More recently, in 1980, author Isaac Asimov observed: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.”

Since then, many folks have dusted off this theme. Journalist and author Susan Jacoby in her 2008 book, “The Age of American Unreason,” bemoaned what she called the resurgence of anti-intellectualism in the modern era. According to The New York Times, she blamed it on television, video games and the Internet, saying they created a “culture of distraction” that has shortened attention spans and left people with “less time and desire” for “two human activities critical to a fruitful and demanding intellectual life: reading and conversation.”

Certainly, the forces Jacoby pointed to exacerbate the cult of ignorance we are awash in. Still, history shows that it’s nothing new. The new media that preoccupy us now may just be building on that well-rooted base. One has only to look at the success of Fox News to see how deep that base is.

We might take heart, however, that there’s an ebb and flow at work. At various times in our history, we have swung from respecting (and electing) smart people to choosing ignoramuses. How else to explain descents such as that from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson (in just 20 years) and from Barack Obama to Donald Trump (in no time at all)?

It’s troubling, nonetheless, that politicians such as Ron DeSantis feel a need to play down or deride their elite-education credentials to try to harness votes from the masses that are less-schooled than they. After using Yale as a steppingstone to Harvard Law School and then entering politics, he soon realized that such credentials were “a political scarlet letter as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” as The New York Times reported. As he has sought to remake higher education in Florida, DeSantis has also said he would eliminate the federal Department of Education, among other agencies.

For his part, Trump has bragged — when it suited his purposes — about attending an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania, even as he failed to mention that he had transferred there after two years at the less tony Fordham University, as The Daily Pennsylvanian reported. In fact, he claimed to have graduated first in his class in 1968 at the university’s Wharton School, though the school newspaper’s investigation of this did not bear that claim out. Indeed, he did not even make dean’s list that year.

He also has often derided intellectuals and pursuits such as reading. He told a reporter for The Washington Post in 2016 that he has never had to read very much because he can reach right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense.’ ” Moreover, Trump told the Post that he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.”

Despite the choice of Joseph Biden in 2020, we seem now still to be perilously in a period when the pendulum remains far from valuing education in our leaders or elsewhere. Indeed, it’s troubling how few Americans today put a premium on schooling, a trend concomitant with the rise of book-banning nationwide. Our next election will be revealing about many things (not least of which are understandable concerns about the current president’s age), but it may also mark either a departure from the pendulum’s swing or its confirmation.

The marketplace of ideas: who gets in?

Posted on September 7, 2023 by Joe Weber

Interesting developments on the free-speech front in Arizona and Massachusetts

The battle royal over free speech on campuses is climbing a few decibels on both sides of the country, it seems. The fracas at Arizona State University is likely to grow louder in coming weeks with a reprise visit by a couple controversial conservatives. As for the East Coast, Harvard has distinguished itself by placing last in a ranking by a prominent free-speech organization.

Let’s turn to ASU. It has become a showcase of sorts for conservatives who feel aggrieved and abused, as well as for academics who find themselves uncomfortably in the crosshairs of today’s cultural warfare.

Conservative radio host Dennis Prager and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who stirred up a hornet’s nest in February when they visited ASU, plan to speak there again on Sept. 27. Their “Health, Wealth & Happiness 2.0” session will be sponsored by a student organization, Turning Point USA at Arizona State University, rather than by an individual college such as Barrett, the honors college that controversially hosted them last time through a now-defunct center.

Conveniently setting the stage for their visit, a university report about the brouhaha over their last visit is expected to be released shortly. That report was demanded by Arizona State Sen. Anthony Kern, who led a hearing into the matter in July. Kern said the legislature’s judiciary committee will take so-far-unspecified action dealing with ASU, depending on the thoroughness of the report.

Kern, who co-chaired the Joint Legislative Ad Hoc Committee on Freedom of Expression at Arizona’s Public Universities, has already telegraphed his feelings that he expects little from ASU that would placate him. “I do not trust the Board of Regents,” Kern said at the July hearing. “I do not trust ASU. I do not trust our universities to teach our kids what needs to be taught.”

For their part, it’s not clear what Prager and Kirk plan to talk about in the coming confab, although the session will also feature at least one state legislator who served on Kern’s ad hoc committee, Austin Smith, who also is a former director of Turning Point USA. That suggests that free speech on campus could take center stage at the session, as well as hoary claims of a leftward tilt among faculty.

Smith had asked the regents to investigate the termination of the director of the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development at Barrett. That ex-official, Ann Atkinson, had complained about her firing in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, suggesting that it was in reprisal for her organizing the first Prager-Kirk session. In fact, the funding for her position fell away when donor Thomas W. Lewis pulled his backing, citing what he called “the radical ideology that now apparently dominates the college.”

Shortly before the wintertime Prager-Kirk session, 39 faculty members at the college had written a letter to their dean complaining about the men’s visit, lambasting them as “purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, as well as the institutions of our democracy, including our public institutions of higher education.”

Notably from a free-speech point of view, however, the Barrett faculty members didn’t call for the session to be cancelled. Instead, as some of them wrote in an op-ed in the Arizona Republic, some had slated a teach-in prior to the session called “Defending the Public University.” They maintained that they encouraged students to attend both events and claimed that many students did so. Nor were they party to the Lewis center’s shutdown, the authors said.

While that suggests an openness to free speech, Atkinson has argued that the faculty bullied students into staying away from both the Prager-Kirk talk and the ad hoc committee hearing in July. So far, though, no evidence proving such bullying has emerged (perhaps the university report will illuminate the matter). It may be that students just found the initial talk uninteresting and that, in July, few were on hand for the legislative hearing.

There are some crucial differences between the upcoming Prager-Kirk session and the February one. For one, a student organization is sponsoring the gathering, rather than a college. Thus, while it bears the imprimatur of that student group, it doesn’t need the blessings of a college where most of the faculty find the speakers reprehensible.

Certainly, the men have distinguished themselves as advocates of notions many find toxic. Prager has criticized homosexuality, for instance, writing “I, for one, do not believe that a man’s inability to make love to a woman can be labeled normal. While such a man may be a healthy and fine human being in every other area of life, and quite possibly more kind, industrious, and ethical than many heterosexuals, in this one area he cannot be called normal.” For his part, Kirk has praised Jan. 6, 2021, rioters at the U.S. Capitol as “patriots” whose travel to Washington, D.C., was funded by Turning Point USA, as the Daily Beast reported.

So far, it doesn’t appear as if ASU faculty members plan counterprogramming to rebut likely comments by the pair, which is an interesting approach. Would such programming elevate Prager and Kirk’s status and serve only to legitimize their ideas? One faculty member suggested to me that engaging them in debate would be akin to dignifying a member of the Flat Earth Society by sharing a stage with him or her, even if only to refute the person’s arguments.

Still, the views of Prager and Kirk raise a compelling question for advocates of free speech and those who see universities as places where conflicting ideas ought to be hashed out. When is someone’s speech so far beyond the pale that it doesn’t deserve an airing? And when a school, as opposed to a student group, brings such a person in front of students does that suggest an endorsement (indeed, might it be considered educational malpractice, if there were such a thing)? The challenge in this MAGA era is amplified because a substantial minority of the public share the ideas of such men.

A daughter-in-law of mine who teaches at Princeton frames this as a matter of progress over time. She contends that the line between acceptable ideas and those rightly consigned to history’s dustbin has consistently shifted. There was a time, for instance, when advocates of slavery (indeed slaveholders) could find a forum at universities. Similarly, pro-Nazi speakers and racists were tolerated on campuses. Has the line moved such that it’s left the likes of Prager and Kirk on the wrong side, irrespective of any followings they have in the general public?

Strolling at Harvard, source: the Boston Herald

Now, as to Harvard, the school has been named the worst for free speech among universities reviewed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. As the New York Post reported, Harvard scored poorly in large part because nine professors and researchers there faced calls to be punished or fired based on what they had said or written. Indeed, seven of them were disciplined.

Moreover, much of the trouble at Harvard has to do with self-censorship — not the type imposed by authority figures. The FIRE rankings rely in large part on surveys of students. And at the Boston school, the Boston Herald reported: “Self-censorship is pervasive across the board, according to the survey. More than a quarter of students (26%) said they censor themselves at least a few times a week in conversations with friends, and 25% said they’re more likely to self-censor now than they were when starting college.”

The atmosphere at the university has grown so troublesome to free-speech advocates there that more than 100 faculty members have joined a new Council on Academic Freedom on campus. Indeed, the debate about whether free discussion is stifled at Harvard has been joined – ironically but appropriately at Harvard.

Harvard Magazine sketched out the arguments last June. In part, it cited an op-ed that founders of the new council wrote in The Boston Globe: “The reason that a truth-seeking institution must sanctify free expression is straightforward,” they wrote. “…The only way that our species has managed to learn and progress is by a process of conjecture and refutation: some people venture ideas, others probe whether they are sound, and in the long run the better ideas prevail.”

This notion, implying that the marketplace of ideas will weed out the intellectual dinosaurs, is a longstanding one, of course. For campuses nationwide, the question today is about who should be permitted into the marketplace and whose ideas deserve only to be shunned.

An Assault by the Right

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Joe Weber

George Wallace, source: The Washington Post

Conservative assaults on higher education are nothing new. Recall George Wallace’s vitriol about “pointy-headed intellectuals” in the late 1960s. Years before then, in 1952, William F. Buckley Jr. earned his spurs with the book “God and Man at Yale,” lambasting universities for straying from his dearly held Christian principles. That same year, the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Communist methods of infiltration in education, as political analyst Pam Chamberlain explained in “The Right v. Higher Education: Change and Continuity.”

Indeed, it has become an article of faith in conservative circles that universities are dominated by lefties who don’t educate, but who indoctrinate. Ronald Reagan in his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966 stoked conservative hostility toward the University of California schools, particularly UC Berkeley, which was a center of demands for free speech on campus and a locus protest against the Vietnam war. After his attacks succeeded, and he forced the schools into a position of needing to charge tuition for the first time in their history.

Unlike these scattered efforts, however, today’s conservative movement is mounting well practiced and orchestrated assaults on what its supporters see as rampant liberalism in education. These drives are led by governors and lesser politicians who in calculated campaigns have won elections or appointments to boards of regents and higher education panels, particularly in red states.

Florida Gov.Ron DeSantis epitomized the drive in 2021 when he signed legislation designed to crack down on a perceived bias in the classrooms by requiring schools to survey themselves annually to measure “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” on their campuses. He followed up early this year by packing the board at the New College of Florida with rightists determined to remake the campus and squash liberal viewpoints there.

He’s hardly alone, however. Other officials have driven out educators they believe would espouse values they can’t stomach, especially on matters of diversity, equity and inclusion (which evidently are values they can’t abide. Consider the actions of the U.S. Supreme Court against affirmative action in university recruitment).

Most notable here are the cases of two distinguished New York Times journalists who, perhaps not coincidentally, were Black women:

— Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose leadership of the 1619 Project earned a Pulitzer Prize, was appointed in 2021 as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. But, after she was denied tenure by conservative trustees, she decamped to Howard University.

— And this year Texas A&M University drove out former New York Times editor and tenured University of Texas professor Dr. Kathleen McElroy as the new head of the journalism department. After announcing her appointment to a tenured spot, the school’s leaders steadily chipped away at the terms, eventually offering her a nontenured one-year position as a professor of practice with three years as the program director, serving at will. She refused and the university wound up settling with her for $1 million.

An alumni group had agitated against McEloy’s hire, balking at her reported advocacy of DEI. Regents echoed the worries. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, one regent texted the chancellor: “I thought the purpose of us starting a journalism department was to get high-quality Aggie journalist [sic] with conservative values into the market.” He wrote: “This won’t happen with someone like this leading the department.”

Take note: the regent didn’t argue for distinguished journalism chops and a commitment to such verities in the field as fairness, thoroughness and accuracy. No. Instead, he applied an ideological test, demanding “conservative values.” Indeed, for conservatives in Texas, McElroy’s affiliation with The New York Times was hardly a plus. It was as if she had worked for Pravda, McElroy said an official at the school told her.

While often underhanded – as when schools chip away at offers that right-wingers object to – some of the assaults are simply dishonest. A flap this year at Arizona State University, for instance, included an official blaming the university for eliminating her position at the school, when in fact her job went away after a funder — a conservative — pulled his support for her center. The donor was offended when faculty members objected vocally to a couple right-wing speakers coming on campus.

Ronnie D. Green, source: University of Nebraska Foundation

And, sometimes, well-regarded academics who personally may be conservative themselves are victims of the assaults — presumably because they aren’t conservative enough. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I taught for 14 years, rightists led by then-Gov. Pete Ricketts attacked Chancellor Ronnie D. Green after he led an effort to promote diversity and inclusion at the school. Green, who grew up on a farm in Virginia, made his academic bones in agriculture and was known for his Christian religious commitments, wound up retiring this year as chancellor after just seven years, at age 61.

Aside from such examples, the efforts by conservatives to remake higher education have drawn heat from such groups as the American Association of University Professors. In a recent statement, the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers condemned the efforts. Their statement said: “Right-wing lawmakers continue to wage a coordinated attack against public colleges and universities with legislation that would undermine academic freedom, chill classroom speech and impose partisan agendas on public higher education.”

The groups cited legislation introduced in at least 23 states that would limit teaching about race gender and sexual orientation, require intellectual and viewpoint diversity statements and surveys, cut funding for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and end tenure for faculty. As the groups said, “This legislation is the latest in a multiyear effort by right-wing activists and donors to reshape academia to its liking.”

These efforts come against a backdrop in which many Americans, particularly Republicans, feel hostile to university educations. According to Gallup, only 36% of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in such schooling Among Republicans, only 19% of Americans expressed such sentiments. Given such feelings, academics who hope the public will back them in fights to preserve tenure, for instance, may be sorely disappointed.

Finally, let me share a personal anecdote. I once gave a college tour to a young man who was quite hesitant about entering the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He told me he feared that his Christian faith would be challenged at the school, despite an abundance of churches on campus. He was trying to figure out if a small Christian college, where he would find reinforcement, would be a better fit for him. I recall thinking a few things: university should be a place where many of one’s ideas as a teenager should be tested (although I doubted his Christian commitments would be), and two, his faith must be a fragile thing, indeed, if it can’t hold up to exposure to people who may believe differently.

And yet, that young man may may be representative of much of the sentiment that has coursed through the right since at least the days of William F. Buckley Jr., before conservatives hit upon the approaches they are taking now.

Today’s assaults may owe their genesis to the isolated attacks of prior decades. But, nowadays, they are well-organized and well-developed. And in a troubling number of cases they are working.

When the WSJ Gets Snookered

Posted on July 9, 2023 by Joe Weber

As a faithful, if sometimes dissenting, reader of the Wall Street Journal editorial and op-ed pages, I am distressed that the paper’s editors seem to have gotten snookered in running a commentary about Arizona State University. More troublesome, they have let their readers be fooled, as well.

Recall that Ann Atkinson, the now-former head of the university’s T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development at the Barrett honors college, wrote in a June 19 op-ed that her center was being shut down after faculty members objected to a session she hosted showcasing several conservative speakers. The piece, “I paid for free speech at Arizona State,” implied that the closure was the action of lefty administrators kneeling before radical faculty members. Atkinson slammed the university for its “deep hostility toward divergent views.” She concluded that “ASU claims to value freedom of expression. But in the end the faculty mob always wins against institutional protections for free speech.”

Well, that’s not the way it went down, friends.

In fact, the donor who had sponsored the center pulled the plug on his financing. The donor, real estate magnate Tom Lewis, was irked at the faculty reaction to the February session, as he said in a statement issued after the commentary appeared. “After seeing this level of left-wing hostility and activism, I no longer had any confidence in Barrett to adhere to the terms of our gift, and made the decision to terminate our agreement, effective June 30, 2023,” he wrote. “I regret that this decision was necessary, and hope that Barrett and ASU will take strong action to ensure that free speech will always be protected and that all voices can be heard.”

Thomas W. Lewis, source: University of Kentucky Alumni Assn.

Tipping his hand ideologically, Lewis elaborated: “Because these were mostly conservative speakers, we expected some opposition, but I was shocked and disappointed by the alarming and outright hostility demonstrated by the Barrett faculty and administration toward these speakers. Instead of sponsoring this event with a spirit of cooperation and respect for free speech, Barrett faculty and staff exposed the radical ideology that now apparently dominates the college.”

By Atkinson’s account, 39 of the 47 Barrett faculty members condemned the session in a letter to the administration. Atkinson’s count may overstate the number of signers a bit, for one thing. More significantly, however – and something Atkinson did not say – the profs did not ask that the session be cancelled. Indeed, it went forward, and she wrote that thousands attended either in person or virtually (again, her numbers seem somewhat inflated).

So, because the profs raised their voices against the session, the conservative funder killed a program that provided a platform for conservative speakers who appeared, apparently without any trouble. Logical? Perhaps not so much. Perhaps a MAGA kind of logic.

Even more illogically, Lewis’s reference to “respect for free speech” is inconsistent with his pulling the bucks. It would seem Lewis respects only some types of speech – certainly not that expressed by the profs

ASU issued its own statement through Provost Nancy Gonzales: “Arizona State University is committed to, in practice, not just rhetoric, all things that support free speech and all of its components. ASU employee Ann Atkinson has lost the distinction between feelings and fact in her recent comments about what prompted her loss of employment at the T.W. Lewis Center at Arizona State University. Ms. Atkinson’s current job at the university will no longer exist after June 30 because the donor who created and funded the center decided to terminate his donation. Unfortunate, but hardly unprecedented. ASU is working to determine how we can support the most impactful elements of the center without that external funding.

“Ms. Atkinson’s frustration with those who would suppress freedom of speech is one we share. But her conclusion that ASU students are the ‘losers’ misses the obvious point: the ‘Health, Wealth and Happiness’ event hosted by Robert Kiyosaki, Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk was a success. Speakers came, they spoke, and more than 600 people attended. Ms. Atkinson is correct that this event was opposed by many faculty, students and others who are part of the ASU community. She is right to say that this opposition was vocal. This is not uncommon in a university setting.”

The university statement concluded: “… ASU has been awarded the ‘green light’ by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and that it adopted the Chicago Principles, which affirm the ‘free, robust and uninhibited sharing of ideas among all members of the university’s community.’”

It it troubling that half-truths and omissions marked the op-ed. But it is far more unsettling that the WSJ, in its eagerness to pounce on a hot “cancellation” tale, would propagate such shortcomings.

While the paper on June 22 published the ASU statement as a letter, it has not issued a response correcting the misleading commentary or acknowledging that it got conned. At a minimum, a note from a perhaps red-faced editor — maybe op-ed chief James Taranto — would be welcome. It may be that in time somebody at the paper with a spine will fess up, something that would much serve readers of a paper ostensibly committed to accuracy, truthfulness and the full story. One can only hope.

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