Better in their words…

WSJ – 11/22/2015

“I’m a Liberal Profes sor, and My Liberal Stud ents Terrify Me,” read the headline of an essay for the liberal website Vox earlier this year. The author, who was frightened enough to write under a pseudonym, admitted that he “cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad,” including books by Mark Twain.

The American Association of University Professors last year warned: “The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.”

The liberals who run U.S. universities can’t be surprised by the epidemic of grievances on their campuses. Their generation used political correctness to exclude conservative thought from the faculty. Now their students reject academic freedom for everyone. Administrators quickly cave in to their demands, abandoning centuries-old principles of open inquiry.

Students have been taught there are no limits, so they expect their most extreme demands to be taken seriously. “Be quiet!” a Yale undergraduate screamed to the master of her residential college: “It is not about creating an intellec- tual space!” Students insist on “trigger warnings,” protection from “microaggressions,” and “safe spaces” where no one will challenge their prejudices.

Protesters at Amherst demand a ban on posters favoring free speech. Johns Hopkins students want a mandatory class on “cultural competency.” Wesleyan undergraduates tried to get the campus newspaper defunded for an op-ed critical of Black Lives Matter.

After students at Yale demanded that Calhoun College be renamed because its namesake defended slavery in the early 19th century, students at Princeton demanded its Woodrow Wilson School be renamed because Wilson was a segregationist in the early 20th century. Even Rhodes scholars are joining in: A group last year ended the tradition of toasting their Oxford benefactor because Cecil Rhodes was prime minister of segregated South Africa more than a century ago—never mind that he was a liberal in that era.

The University of Michigan canceled a screening of “American Sniper” when Muslim students protested (the school showed “Paddington” instead). Students at Smith refused media access to a sit-in unless journalists first pledged “solidarity” with the protesters. A University of Missouri professor called for “muscle” to remove a student journalist covering protests. Disinvited campus speakers include former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a critic of Islamism. Comedians Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David avoid campuses for fear of offending.

The good news is that some universities are bucking the trend. The University of Chicago formed a committee under law professor Geoffrey Stone “in light of recent events nationwide that have tested institutional commitments to free and open discourse.” The committee report, released in January, cited former university president Robert Hutchins, who defended a speech on campus by the 1932 Communist Party presidential nominee by saying the “cure” for objectionable ideas “lies through open discussion rather than through prohibition.” Another former president, Hanna Gray, said: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think.”

The Chicago statement on free expression echoes these sentiments: “It is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.”

Instead, “the university’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the university community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the university community, not for the university as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.”

(Disclosures: I am a proud Chicago alum, an embarrassed Yale grad and a mortified Rhodes scholar.) Purdue and the Princeton faculty have voted to adopt the Chicago principles. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is encouraging other universities to sign up. Meanwhile, expect students to find ever more microaggressions, perhaps including degrees in the names of offending founders: Elihu Yale made his fortune as a British East India Company imperialist. Exploited Chinese laborers built Leland Stanford’s transcontinental railway. James Duke peddled tobacco. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Mellon were robber barons.

Liberal academics are reaping what they sowed. They can now adopt the Chicago approach of tolerating “offensive, unwise, immoral” ideas or resign themselves to producing graduates knowledgeable only about their own pieties.

By L. Gordon Crovitz

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And a few letters on the subject:

It is difficult to teach certain subjects under conditions one or two steps away from Stalinist show trials. Unlike Cardinal József Mindszenty in 1948, Nicholas Christakis and Yale President Peter Salovey didn’t require extensive psychological torture to exact abject apologies for their sociopolitical sins. How much more difficult then would it be for a single professor, especially an untenured professor, to challenge the “social justice” consensus?

For 27 years I taught an introduction to law class to 19- and 20-yearolds. How would I now cover the First, Fourth and Sixth Amendments? Forget the Second Amendment; my students might discover I belonged to the National Rifle Association, which in itself would be grounds for burning me in effigy, if not in fact.

More than this, my whole style of teaching would be at risk, since I used a modified law school/Socratic approach, provoking my students at every turn. I frequently played devil’s advocate so convincingly that my students would ask, “Do you really believe that?” How can you use case law (appellate judicial opinions) to examine law and justice when students, presumably, must insist there be a correct side to any controversy, to be decided by scant and slanted facts presented by the mainstream media? I would certainly have been dishonorably discharged from my appointment, and perhaps if anyone at UCF reads this letter, I will be relieved of my emeritus status, granted in the old days when we challenged the minds of our students.

RANSFORD C. PYLE, J.D., PH.D.  -Gainesville, Fla.

I think we should encourage our college students to perfect their skills at demanding and condemning, so when they face a prospective employer in the future they will be able to clearly articulate their demands on the policies and performance of the company before they consent to a job interview.

HARLON MILLS  -Cordova, Tenn.

I’d be happy to help kick-start a campaign to fund a semester of study abroad to Syria or Iraq for these sensitive students. Perhaps some time spent in “meaningful discourse” with ISIS members will teach them the value of the First Amendment.

VERNON A. VALENTINO  -Lafayette, La.

Regarding your editorial “Bonfire of the Academy” (Nov. 11): The editors lament the lack of “adult leadership” at today’s universities. It wasn’t always so. I was at MIT in the late 1960s, and we had our fair share of protests and sit-ins. Most dealt with the Vietnam War but there were other more mundane issues, like tuition increases. At one such protest, MIT Dean Kenneth Wadleigh showed up unexpectedly and delivered the line: “Anyone here five minutes from now won’t be here tomorrow.” It was refreshing to see how quickly the room emptied.

JIM HAHN  – Scottsdale, Ariz.