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Combating the College Free Speech Crisis
Increasingly, American college campuses are places where critical thinking is eschewed for group think; where thought police maintain total control and punish wrongthink in classrooms and outside. For PragerU, Greg Lukianoff, President at The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education explained the situation:
On several campuses, concerned citizens are testing out various solutions to the crisis on campuses.
At the University of Minnesota, a major donor decided to pull funding after conservative commentator Ben Shapiro was denied a large on-campus meeting area and was forced to speak at a smaller venue at the St. Paul Student’s Center. Fox News reported at the time:
In protest, an anonymous university donor pulled their annual contribution and will instead give the money to the on-campus chapter of Young America’s Foundation.
In a letter to University of Minnesota President Eric Kaler, the donor wrote this was “clearly a case of discrimination”:
I believe the treatment of Ben Shapiro was clearly a case of discrimination. It was not discrimination by race or gender. It was more damaging than that. You have discriminated against the free dissemination of ideas.
The question then becomes why you discriminate against conservative thought. My simple theory is that the administration and faculty of our major bodies of higher education are fearful. They are fearful that once people like Ben Shapiro speak about their conservative ideas, the students will begin to understand a simple fact. It is the fact that they have been exposed to only one way of thinking and thus will be furious over having spent so much time and money only to find out that they have been essentially brainwashed.
Because of this, I have decided to give my annual contribution for scholarship at the U of M to the Young Americans for Freedom.
An excellent example of how much damage you have done; I am not signing my name for fear of political retaliation.
YAF spokesperson Spencer Brown praised the donor’s decision and said it’s important to take a stand against an institution that “undermines and discriminates against conservatives”:
At Yale University, one alumni, Jamie Kirchick, is taking another tactic: running for a leadership position on the Board of Trustees. In a WSJ op-ed he wrote,
A sign that something had gone terribly wrong came in October 2015, when a viral internet video revealed a student mob shrieking at Nicholas Christakis, then master of Yale’s largest residential college. That these students were treating a professor with such disrespect was bad enough, but the impetus for their outrage was an innocuous email written by his wife, fellow professor Erika Christakis, doubting Yale needed to warn students about “appropriate Halloween wear.” Yale’s failure to stand up for the Christakises—he stepped down as master, she left the university—left me ashamed. When the university rewarded two of the mob’s leaders with a prestigious prize, something was deeply amiss.
Further developments have only confirmed my worries. Yale ditched the title “master” on the ludicrous grounds that it is racist; a survey finds half the faculty approves of “trigger warnings” for readings and classroom discussions, and the number of campus administrators continues to swell while the cost of attending has increased to $70,000 a year.
The 1974 Woodward Report, Yale’s policy on free expression, notes: “The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.”
A worthy aspiration, but recent events have tested Yale’s commitment to it. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education gives Yale a yellow-light speech-code rating.
As a trustee, I will advocate that every incoming freshman be sent a copy of the Woodward Report. Yale’s president and dean should also issue an annual statement modeled on the excellent letter sent by the University of Chicago’s dean of students, Jay Ellison, to that school’s freshman class. “Our commitment to academic freedom,” he wrote, “means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”
Kirchick explained his decision and why it is of importance to more than just the Yale community with Margaret Hoover on Firing Line recently as well, “Elite universities are training the future leaders of the United States… trends that often incubate on college campuses can then sweep the country.”
After years of watching the situation on campuses devolve into anarchy when conservative speakers come to speak, it’s refreshing seeing those with influence at these schools try to avoid the fate of the University of Missouri. After protests swept the school in 2015, enrollment numbers have tanked. It would take a lot more for a school as distinguished as Yale to see numbers of applicants tank as quickly as Missouri did, but the bubble won’t last forever. Eventually, parents and students will decide to stop sending their children to indoctrination camps to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If there’s any hope at saving the college experience, it’s going to because of donors like the one in Minnesota and concerned alumni like Jamie Kirchick.
Published in Education
The next time my college asks for money, I am going to tell them NO and that the reason why is that they apparently have a 100:1 ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans on their faculty based on a recent study. It wasn’t like that when I was there 30 years ago, although it was starting. We should have fought harder back then.
I sincerely hope that the financial pressure brought to bear by alumni and committed individuals like Jamie Kirchick can rescue our colleges and universities. They are, in many ways, wondrous places. When I walk around my current university, I marvel at the buildings and the intellectual history. Maybe because I am in STEM, mostly what I see are very smart and talented students grappling with advanced science and engineering. I regularly see groups of students working on drones and robots and see lectures advertised about autonomous vehicles, microbiomes and big data. I would hate to lose that, even as the social sciences, arts and humanities have become almost completely politicized. Our universities are worth fighting for.
Make no mistake, those roboticists are being indoctrinated at the undergrad level.
Yikes! That video and the information in this post are seriously scary. I attended, and graduated from, a California state university, when I was in my 30’s. (I’d started college after high school, but interrupted it by getting married and having children.) Anyway, this was about 25 years ago, and I was dismayed then at how some ideas were okay, but some were not. Not being a youngster anymore, I tended to speak up.
I would absolutely NOT have sent one of my children to a college that has the ridiculous rules that are discussed in this presentation. Hopefully, enough parents will recognize this problem and keep their children out of schools that do this. But…seriously? YALE?? Wow.
We need to let bad colleges fail. Without the threat of financial failure, nothing will change.
This would solve part of the problem, but how do you define a bad college? As long as a school is difficult to get into, there will be lots of demand to go there. One of my nieces is a straight A high school student in an excellent school; she knows several kids who got into Harvard, and now she wants to go there too. Scares me out of my mind.
Also, there!s institutionalized anti-Semitism–even on campuses where every building bears the name of a Jewish donor.
Jews:
pull out your money!
The first donor is right that the administration of schools is fearful and that that is why they discriminate against conservatives, but I think he misses what they are fearful about. They are not ideological themselves. They are basically bureaucrats who take the path of least resistance. The left is far more fearsome than conservatives. Cross them and you’ll never hear the end of it. It’s hard to imagine the degree of self-assured fanatical self righteousness that could make someone get up in the middle of a restaurant and start shouting at a cabinet member (or anyone else). I try to imagine what it would take for me to do that and I just can’t think of anything that could trigger that. The fanatics scream Jump, and the school admins ask How high. If somehow conservatives became this fanatical and scared the admins more, the admins would take their side.
Private universities are one thing, but what about public universities?
Look up the percentage of annual operation revenues at any large public university – say, the University of Oklahoma, Penn State or the University of Alabama – which comes from state appropriations. In many cases the percentage/amount is precisely enough to cover the annual operating budget’s deficit. (Small public universities are usually more dependent on the state.)
Balky donors and the odd trustee are not going to make a bit of difference there. Their contributions have already been calculated and are tiny in the scope of the OB. Plus, large donors contribute to the capital, not the operating, budget.
Now explain to me, conservatives, why we elect majorities in state legislatures. Is it so they can rubber-stamp the expansion of “studies” programs on campus, hire new “scholars” to teach them, fund the tripling of administrative staffs to cultivate and cater to snowflake sensibilities and effect the indoctrination of our own children in progressive seminaries?
We have the money, the votes but not the control of the purse. When does that lunacy stop?
MAGA
A two-year technical degree is a fine alternative to the traditional four-year degree. The graduate gets into the job market two years sooner than his counterparts (although likely at a lower starting salary), and at a much lower cost. He has a chance to work his way up the food chain to a better job with a higher salary.
A friend of mine at work took an even different route (I’ve told this story before). She had three years of college under her belt, but got married her senior year and quit because she started making babies. Even without a four-year degree, she became a lead project controls engineer overseeing about six people, and was indispensible to our project team. Heck, her grade level was higher than mine, and I have a Masters!
A side note: More often than not, graduates find themselves working in a field only somewhat related to their majors, if at all (like my wife).
I would add that some employers happily make room in their schedules and provide other kinds of aid for an employee to gain a degree that is useful to their business (somewhat like the military does but with less taxpayer money). It’s good for all concerned and the degree is pretty much guaranteed to not be one of the useless varieties.
Good point. I’m not sure how many businesses do that though. They would certainly have to be large corporations, given the cost of college. A small business might be able to shell out a few hundred dollars per employee, but that’s only the cost of freakin’ books these days . . .
Aside: I’m still seething over the cost of my daughter’s calculus book. Calculus has been around for over 300 dang years! Why is this book better? More readable font? Sheesh . . .
True. It’s mostly about their trying to carve out schedule room for a would-be graduate.
Textbooks might be the biggest scam in all of education despite there being so many other strong contenders.
College free speech crisis?
That was a story years or decades ago.
Now the United States just has a free speech crisis.
Every day conservatives are banned from the big three — Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube/Google.
And that does not include all of the smaller companies and businesses across the nation.
(The Leftists really hate pro-Trump women like Betsy DeVos, Sarah Elizabeth Huckabee Sanders, Kirstjen Nielsen, Kellyanne Conway, Gina Haspel, Ivanka Trump, Melania Trump, etc. You can’t wear our fashion label or eat at our restaurant!)
Can you imagine these expletives saying that to members of organized crime? To actual dictators?