RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/05/a_delusive_assurance_that_all_is_well_on_campus_140713.html

For many decades, defenders of liberal education — not only conservatives — have been warning the public about colleges’ and universities’ hostility to free speech. If the warnings are unsound, why has controversy persisted? If they are sound, why hasn’t the problem been corrected?

One tranquilizing possibility explains away the problem: Malcontents there will always be. The boundaries of free speech are inherently uncertain and always fluctuating. Free speech, and debate about free speech’s limits, are welcome on campus. Controversy only persists because of outside agitators ignorant of university culture and determined to extract partisan advantage by misrepresenting campus life to a polarized public.

But the persistence of the criticism is also consistent with an alarming possibility: Universities’ determination to regulate speech and curtail dissent is entrenched on campus; unfree speech is entwined with the structure of university governance; and censorship, both open and covert, serves the interests of the huge and self-reproducing progressive majorities that dominate university administration and the professoriate. Consequently, higher education is exceedingly resistant to reform.

The question is of special concern because all of our other freedoms are bound up with free speech, which enables us to contribute to and learn from public debate, hold officials accountable, and associate with others to advance our private interests and the public good. The security and vigor of free speech depends in turn on the lessons about liberty of thought and discussion taught — both in the classroom and through the norms and rules that constitute the educational enterprise — by our schools, not least institutions of higher education.

The president of Columbia University says not to worry, all is well. In last month’s Atlantic, in an article headlined “Free Speech on Campus Is Doing Just Fine, Thank You,” Lee Bollinger asserts that First Amendment norms are evolving as they have throughout American history. And he offers his assurance, as a free speech scholar as well as a university president, that higher education is standing fast in its commitment to present both sides of the argument. “At Columbia and at thousands of other schools across the United States,” he writes, “controversial ideas are routinely expressed by speakers on both the left and the right, and have been for decades.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/intellectual-dark-web-quiet-revolution/

A group of mostly young writers challenge the Left’s excesses.

The dominant assumption in conservative circles is that college campuses are left-wing echo chambers with little room for dissenting opinion. But this assumption misses a host of previously apolitical or liberal college students who are voluntarily seeking out conservative thought as an alternative to the contemporary liberal-arts curriculum.

The leading figures of this movement, known colloquially as the Intellectual Dark Web, are a loose assortment of young intellectuals who have gained notoriety for articulating opposition to some aspect of what they see as the porous narratives of identity politics, The IDW has become an industry of sorts — Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan are wildly popular — and it is leading something of a quiet grassroots insurgency against campus intelligentsia throughout America. As a collective, the IDW provides college students with an alternative to the intersectional narrative that is the foundation of the contemporary progressive belief system. Identity politics is not gospel, they say, and it is not mandatory to accept its premises as unquestionable truth. To be sure, so far there is no readily available evidence that demonstrates the ubiquity of this movement, but the explosive popularity of many IDW members — particularly among young people — makes it difficult to conclude that their influence is not significant.

At first glance, it may be difficult to identify any uniform ideological trait they all share. The IDW contains religious conservatives and liberal atheists alike; its diverse cohort includes traditionalists, rationalist liberals, gay comedians, libertarian potheads, and others. Jonah Goldberg wrote last year that members of the IDW are unified only by their objection to the corrosive dogmas of trendy discourse and by the fact that they have all provoked the ire of those who espouse them.

Yet this new class of intellectuals serves for many as the new gatekeeper to the Right. Through them, many college students — myself included — have found their way to Edmund Burke. And to the convert whose access to the conservative tradition came through this cohort of thinkers, it is no coincidence that, despite the variety of political beliefs espoused by individual members of the IDW, they often lead many of their followers to a more traditionalist conservatism.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/05/georgetown-professor-equates-american-flag-nazi-swastikas/

On MSNBC Wednesday, Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson equated the American flag to Nazi swastikas and Klu Klux Klan cross-burning.

“Those symbols are symbols of hate,” Dyson said.

MSNBC host Hallie Jackson interviewed Dyson in light of the controversy ignited by Nike’s terminated shoe design featuring the American Betsy Ross flag in response to protests by former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Addressing the argument that Nike’s decision was “PC [political correctness] culture run amok,” Jackson asked Dyson to articulate why the American flag is so offensive to some.

“Why don’t we wear a swastika for July 4th?” Dyson said. “Because, I don’t know, it makes a difference. The cross burning on somebody’s lawn. Why don’t we just have a Nike celebration of the cross, those symbols are symbols of hate. So we can take PC culture back.”