RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-owns-the-university-florida-hamilton-center-board-administrator-students-dei-bureaucracy-tenure-651c812f?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

American higher education is in crisis. The rise of diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies and a growing intolerance for dissent has spurred political battles for control of campus decision-making in North Carolina, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere. The fights point to a fundamental question: Who “owns” a university? Perhaps the question is better phrased: To whom does a school belong?

In the competitive private marketplace, ownership is clear. When Elon Musk buys a company like Twitter, few question his authority to fire staff or change access rules. While practices vary enormously among the thousands of American colleges and universities, seven groups often claim at least partial ownership and control:

• The board. Most schools, public or private, are overseen by a legally constituted governing board.

• The politicians. At public institutions, state government usually is the legal “owner” of the school.

• The administrators. A school’s president and senior bureaucrats are vested with executive responsibility, which resembles ownership.

• The faculty. The professors who administer academic offerings and conduct grant-inducing research often feel the school belongs to them.

• The students. They are a primary reason for the school’s existence and their families pay substantial tuition and fees.

• The alumni. Graduates constitute the donor base at most private schools and some public ones as well.

• The accrediting agencies. The federal Education Department charges these bodies with certifying an institution’s right to confer degrees.

https://thespectator.com/topic/stop-law-students-blocking-free-speech-stanford/

When a federal appellate judge speaks at a major law school, he should expect tough questions from a learned audience. He should not expect to be shouted down. When he tries to speak but is heckled, jeered and disrupted, he should expect a university administrator to step in, read the students the riot act and restore order. He shouldn’t expect that administrator to sympathize with the disruptive students and let the trouble continue, as the feckless bureaucrat at Stanford Law School did.  

Her shameful behavior is hardly unique. It’s characteristic of mid-level bureaucrats hired to push “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” at universities across the country. They show very little concern for free speech, alternative views or robust debate. That’s a very big problem since those are the very essence of higher education in a democracy. 

These metastasizing DEI bureaucracies endow political ideologues with unchecked power over students’ lives and campus activities. The episode at Stanford shows how they use it. That needs to be fixed. One path to doing that (and lowering the cost of higher education, now encumbered by top-heavy administrative structures) is to abolish the entire DEI apparatus. 

The victim at Stanford was federal appellate judge Kyle Duncan and all the students who came to hear him. True, the university later apologized, but that’s just cheap talk unless it is followed by serious actions against the disruptive students and the administrator who failed in her basic responsibility. Of that, we have heard nothing. Only the naive expect much better from Stanford (or Yale, Harvard, Columbia and dozens more). Stanford students are so committed to their illiberal views, so cloaked in moral righteousness, that they actually protested the dean even issuing an apology. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/future-lawyers-who-are-afraid-of-debate/

Something disturbing is taking place with increasing regularity at elite law schools. For the third time this year, a guest speaker has been rudely confronted by a mob of tendentious scolds intent on suppressing views with which they disagree.

Not content merely with expressing their opposing point of view, these campus brownshirts are so sure of their beliefs, so positive that their perception is the valid one, the only true one, that they are comfortable with suppressing the alternate opinions and ideology of those whose speech they seek to silence.

And they exert their unearned moral and intellectual superiority to silence ideological opponents because feckless administrators have tolerated this outrageous behavior—the use of what is known as the “heckler’s veto”— for too long now and are reaping the inevitable backlash.

The heckler’s veto is an unethical tactic used the advance one’s own beliefs by defeating an ideological opponent’s argument by silencing him, instead of having to offer a compelling argument of one’s own; someone with alternate views has his speech canceled or, if it is held, shouted down, disrupted, and jeered at.

This is precisely what took place at the Stanford Law School on March 9th when Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan was scheduled to deliver a lecture on the topic of “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter.” Instead of being greeted by a polite group of students eager to learn from a federal judge’s wide experience, Judge Duncan, who had been invited by Stanford’s Federalist Society (FedSoc), instead stood at the front of a full classroom with some 100 jeering, insulting activists who only purpose of attending was to silence Duncan and prevent him from speaking at all.