RUTHFULLY YOURS

Only apologists determined to avert their eyes and cover their ears could deny with a straight face that higher education in America today nurses hostility to free speech.

Sporadic eruptions of that hostility have made the headlines. Last year, in early February, violent protests swept across the University of California, Berkeley against right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, causing the university to cancel his speech. In March, Middlebury College students disrupted a talk by the distinguished American Enterprise Institute social scientist Charles Murray and assaulted his host, Professor Allison Stanger, sending her to the hospital. In April, fear of more violence compelled UC-Berkeley to rescind an invitation to the acerbic conservative columnist Ann Coulter. Last fall semester, student efforts to shut down speech on campus skyrocketed.

Less overt forms of hostility to free speech on campus run deeper. Colleges and universities teach students that free speech is merely one among many values. Campus authorities encourage students to expect that schools will silence, or at least cordon off, offensive opinions. In the humanities and social sciences, professors routinely exclude from class discussion, syllabi, and departmental offerings ideas for which a good case can be made but with which they disagree.

Some want to believe that controversies over campus free speech are a tempest in a teapot. While acknowledging that walling off students from disfavored opinions for four or five years may instill bad intellectual habits, the optimists suppose that once these graduates take their place in the real world they’ll quickly discover that the Constitution provides broad protection for speech, including the expression of, say, conservative convictions that university majorities often deem appalling and degrading. The hope is that hostility to free speech nursed on campus stays on campuses.

The Trump administration is reportedly planning to scrap a controversial Obama-era education regulation that penalized schools for having disparate rates of discipline and turned school districts across the country into war zones.

The U.S. Departments of Education and Justice issued the federal directive jointly in 2014, warning public school districts receiving federal funding that they “could face investigation and funding cuts if they fail to reduce statistical ‘disparities’ in discipline by race,” the New York Post reported.

After Mayor de Blasio adopted the more lenient school discipline standards in early 2015, “more schools saw fighting, disrespect, drugs, gang activity,” said Max Eden, an education policy expert and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

While NYC school suspensions are down, crime has spiked in the city’s public schools, including major crimes such as robbery and arson, new NYPD data show. The current academic year has seen the first school murder in more than 20 years — a stabbing at a Bronx high school — and the first time a gun was fired inside a school in more than 15 years. What’s more, new state Education Department data reveal there were more rapes and other sex crimes at NYC public schools during the 2017-2018 school year than any year since 2007.

The Obama-era school discipline policy received fresh scrutiny in the wake of the Parkland school shooting when critics said it prevented police from using available tools that could have stopped it.

According to an instructor at Columbia University, eating a vegan diet can help fight racist violence.

The adjunct lecturer, Christopher-Sebastian McJetters, made the comments during a lecture for Cornell Students for Animal Rights, according to the Cornell Daily Sun.

“I want to talk about the psychology that goes into why we do this, the way that we do this, and the ways that animal violence and exploitation manifests itself outside of our food system,” he said.

According to McJetters, “what we do to other animals informs how we treat one another on this planet, and it is always — always — someone who doesn’t have institutional power, and they’re usually brown.”

“Whiteness has analyzed us and decided that we are not worthy of our individual selves and our individual bodily autonomy and that we get to be objectified and used,” he said. “Both of us, black people and animals.”

McJetters’s perspective is particularly interesting to me because lately I’ve been seeing people complain that aspects of veganism are racist. In January, a sociologist claimed that veganism had strong connections to “white masculinity” because the male vegans she interviewed used facts rather than emotions to explain the reasons behind their veganism. That same month, two professors wrote an article about how Beyoncé’s support for veganism “reproduces existing patterns of discrimination and inequality.”

On Monday, students at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) protested to demand the school’s on-campus health center provide transgender drugs, which it stopped providing last spring.

The on-campus student health center had briefly provided hormone replacement therapy (HRT) under Dr. Annamaria Kontor, who was fired last May for exceeding her authority in providing these drugs. Kontor had reportedly ignored several notices urging her to stop the practice.

“HRT is not a luxury that people just want — they need this. It’s a medication,” Natasha Amadasun, a student at the protest who identified as non-binary and transgender but does not take HRT, told the Democrat and Chronicle. Amadasun works at the Q Center, an LGBT establishment on campus.

“A lot of students come into the Q center with questions (about access) and we can’t really help them because we don’t have much information,” Amadasun, who goes by the pronoun “they,” told the paper.

Since the on-campus center no longer provides HRT, students who identify with the gender opposite their birth sex go to either Trillium Health or the University of Rochester Medical Center, both of which have long wait lists and can be difficult to access without vehicles, the Democrat and Chronicle reported.

Kenji Vann, a biological woman identifying as a man, reported on relying on parents and friends to drive him to Strong Memorial Hospital for HRT appointments. Having hormone treatments available on campus “would be so much more convenient for scheduling,” Vann said.

“Students are tired of waiting and feeling kind of invisible, especially on a campus with such a large queer presence,” Taryn Brennan, president of the LGBT group OUTspoken, which organized the protest, told the Democrat and Chronicle. The protest also complained about the policy on gender-neutral bathrooms on campus, and demanded more accessible information for LGBT students.

Perhaps ironically, RIT has a reputation for championing LGBT identities, including offering “gender-inclusive” housing.

Despite this stance, the school insisted that Dr. Kontor did not have the proper authority to provide HRT. In a letter firing Kontor, Dr. Wendy Gelbard, the college’s associate vice president of Student Health, Counseling and Wellness, wrote, “The Student Health Center’s practice prohibits prescribing hormone therapy for the purpose of gender transition.”

Gelbard later repeated that administering and monitoring HRT for the purpose of gender transition was “beyond the scope of practice of the Student Health Center.” She also wrote that Kontor had ignored several notices not to provide hormone therapy to transgender students — notices Kontor denied receiving. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hampton Middle School has a problem.

The school in Hampton, Georgia managed to make national news twice in one week.

A sixth-grade teacher from the school was caught on tape ranting against Trump’s slogan of Make America Great Again. “Maybe he’s talking about it was great during segregation in the ‘60s. Is that what he’s talking about?”

“He must be talking about when it was great for Europeans,” Johnetta Benton sneered. “Because when it comes to minorities, America has never been great for minorities.”

Josie Orihuela , the Cuban-American student who tried to argue with her teacher, was told that she had no right to complain because her European ancestors have killed millions.

The teacher, who was supposed to be talking about Black History Month, also claimed that all Americans were illegal immigrants who had stolen the land. “When you say immigrants are killing folks, that’s us. That’s you, you, you, you and you,” she said, pointing at the different students, including Josie.

Josie had been named after her grandfather, who had fled Castro’s Cuba, and had Cherokee ancestry.

Last week, a student panel at Yale University suggested that white supremacy is central to nonprofit charities. According to Yale students, the “white savior” mentality turns charities into a racist and oppressive “nonprofit industrial complex” keeping people of color down.

“The nonprofit industrial complex is very real and very alive in New Haven and needs to be dismantled just like any other oppressive system,” Kerry Ellington, organizer for People Against Police Brutality, argued. “White folks are centering themselves in these spaces and don’t know how to listen to the communities they serve.”

The U.S. Health Justice Collaborative, an initiative started by students in Yale’s health professional schools, organized and hosted the event. The panelists included a journalist, nonprofit directors, and several organizers. Each of them discussed how their careers in nonprofits involved “white saviorism.”

Over 1,300 people said they were “interested” in the event on Facebook, and many attendees were turned away at the door, organizer Robert Rock, a senior with the class of 2018, told the Yale Daily News. Those turned away could watch the event livestreamed on Facebook.

Barbara Tinney, executive director of the New Haven Family Alliance and a member of the panel, described her initial shock at the “audacity” of the event’s title: “Paved With Good Intentions: White Saviorism and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.” Even so, Tinney said the panel echoed themes she had previously discussed with her colleagues over her long career in the New Haven nonprofit scene.

Tinney suggested there is a conflict between the work nonprofits do and “many of the oppressive power dynamics they can help maintain.”

Panelists lamented the predominance of white people at the head of nonprofits, and launched into a discussion of “white fragility,” a term referring to the alleged widespread avoidance of difficult racial discussions in order to prevent “white discomfort.”

“When my white allies use their claws, they could get pushback,” Kica Matos, director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change, said on the panel. “When I hiss, I could get shot.” Even so, she suggested that discomfort should not stop “white allies from showing up to support people of color,” the Daily News reported.

Journalist Jordan Flaherty half-jokingly referred to Batman as a “white savior,” the Daily News reported, “because he is a rich white man who dedicates his money to gadgetry and vigilante justice, rather than investing in his community.”

The “white savior” panelists suggested that many nonprofits, led by white people, misunderstand the needy communities they aim to serve, entrenching poverty rather than alleviating it. CONTINUE AT SITE

What took them so long? That was our first question when we heard the latest news about the distinguished University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. Last summer, Professor Wax created a minor disturbance in the force of politically correct groupthink when she co-authored an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.”

What, a college professor arguing in favor of “bourgeois” values? Mirabile dictu, yes. Professor Wax and her co-author, Professor Larry Alexander from the University of San Diego, argued not only that the “bourgeois” values regnant in American society in the 1950s were beneficial to society as a whole, but also that they were potent aides to disadvantaged individuals seeking to better themselves economically and socially. “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake,” Professors Wax and Alexander advised.

Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

Such homely advice rankled, of course. Imagine telling the professoriate to be patriotic, to work hard, to be civic-minded or charitable. Quelle horreur!

Wax and Alexander were roundly condemned by their university colleagues. Thirty-three of Wax’s fellow law professors at Penn signed an “Open Letter” condemning her op-ed. “We categorically reject Wax’s claims,” they thundered.

What they found especially egregious was Wax and Alexander’s observation that “All cultures are not equal.” That hissing noise you hear is the sharp intake of breath at the utterance of such a sentiment. The tort was compounded by Wax’s later statements in an interview that “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans” because “Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.”

Tenure used to protect professors against termination for anything short of criminal behavior. In today’s PC climate, however, it’s no match for administrators who want to get rid of someone who’s said things they dislike. Violations of vague “harassment” policies are the weapon they employ.

That’s what Louisiana State professor Teresa Buchanan discovered in 2015 when she was terminated over her tendency to use coarse, blunt language. Even though she was a good teacher (she taught in LSU’s school of education), the administration decided to fire her after some complaints from students and an outsider. Objections from the faculty senate, which opposed Buchanan’s firing, made no difference.

With the assistance of FIRE, Buchanan took her case to court, but lost when the district court judge dismissed her complaint. I write about the case in this Martin Center article.

I have never been a great fan of tenure, but universities that have it should not undermine it with terminations for speaking in ways that offend “progressive” ears. Faculty (tenured or not) shouldn’t have to worry that the next thing they say or write will upset one of those people on campus who are looking for excuses to drop the ax on their perceived ideological enemies.