RUTHFULLY YOURS

Florida this week joined eight other states that have banned “free speech zones” at public colleges — which, in the topsy-turvy way things work on campus these days, is a win for free speech.
:

It’s a win because schools set up such zones in order to limit speech everywhere else. This cuts at the (orderly) free exchange of views that is supposed to be at the heart of any college’s mission.

But that ideal runs counter to the progressive dogma that young men and women need protection from ideas that somehow cause them pain. And it makes things tough on college administrators who must deal with the kids (and non-student radicals) who’ll happily stage a riot to serve their inner censors.

Thus Florida State, for example, offered a campus “compliance” map showing the exact locations where literature distribution and sign postings can take place — because the zones are otherwise so hard to find.

Yes: It actually takes a law to stop many school officials from caving in to the left.

Interestingly, the states that have taken this principled stand tend to be “purplish” ones, neither deep lefty blue nor righty red: Virginia, Missouri, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado, North Carolina, Tennessee and now Florida — plus Utah, whose many Mormons have historic reasons for respecting speech rights.

It’s shameful that such laws are needed — and depressing that states like New York are behind the curve.

The cost of college has risen at more than twice the rate of inflation for decades, and the increasing availability of federal student loans is a principal cause. But even as demands grow daily to do something about student debt and loan defaults, hardly anyone laments the demise of a once-proud American aspiration: working your way through college.

In 1956, as a freshman at Yale, I waited tables in a student dorm for about $1 an hour, 10 hours a week, over the 30-week academic year. I received a full scholarship, but even if it had ended, I recall that Yale’s “all in” price—including tuition, room and board—was $1,800 a year. My work during the term could have covered one-sixth of that.

Today tuition, room and board at Yale run $66,900. Working the same amount as I did—even at, say, $12 an hour, an increase of roughly one-third after inflation—produces income of $3,600, or slightly more than 5% of the total. To earn enough to pay for one-sixth of a Yale education would require an hourly wage of more than $37! Yale’s own literature, by the by, lists the amount that a freshman on scholarship can expect to contribute during the school year at $2,850. The same basic economics applies to summer employment.

Yale’s experience closely tracks what has happened at virtually all of America’s elite private colleges and universities. The situation in public schools is little better. A half-century ago, the tuition and fees at many such institutions were barely above zero. Fully working your way through college was a real possibility. Now a year’s education at a typical state university, even for in-state students, can easily exceed $25,000, well beyond what can be earned while studying full-time. That is why so many students at public institutions are now leaving college, whether or not they graduate, with mountains of debt.

To reduce their need to borrow, increasing numbers of students are attending community colleges for their first two years while continuing to live at home. Admittedly this helps, although at the cost of greatly diminishing the college experience. But it doesn’t change the financial realities once these students then transfer to four-year institutions. CONTINUE AT SITE

Ten years ago while teaching English at Emory University, I noticed a trend. Each year there seemed to be more and more girls on campus. Also, from the time I started teaching college in 1993 as a graduate student, I would hear gripes from male students about their high school teachers and college professors who made them read books by Amy Tan and listen to lectures on feminism, even in math.

As time passed, I also noticed a change in the demeanor of boys. Each year they seemed to become less confident. By 2013, my last year of teaching, many were walking in a stooped-over shuffle and ending statements with a question.

In 2008, in an article for the Weekly Standard, I looked into the decline of boys’ academic performance. Forced to read books about feminine topics and forced to learn under feminine pedagogy, they weren’t performing well academically. While slightly more men than women held bachelor’s degrees in 2005, women made up 57 percent of total fall enrollments and were much more likely to graduate. By 2014, 30.2 percent of women held bachelor’s degrees opposed to 29.9 percent of men. Among younger adults, aged 25 to 34, 37.5 percent of women hold bachelor’s degrees, but only 29.5 percent of men do.

Men in 2008 still held a slight advantage in earning doctorate degrees, but were projected to drop behind women by 2014. Today, women earn the majority of doctoral degrees and outnumber men in law school and medical school, as Tucker Carlson reports. He also reports that younger women now surpass men in rates of homeownership and wages. Men’s addiction and suicide rates are rising, while testosterone levels are plummeting.

From Bad to Worse to “Uncomfortable”
In the intervening 10 years, as things have gotten worse for boys and men, the rhetoric about “white male privilege” has become more strident. There are mandatory classes on diversity. Workshops on “toxic masculinity” tell men they aren’t OK. Men are even attacked forthe way they sit on a chair or a subway seat. Many teachers make it a policy to call on boys last in class and to give girls extra attention. On most campuses when it comes to charges of rape, there is a presumption of guilt. Fraternities have been banished on many campuses.

Inclusion is merely the new soft, cottony term for marginalizing, shutting down, and kicking out the disfavored.

When a large-scale survey of college students’ attitudes toward free speech was released this week, the terms were puzzling. Students were presented with the following choice: Is it more important to protect free-speech rights or promote a diverse and inclusive society? A disturbing 53 percent chose the latter option, including large majorities of women, blacks, and Democrats.

The question on everyone’s mind was: How can it be that “free speech” and “inclusion” are opposites? The whole point of the First Amendment, in its clauses on both religion and expression, is to protect the right to think and express unpopular, minority, even radical views. Yet the question in the survey was cleverly phrased: It unveiled the troubling truth that like so many other euphemisms, inclusion has come to signify its opposite. The important student constituency of the Democratic party simply revealed what is true of the Left overall: When they say “inclusion,” they’re talking about “exclusion.”

The survey doesn’t make sense unless you acknowledge this fact. “Free speech” and “in the name of diversity, everyone is allowed to say their piece” aren’t opposing ideas. “Free speech” vs. “shut up, heretic” are. When these students extol “inclusion” they aren’t talking about being welcoming to minorities, women, or unpopular viewpoints. They aren’t thinking about Jason Riley (a black author who was disinvited from a Virginia Tech speaking engagement because of the administration’s fear that he might spark protests) or Christina Hoff Sommers (who this month was blocked from entering the forum for her speech at the law school of Oregon’s Lewis & Clark College, then repeatedly shouted down and interrupted, then asked to cut off her remarks by the dean of diversity and inclusion because the students were getting “antsy”). They are portraying free speech as a zero-sum game in which the speech of X cancels out the speech of Y, who after all could have been appearing in that hall or on that op-ed page instead.

Fewer and fewer college students are choosing to major in English. Professor Duke Pesta, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh laments that and thinks he knows what it will take to arrest that decline. As he writes in today’s Martin Center article,

A major in English was once a serious endeavor masquerading as a frivolous one. Despite the occasional “do you want fries with that?” condescension from business or science students, the study of literature — immersion in its aesthetic, historical, and philosophical contexts — conserved for posterity a reservoir of truth and paid forward for humanity a legacy of beauty that inspired business to philanthropize the arts, and science to technologize our access to the great authors.

Today, a major in English is an increasingly frivolous endeavor masquerading as a serious one.

What has gone wrong? The problem, Pesta argues, is that English Departments have largely been taken over by “progressives” who don’t care much about great literature, but are fixated on leftist politics. You know the type — everything must be analyzed from race, class, and gender angles.

If the people in charge wanted to turn things around (and Pesta isn’t saying they do), there are three big things they could do.

First, go back to teaching classic books and authors. He writes,

For thousands of years, Western culture defined, evaluated, and accepted certain values and aesthetic experiences as canonical. These values had very little to do with politics, broadly understood, but expounded higher moral understandings and offered deeper insights into human nature. Racial, sexual, and economic biases were never the primary (or secondary or tertiary) criteria by which canon-building occurred.

Second, focus on ideas, not ideologies. Pesta rightly says,

The classics only matter if we give them fair hearing. Across English departments, postmodern reading strategies drown out or shout down original texts and voices, reducing them to strawmen and co-opting them to speak the language of progressivism.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The day before I was slated to speak at Claremont McKenna College last April, I got one of those red-flagged “urgent” e-mails from an administrator. She explained that the college had picked up word of a brewing protest, and was considering moving the event to a building with fewer plate-glass windows and better means of egress. This was not exactly reassuring.

After hearing no additional news about a potential disruption, the administration decided to keep the event in the original building, the Athenaeum. But by the time I arrived, a massive mob of protesters had gathered, so a police escort brought me into the building through a secret passageway.

The auditorium was almost completely empty. Some 300 students had blockaded the building, making mincemeat of the police barricades that had been set up to keep the entrances open. The police simply stood down, as is too often true in our Black Lives Matter era. They didn’t want to offend the students, and they certainly didn’t want to be caught on video using force.

But what was most disconcerting was the fact that the few people who were in the room were transfixed by what was happening outside. Students were shouting and pounding on the plate-glass windows. The lectern had been moved, before the speech, away from the windows, so that when the lights went on inside, I would not be visible to the mob outside.

I took two questions via livestreaming, and at that point the police decided that they could no longer guarantee my safety. They quickly devised an escape plan: I was hustled through the kitchen and into a waiting police van, and sped away to the Claremont Police Department.

The incident was not the high point of open-mindedness in academic history.

FRANK FUREDI: We have to remember that the type of horrible experience that Heather had is just the tip of the iceberg. Fortunately, aggressive mobs of students are still relatively rare, but for every mob scene, there are lots of incidents of censorship and intimidation going on in college classrooms, seminars, and cafeterias.

These incidents represent a much larger problem. One set of radical political views dominates our campuses, and students who deviate from those views are being forced to self-censor. Americans tend to think that this trend is the legacy of the 1960s radicalism that played out in this country. Yet the same phenomenon is occurring across the entire Anglosphere. Similar attitudes have emerged on campuses in Canada, Australia, and my home country of England—none of which had quite the same experience with cultural leftism in the 1960s.

In my latest book, Populism and the Culture Wars in Europe, I argue that these struggles on campuses have little or nothing to do with 1960s radicalism. Today’s radicals have certainly adopted some of the rhetoric of old-fashioned leftism, but they’ve reformulated it into a therapeutic identity politics that would be unrecognizable to the antiracists of the 1960s.

A bit of good news out of Florida where the legislature passed an education reform bill that includes a provision that would outlaw campus “free speech zones.”

Liberals have used these misnamed “free speech zones” to marginalize people and ideas they didn’t agree with. Florida becomes the first state to ban them.

Campus Reform:

Joe Cohn, legislative policy director for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) told Campus Reform that the elimination of free speech zones will benefit students.

“Students shouldn’t have their free speech rights quarantined into misleadingly labeled free speech zones and unfortunately public institutions in Florida are doing just that,” he said.

Burnett also observed that the “Cause of Action” would allow students to sue the public institution in a state court if their First Amendment rights are violated, noting that this would be cheaper to litigate as opposed to a federal court.

“The Florida affiliate (of the ACLU) is somewhat of an outlier here in the position that they are taking, and in this particular instance, we think they’re wrong and we look forward to working with them on issues of common ground in the future,” he said, claiming that the Florida ACLU deviates in this respect from the other ACLU chapters across the country.

In a statement to Campus Reform, Generation Opportunity (GO-FL), a nonpartisan organization committed to more freedom and a bright future for all young Americans, said that the ending of free speech zones will help students confront challenging ideas.