RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mr. Struppa is president of Chapman University.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing lately, throughout the academy and in the news, about donations the Charles Koch Foundation has been making to universities. In the heat of the debate, many details of these donations have been described inaccurately or distorted purposefully. But after the allegations, irate commentaries and internal academic battles, the actual outcome of opposition to these gifts is to limit the academic freedom the protesters claim to champion.

I am president of Chapman University, a midsize private institution in Southern California. We recently received a $15 million grant to establish an institute dedicated to challenging the perceived tension between economics and the humanities, reintegrating their study in the spirit of Adam Smith. The institute is the brainchild of my distinguished colleague Vernon Smith, a Nobel laureate in economics, and his collaborators. Appropriately enough, the institute is called the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy, where “Smith” refers to both Adam and Vernon.

The institute is doing exciting and innovative work, offering a curriculum that infuses the humanities with desperately needed energy. I was thrilled to see the enthusiasm among students taking courses developed by the institute.

Yet the Smith curriculum and the faculty who devise it have come under attack because one-third of the $15 million gift came from the Koch Foundation. The criticism, led by the “UnKoch My Campus” organization, takes a familiar tone: The Koch brothers are trying to infiltrate the university so they can dictate curricula and research priorities. Ultimately, the critics’ complaint is that the gift is a challenge to academic freedom.

The most remarkable thing about the title of this column is that not one reader will think it’s a joke. That, my friends, is further proof of the low esteem in which most Americans hold our universities.

The Left has rendered our universities, in the description of Harvard professor Steven Pinker, laughingstocks.

As reported in the Cornell Daily Sun and then around the world, this is what actually happened last week at Cornell University, one of our “Ivy League” universities: Senior Letitia Chai presented a trial run of her scholar senior thesis wearing a blue button-down shirt and cutoff jean shorts. Her professor, Rebekah Maggor, asked her, “is that really what you would wear?”

The professor went on to say that Chai’s shorts were “too short”—that as a speaker she was making a “statement” with her clothes. As reported in the newspaper, “The class does not have a formalized dress code, but asks students to ‘dress appropriately for the persona (they) will present.’”

Offended and hurt by the professor’s suggestion, Chai decided that she would present her thesis in even less clothing. She appeared before her fellow students in her shirt and shorts and then removed them. As she stripped down to a bra and panties, she explained: “I am more than Asian. I am more than a woman. I am more than Letitia Chai. I am a human being, and I ask you to take this leap of faith, to take this next step—or rather, this next strip—in our movement and to join me in revealing to each other and to seeing each other for who we truly are: members of the human race. . . . We are so triumphant, but most importantly, we are equals.”

Twenty-eight of the 44 audience members followed suit, stripping down.

Political correctness and identity politics are corrupting colleges and universities around the country, public and private, even in states usually regarded as Republican bastions. It may surprise some readers, but in the home state of stalwart conservative Senator Ted Cruz, where the GOP controls both houses of the legislature and holds all statewide elected offices, leftist zealots at the University of Texas are in control and doing their best to mimic—or perhaps outdo—UC Berkeley.

Under the leadership of university president Greg Fenves, UT is being molded into a burnt-orange knock-off of Evergreen State—a showcase for left-wing academic fads. Fenves, a Berkeley alumnus who also taught there, has overseen the removal of “offensive” historical statuary (including one commemorating a former Texas governor, James Stephen Hogg); an expensive legal battle to defend the school’s use of racial preferences in admissions; the expansion of a highly paid diversity bureaucracy (with a staff approaching 100); the denial of due process in UT’s handling of sexual-misconduct claims; the implementation of campus speech codes and the creation of “bias response teams”; and, in 2016, UT’s first international black studies conference, featuring the notorious Communist activist Angela Davis (a former member of the FBI’s most wanted list) as a keynote speaker.

Many UT alumni place greater importance on the success of the school’s sports teams than they do on academic politics, paying scant attention to Fenves’s transformation of their alma mater into a social-justice academy. Despite his aggressive activist agenda, the only significant pushback Fenves has faced thus far was over the university’s “MasculinUT” program, a widely ridiculed campaign designed to combat “toxic masculinity” on campus. The risible initiative suggested that men suffer when they are told to “act like a man” or are encouraged to be the “breadwinner.” The $330,000-per-year Dean of Students, Soncia Reagins-Lilly, was forced to put the program on hold when national media and radio talk show hosts mocked it.

Students at the University of Michigan, beware. If you say anything politically incorrect or out-of-line with the political and social orthodoxy on your campus, you may get a knock on your dorm room door from the university’s equivalent of the Thought Police, and be forced into a re-education camp. Or you may be suspended or thrown out of school, potentially damaging your educational prospects and your entire future professional career.

If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider a new lawsuit filed in federal court in Michigan by Speech First, Inc., against the president of the University of Michigan, other senior university officials, and the entire board of trustees. Speech First is a nationwide membership organization of students, faculty, and alumni (including students at Michigan) dedicated to preserving First Amendment rights on college campuses.

That is a very tough job these days when so many students and administrators don’t believe the First Amendment should apply in their dormitories, their classrooms, or anywhere else on campus (or off campus, for that matter).

Don’t be surprised if what I am about to describe sounds like a scene out of George Orwell’s 1984, where the Thought Police would arrest any citizen criticizing the regime or otherwise disagreeing with the official view on everything from politics to culture. And they used surveillance that included informers and electronic devices like cameras and microphones.

Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness.

A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.

The National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that funds university research, is consumed by diversity ideology. Progress in science, it argues, requires a “diverse STEM workforce.” Programs to boost diversity in STEM pour forth from its coffers in wild abundance. The NSF jump-started the implicit-bias industry in the 1990s by underwriting the development of the implicit association test (IAT). (The IAT purports to reveal a subject’s unconscious biases by measuring the speed with which he associates minority faces with positive or negative words; see “Are We All Unconscious Racists?,” Autumn 2017.) Since then, the NSF has continued to dump millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism. In July 2017, it awarded $1 million to the University of New Hampshire and two other institutions to develop a “bias-awareness intervention tool.” Another $2 million that same month went to the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University to “remediate microaggressions and implicit biases” in engineering classrooms.

Fascinating numbers from a new study by Mitchell Langbert. And its results just go to further reinforce the Freedom Center’s call for intellectual diversity in academia.

The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans. The political registration in most of the remaining 61 percent, with a few important exceptions, is slightly more than zero percent but nevertheless absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation and in favor of Democratic affiliation. Thus, 78.2 percent of the academic departments in my sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.

A Cornell student delivered a thesis lecture in her underwear in order to combat systemic oppression.

Sorting out the tangled jumble of ideas that together define feminism can be a head-scratching experience. “We aren’t just sexual commodities,” some of them say, as they strip down to their lingerie.

An “I’m Spartacus” moment took place at Cornell University the other day, but because it was led by a young woman who grew up in a sex-drenched culture, it was more like an “I’m Victoria’s Secret” moment.

“Strip, everybody,” said senior Letitia Chai after removing her clothes down to her bra and panties to deliver her thesis. The Cornell Daily Sun reports that 28 of 44 students present doffed their clothing in solidarity.

Chai was reacting to the systematic oppression of being asked whether it was a great idea to deliver a lecture on the refugee crisis while wearing skimpy cut-offs. The professor of the class, “Acting in Public: Performance in Everyday Life,” was trying to do Chai a favor; college boys, like boys in general, are easily distracted by the sight of female flesh and are less likely to process what a woman is saying when they’re leering at her body parts.

Moreover, to the extent a college professor’s job is to prepare young people for the real world by gently nudging them away from teen habits and toward the way adults who take their careers seriously behave, the pedagogue was providing Chai with useful counseling. A year at Cornell costs a bit more than $70,000, and it is axiomatic that a degree from such an Ivy League university is mainly seen, these days, as a method for enhancing students’ value on the job market. College students need to be taught extremely basic skills like how to write an email, so it isn’t obvious that they understand that they shouldn’t show up for a job dressed like their last gig was prowling Eighth Avenue asking men, “Want a date?”

Progressives dominate all but a few corners of American academia, but apparently they want it all. Witness the political and media assault on George Mason University, an island of intellectual diversity in Northern Virginia that has committed the sin of accepting money from conservative donors.

A public university with some 36,000 students, George Mason has made a mark in economic debates through its Mercatus Center. This has caught the attention of an outfit called UnKoch My Campus, which claims that donors like Charles and David Koch inappropriately influence university decisions. The demand is for “transparency” but the real goal is to silence conservative views.

George Mason recently released hundreds of pages of public records in response to requests by Transparent GMU, the local UnKoch affiliate. They include contracts and correspondence related to a $30 million donation in 2016, the largest in school history. Ten million dollars came from the Koch Foundation, and $20 million from an anonymous donor represented by attorney Leonard Leo. Mr. Leo is also a vice president of the Federalist Society, the non-secret network of conservative lawyers.

Cue the outrage. Among the horrors supposedly uncovered by UnKoch is that one condition of these gifts was that George Mason rename its law school after Antonin Scalia. UnKoch wants everyone to know that the Great Scalia was “one of the most ideological and polarizing Supreme Court Justice [sic] in history.” OMG, as the kids say. The New York Times ran a nearly full-page story on the documents.

Does anyone say “department store” anymore? If you’re a Millennial or maybe even a tad older, you may not even be aware of what a department store is. If you’re thinking, Walmart or Target, or even Kohl’s, think again.

Until the 1970s or so, department stores were grand affairs; multi-story edifices, arranged in “departments,” and organized by floor. You needed to take an elevator, usually operated by a real person, to get to the floor that stocked whatever you were looking for. And as the elevator approached a floor, the operator would shout out the stops like a train conductor: “Fourth floor, kitchen appliances! Fifth floor, ladies lingerie!”

These days, you won’t find too many department store elevator operators, but even if you could, Richard Ned Lebow, a professor of political theory at King’s College London, recently showed that it’s no job for an amateur. A lot can go wrong just calling out the floors.

While attending an academic convention, Ledbow was riding in a hotel elevator―not in a department store elevator―with other passengers, including a number of women. Instead of saying the number of the floor he wanted to another passenger to press, Lebow quipped “Ladies Lingerie” as his floor choice.

Anyone who’d ever taken an old-fashioned department store elevator ride would have gotten the joke, and probably chuckled. Anyone not schooled in department store lore but possessed of good manners and an unexcitable mind probably would have ignored the comment, or thought this guy wandered into the wrong building. And that would be the end of it.

But that was just the beginning of it for Simona Sharoni, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Merrimack College. Sharoni was also on that elevator, and Lebow’s seems to have crack ruined her whole day.

Sharoni didn’t think Lebow was only joking. She couldn’t imagine anyone having the temerity to “make a reference to men shopping for lingerie while attending an academic conference.”

Right. Who does that? But still . . . what’s the problem?

Whether you like the joke or not, this should have been handled between the two professors without involving a bureaucracy.

Last month, a King’s College professor told a harmless joke on an elevator during an International Studies Association conference — and now, he’s facing disciplinary charges.

According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Richard Ned Lebow was on a crowded elevator when Simona Sharoni, a professor of gender studies at Merrimack College, asked him what floor he needed, and Lebow jokingly answered, “ladies’ lingerie.”

Seems harmless, right? At the very least, nothing to write home about, right? Apparently not. Sharoni got so offended by the joke that she filed a complaint with the International Studies Association.

“I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that we froze and didn’t confront him,” she wrote in the complaint.

It gets worse: ISA actually determined that Lebow’s joke had violated the group’s code of conduct.

After finding out he was under investigation, Lebow attempted to resolve the matter himself — adult-to-adult and bureaucracy-free — by writing to Sharoni. He didn’t exactly apologize but he did insist that he “certainly had no desire to insult women or to make you feel uncomfortable,” adding that what he had said was simply a “standard gag line” that he’d heard often when he was young in the 1950s.