RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a 1989 article in The New Republic, Andrew Sullivan made what he called “a (conservative) case for gay marriage.” Today same-sex marriage is legal everywhere in America, supported by majorities of voters and accepted as a part of American life.

Now Sullivan has cast his gaze on what he regards as a disturbing aspect of American life — the extension of speech suppression and “identity politics” from colleges and universities into the larger society. The hothouse plants of campus mores have become invasive species undermining and crowding out the beneficent flora of the larger free democratic society.

Sullivan can be seen as a kind of undercover spy on campuses, to which he is invited often to speak — because of his bona fides as a cultural reformer — by those probably ignorant of the parenthetical “conservative” in his 1989 article. As Jonathan Rauch did in his 2004 book, “Gay Marriage,” Sullivan argued that same-sex marriage, by including those previously excluded, would strengthen rather than undermine family values and bourgeois domesticity. That now seems to be happening.

The spread of campus values to the larger society would — and is intended to — have the opposite effect.

Take the proliferation of campus speech codes. Americans of a certain age have trouble believing that colleges and universities have rules banning supposedly hurtful speech. They can remember when campuses were the part of America most open to dissent. Now students are disciplined for handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution outside a tiny isolated “free speech zone.”

I belong to Freethinkers of Portland State University, a skeptic student group. On Saturday we’re hosting a panel on diversity featuring James Damore, the Google employee who was fired last July for writing a memo expressing heterodox views about sex disparities in the company’s workforce.

We expected controversy. But we also got danger. The left-wing newspaper Willamette Week published an article with a false and inflammatory headline: “Tech Bro Fired from Google for Saying Women Are Biologically Unfit to Be Engineers Will Speak at PSU Next Month.” The subheadline inaccurately attributed to Mr. Damore the view that “women can’t do math.”

Campus activists called us misogynists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis. A person claiming to work for campus audiovisual services tweeted that he could break into our event through a back entrance and “literally turn the whole building off.” There were threats of violence. A Facebook user—it’s not clear if he’s connected to PSU—suggested he’d throw “active grenades” at Mr. Damore onstage. Campus police took these threats seriously enough that they denied our request for a larger venue, despite overwhelming interest.

Every year, FIRE chooses the 10 worst colleges for free speech — and unfortunately, 2017 left us with plenty of options: Campuses were rocked by violent mob censorship, monitored by bias response teams, plagued by free speech zones, and beset by far too many disinvitation attempts. Although the number of colleges with the most restrictive speech codes has continued to decline, 90 percent of schools still maintain codes that either clearly restrict or could too easily be used to restrict free speech. https://www.thefire.org/the-10-worst-colleges-for-free-speech-2018/

Today, we present our 2018 list of the 10 worst colleges for free speech. As always, our list is presented in no particular order, and it includes both public and private institutions. Public colleges and universities are bound by the First Amendment; the private colleges on this list, though not required by the Constitution to protect student and faculty speech rights, explicitly promise to do so.

A new feature of this year’s list is our Lifetime Censorship Award. This “honor” goes to the one college or university that is so frequently discussed as a contender for our annual “worst colleges for free speech” list that it deserves special recognition. This year, that school is DePaul University.

Are you a student or faculty member whose free speech rights are imperiled on campus? Submit a case to FIRE. Also, check out FIRE’s Guides to Student Rights on Campus to help you fight for free speech, due process, religious liberty, and more.

America’s colleges and universities are experiencing an intellectual crisis. While this is usually cast in terms of “free speech,” that is only a symptom of a deeper sickness. The root issue is whether universities remain true to their foundational mission or whether they are no longer invested in safeguarding free inquiry and welcoming heterodox thought. A new survey of college and university leaders offers a revealing look at how the mandarins of higher education view this crossroads. It offers little grounds for optimism.

Conducted by Gallup, Inside Higher Ed’s 2018 Survey of College and University Academic Officers is a representative nationwide sample of 516 campus leaders across 277 public institutions, 223 private institutions, and 16 for-profit institutions. In plowing through the results, one cannot escape the sense that those at the helm of the nation’s higher-education institutions suffer a case of willful blindness — and that, worse, they seem collectively sure that the buck stops somewhere else.

For instance, only 41 percent of college and university leaders said that free-speech rights are secure on the nation’s campuses, and only 36 percent said free speech is secure in the United States as a whole. Yet when asked about their campuses, fully 80 percent insisted that free-speech rights are secure. In other words, campus leaders see threats to free speech everywhere — except on their own campuses.

On every question about the campus experiences of liberals and conservatives, however, even these campus leaders report that disparities exist. For instance, regarding their own campuses, only 68 percent of campus leaders say that politically conservative students feel generally welcome in classrooms. This bears repeating: Barely two-thirds of campus administrators report that conservatives feel welcome — even as 80 percent insist that free speech is secure. (Meanwhile, just 3 percent say that liberal students feel unwelcome in campus classrooms.)

Herbert London is President of the London Center for Policy Research https://www.londoncenter.org/

For those in the West who have lost their way, no longer sure of whether to believe in their traditions or believe at all, it is useful to recall that liberty is our overarching concern. Liberty, as Edmund Burke counsels, “must inhere in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which… becomes the criterion of happiness.”

Existentialists demur. For them the past is a dream from which they wish to awaken. They refuse to accept the “tyranny of the dead.” However, it is the history of self-government and the unique spirit and energy emerging from the Judeo-Christian tradition that offers a communion of liberty that sets the West apart from others.

Liberty now inheres in — or so we are told — the technique of administration, a liberty created and perfected by a remote class of specialists. This technique applies rationality and technology in order to annul one’s national inheritance. Yet however successful the specialists are in redrafting history as the efflorescence of gender, race, and class, the past and present are being sacrificed for a future of group rights and a diminished sense of liberty.

Tradition affirms the existence of beliefs and practices distilled from human experience shaping the meaning of who we are. To force that experience into an ideological Procrustean Bed is to mislead and misjudge. Only in traditional society can a democratic republic serve the ethical ends of the populace. This is possible because each person is seen as having his own peculiar and essential function. For example, the family is central in the succession of culture since it can encourage a reverence for the past and future. It is, after all, love for the living tradition of one’s culture and the ballast it establishes that lead society’s members to reproduce.

The consumers of higher education have spoken. Workforce outcomes are, far and away, the driving motivation for pursuing post-secondary education across all ages, races, and degree types.

According to a new Strada-Gallup poll, which surveyed 86,000 students at over 3,000 post-secondary institutions, 58 percent say work outcomes — such as finding a good job with good pay and opportunities for career advancement — are their primary motivation for attending. This is true across all higher education pathways and demographic subgroups.

Not surprisingly, even more Americans (72 percent) with postgraduate education experiences identify career goals as their top motivation, as do 60 percent of those on a technical or vocational pathway. The second most common motivation for Americans with postgraduate education eperiences, “general learning and knowledge,” trails at just 23 percent.

Of course, most students who pursue post-secondary education want a good job when they graduate. And, it turns out, this clarity of purpose is important. This new data tells us not only that many students go to school in order to get a job, but that clearly defined career goals play an important role in determining if those students actually complete their chosen course of study.

Students who do not complete their degree are relatively likely to report general aspirations for learning and knowledge as their top motivation (31 percent). Those who did complete their degrees tended to place these goals lower on their list: vocational/technical training (14 percent), post-graduate work/degrees (18 percent), two-year degrees (25 percent), or four-year degrees (20 percent). In an earlier Strada-Gallup report, students who did not complete their education were also the most likely to say they would study a different major if they could do it all over again.

The most popular class at Yale is also being described as the most difficult class at Yale. Yet its professor is lax about checking to see whether assignments have been carried out and encourages students to take it on a pass/fail basis.

Welcome to Happiness 101.

Some 1,200 Yale students, or one-quarter of the student body, are taking Professor Laurie Santos’s class, actually called PSYC 157, or “Psychology and the Good Life.” It’s not only the most popular course today but the most popular one in the 316-year history of Yale College. Santos’s purpose is to provide an antidote to what appears to be an epidemic of stress-related psychic unease on today’s campus, and she has counterparts at other colleges. The course is “a cry for help,” one Yale student said. By all accounts, the frenzy of competition among high-achieving young people is more intense than ever before: From middle school, if not earlier, kids are desperate to beat their peers on the next leg of the rat race. First it’s getting into a top-ranked college, then it’s acing the tests and scoring the internships that lead to either a fabulous first job or admission to a name-brand graduate or professional school.

Students appear to be more stressed out than before: More than half of Yale undergraduates were found to have sought mental-health counseling in a 2013 survey. A national survey four years earlier had discovered that 84 percent felt generally overwhelmed and a quarter were so depressed they said it was difficult to function. This has happened even as universities have been eager to coddle students by, for instance, grading them ever more leniently. “In many departments now, there are in effect only three grades used: A, A-minus, and B-plus,” a Yale report found in 2013. (In WFB’s day, only about the top 10 percent were given A or A-minus marks.) Coursework has changed dramatically also: Students can get away with reading less and watching television more. (Offerings this semester include “Scandinavian Film and TV,” “Trauma in American Film and TV,” and “Hollywood in the Digital Age.”)

What should a city do with poor teachers who, thanks to union rules, cannot be fired? For years New York has let them linger on its Absent Teacher Reserve, where they are paid without having a permanent spot in any school. But now the city is taking the opposite approach: putting them back into classrooms.

The ATR is an example of what happens when reform runs up against inflexible labor rules. In 2005 Mayor Michael Bloomberg ended the practice of filling teaching slots in New York’s public schools by seniority. Instead, he gave principals increased power to hire the teachers they thought best. The complication was the union contract. Laid-off teachers could either look for a position elsewhere or join the ATR, where they receive full salary and benefits as they move across schools doing short-term work, often as substitutes.

The ATR differs from the notorious “rubber rooms,” or reassignment centers, where suspended teachers accused of misconduct once awaited adjudication of their cases. Teachers aren’t placed on the ATR because they are facing dismissal. They just can’t (or won’t) persuade a principal to hire them. Some have received ineffective teaching ratings. Others have records of disciplinary problems like absenteeism or sleeping on the job.

When University of Washington’s College Republicans invited controversial activist Joey Gibson to speak, administrators gave them the OK—and sent them a $17,000 security bill. The student group sued Tuesday, and in an 11th-hour ruling Friday a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the college, saying the bill “runs afoul [by] chilling speech.”

The free-speech rally will proceed Saturday on the university’s main plaza, the Red Square. Administrators are urging students to stay away for their own safety. University President Ana Mari Cauce said Friday that campus police have “credible information that groups from outside the UW community are planning to join the event with the intent to instigate violence.”

The threat is real. In 2017, when the College Republicans hosted alt-right parvenu Milo Yiannopolous, masked activists showed up to protest, while other nonstudents showed up to counter-protest. By the end of the night Joshua Dukes, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, was hospitalized with critical injuries. The woman charged with shooting him in the stomach, Elizabeth Hokoana, told law enforcement Mr. Dukes was wielding “a big knife” and was “about to gut my husband.” She and her husband have pleaded not guilty to assault.

Forty-one percent of Tulane’s undergraduate women have been sexually assaulted since arriving on campus, the university reported last month. That’s a shocking statistic, but is it true? The number is worth breaking down because Congress may soon require all colleges to use similar surveys to inform their practices.

One problem is how broadly Tulane defines sexual assault. The school goes beyond rape or attempted rape to include any form of unwanted sexual contact, including a stolen kiss or hug. The latter may be unwelcome but are they assault? This definition helps explain why nearly 38% of female undergraduates and 16% of males said they’d been victims of unwanted sexual contact. The statistics for rape or attempted rape are lower, but the 41% can’t be easily broken down because some students reported more than one form of assault.

Other questions are subject to questionable interpretation. Students were asked if they agreed with the statements, “I don’t think sexual violence is a problem at Tulane” and “there isn’t much need for me to think about sexual violence while at college.” Disagreement indicates that sexual violence is a pressing issue. But students who agree risk being seen as ignorant or uncaring, which some campuses and activists say is evidence of a “rape culture.”

Self-selection almost certainly occurred to some extent. Tulane highlights its large pool of 4,500 respondents. But the university boosted participation by offering “incentives for Greek organizations, residence halls, and graduate/professional schools” to recruit members to take the survey. Tulane’s Institutional Research Board approved these incentives, but we wonder if the groups urging students to participate may have also influenced answers.