RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you follow free-speech controversies for any length of time, you’ll understand two things about public opinion. First, an overwhelming percentage of Americans will declare their support for free speech. Second, a shocking percentage of Americans also support censoring speech they don’t like. How is this possible? It’s simple. “Free speech” is good speech, you see. That’s the speech that corrects injustices and speaks truth to power. That other speech? The speech that hurts my feelings or hurts my friends’ feelings? That’s “hate speech.” It might even be violence.

A new survey of college students demonstrates this reality perfectly. Conducted by McLaughlin & Associates for Yale’s William F. Buckley, Jr. Program, the survey queried 800 college students attending four-year private or public colleges, and the results were depressingly predictable.

First, the “good” news. Students claim to love free speech and intellectual diversity. For example, 83 percent agree that the First Amendment needs to be “followed and respected.” A whopping 84 percent agree that their school should “always do its best to promote intellectual diversity,” including by protecting free speech and inviting controversial speakers to campus. Similarly, 93 percent agree that there’s value in listening to and understanding “views and opinions that I may disagree with.”

But that’s not good news at all. It’s simply evidence that in the abstract students will claim to be open-minded. They’ll claim to value different views — right until the moment they really get offended. For example, 81 percent agree with the statement that “words can be a form of violence.” A full 58 percent of students believe that colleges should “forbid” speakers who have a “history of engaging in hate speech.”

And what is hate speech? The definition the students liked was staggeringly broad. Two-thirds agreed that hate speech is “anything that one particular person believes is harmful, racist, or bigoted.” They further agreed that hate speech “means something different to everyone.”

Given these realities, it should come as no surprise that large numbers of students believe that interruptions or even violence are appropriate to stop offensive speech. Almost 40 percent believe that it’s “sometimes appropriate” to “shout down or disrupt” a speaker. A sobering 30 percent believe that physical violence can be used to stop someone from “using hate speech or engaging in racially charged comments.”

It’s a small consolation that a slight majority of students say that they have not felt intimidated out of expressing their views — but this means that, in institutions allegedly dedicated to critical thinking and open inquiry, almost half the student respondents indicated they were indeed intimidated.

Survey findings like this should serve as an alarm bell every bit as important as the shout-downs and attacks that dominate the headlines. Naysayers and defenders of the status quo on campus will argue that the censors represent a mere fringe, that our campuses are still more free than critics suggest. That may be true on some campuses, but these poll numbers indicate that the so-called radicals are perhaps more mainstream than we’d like to admit.

In places like Edina, Minnesota, the Left has transformed K-12 schools into indoctrination factories whose overarching purpose is to train students to be reflexively racist and anti-American.

Educators in Edina, a wealthy Minneapolis suburb, don’t even try to conceal their sinister goals. Elementary school students there are subjected to an A-B-C book titled A is for Activist. Among the alphabetized propaganda points are these gems:

“A is for Activist. Are you an Activist?”

“C is for … Creative Counter to Corporate vultures.”

“F is for Feminist.”

“T is for Trans.”

“X is for Malcolm as in Malcolm X.”

When Donald Trump won the election last November, anarchy and partisan bullying paralyzed the high school.

“I felt like the school was descending into mass hysteria,” one student said of the day after the election. Another said Trump’s victory was treated as “the end of the world as we know it.”

Students reported “[e]very teacher was crying in class, one even told the whole class ‘Trump winning is worse than 9/11 and the Columbine shooting.’” The sheer volume of “liberal propaganda that was pushed every single day in class this year was worse than it’s ever been–and you’re bullied by the teachers and every student if you dare speak against it.”

“[T]he teachers can absolutely do whatever they want. The administration will do nothing about it!! The day of the election every single student was in the commons chanting ‘F*** TRUMP’ and the teachers never did anything. A LOT of people are starting to complain and my mom has some friends who are leaving the school district.”

Teachers in Edina use totalitarian methods, particularly self-criticism sessions, to enforce ideological rigidity and reinforce social cohesion.

One mother complained of a humiliating Khmer Rouge-like denunciation process her son was forced to endure. In a 10th grade AP World History class, the teacher “called out any Trump supporters and asked them to assure the class that they weren’t racist.” In much of the United States, sending one’s children to public schools is already tantamount to child abuse. Too often elementary and secondary schools, especially in the inner cities, fail to teach pupils even the basics of reading, writing, and thinking critically. Nowadays they focus on crusades for so-called social justice instead of doing their jobs. This includes pedagogical sermons excoriating President Trump for the crime of trying to “Make America Great Again.”

In Edina radical indoctrination has supplanted actual education that helps students prepare for the real world.

Test scores in the community’s once top-rated schools have been plummeting, writes Katherine Kersten, senior fellow at the Minnesota-based Center for the American Experiment, in Thinking Minnesota magazine.

“There’s been a sea change in educational philosophy, and it comes from the top,” she writes.

In recent years teachers have been shoving so-called white privilege, along with Marxism, feminism, and post-colonialism, down their young charges’ throats.

It’s no secret that public school teachers across America are largely driven by ideology, not a desire to educate. They teach students that America, a nation flawed in its conception by the original sin of slavery, has never truly experienced reforms. It is as if the Civil War and the Civil Rights Era never happened. Corporations and the rich oppress the citizenry daily as the U.S. unjustly pushes around less powerful countries, especially Muslim ones. America is so fundamentally corrupt and evil in their view that it can only be fixed by radical changes like those espoused by educational theorists like Paulo Freire and Bill Ayers.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire argued that schools be used to inculcate radical, revolutionary values in students so they become agents of social change. Generations of teachers answered his call.

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1952, Eve A. Browning received her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, in 1979. After teaching for three years at Ohio State University and a year at the University of Denver, she spent three decades on the faculty of the University of Minnesota at Duluth. Three years ago she left Duluth for the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she now chairs the Department of Philosophy and Classics. She has two academic books to her name, both published in 1992: one, co-edited by her, is about “feminist ethics,” and the other, written by her, is about “feminist criticism.” She’s published scholarly papers in such journals as the University of Dayton Review and reviewed books for the Women’s Studies Review and Women’s Review of Books.

It’s not a stellar CV, to put it mildly. Then again, over the years Browning has participated in conferences with titles that include the words “ethics” and “moral complexity” and “extreme vice” and “liberty and virtue” and “liberty and moral decline” and “character formation” and “modern freedom.” So you might expect that she’s actually devoted some serious thought to these topics.

In September of last year, however, Browning had a meeting with a graduate student that raises sobering questions about the extent and depth of her reflection on these matters. The student was Alfred MacDonald, who at the time of the meeting had been studying philosophy at UTSA for about two months; Browning, in her capacity as department chair (he wasn’t taking a class with her), had summoned him to her office for a discussion. About what? She wouldn’t say. Her caginess on this point, and her unwillingness to handle the matter by e-mail, raised MacDonald’s suspicions, and so he clandestinely taped their conversation, which in the state of Texas is legal. He posted the tape on YouTube, which took it down after Browning complained; the complete tape is now available here, with a shorter version here. There’s also an online transcript of their exchange.

These videos and transcript are representative documents of our times.

After mentioning that MacDonald had missed a couple of classes – an issue that he acknowledged and explained – Browning came round to what was plainly the real problem in her eyes: she’d been informed that in a conversation MacDonald had recently had between classes, “the topic of one student being engaged to a Muslim” had come up, “and it was alleged that you made offensive comments about Islam to that student.”

MacDonald admitted at once to having said to another student: “I don’t think highly of Islam because I am bisexual and could be legally put to death in about a dozen countries that use Islam for their legal system.” But not until he’d said this did his interlocutor reveal that her fiance was a Muslim. Whereupon, says MacDonald, “I repeatedly told the student ‘I’m sure he’s a great guy.’ She seemed pleasant as if nothing had gone wrong, and then reported this to the chair afterward.”

Hence the meeting with Browning, who, after being told by MacDonald what he had said to his fellow student about Islam, asked him: “Do you understand how someone would find that offensive?” Note well: Browning didn’t mean that the Islamic death penalty for gay people is offensive; she had nothing to say about that. What she meant was that mentioning the penalty is offensive.

She then professed to be puzzled by MacDonald’s reference to the Islamic death penalty:

EVE BROWNING: It’s a confusing comment to me because Muslims do not all live in countries in which bisexuals are executed. Muslims live in the United States –

ALFRED MACDONALD: Sure.

EVE BROWNING: – Muslims live in France, Muslims live in every country in the world – it’s the fastest growing world religion.

Needless to say, these facts were entirely irrelevant to MacDonald’s point about Islamic law – and Browning cannot possibly be stupid enough to have thought otherwise. But MacDonald agreed that they were, indeed, facts, and even volunteered that “one of my good friends at the university is Muslim.” But this didn’t win him any points with Browning, who asked: “And do you tell him that you object to his religion because there are places on earth where gay, lesbian and bisexual people are discriminated against, including your own country?”

This, of course, was a classic moral-equivalency ploy: hey, gays may be victims of “discrimination” in Iran and Saudi Arabia, but don’t forget that they also experience prejudice in the U.S.! MacDonald corrected Browning, informing her that his Muslim friend was a “her,” not a “him,” and reiterating that when it came to the treatment of gays in those Islamic countries, he wasn’t referring to mere discrimination but to execution. As he put it: “Death penalty’s pretty severe.”

But Browning couldn’t even be bothered to agree. Instead, she resumed her attack on him for being “offensive”:

EVE BROWNING: What does that have to do with her being engaged to a Muslim?

ALFRED MACDONALD: Nothing. I wasn’t talking about the engagement to the Muslim. I was talking about Islam in that particular moment.

EVE BROWNING: Well, let me just say that kind of thing is not going to be tolerated in our department. We’re not going to tolerate graduate students trying to make other graduate students feel terrible for our emotional attachments.

She then threatened to refer MacDonald to the university’s “Behavior Intervention Team,” which, she explained, is “trained on talking to people about what’s appropriate or what isn’t,” or to “the student conduct board,” which had the power to recommend his dismissal from the university. When MacDonald commented that he “thought that UTSA was a public university with first amendment protections” and expressed surprise that he could be kicked out for stating objective facts about Islam, Browning affirmed that this was indeed the case, and that the chief objective of her conversation with him was to try to “inculcate” in him “professional standards and performance and behavior” – because when anyone deviates from these standards, “students are intimidated; they don’t learn well, they aren’t happy, they don’t flourish, they leave the program.”

Browning then repeated these points at some length, saying that “confrontational interaction with other graduate students is objectionable and unprofessional,” that MacDonald’s Islam comment had been “very objectionable,” that “if you do behave objectionably…you’re not being a constructive member of the community,” and so on. When MacDonald tried to push back against her characterization of his Islam remark, she complained: “You’re clearly expressing a lot of resistance to what I’m telling you.” And she told him that if he were working under her in an office environment, his Islam comment “would get you fired.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Middle East professors all belong to MESA (Middle East Studies Association) which is a cartel funded by Arab nations. The catch is that one cannot get a job in academia teaching Mideast studies without belonging to MESA…..rsk
‘m a professor!” So cried Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) professor Anila Daulatzai as she was forcibly removed from a Southwest Airlines flight for lying about having a life-threatening allergy to the two dogs in the cabin. Unable to provide the required medical certificate, Daulatzai, who had demanded that the dogs be removed, then refused to leave the plane. Daulatzai’s Muslim faith was the likely cause of her aversion to dogs, but it was her dishonesty and unwillingness to cooperate that ended in her arrest.

A former visiting assistant professor of Islamic studies at Harvard Divinity School, Daulatzai has joined the growing ranks of Middle East studies academics who run afoul of the law. Their misdeeds, which range from sexual harassment to domestic abuse and murder to terrorism, demonstrate that being “a professor” is no barrier to criminality.

Just last month, a professor in McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies whose name has not been released to the public was accused of “sexual violence” by way of stickers left in women’s restrooms on campus. The professor, who is up for tenure this semester, denies the charges, despite former students testifying to his “predatory” behavior. An open letter to Robert Wisnovsky, director of the Institute of Islamic Studies, from the World Islamic and Middle East Studies Student Association reiterated the allegations, recommending against tenure and concluding that “women are at a disadvantage within the Islamic Studies department.”

Likewise, it emerged in 2016 that two prominent professors, U.C. Berkeley’s Nezar AlSayyad and UCLA’s Gabriel Piterberg, had been sexually harassing female graduate students for years. AlSayyad, former chair of U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Piterberg, former director of UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies, exploited their positions of power to take advantage of the young women entrusted to their care. Both universities’ perceived negligence and leniency in handling the cases led to student protests and loss of faith of the system.

Another kind of relationship between student and teacher underpinned a controversy earlier this year involving Rollins College professor Areeje Zufari. Zufari, a Muslim, resigned in April following a conflict with Christian student Marshall Polston, whom she had falsely accused of stalking after he challenged her anti-Christian, Islamist assertions. After a wrongful suspension and a disciplinary hearing, Polston was reinstated, while Zufari now teaches at Valencia College. Even more sordid is Zufari’s past, including numerous ties to Islamist associations and an affair with a married man under FBI investigation for terrorist activity.

Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse lately as “implicit bias.” Embraced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and most of the press, implicit bias has spawned a multimillion-dollar consulting industry, along with a movement to remove the concept of individual agency from the law. Yet its scientific basis is crumbling.

Implicit-bias theory burst onto the academic scene in 1998 with the rollout of an instrument called the implicit association test, the brainchild of social psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji. A press release trumpeted the IAT as a breakthrough in prejudice studies: “The pervasiveness of prejudice, affecting 90 to 95 percent of people, was demonstrated today . . . by psychologists who developed a new tool that measures the unconscious roots of prejudice.”

In the race IAT (there also versions for everything from gender to disability to weight), test-takers at a computer are asked to press two keys to sort a series of black and white faces and a set of “good” and “bad” words. For part of the exercise, the test-taker presses one key for white faces and words like “happy,” and the other key for black faces and words like “death.” Then the protocol is reversed, pairing white faces with “bad” words and black faces with “good” words. (The order is randomized, so some test-takers sort black faces with “good” words first.)

A majority of test-takers—including about 50% of blacks, according to some accounts—are faster at the sorting game when white faces are paired with good words. This difference is said to represent an “implicit bias” in favor of whites that can explain racial disparities in society.

Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Banaji did not pioneer response-time studies; psychologists already used the methodology to measure how closely concepts are associated in memory. And it’s widely accepted in psychology that automatic cognitive processes and associations help people navigate daily life. But Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Banaji, now at the University of Washington and Harvard, respectively, pushed the technique into charged political territory. Not only did they confidently assert that any differences in sorting times for black and white faces flowed from unconscious prejudice, they claimed that the implicit bias allegedly measured by the IAT could predict discriminatory behavior. In the final link of their causal chain, they argued that this unconscious and pervasive predilection to discriminate is a powerful cause of racial disparities.

As they wrote in “Blindspot,” their 2013 best seller: “Given the relatively small proportion of people who are overtly prejudiced and how clearly it is established that automatic race preference predicts discrimination, it is reasonable to conclude not only that implicit bias is a cause of Black disadvantage but also that it plausibly plays a greater role than does explicit bias.”

If these sweeping claims were correct, every personnel decision could be challenged as the product of implicit bias. The pressure to guarantee equality of outcome through quotas would grow stronger. But the politics of the IAT had leapfrogged the science behind it. Core aspects of implicit-bias doctrine are now under methodological challenge.

A person’s IAT score can vary significantly each time he takes the test, undercutting its reliability as a psychological instrument. Test scores have almost no connection to what IAT research ludicrously counts as “discriminatory behavior”—trivial nuances of body language during a mock interview, say, or a hypothetical choice to donate to children in Colombian slums rather than South African ones.

Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Banaji now admit that the IAT does not predict “biased behavior” in the lab. (No one has even begun to test its connection to real-world behavior.) The psychometric problems associated with the race IAT make it “problematic to use to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination,” they wrote, along with a third co-author, in 2015.

The mentality of grievance obsession, now widely held throughout the academic world, is a path toward madness. Once a hunt for invisible “microaggressions” begins, there is no end point, only a spiral into angry obsession or despair.

Ian Miles Cheong of the Daily Caller brings us news of the ultimate expression of the self-destructiveness of political correctness.

So-called “Diversity Educators” are suffering from burnout due to the “emotional weight” of their jobs, according to a recent academic journal article published this week in the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice.

The study, written by University of North Carolina-Charlotte professor Ryan Miller and six colleagues from the University of North Texas, interviewed seven interviewed diversity educators from a “predominantly white research institution” who claim that they suffer from “compassion fatigue,” “burnout,” and “racial battle fatigue” in their efforts to combat microaggressions on campus.

According to Miller, the burnout is caused by the diversity educators’ “consistent exposure to various microaggressions” from students who don’t see things their way. He notes that these microaggressions have been conceptualized by some scholars “as forms of assault and torture.”

The article, which was highlighted Friday by Campus Reform, describes the burnout as a “gradual wearing down of individuals entrenched in the work of helping others as diversity educators.”

“Team members described the emotional toll of facilitating diversity education, which sometimes led to fatigue, burnout, and disengagement,” Miller states. He adds that they “found it difficult to separate their identities and experiences from the topics at hand in a facilitation.”

This last point is a characteristic instance of self-obsession, which is required for a hunt for microaggression to even be conceptualized. The following point, however, is entirely rational in a limited way (i.e., if you are self-obsessed)

The diversity educators struggle with feeling underqualified for their jobs and suffer from a desire to “prove their legitimacy to others,” according to Miller, who proposed paying them higher salaries and giving them more recognition for their efforts.

Today’s universities, with notable exceptions, are bastions of extreme political correctness. The problem is so bad, you wonder how anyone can learn anything useful.

In fact, they don’t. Students are so indoctrinated into an alternate reality of white supremacists hiding under the bed and fascists sitting next to them in class that fear becomes the norm. Anything and everything — even unrelated and unremarkable occurrences — can set off a wave of hysteria.

In the case of Michigan State University, the hysteria becomes a parody.

A student living in a dorm room reported a “noose” hung outside her door. The armies of righteous indignation were activated and the “incident” became a cause on social media.

The president issued a condemnation, students decried racism on campus, and black people reported being in fear for their lives.

In the immortal words of Emily Litella: “Never mind.”

Fox News:

A lost shoelace at Michigan State University caused a racial uproar Wednesday after someone mistook it for a noose.

MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon released a statement Wednesday morning saying she was “distressed” after finding out “a student reported a noose was hung outside of her room.” Simon commended the student’s “courage” for reporting the “racial incident” and put out a clear message.

“This type of behavior is not tolerated on our campus,” Simon said. “No Spartan should ever feel targeted based on their race, or other ways in which they identify.”

But by Wednesday afternoon, the investigation by MSU Police revealed there was no noose.

Instead, they found “the object was a packaged leather shoelace and not a noose,” MSU spokesman Jason Cody said in a news release, adding that the shoelaces “are packaged in a way that someone could perceive them to look similar to a noose.”

Officers tracked down and interviewed the student who lost both of the shoelaces. That student happens to live on the same floor as the one who made the report.

“Also, the original shoelace found inside the residence hall was not directed at any individual,” Cody said, adding that police believe someone found the shoelace and put it on a stairwell door handle after picking it up off the floor. CONTINUE AT SITE

While colleges talk a lot about diversity, conservatives hammer these same schools for focusing only on skin-deep matters like…well…skin. Rarely is there any concerted effort to make sure there is any kind of ideological diversity on their campuses. At least, that’s what folks on the right keep saying. But colleges keep acting like Kevin Bacon in Animal House, waving their hands and saying, “All is well!”

Only, it isn’t.

From The College Fix:

A new survey conducted by a student newspaper has revealed a staggering political divide among the faculty members of one of the nation’s most elite universities.

The Yale Daily Newsput a startling number on liberal predominance in a survey of the prestigious university’s faculty. Of the 314 respondents, a mere 7 percent identified as conservative, with only 2 percent saying they were “very conservative.” In contrast, nearly three-quarters identified as liberal or very liberal.

Speaking with with The News, Yale President Peter Salovey said the results were “neither positive nor negative.”

“It’s in the educational interest of students to be exposed to a diversity of political viewpoints… Having said that, in most fields, the political point of view of a faculty member is not relevant to the substance of their teaching, and so we would need to be very careful about making it a part of the hiring process for faculty,” Salovey told The News.

Salovey has, however, declared that Yale’s largely white faculty represents the “single biggest problem” the university faces; and in 2015 the school pledged to spend more than $50 million to increase the racial makeup of the faculty, according to The News.

Really? Their ideological viewpoint is completely irrelevant, but their skin color is?

If the issue was latent racism in the hiring process, I could see why Salovey would express concern. That can ultimately hurt the school, so it makes sense.

Yet that doesn’t seem to be the worry here. No, only the skin tone of the faculty is important.

All this while dismissing any concerns over ideological diversity at all. Nice. CONTINUE AT SITE

Ryan Walters has loaded up on advanced classes, studied until the wee hours and composed possible graduation speeches in his head as the high-school junior worked to be valedictorian at Heritage High School in Wake Forest, N.C.

But neither he nor any of his classmates will hold the title.

The Wake County Public School System, the 15th-largest in the nation, won’t have valedictorians after this school year, joining other districts that have moved away from lauding a single-highest performer.

“I think it’s pretty stupid, and I don’t think it’s fair,” says Mr. Walters, 16 years old. “Wake County is instilling in us that we shouldn’t try to be the best.”

It’s getting lonely at the top of the class in high school—or very crowded—as more schools alter or do away with the traditional role of valedictorian. While some schools no longer hail a single student with the best grade-point average, others are granting the distinction to anyone who gets at least a 4.0 GPA. And that is increasingly common as certain honors, or advanced-level classes, tend to grant higher than a 4.0 for an A.

At least half of U.S. states have schools that have stopped naming valedictorians, or now name multiple, to head off what school officials say has become unhealthy competition among students.

In recent weeks, Brown County Schools in Nashville, Ind., and Mehlville School District in St. Louis, decided to phase out naming valedictorians. Other districts around the country are discussing similar moves.

Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Va., had 178 valedictorians last school year, or 1 in every 3 graduates. Valedictorians are those who achieved at least a 4.0 grade-point average. Every valedictorian is ranked No. 1 in the class.

Murfreesboro, Tenn.’s Central Magnet School had a record-breaking 48 valedictorians last school year, a quarter of its graduating class. Awardees achieve the highest grade point average, take a minimum of 12 higher-level courses and meet state requirements to graduate with honors and distinction.

James Evans, spokesman in Rutherford County Schools, where Central Magnet is located, said the school has a lot of high achievers. “We’re pretty proud,” he said.
Ryan Walters, a junior at Heritage High School in Wake Forest, N.C. Photo: Jessica Cannon

More schools also no longer calculate numerical rankings for students—information still used by some colleges—out of fear that students missing higher rankings by a few points could be hurt in the college-acceptance process, or passed over for scholarships.

“We found that it’s shutting our students out from some really positive opportunities,” said Scott Martzloff, superintendent of the Williamsville Central School District in western New York, where the school board in September approved the elimination of class ranking. “I think it causes a lot of stress and unhealthy competition.”

But backlash is growing in some areas of the country, with students at the top of their class as well as their parents saying that high performance is being cast aside or diluted in the name of fairness.

“If everybody is called valedictorian, it doesn’t mean anything,” said Deborah Morley, whose daughter attends Exeter Union High School in Exeter, Calif., where all students with at least a 4.0 GPA can be valedictorian starting this school year.

At least one school, Melrose High School, outside of Boston, recently bucked the trend by going back to naming valedictorians after hearing from students. The new rule, approved in April after a school year without a valedictorian, awards the title to the student with the highest GPA.

“That was really important to people, especially the kids,” said Principal Jason Merrill.

Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared at Acculturated and is reprinted here with permission.

In a recent editorial in the Hoya, the official student newspaper of Georgetown University, students called for more conservative professors on campus.

The editorial is a refreshingly reasonable voice in the ongoing culture and free speech wars that are roiling America’s college campuses. The editors of the Hoya do not demand that a circus act like Milo Yiannopolous be allowed to come and disrupt the campus, or that the left continue its dominance of the country’s universities.

Instead, they make a straightforward case that the dearth of conservative professors at Georgetown is leaving students unprepared for the genuine diversity – that is, the diversity of thought – that is part of the real world. Georgetown’s homogeneity, they argue, is leading to an atrophying of their skills for debate and reasoned argument. In other words, without conservatives, they have no one to test their ideas against.

“One of the hallmarks of higher education is the opportunity to understand and grapple with a wide range of ideas,” the editorial notes. It goes on:

Yet, Georgetown falls short on its commitment to this ideological diversity in the makeup of its instructional corps. The university must work to remedy its lack of politically conservative professors by considering a diversity of viewpoints when hiring instructors, from assistant professors to those with tenure, and by ensuring that no bias exists against conservative educators in the hiring process.

The editorial cites a 2016 article in the Wall Street Journal by John Hasnas, who wrote that Georgetown faculty search committees often blackball conservative candidates. The Hoya editors also cite the Higher Education Research Institute, whose research has shown what even the Washington Post called “a dramatic shift” in recent years toward hiring faculty that leans left. In 1990, 42 percent of college professors identified as liberal or far-left, according to the HERI survey data; by 2014, that figure had risen to nearly 60 percent, while only 12 percent of professors identified as conservative.