RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s Note: The following piece first appeared on Josh Blackman’s blog. It is adapted and reprinted here with permission.

On Thursday, March 29, students at the City University of New York School of Law protested and heckled my lecture about free speech on campus. You can watch video of the entire event, which lasted about 70 minutes, below. The protest and heckling took place during the first eight minutes of the recording.

In this post, I will recount the events that led up to the protest, and describe my experiences during the encounter. In future writings, I will provide my own commentary. Here, I will try to lay out the facts to the best of my recollection, aided by the (sometimes) inaudible recording.

In October, the CUNY School of Law Federalist Society invited me to speak on a panel discussion about theories of constitutional interpretation. I had planned to speak about originalism. Alas, the students were not able to find any other professors who were willing to participate in the event. After several rounds of emails, I suggested an event about free speech on campus. It is a talk I had given before, without any problems, at Southern Illinois, Texas Southern University, the University of Massachusetts, Barry University, the University of Oregon, and my home institution, the South Texas College of Law Houston. The Federalist Society chapter agreed that this would be a good topic for CUNY. Alas, once again, the chapter was unable to find any other professor who would participate in the event. (This is fairly common.)

Three days before the event, the president of the chapter wrote, “We passed out the flyers today (first day back from spring break) and a large number of students are already up in arms about the event.” The Office of Student Affairs explained that “some enraged students, . . . apparently, are planning to protest.” I asked why they were protesting. The president provided an explanation:

These students saw first, that this is a Federalist Society event; and second, they saw a few of your writings (specifically a National Review article praising Sessions for rescinding DACA and ACA), and instantly assume you’re racist; and third, our event being titled about free speech is reminiscent of events that claim free speech just to invite people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter.

He explained that “we have the support of the administration” and the event would proceed as scheduled.

Hours before the event began, Mary Lu Bilek, the dean of CUNY Law, sent an email to all students:

As a law school, a public institution, and a school within the CUNY system, we are committed to academic freedom, the free exchange of ideas, and expression of all points of view, including the freedom to disagree with the viewpoints of others.

Students at the City University of New York (CUNY) Law School protested and attempted to shut down a lecture on free speech by accusing the speaker of holding racist views and belittling his commitment to the rule of law.

Josh Blackman, a newly tenured professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, was invited to campus by the CUNY Law School Federalist Society, and had prepared a lecture on free speech. Three days before the event, the president of the Federalist Society chapter informed Blackman that a group of “enraged” students intended to protest his lecture but assured him that he had the administration’s full support.

“These students saw first, that this is a Federalist Society event; and second, they saw a few of your writings (specifically a National Review article praising Sessions for rescinding DACA and ACA), and instantly assume you’re racist; and third, our event being titled about free speech is reminiscent of events that claim free speech just to invite people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter,” the chapter president told Blackman.

Upon arriving at the event, Blackman was met by dozens of law students shouting phrases such as “Legal objectivity is a myth” and “He’s a white supremacist,” according to his account, which is corroborated by a video of the incident.

Most of the protesters were carrying signs with messages espousing their support for social equality and assigning racist motives to Blackman.

Is this just a gratifying dream or a frightful, dangerous fancy: to have a government agency that cracks down on the sources of intellectual and spiritual pollution the way the Environmental Protection Agency treats manufacturers that produce toxic pollutants?

The dream is reality, at least in part, as evidenced by the recent intervention and inquiry of the Department of Justice in lawsuits against Harvard and other elite colleges and universities. The real monster here is not expanded powers of government that might endanger free minds in higher education but rather the administrative state itself that, of course, gets its brains from these institutions.

The administrative state, which the Trump Administration intends to “deconstruct,” is a hulking monstrosity of bold bureaucracy and supine elected officials that has replaced constitutional government in the United States.

Harvard and other elite colleges have recently attracted the attention of the Trump Department of Justice. The issues include long-suspected discrimination against Asian-Americans in admissions at Harvard and collusion (that is, a conspiracy!) on early decisions in admissions. To prove this in court, the accusers would need access to admissions committees’ data and decision-making. The universities plead privacy and protection of trade secrets about their admissions decisions and financial-aid calculations.

Might colleges violate “antitrust laws by exchanging information about prospective students who make early decision commitments”?

Early decision (narrower than early application) requires students who are accepted to commit to that institution—and no other. This practice requires an applicant to take an offer without being able to compare financial aid packages. “Early decision programs have afforded some colleges nearly half of their freshman classes”—Duke University, for example. One education consultant observed, “only about 200 schools of the more than 4,000 in the country use early decision. ‘Given that this doesn’t affect many schools, or many students, it’s the ultimate first-world problem.’”

Cornell University is so bad at conducting sex assault and harassment investigations that 23 professors from its law school have filed a brief in court to require the school to follow its own policies.

Cornell, apparently in its zeal to appease the media and culture created by the Obama administration, is denying male students accused of sexual assault proper due process procedures, according to multiple lawsuits against the university. Now, a third of its law school professors are defending one of those students who filed a suit.

Colleges and universities typically fall back on the defense that at least they followed their own policies when denying a male student due process rights. But Cornell isn’t even doing that. Professor Sheri Lynn Johnson, who filed the brief, asserts that Cornell didn’t provide an accused student the right “to test his accuser’s account of events and credibility by having a disciplinary hearing panel ask his accuser proper questions that he proposes,” which is granted to students in Cornell policy.

Although the brief specifically addresses this policy in one case, the professors note they are “concerned more generally with whether Cornell respects this and other procedural protections in its Title IX policy going forward and whether courts properly interpret the policy.”

The specific case included in the brief involves the pseudonymous John Doe and his accuser, referred to as Sally Roe. Sally made inconsistent statements throughout the investigation and hearing, and even though John submitted questions to the hearing panel to be asked of her, none of his questions were asked.

While congresscritters expressed outrage at Facebook’s intrusive data grabs during Capitol Hill hearings with Mark Zuckerberg this week, not a peep was heard about the Silicon Valley–Beltway theft ring purloining the personal information and browsing habits of millions of American schoolchildren.

It doesn’t take undercover investigative journalists to unmask the massive privacy invasion enabled by educational technology and federal mandates. The kiddie data heist is happening out in the open — with Washington politicians and bureaucrats as brazen co-conspirators.

Facebook is just one of the tech giants partnering with the U.S. Department of Education and schools nationwide in pursuit of student data for meddling and profit. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Pearson, Knewton, and many more are cashing in on the Big Data boondoggle. State and federal educational databases provide countless opportunities for private companies exploiting public schoolchildren subjected to annual assessments, which exploded after adoption of the tech-industry-supported Common Core “standards,” tests, and aligned texts and curricula.

The recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act further enshrined government collection of personally identifiable information — including data collected on attitudes, values, beliefs, and dispositions — and allows release of the data to third-party contractors thanks to Obama-era loopholes carved into the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act.

College continues to get more interesting. One young man who missed 15 out of 28 days of school explains that he and “his ex-girlfriend just had a baby.” When asked who would take care of the baby, the boy (also a product of a single-mother household) said his mother and the girl’s mother needed to work this out. Although he admitted that his girlfriend had used birth control for two years, by the “third year, it didn’t seem that necessary.” While he was happy about the baby, the young man also explained that he wasn’t even sure the baby is his, so he was scheduled to have a DNA test soon.

Nothing like common sense, fidelity, and future planning!

But did you know that in the inverted world of education today, if a student has a baby, then more financial aid is available? Indeed! Consequently, students are being told by their college advisers that they should get pregnant. Even some of the students are appalled at this suggestion. But then there are those who proclaim that “the money comes from the government,” implying that it is not really problematic. Deliberately unschooled in how things actually work, and already the recipients of financial assistance, these students see government as the ultimate security blanket. There is no connection to the idea that government comprises taxpayers.

What a wonderful idea – to have a money tree somewhere pumping out financial aid ad infinitum!

Should we be surprised, given what has been documented in the booklet titled “Leftist Indoctrination in Our K-12 Public Schools” by Sara Dogan and Peter Collier? In Edina, Minnesota, the Highlands Elementary School students write poems that link “the anti-police and racially divisive Black Lives Matter movement with peace.” The principal reproduced Black Lives Matter’s own website, which states that its members “are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and villages.”

Then there is the book titled A is for Activist, which features “C is for Creative Counter to Corporate Vultures, E is for environmental justice, T is for Trans. X is for Malcolm. As in Malcolm X.” It is billed as an “ABC board book written and illustrated for the next generation of progressives[.]”

In Ithaca, New York, the Beverly J. Martin Elementary School students sat through a presentation featuring Bassem Tamimi, who videos his own children sharing a message that “we [Palestinians] don’t like that Israel kill [sic] us, kill Gaza, kill Palestinian[.]” Actual facts be damned.

Brown University costs $73,000 per year to attend.

The Brown University Health Services office now offers “safe spaces for men” to help them “unlearn toxic masculinity” and combat traditional notions of “what it means to be a man.”

Viewing masculinity as if it were a public health crisis, “Unlearning Toxic Masculinity” offers a three-pronged approach for helping male students recover: a weekly discussion group to unlearn “toxic masculine norms,” a biannual magazine, and a video series.

The crux of the programming revolves around Masculinity 101 Peer Education, a peer-to-peer weekly discussion group that convenes male students to talk about issues such as “Cultivating Empathy” and “Harm and Healing.”

Eight students have already been hired to facilitate these workshops, PJ Media has learned. According to the program description, the workshops vow to teach students what “healthier norms of masculinity can and should look like.”

Warns Brown University: “Modern society is quick to bestow unearned privilege on men … there is nothing in place to teach men — young men especially — how to avoid abusing that privilege or how to leverage it for good.”

Unlike programming at other schools, the Masculinity 101 Peer Education program notes that it is open to all students regardless of gender, and especially since its programming also is dedicated to destroying the male-female gender binary.

Race advocates and the media are greeting a new Government Accountability Office report on racial disparities in school discipline as a vindication of Obama administration policies. The GAO found that black students get suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students nationally, a finding consistent with previous analyses. The Obama Education and Justice Departments viewed that disproportion as proof of teacher and principal bias. Administration officials used litigation and the threatened loss of federal funding to force schools to reduce suspensions and expulsions radically in order to eliminate racial disparities in discipline. The GAO report, which implicitly rubberstamps the Obama approach, comes just as Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos is evaluating whether to rescind Obama’s school discipline directives. DeVos should go forward with that rescission: the administration’s policies were fatally flawed, as is the GAO report that attempts to justify them.

The GAO report ignores the critical question regarding disciplinary disparities: do black students in fact misbehave more than white students? The report simply assumes, without argument, that black students and white students act identically in class and proceeds to document their different rates of discipline. This assumption of equivalent school behavior is patently unjustified. According to federal data, black male teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at nearly 10 times the rate of white male teenagers of the same age (the category “white” in this homicide data includes most Hispanics; if Hispanics were removed from the white category, the homicide disparity between blacks and whites would be much higher). That higher black homicide rate indicates a failure of socialization; teen murderers of any race lack impulse control and anger-management skills. Lesser types of juvenile crime also show large racial disparities. It is fanciful to think that the lack of socialization that produces such elevated rates of criminal violence would not also affect classroom behavior. While the number of black teens committing murder is relatively small compared with their numbers at large, a very high percentage of black children—71 percent—come from the stressed-out, single-parent homes that result in elevated rates of crime.

Can you imagine a public university banning free speech and threatening arrests over flyers exposing anti-Semitism and warning about a student group funded by terrorists that promotes their propaganda?

But that’s exactly what happened to the Freedom Center at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis” is the Latin motto that circles the seal of the University of Texas. The University of Texas system motto is a latinized quote from the second president of the Republic of Texas, “A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy.”

The University of Texas at San Antonio disgraced the motto by banning any flyers and posters from the David Horowitz Freedom Center under threat of criminal prosecution. The threatening letter from UTSA contains a “criminal trespass warning” to “the David Horowitz Freedom Center and its members”.

“You are barred and forbidden from entering or remaining on any UTSA properties. If any member of your organization returns, they are subject to arrest,” the public institution has threatened

At the University of Texas at San Antonio the guardian genius of democracy is behind bars. Its administration is protecting Hamas front groups while suppressing free speech and civil rights.

President Taylor Eighmy celebrated the unconstitutional threats of arrest against the Freedom Center. “Freedom of expression is vital to institutions of higher education, but we cannot tolerate speech that violates our freedom of expression policies,” the head of a taxpayer-funded institution warned.

Freedom of expression means something very different at the UTSA than it does everywhere else.