RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the name of social justice and diversity, students at elite colleges are casting aside the very works that probe those topics so deeply. The central authors of the Western tradition—from Plato and Aristotle to Mill and Orwell—are no longer part of the required curriculum in the social sciences and the humanities. Their absence carries a high price.

It means liberal-arts students are no longer liberally educated. They are not historically literate or well-versed in such uniquely Western achievements as free speech, government by consent, rule of law, secure property rights, and religious toleration. That don’t understand the rarity or fragility of those achievements, the struggles needed to secure them, or the ways they protect ordinary citizens from tyranny.

One cost of this ignorance is now painfully obvious. Free speech is imperiled on campus, burned at the stake of other values deemed more important: “social justice,” “inequality,” and “oppression.” The campus warriors overlook the crucial question: Who decides?

To understand the other losses inflicted by this cultural shift, it helps to remember a once-popular but now forgotten name from mid-century America: Clifton Fadiman.

Fadiman served as a friendly, knowledgeable guide to the world of liberal education, a maître d’hôtel for that rich banquet. He played that role at a time when many Americans wanted to improve their education and appreciated a helping hand. Many, like me, lived far from good bookstores, far from universities. Beyond reading Shakespeare and “Huckleberry Finn,” we didn’t know where to begin. Fadiman showed us.

His most lasting achievement was “The Lifetime Reading Plan,” a book meant for Americans who wanted to educate themselves and so enrich their lives. That guide, now in its 4th edition, is still immensely valuable.

Intellectuals looked down their noses at Fadiman and his ilk, dismissing them as “middlebrow.” Whether their brows were middle, high, or low, these egalitarian educators were doing important work. They were skilled guides for anyone with a library card and a thirst for learning.

Fadiman and others, like Encyclopædia Britannica, which published the Great Books, revealed a great truth: With a little guidance, you can do a lot to educate yourself, and you can do it at any age. Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan does that. The Kirkus review of the first edition captures its flavor well:

“[Fadiman] sees, in the books and writers he has chosen, the tools not only of self-enhancement but of self-discovery. … This is not a reading plan for the scholar, but for ‘everyman‘ — the high school student who can go no farther in formal education, the college graduate who has bypassed the treasures of literature, the average layman who is reasonably literate, but needs a refresher on things half experienced in the past.”

When Michael Isaacson, an adjunct professor at John Jay College, publicly tweeted about his looking forward to teaching future dead police officers, more than a bit of truth about our system of post-secondary education was encoded in that message. You might think of Isaacson, a self-congratulatory founder of the Antifa thugs, as something of a deviant. He isn’t.

His tweets reflect what far too many professors on campuses nationwide think but are afraid to say outside the confines of their classroom. Since the 1960s, universities have been increasingly taken over by the far Left, whose members have cloned themselves by imposing tacit political tests for recruitment, promotion, and tenure.

The wide-eyed, long-haired militants who smashed their way into the dean’s office, shouting, “Up against the wall, [expletive deleted],” in a few decades became deans. Within the university, they fashioned every hare-brained policy from social promotions to leftist-dominated studies departments that are merely propaganda fiefdoms organizing for off-campus political activities while masquerading as intellectual disciplines.

There are really two universities: the humanities, the social sciences, and the studies departments versus engineering, business, and the natural sciences. Serious intellectual work still occurs on campus in the latter fields but far less so in the former.

Universities are bureaucratic hierarchies, and hierarchies are status systems. In the contemporary university, status is defined by access to external research support. Universities, especially public universities, can no longer count on public largess as they did decades ago. Departments that can bring in external funding with its generous allocations of overhead money are valued. Others are not. Universities need research contracts and grants to survive.

Universities might talk about their commitments to political correctness, but as Congress exempts itself from its own legislation, so too do universities exempt high-valued departments from the political nonsense they sell the public. As my colleagues in engineering used to chide me, “p.c.” to them meant simply “personal computer.”

The traditional argument for the liberal arts and social sciences was that they broadened students’ intellectual horizons, made them think conceptually, and compelled them to grapple with unpopular ideas. We can debate whether that mission ever was achieved, but one thing is eminently clear: Those goals no longer exist. They have not for decades.

The liberal arts and social sciences are largely, although not exclusively, default majors for students and an assumed safety valve for institutions. These are little playpens inhabited by faculty and students who are more concerned about the conflict in the street than the life of the mind. Their function is to sop up tuition money and provide a dress parade when the government representatives come to do their so-called cultural audits.

The time, energy, and intellectual commitments in the real university do not allow for demonstrating or being concerned about which speakers should be disinvited. And while the University of California, Berkeley, has gotten a lot of attention for its demonstrations, it should be remembered that at the height of the Free Speech Movement, the strongest and most populous student group was Campus Crusade for Christ, which outnumbered FSM participants about five to one.

During major demonstrations at Berkeley, most students were in class, not in the streets. But that is never news. Even today, Berkeley, which needed phalanxes of armed police to protect the free-speech rights of mainstream conservative Ben Shapiro, boasts one of the best engineering colleges in the country. Rest assured, few if any of Berkeley’s engineering students were embroiled in demonstrations.

The students and faculties of a lesser god have been left to create their own propaganda mills and therapeutic societies based on a leftist ideology that has worked nowhere and came visibly crashing down with the Berlin Wall. At some point, serious intellectuals would not be saying that real Communism has not been tried. They would be responding to the overwhelming weight of evidence that Communism and other leftist fantasies simply do not work. But propaganda mills masquerading as academic disciplines do not care about evidence.

This year’s annual Constitution Day lecture at Princeton University was titled “F%*# Free Speech: An Anthropologist’s Take on Campus Speech Debates” and maintained that “the academy has never promoted free speech as a central value.”

According to an article in Campus Reform, the lecture was given by the chairwoman of the Department of Anthropology and director of the Program in African Studies, Carolyn Rouse.

In the lecture, Rouse stated that we should “rethink academic freedom and academic values” and that “the way in which free speech is being celebrated in the media makes little to no sense anthropologically.”

“Put simply, speech is costly,” Rouse said. “So, contrary to the ACLU’s statement on their website regarding the role of free speech on college campuses, the academy has never promoted free speech as its central value.”

Rouse might want to rethink this. After all, in the wake of the election, Rouse has been seeking submissions for her “Trumplandia” project — “a virtual space for documenting the impact of Trump’s presidency on the world” — something she says was inspired by her belief that “the changes promised by the president-elect to ‘make America great again’ were authoritarian and racist.”

The irony is as rich (and sickening) as a mayonnaise-covered chocolate truffle: This professor actually has the nerve to knock those who value free speech on campus, while using her position as a campus leader to spearhead a project that openly calls the president “racist” — an obvious example of the kind of speech that some might want to censor.

To be fair, it doesn’t seem that Rouse actually went so far as to say that there was anything wrong with the First Amendment in itself. Rather, according to Campus Reform, she seemed to define “free-speech absolutism” as the idea that all opinions should be considered equally, without, as Campus Reform puts it, “reference to any peer review process or any system of credentials,” e.g., a skeptic without any experience in climatology being free to call climate change a hoax. Rouse also argued that academia is a “semi-autonomous social field,” and that all “semi-autonomous social fields” have the right to make their own rules for themselves.

Now, Rouse is right to say that all kinds of institutions have all kinds of rules. Where she’s wrong, however, is the insinuation that the best way to counter incorrect or uninformed speech is to limit it. This is especially wrong when we’re talking about academia, seeing as the entire purpose of something such as classroom discussion is to learn and grow from a free exchange of ideas. Someone is out there spreading falsities? Well, then counter it with truth. That is, after all, how the real world works. Rouse suggests that it doesn’t — that “free-speech absolutism doesn’t exist,” because everyone tailors his or her own speech to fit within the bounds of socially acceptable standards — but anyone who has ever seen Twitter or a comments section could easily tell you that that’s simply not true.

If you want to understand how we got to Berkeley or Charlottesville, here’s a truly disturbing survey on college students and support for free speech.

It won’t surprise anyone that support for free speech among college students is weak. What this survey measures though is support for suppressing free speech, not just legally, but through harassment and even violence.

As the headline says, 1 in 3 male college students is for using violence to silence unpopular speakers.

But the deeper you dive into the survey, the more disturbing it becomes. I’ve noted before that millennials across the political spectrum tend to be illiberal. This survey (which is funded by the Koch Foundation) surveyed across the political spectrum.

Republican and independent college students are a little better than Democrats. But not by much.

When asked, “Does the First Amendment protect “hate speech”? 44% of students said it didn’t. Only 39% thought it did.

39% of Republican students and 41% of Democrat students and 44% of independent students thought that it did not.

Public students were more likely than private school students to think that it did not. Only 31% of female students, compared to 51% of male students thought it did.

51% of students supported heckling offensive speakers. And I’ll quote from the survey…

The responses to the above question show a very distinct variation across political affiliation, with 62 percent of Democrats but “only” 39 percent of Republicans agreeing that it was acceptable to shout down the speaker.

39% of Republicans is a whole lot.

Bruce Gilley isn’t very popular in academic circles these days. Many of his fellow scholars aren’t particularly fond of a paper he wrote arguing that colonialism wasn’t the net negative thing that social justice crusaders believe it is. However, Gilley is getting support from where it matters most.

The university that pays his salary is standing behind him in the face of adversity.

From The College Fix:

A public university that evaluates job applicants with 44 questions about “cultural competencies” is standing behind a professor facing a professional blacklist for making “the case for colonialism.”

Scholars and students around the world are calling for peer-reviewed Third World Quarterly, which is published by the multinational academic publisher Routledge, to retract the September article by Bruce Gilley, associate professor of political science at Portland State University, and replace the journal’s editors.

…

Gilley did not respond to a request for comment. Margaret Everett, interim provost and vice president for academic affairs at PSU, sent The College Fix a statement through a representative:

Academic freedom is critical to the open debate and free exchange of knowledge and argument. Because of Portland State University’s commitment to academic freedom, we acknowledge the right of all our faculty to explore scholarship and to speak, write and publish a variety of viewpoints and conclusions. The university also respects the rights of others to express counterviews and to engage in vigorous and constructive debate about the faculty’s work.

‘He brings up the other side of a debate that has always been off-limits’

Individual faculty in Gilley’s department declined to be interviewed on the record, but a philosophy professor at PSU who has previously courted controversy says their silence is emblematic of fear.

“They’re afraid of reprisals from their leftist colleagues,” Peter Boghossian told The Fix.“Gilley has my unwavering support. He’s a professor. His job, literally, is to publish in peer-reviewed journals. If professors are afraid of publishing anything that’s morally unfashionable, our entire engine of knowledge production would be compromised.”

Boghossian touches on the real problem here. Gilley wrote something that may or may not be factually accurate — I leave it to actual scholars to determine that. But what he’s being blasted for was daring to actually argue a contrary point of view. Many of the criticisms leveled at Gilley don’t actually take issue with the scholarship itself, but rather with the fact that its findings simply aren’t popular.

To the list of forbidden ideas on American college campuses, add “bourgeois norms”—hard work, self-discipline, marriage and respect for authority. Last month, two law professors published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer calling for a revival of the “cultural script” that prevailed in the 1950s and still does among affluent Americans: “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Eschew substance abuse and crime.” The weakening of these traditional norms has contributed to today’s low rates of workforce participation, lagging educational levels and widespread opioid abuse, the professors argued.

The op-ed triggered an immediate uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, where one of its authors, Amy Wax, teaches. The dean of the Penn law school, Ted Ruger, published an op-ed in the student newspaper noting the “contemporaneous occurrence” of the op-ed and a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and suggesting that Ms. Wax’s views were “divisive, even noxious.” Half of Ms. Wax’s law-faculty colleagues signed an open letter denouncing her piece and calling on students to report any “bias or stereotype” they encounter “at Penn Law ” (e.g., in Ms. Wax’s classroom). Student and alumni petitions poured forth accusing Ms. Wax of white supremacy, misogyny and homophobia and demanding that she be banned from teaching first-year law classes.

Ms. Wax’s co-author, Larry Alexander, teaches at the University of San Diego, a Catholic institution. USD seemed to be taking the piece in stride—until last week. The dean of USD’s law school, Stephen Ferruolo, issued a schoolwide memo repudiating Mr. Alexander’s article and pledging new measures to compensate “vulnerable, marginalized” students for the “racial discrimination and cultural subordination” they experience.

USD’s response is more significant than Penn’s, because it is more surprising. While USD has embraced a “social justice” mission in recent decades, the law school itself has been less politicized. It has one of the highest proportions of nonleftist professors in the country—about a quarter of the faculty. Mr. Ferruolo, a corporate lawyer with strong ties to the biotech industry, presented himself until recently as mildly conservative. If USD is willing to match Penn’s hysterical response to the Wax-Alexander op-ed, is there any educational institution remaining that will defend its faculty members against false accusations of racism should they dissent from orthodoxy?

Two aspects of the op-ed have generated the most outrage. Ms. Wax and Mr. Alexander observed that cultures are not all “equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” Their critics pounced on this statement as a bigoted, hate-filled violation of the multicultural ethic. In his response, Penn’s Dean Ruger proclaimed that “as a scholar and educator I reject emphatically any claim that a single cultural tradition is better than all others.” But that wasn’t the claim the authors were making. Rather, they argued that bourgeois culture is better than underclass culture—specifically, “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks.” The authors’ criticism of white underclass behavior has been universally suppressed in the stampede to accuse them of “white supremacy.”

The op-ed’s other offense was extolling the 1950s for that decade’s embrace of bourgeois virtues. “Nostalgia for the 1950s breezes over the truth of inequality and exclusion,” five Penn faculty assert in yet another op-ed for the student newspaper. In fact, Mr. Alexander and Ms. Wax expressly acknowledged that era’s “racial discrimination, limited sex roles, and pockets of anti-Semitism.”

The Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School announced on Wednesday that it was inviting Chelsea E. Manning–who disseminated almost 750,000 secret American government cables and documents about Iraq to Wikileaks and spent seven years in prison before her sentence was commuted by President Obama–to become a visiting fellow. Then, on Friday, it rescinded the invitation. The school’s dean, Douglas W. Elmendorf, issued a broadly worded statement. He indicated that, on the one hand, he continued to believe the invitation was appropriate but, on the other, that “in retrospect” he had gotten the balance between controversial actions and “public service” wrong, and that the title visiting fellow, even if used for a only a day to give a talk, was ultimately inappropriate in the case of Manning.

The immediate trigger for the outcry over Manning’s appointment stemmed from the decision of Michael J. Morrell, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to write a letter to Elmendorf complaining about Manning. In it, Morrell submitted his resignation from the Kennedy School, where he has been a nonresident senior fellow since 2013, and asserted that inviting Manning “honors a convicted felon and leaker of classified information.” Next Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA, backed out of a Harvard forum, pointing to Morrell’s protest. “WikiLeaks,” Pompeo said, “is an enemy of America.” Given Morrell’s own serial attacks on Donald Trump, during the 2016 presidential election campaign, as, among other things, an “unwitting dupe” of the Kremlin, Pompeo’s move testifies to the bond of loyalty that exists among current and former CIA officials, not to mention the deep anger aroused by leaking, which is, at bottom, a treasonous act. If all American government communications are going to be subject to constant exposure at the whim of an individual who arrogates the right to themselves to deem what is appropriate and inappropriate, then foreign policy would essentially grind to a halt.

In a sense, however, Pompeo’s refusal to visit may be backfiring. His withdrawal from visiting Harvard to deliver a talk is being inflated into an entire campaign by the deep state to stifle dissent. Writing in the Nation, for example, John Nichols attacked Pompeo: “Manning blew the whistle on what would come to be understood as military and diplomatic scandals because she felt Americans had a right to know what was being done in their name but without their informed consent. Mike Pompeo, a secretive and conflicted politician, has no such instinct; he serves wealth and power without questioning whether the dictates of the privileged are right or honorable.” Manning herself alleged on twitter, “this is what a military/police/intel state looks like — the @cia determines what is and is not taught at @harvard.” The course that events have taken is allowing Manning to present herself as a victim all over again. It’s a shrewd maneuver, one that will surely lead to a spate of media appearances that will dwarf anything Harvard could ever offer.

For all the huffing and puffing about the CIA, however, the real problem is something else. It isn’t that the CIA is somehow setting the course curriculum at Harvard. It’s that Morrell himself has no real standing to criticize Manning. His own government record is checkered enough to render his judgments suspect.

A fascinating drama played out yesterday at Harvard, as campus-based politically correct thinking slammed into reality, and the grown-ups had to set the boundaries back to common sense. All very publicly.

The invitation by the Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics to Chelsea Manning to become a visiting fellow has been withdrawn in the wake of a firestorm. What mattered to Harvard more than blogger backlash was the resignation of Mike Morrell from a fellowship at the University’s Belfer Center and CIA Director Mile Pompeo’s cancellation of a planned talk and visit. Morrell’s Statement (embedded below in a tweet) below set off alarm bells that Harvard as a whole was placing its relationship to the Intelligence and Military sectors of the federal government in peril. He states that cannot be part of an institution that honors a felon and leaker of classified information. He reminds Harvard that senior military leaders have stated that Manning’s leaks put the lives of our soldiers at risk.

But here is what got the attention of the real powers at Harvard:

Please know that I am fully aware that Belfer and the IOP are separate institutions within the Kennedy School. And that most likely Belfer had nothing to do with the invitation of Ms. Manning to be a fellow at IOP. But as an institution, The Kennedy School’s decision will assist Ms. Manning in her long-standing effort to legitimize the criminal path that she took to prominence, and attempt that may encourage others to leak classified information as well. I have an obligation to my conscience – and I believe to the country – to stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national security information.

It is critical that Morrell specifies that he doesn’t blame the Belfer Center. This is what tells other parts of Harvard that they could share in the taint, and possibly lose valuable associations with members of the defense and intelligence communities, past, present, and maybe future. Manning’s continuing presence on campus could well become a circus, pressuring others to reckon with the principle that Manning’s honor of becoming part of the Harvard community encourages others to leak national security information.

Morrell cc’s to former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, the head of the Belfer Center, who also must ponder honoring a person who endangered the lives of soldiers.

Morrell does not mention other schools than the Kennedy School, but he is generalizing responsibility from the specific unit of the IOP to the School as a whole. One more step like that, and Harvard as a whole comes under threat. If Manning becomes an ongoing circus, that could happen.

The real powers at Harvard are The Harvard Corporation and The Board of Overseers. They hire and fire presidents, and they control the money. They think in terms of institutional relationships and the long-term health and status of the oldest and wealthiest university in the country, of which they are the custodians. Anything that threatens that must go.

That must be what explains this late-night statement from Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf. To my eyes, the good dean seems a bit worried about his job, as he engages in self-criticism after weaseling around that “fellow” is a pretty generic term that mistakenly he thought did not imply honor. (Which obscures the fact that the visiting fellow program to which Manning was invited is a pretty big deal, and places very specific teaching obligations on the fellows.)

But I see more clearly now that many people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific, so we should weigh that consideration when offering invitations. In particular, I think we should weigh, for each potential visitor, what members of the Kennedy School community could learn from that person’s visit against the extent to which that person’s conduct fulfills the values of public service to which we aspire. This balance is not always easy to determine, and reasonable people can disagree about where to strike the balance for specific people. Any determination should start with the presumption that more speech is better than less. In retrospect, though, I think my assessment of that balance for Chelsea Manning was wrong. Therefore, we are withdrawing the invitation to her to serve as a Visiting Fellow—and the perceived honor that it implies to some people—while maintaining the invitation for her to spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak in the Forum. I apologize to her and to the many concerned people from whom I have heard today for not recognizing upfront the full implications of our original invitation. This decision now is not intended as a compromise between competing interest groups but as the correct way for the Kennedy School to emphasize its longstanding approach to visiting speakers while recognizing that the title of Visiting Fellow implies a certain recognition.