RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government,” wrote Ben Franklin. “When this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved.” Imagine what Franklin, James Madison and the other Founders would make of a new Brookings Institution survey showing that American college students have no clue what the First Amendment means.

John Villasenor surveyed more than 1,500 undergraduates, and among the alarming findings: Most American college students do not know that even hate speech is constitutionally protected; half agree that it’s okay to shout down a speaker whose views they don’t agree with; and nearly one of five believe it is acceptable for a student group opposed to a speaker to use violence to keep him from speaking. Some of the answers vary by political identification, but overall the findings suggest great confusion.

Mr. Villasenor’s conclusion is blunt. “Freedom of expression,” he says, “is deeply imperiled on U.S. campuses.” We’d take that further. Given that a functioning democracy rests on free expression, what do these results say about America’s future when these students leave school and begin to take their places in public life?

It’s easy to mock the students for their ignorance. But what about the people responsible for teaching them? These results suggest that the failures of our education system are beginning to have terrible consequences for America’s civic life.

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.