RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mr. Miller is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College, a writer for National Review, and the founder and executive director of the College Fix.

Riots last week at the University of California, Berkeley stopped Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing provocateur who contributes to Breitbart News, from speaking on campus. The violence forced the cancellation of his event and inflicted $100,000 in damage to school property, according to administrators. Then it spread to New York University, where police arrested 11 protesters who tried to halt the libertarian comedian Gavin McInnes from talking to students.

The American Association of University Professors has said nothing about this coastal turmoil. Yet it has condemned what it apparently regards as a greater threat: students who provide accurate reports on the shouted-down speakers in their auditoriums and the left-wing biases in their classrooms.

In a 1,000-word statement released last month, the AAUP bemoaned “new efforts by private groups to monitor the conduct of faculty members,” which it likened to “witch hunts.” Then it named names: Professor Watchlist, Campus Reform and the College Fix.

I know a little about the first two groups and a lot about the third: I founded the College Fix seven years ago. Every day the website publishes articles by student journalists, who work with our professional editors to tell true stories about campus politics and culture. Our goal is to create compelling and original content, while identifying a new generation of promising writers and editors before they make the mistake of going to law school.

In recent days, the Fix has carried accounts of the disturbances at Berkeley and NYU. Our writers also have covered Barnard College’s proposal to require attendance at workshops on “inclusion and equity,” plus Pepperdine University’s decision to remove a statue of Columbus, whose presence has became too “painful,” according to the school’s president, Andrew K. Benton.

The Fix also brings readers into classrooms, as it did last fall when professors turned their lecterns into bully pulpits. One article described how Bruce Conforth, a music lecturer at the University of Michigan, began an election-eve class by urging students to vote for Hillary Clinton because she favors abortion rights, a higher minimum wage, and tuition-free college. Readers who questioned the article’s accuracy could watch an accompanying video of Mr. Conforth’s stump speech.

Professors who proclaim their own partisanship are bad enough, but some even turn their classrooms into semester-long re-education camps. Last fall at the Colorado Springs campus of the University of Colorado, history lecturer Jared Benson and sociology instructor Nicholas Lee taught a course titled “Resistance and Revolution.” In expletive-laden lectures, these self-styled Marxists called America’s founders “terrorists,” compared the Sons of Liberty to the Westboro Baptist Church, and ridiculed “the taxation-without-representation argument” as “asinine” on the grounds that American revolutionaries were rich men who didn’t want to pay their fair share. They also insisted that Ronald Reagan had little to do with the demise of the Soviet Union and that Martin Luther King Jr. was a secret communist (which they meant as a compliment). CONTINUE AT SITE

Of the many intellectual perversions currently taking root on college campuses, perhaps none is more contradictory to what should be one of higher education’s core values than the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barraged with vitriol, all at the hands of progressive groups who give lip service to the notion of academic free speech, and who demand it when their own speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view.

This is the tragic and inevitable result of a decades of grievance-based victimism by self-designated groups who frame their rights and demands on identity politics. Those who see themselves as perennial victims also feel very comfortable, when they express their feelings of being oppressed, in projecting that same victimization outward on their oppressors, as witnessed recently, for example, at Berkeley University where some 1500 violent rioters, including members of the radical, far-Left Antifa group, feminists, gay activists, pro-immigration groups, and other faculty and students, lit fires, smashed windows, tossed smoke bombs, destroyed property, and pepper sprayed and beat pro-Trump bystanders and conservatives, all because of the purported extreme ideology of Milo Yiannopoulos, a speaker invited to campus by the Berkeley College Republicans that evening as part of his “The Dangerous Faggot Tour.”

Lost in the reporting about the Berkeley rioting, of course, is the topic that was to be the theme of Yiannopoulos’ February 1st speech. It was specifically to address Berkeley’s recent decision, along with approximately 30 other campuses across the country, to become “sanctuary campuses,” giving them the dubious distinction of flaunting the intent and spirit of federal law that could lead to the arrest of students who are attending schools in this country but are actually not legally permitted to do so. Yiannopoulos was also going to raise the related, and clearly relevant, question of whether, once they had, in contravention of current law, declared themselves either sanctuary cities of sanctuary campuses, these entities should lose Federal funding.

Interestingly, in sending a letter to the university community prior to the Yiannopoulos’ planned speech, Berkeley’s Chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, confirmed, on one hand, a “right to free expression, enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and reflected in some of the most important moments of Berkeley’s history,” but then portrayed Yiannopoulos in that letter as “a troll and provocateur who uses odious behavior in part to ‘entertain,’ but also to deflect any serious engagement with ideas,” clearly signaling to readers that, as far as the Berkeley administration was concerned, this speech would be in violation of the prevailing norms and beliefs of the University at large and would, consequently, have no intrinsic intellectual value.

So while Dirks was purportedly supporting the idea of academic free speech, together with its oft-lauded vigorous open debate, he actually was violating the content neutrality that is required of free speech on campuses by leaving no one reading his letter with any doubt as to where he and the University stood on this issue, especially since the decision had already been made to ignore existing statutes that would call for the arrest and possible deportation of individuals who attend schools in this country but are not legally permitted to do so.

The debate over whether immigration to this country should continue without proper vetting and oversight, of course, was one of the central issues of the recent presidential election, so there is considerable emotion and debate over this topic, especially among college students and faculty (not to mention Democrat governors and mayors across the country), who have taken it upon themselves to decide that they have greater moral authority to settle this issue than the government does in enforcing existing laws of this nation.