NAS Blog

Yesterday, good news, since we were elated to acknowledge FIRE’s victory for academic freedom at a California community college. Today, back to the more familiar bad news, since a federal judge has upheld the right of Eastern Michigan University to expel Julea Ward, an evangelical Christian student who was training as a high school guidance counselor. Ward, as we’ve reported previously, was just shy of graduating from EMU’s counseling program when she was mugged by PC ideology. Because of her religious convictions, she could not agree to counsel prospective homosexual clients in the affirmative manner required by EMU’s program. Should such a case arise, she said, she’d simply refer gay clients to other counselors able to accomodate their needs. Oh no, said EMU, that’s not good enough, not by a mile. Sign this paper, or out you go. I can’t, she insisted; you’ re gone, they replied. Supported by the Alliance Defense Fund (read the ADF’s press release here and an Inside Higher Education article here), she sued the school, contending that her First Amendment rights had been violated. Ordinarily, you’d expect First Amendment claims to weigh especially heavily in a case such as this, but the judge, alas, bought the university’s argument about needing latitude in designing its curricula and programs, and the courts have always deferred in such instances, etc., etc. This isn’t about thought control, insisted the counseling program’s directors, it’s simply a matter of recognizing the need to deal with a wide variety of clients, including those with beliefs different from one’s own. Who could disagree? Maybe I’m cynical, but I somehow don’t think a gay atheist will be required to declare that he’s willing to counsel Southern Baptists in a manner that affirms their beliefs. ADF is appealing the case, and we wish them well. Increasingly though, it seems that the acceptable parameters for discussing homosexuality on campus these days are narrowly one-dimensional. And if you don’t see the issue that way and you’re a faculty member without tenure, or if you’re a student and want your degree in counseling or social work, better keep quiet or go elsewhere.

Our friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education continue their stellar work defending the academic freedom and First Amendment rights of college faculty members – especially untenured adjuncts – who collide with stifiling campus political orthodoxies. This time, they’ve scored against the San Jose/Evergreen Community College District, which will have to pay 100K in lost wages to an adjunct instructor who was terminated in 2007 after a student complained that her brief classroom discussion of the origins of homosexuality was “offensive.” The district will have to pick up the tab for legal expenses as well. Too bad for them – and the taxpayers who will carry theses costs – that they didn’t simply respect the instructor’s academic freedom in the first place.

But while I’m glad that FIRE was able to intervene successfully in this case, I also wish that they and other organizations such as the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) didn’t have so much work to do. This is getting to be a depressingly familiar scenario: 1) Instructor in a psychology or ethics course examines homosexuality or sex differences, says something that a student finds “offensive.” 2) A complaint is forwarded at the speed of light to the administration, cc to the campus women’s center, the dean of multicultural affairs or the LGBT office, who don’t necessarily need to interview the instructor, but nevertheless agree that yes, yes, the classroom discussion was indeed “offensive.” 3) The administration informs instructor that she’s outta here. 4) Board of directors upholds administration, unimpressed by quaint ideas about academic freedom or First Amendment protections.

Honestly, I wonder what the worst aspect of cases such as this one is. It’s appalling, of course, that such an Orwellian intellectual climate exists on so many campuses, and the examples of outrages such as this one seem to pop up weekly. See Ashley Thorne’s recent post detailing the latest incident involving a socal work student whose religious convictions ran afoul of a counseling program at Augusta State University in Georgia. But what about boards of trustees, such as the one in the San Jose/Evergreen case? What could they, as the governing bodies at a public institution have been thinking? Apart from the deserved embarassment their school has incurred and the hefty settlement costs they’ve handed to taxpayers, what does academic freedom or First Amendment protections mean to them? Not much, I have to conclude, since they upheld the administration’s outrage, without apparently seeing it as such. Kudos to FIRE once again, which seems to have a much firmer grasp of the academic enterprise and its mission than do many of the people to whom it’s been directly entrusted.

I could be wrong, but in the wake of all the mudwrestling that’s followed the NAACP’s recent branding of Tea Partiers as racists, I think that the ideological fulcrum of the “diversity” debate has significantly shifted ground. For once, the response by public figures has been direct and emphatic, instead of the usual backpedaling after some vague, apologetic mumbling about the need to “include” all groups, the value of a diverse work force or the wish to avoid offending anyone, etc., etc., etc. The public rejection of the NAACP’s allegations, moreover, has been bi-partisan, including prominent Republicans such as Sarah Palin and no less than Vice President Biden and President Obama on the Democratic side of the aisle. Hopefully, this means that absurd or silly allegations of racism will no longer compel politicans and bureaucrats to jump through the hoop as they’ve done so frequently in the past.

Especially encouraging, though, is this piece by Virgina Democrat James Webb in today’s Wall Street Journal. Webb argues that although “diversity” policies had their origins in the laudable and necessary efforts to redress the unique injustices suffered by black Americans, they have long since become obsessed with skin color or ethnic background, often with unconcealed hostility toward whites. Thus, newly arrived immigrants often benefit from these policies, even though their own experiences don’t remotely resemble those of blacks. It doesn’t stop there either, since in many academic institutions, “diversity” and “inclusiveness” now extend to ever -expanding categories of sexuality, life experiences or those with physical disabilities. A particularly hard sell for me has always been affirmative action for “women” within the diversity rubric, as though the largely white, middle-class feminist movement could claim grievances comparable to those suffered historically by blacks. Yet many academic job postings routinely specify that “women and ethnic or racial minorities are especially encouraged to apply.” That doesn’t compute.

Anyway, Webb says it’s now time to end racial preferences, stop discriminating against whites, and simply treat everyone equally under the law. Amen.

If you haven’t already done so, check out this piece by Ross Douthat in the New York Times. Following up on Russell Nieli’s compelling reasearch, which we referenced here last week, Douthat – himself a Harvard graduate – takes note of the deep and ever widening cultural divide between elite academic institutions and the values of rural, religiously observant working-class whites, who are notably absent from Ivy League campuses. Don’t think though, that this means anyone sees a need to seek them out for the sake of increasing “diversity” at Yale or Princeton. No, the academics at these cloistered, self-referencing institutions are likely to see only “crypto-klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs” among the farmers, Eagle Scouts or aspiring R.O.T.C. candidates who currently have the toughest row to hoe if they apply to most top schools. If these applicants think that the deck is stacked against them, that’s because it is: the “perfessers” really don’t like folks like them.

Anyone who’s followed Ashley Thorne’s posts describing the recently discontinued La Raza/Chicano “studies” program in the Tucson public school sytem may well have experienced a sense of the surreal: how on earth did this balkanized, ideological bomb-throwing find its way into any classroom anywhere? Could anyone actually have been serious about a “curriculum” that could only engender ethnic chauvanism and antagonism toward non-hispanics, especially whites? Unfortunately, yes, since the Tucson program is simply an extension/imitation of what’s been going on in academic precincts for quite some time now. Here you can easily find any number of undergraduate courses and “studies” programs devoted to fostering group identity, group chauvnism, group grievance, group entitlement, etc., etc. But as these two pieces (here and here) in the Chronicle of Higher Education illustrate, ethnic studies has apparently been catching some flak, even from within the academy, and the authors respectively write to mount a defense. Of course, they believe, lots of criticism predictably emanates from the incorrigible racism which perdures at all levels of American society, and which was recently made manifest in Arizona’s new statute which effectively terminated the Tucson curriculum. But one of the authors interestingly argues that ethnic studies programs at the college level have been weakened by academic “liberals,” who have used them as a means of celebrating “diversity’ rather than generating political activism and group advocacy (as in “empowerment”). That, he concludes, is where ethnic studies needs to refocus, as the La Raza program was apparently doing so well. As the comments thread indicates, a number of academic observers with first-hand experience of similar programs also think that’s exactly what’s wrong with them.

Our friend Christina Sommers has frequently piqued the wrath of academic feminists by arguing that public education, far from favoring boys as legend has it, is loaded heavily against them and in favor of girls all through the K-12 years. See, for example, her book The War Against Boys, which makes that case very convincingly. In this article in today’s American, the AEI magazine, Sommers illustrates how the “war” continues in the New York City school system’s program for gifted students. Despite the fact that, statistically, there are approximately equivalent numbers of academically talented boys and girls, the selection process, especially the heavily verbal rather than quantitative orientation of the qualifying exams, is decidedly skewed in favor of girls. Not surprisingly, nearly three-fifths of the students selected for the special programs are girls. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with providing talented girls with every opportunity to realize their potential. But equally talented boys are currently getting the very short end of the stick. It’s simply one more example, Sommers concludes, of the fact that boys of every variety have been relegated to second-class status by feminist-dominated school systems. To my mind, the greatest irony lies in the fact that, despite the increasing dominance of academic, leadership and social awards by girls, many of them also graduate from high school with a strong sense of grievance and victimhood. Thus, the typically upscale suburbanite valedictorian on her way to an Ivy League school next Fall, with lots of scholarship support in hand, will often as not give an address explaining how things are so heavily stacked against women, and she fully expects to encounter massive discrimination in the years ahead. Her college experience, alas, isn’t likely to dispel that outlook.

You may have thought – or wished – that American colleges and universities had finally exhausted the outer reaches of “diversity” on their campuses. Really, there’s simply GOT to be a finite limit to this thing, and we really will run out of special categories, special programs, special courses, special campus codes and relentless micromanagement by administrators, hiring committees and dormitory resident heads seeing that students and faculty members are sufficiently serious about “diversity.” Well, if that’s what you thought, brace yourself: according to this piece in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, a new, significantly expanded version of “diversity” is about to arrive on campus, with lots of new student classifications and obligations to accomodate them. And here’s a surprise: this also means vastly greater possibilities for antidiscrimination litigation as well. Take students with various physical or learning disabilities, for example: they’re accustomed to all kinds of accomodations, whether in the use of guide dogs or the constant availability of special education teachers during their K-12 years that aren’t currently provided in most college programs. If all of they’re accustomed to receiving these services at the secondary level, then why can’t colleges and universities do likewise? There may be nothing wrong providing such accomodations, of course, but it’s not immediately obvious how they’re related to the idea of “diversity.” This is in addition, of course, to the endlessly proliferating categories of ethnic racial and sexual categories which will have to be recognized and accomodated. If you’ve been troubled by the imperial march of “diversity” up to now, this is not going to make for very edifying reading. Simillar to The Blob, it expands endlessly. The comments thread, though, suggests that a number of readers have finally reached their limits and are willing to say so. Hopefully, they’ll speak up at faculty meetings as well.

Steven Rhoads, NAS member and Political Science professor at the University of Virginia, writes [along with co-authors Laura Webber and Diana Van Fleet]at the Chronicle of Higher Education about the “hook-up” sexual culture now so widespread on many college campuses (and high schools as well, according to what one informed local counselor tells me). The subject has been examined here before, when we published Wendy Shalit’s call for the recovery of some minimum standard of modesty in the dorms. Good luck with that, since I doubt that there is much on campus these days that hasn’t been exposed, practiced, discussed or attempted. Most undergraduates, their sap rising, have long been accustomed to inhabiting the same buildings , the same floors, using the same common bathrooms and, more recently, the same dorm rooms. Beyond that, many undergraduate newspapers feature a regular “sex columnist,” who usually doesn’t devote a lot of space to modesty. Not much then, seems to stand in the way of the “hookup” culture, and, as Shalit discovered, the burden is on those uneasy with it to remove themselves by choice: there are few institutional props that even encourage, much less accomodate them. We’re certainly not in Kansas anymore.

Rhoads and his co-authors share Shalit’s negative take on casual, random sexual encounters, but offer some intriguing empirical research results rather than simply subjective disapproval. On the basis of extensive survey questionaires, they find that young college women in particular, perhaps to their surprise, are increasingly unedified and troubled when they reflect on their “hookup” experiences. Not quite what they expected, it seems. It’s worth reading, especially for the lively comments thread which follows.

If you follow the comment threads in places where anything concerning science is being discussed, you’ve probably noticed how little it takes to get some posters really apoplectic about the dangers to scientific inquiry posed by “fundamentalists,” “creationists” or other assorted religious cranks and yahoos. Interestingly enough, virtually all of the science reportage I’m referring to isn’t even remotely connected to the religion/science controversy. Nevertheless, the discussion doesn’t get very far before someone weighs in with dark warnings about the fate of Galileo, the Scopes trial and McCarthyism [not scientific, I know but it gets in there anyway], along with much less decorous references to “bigots,” “Christofascists,” or “witch burners.” Such dangerous people do exist, but it’s pretty hard to find any of them on most college campuses. So why is it necessary to do battle with them when they don’t even show up? More than that: even if no one says anything about religious belief at all in these venues, it’s not the least unusual to encounter unprovoked, stern admonitions about the incompatibility of science and faith. Curious, to say the least.

In this light, I’m hoping that something productive will come from a new initiative sponsored by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, a Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion (DoSER), the subject of this piece today at Inside Higher Ed. One purpose will be to “facilitate communication” between science and religious belief, since the two are so often seen as mutually exclusive, and some commenters have already jumped in to insist that it must ever be so. Hopefully though, the tone of the “dialogue” can at least become a bit more civil, particularly on the part of those who so often mount a stiff defense when no one attacks.

Today’s New York Times features John Tierney’s followup to his piece last week about attempts to legislate “gender equity,” which he concludes will never work: a mixture of innate biological factors and individual career choices, rather than a “glass ceiling” or deliberate discrminination account for the statistical disparities between men and women in fields such as physics or mechanical engineering. Tierney cites a solid body of research to bolster his conclusion – including the stellar work of our friend Christina Sommers – but the comments thread indicates that, where this subject is concerned, ideology still reigns supreme for many others. The gap can be explained by “gender bias,” case closed. Unfortunately, Congress seems to be listening to the ideologues at the moment.