NAS Blog

California taxpayers are now on the hook for  $100,000, which the San José/Evergreen Community College District (SJCCD) has agreed to pay an adjunct professor in lost earnings in exchange for dismissal of her First Amendment lawsuit.

The background of the lawsuit? Sheldon had led a short discussion about the nature/nurture debate regarding sexual orientation in her Human Heredity course. She was then fired due to a student complaint and went to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for assistance.

“This welcome settlement demonstrates that colleges cannot get away with punishing a professor for teaching relevant class material, even if a student finds it offensive,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff.

An aspect of this case worthy of the attention of NAS afficionados is the SJCCD’s contention that Sheldon was teaching non-scientific material as science.

In any event, congratulations to Sheldon and FIRE for persevering in this good fight. And condolences to CA taxpayers.

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.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Professor Donald Downs (author of Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus) discusses the lawsuit UNC-Wilmington professor Mike Adams has brought against the school, in which he argues that its refusal to promote him was grounded in hostility to his writings and thus an infringement upon his First Amendment rights.

Downs doesn’t think the case is clearly black or white, but worries that the district court’s ruling in favor of UNCW (the case is now on appeal to the Fourth Circuit) represents a further erosion of First Amendment protection for speech by public employees.

I don’t think this is an easy case either. We have here a collision between the First Amendment (or at least “First Amendment values” of uninhibited speech in the public realm) and another consideration that has, unfortunately, been given short shrift for most of the last century — freedom of contract. I’m strongly inclined to say that employers and employees, public and private, should be free to enter into whatever contracts as they mutually agree. Professor Adams thought he deserved a promotion (a modification of his contract with the university), but the UNCW administration didn’t agree. Should that decision be overridden in the courts because Adams’ writings bothered the administrators? Does the First Amendment mean that public employees can never suffer any adverse consequences because of things they’ve said or written?

Suppose we turn this case around so that the professor who wants the promotion is a rabid, hard-left socialist whose posts on, say, The Daily Kos, cause heartburn among the school’s administrators. Would it be a blow to free speech if they told him that he won’t get a promotion because his outside writings are such an embarrassment? Or would it be a sensible and harmless exercise in freedom of contract?

Writing in the Wall Street Journal (June 18), Timothy Knowles, “a former teacher, principal and district leader” laments the difficulty of eliminating “low-performing teachers.”  Granted, there are abundant reasons for tenure reform at the K-12 level.  College, however, is a different matter.

Marketing his new book, Cary Nelson, spear point of the AAUP, says

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, devout believer that you only have academic freedom and free speech if you have job security.  If you don’t have job security, you can’t speak out forcefully, and I think that means academic freedom will be diminished.

I rarely agree with Dr. Nelson, a fellow I find usually animated by left-wing, social constructivist, and Sixties sentiments, but in this case he is right.

Mr. Knowles paints administrators as ex-teachers called to a higher mission.  However, in college, many administrators have little or no classroom experience, and Mr. Knowles seems oblivious to just how political, punitive, and self-serving careerist administrators can be (just look at how many of the cases at FIRE originate from administrative excesses).  Without tenure, my campus would have no discernible conservative voice at all.  I would have been fired by at least three different college presidents for a variety of transgressions:  organizing the faculty union, suing the college, publically criticizing multiculturalism, openly opposing “student learning outcomes.”

Students can survive a poor teacher (how many great teachers are there?), but they can’t survive a university monoculture that is an ideological echo chamber.  Tenure may sometimes protect incompetent knaves but, where it still exists, tenure also protects vital intellectual pluralism.

Those who work in the private sector have long known (right?) that your privacy ends at the steps of the workplace. Plan accordingly.

The issue of whether this principle applied to the public sector arose in the case of Ontario v. Quon. The answer: Your public college administrators can read your email, texts, and see who you have called. Melancton Smith has a good blog on the case over at Beacon.

It amazes me how few people realize this basic fact. On a college campus, the IT personnel have to be busy sniffing out the bandwidth hogs who are torrenting illegal movies, spreading malware, etc. They are good at monitoring the system — probably better than most employers.

For more on the limits of campus privacy, see my two-part Big Brother and U, Part I: Is Your University Reading your Email?

NAS Chairman Steve Balch defends the right of Bill Ayers – former leader of the radical communist group the Weather Underground to speak at the University of Wyoming. “We need more debate rather than less at our universities and, of course, the First Amendment applies to all,” he wrote.

In recent years, threats from Islamic extremists have resulted in murder of those simply depicting Mohammed (forbidden by Islamic tradition, although not unknown to Islamic culture).

From a prominent woman who fled Islamic death threats:

“‘South Park’ and the Informal Fatwa”

In a profile of cowardice, Comedy Central responded to a recent death threat by censoring the image of Mohammed on South Park

You can “piss Christ,” bash Buddha, mock the Pope, but humor is apparently not in the hadith.

Read:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/apr/22/south-park-censored-fatwa-muhammad

http://article.nationalreview.com/432601/self-censoring-isouth-parki/nina-shea

And here is the image (censored) that Comedy Central now allows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SP-s10e04-censor.jpg

When Danish cartoonists published cartoons of Mohammed, Islamic extremists rampaged worldwide and killed 100 people. Those who published the cartoons in the “land of the free” (USA) lost their jobs or were forced to grovel with apologies. Others had to go into hiding.

Academics, of course, led the way by rotting out the foundations of any reasoned defense of a free and civil society.

“Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” was the chant during the culture wars. There isn’t much left of “Western Civ” or any civilization, unless it is Nihilism with cowardly fear (but not reverence) for Islam.

Case in point: Years ago, Yale University admitted “Yale Taliban”--the propaganda minister for the Taliban–despite the fact he had only a fourth-grade education. Then, when Yale University Press published a book on the cartoon controversy, they censored the images for fear of death threats.

Now it is another sniveling retreat in popular culture (South Park).

“Land of the free”? “Home of the brave?

More of the same.

Shame on you Comedy Central!

Video: Peter Wood Talks About Anger on MSNBC, Peter Wood

Anger, Sedition, and Freedom of Speech, Ashley Thorne

Fighting City Hall: Is It Worth It? Richard J. Bishirjian

Why Texas Should Revive Western Civ Study, Steve Balch

Shimer Unmanned, Peter Wood

The shape of satire is circular; what a satire mocks can never be shown as improving because satire’s aim is to expose, ridicule, and thereby correct, similar folly in reality.  Nothing changes in Gulliver’s Travels or Candide because Swift and Voltaire want us to change and the world to change.

Fine satire can devastate its object.  I just finished watching 2081, The Moving Picture Institute’s film of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.” Vonnegut imagines a world in which the familiar “progressive” goals of “equity” and “social justice” and “self-esteem” have been achieved . . . with a vengeance.  Vonnegut’s 2000-word reductio begins

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Equality of opportunity has become equality of outcome.  Strong people (and ballerinas) must wear weights; handsome people must wear masks; smart people must wear radios in their ears which shriek every few seconds “to keep people . . . from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”

Screenwriter/Director Chandler Tuttle and Producer Thor Halvorssen have created a tight, well-cast, well-acted, 25 minute visualization of what Richard Bernstein called “the dictatorship of virtue.”  I give the film an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

Our friends at FIRE continue their meritorious work on behalf of free speech on campus, this time at Duke, which, as you may recollect, has had some problems with the idea over the years. In this instance, the Duke University Women’s Center had refused to allow a group of undergraduate women, members of Duke Students for Life, to use its facilities for a presentation on motherhood. Apparently, some of the others at the women’s center got quite exercised about the topic, and complained loudly, prompting one of the DWC’s staffers to refuse the request. Remember that the Women’s Center, like many other student organizations on Duke’s campus and elsewhere, is supported by the activities fees that come out of everyone’s tuition. Its use, in principle at least, isn’t restricted to a specific set of viewpoints or groups. Ah, but as I’ve learned over the years, that’s often exactly how it works in practice, especially at Women’s Centers, where being a “woman” is less about being female, and much, much more about feminist ideology. Sad to say, but I’ve heard this record many, many times before. That’s why it’s so heartening that FIRE has been able to talk sense to Duke’s administration, and that they’ve responded by doing the right thing and rescinding the ban. Too bad, though, that there was ever a need for such action in the first place. There’s a long, long way yet to go, but FIRE’s efforts certainly have us moving in the right direction.