NAS Blog

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.

Princeton’s Russ Nieli has an illuminating essay on Minding the Campus entitled “How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others.” It absolutely knocks the stuffing out of the contention we hear so often from college administrators that their reason for using certain preferences is that a more “diverse” student body will enhance learning and break down stereotypes. If they actually wanted to do that, they would look for students who really do bring different beliefs and perspectives and would drop the bias Nieli shows against students from military families, those who have been active in groups like 4H, and so on. They aren’t looking for Justice Powell’s phantom “educational benefits of diversity” but are merely looking to fill quotas.

Nieli advocates that elite colleges get over their diversity mania and follow what he calls the Cal Tech model: focus on enrolling students who are the most academically talented and the most eager to learn.

A new essay on campus feminism is now available online at NAS.org. Authored by Karin Agness, founder and president of the Network of enlightened Women (new friends of NAS), the article will appear in the forthcoming “Student Culture” issue of Academic Questions (vol. 23, no. 2).

Agness documents the rise of feminism in higher education and recounts her own encounter with feminism as an undergrad at UVA:

At the end of the tour, I asked her, “Would the Women’s Center consider cosponsoring a group for conservative women?” She looked at me as if I were crazy, chuckled, and said, “Not here.” I thanked her and decided to start a club for conservative women on my own.

If you’re feeling confused about the boundaries of sexual conduct on campus these days, that’s more than understandable. In February, you’ll recall, we noted here the observance of Yale’s freewheeling, everything goes Sex Week festival. Let it all out, the message seemed to be, no holds barred. You’d better be careful about that and a lot less if you happen to attend Duke, however. Now, from the same folks who gave us the lacrosse team fiasco four years ago, predicated on false allegations of rape, we have a new sexual misconduct policy which seems intended to convert that entire farce into a comprehensive and repressive new regime which aims at enforcing some bewilderingly vague notions of what exactly constitutes rape. No one has to convince me that rape is a horrific crime which merits severe punishment; I wonder, though, what it takes to convince some other people that false allegaions of rape also occur, carrying lasting consequences of their own. Two long-time friends of NAS, journalists Cathy Young and John Leo, provide some helpful perspective.

Duke University, according to FIRE, has adopted a new “sexual misconduct” policy that can find a student guilty of non-consensual sex merely because he or she is considered “powerful” on campus.

The policy — which FIRE describes as “vastly overbroad, illogical, impractical, but also insane” –

• claims that “perceived power differentials may create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion”
• transforms students of both sexes into unwitting rapists simply because of the “atmosphere” or because one or more students are “intoxicated,” no matter the degree, and
• establishes unfair rules for judging sexual misconduct accusations.

Rape and sexual misconduct are grave offenses. But what’s wrong with Duke that it can’t rationally address them? As FIRE’s Robert Shibley sensibly concludes, “students deserve a policy under which true offenders will be punished but the innocent have nothing to fear.”

Check out NAS’s review of the online one-stop shop Intellectual Takeout! Have you or a student you know ever experienced a situation like one of these?

• You’re in class and the professor is singing the praises of John Dewey and his educational philosophy. You’re not exactly sure why, but something doesn’t sound right about child-centered school.
• Your biology teacher announces that global warming is real, man-made, and that we have to do something about it. You’re skeptical but don’t have any counter-evidence.
• A friend is considering joining a feminist student group on campus because she wants to connect with other women and find new friends. You want to warn her about the feminist mindset but lack specific points with which to persuade her.

This is where Intellectual Takeout comes in. It provides educational content for students to help them respond to the politically correct one-sidedness on campus.

NAS is proud to partner with Intellectual Takeout in these ways:

1. Intellectual Takeout will consult NAS on questions not covered in the library topics through “Ask the Professor.” (We just received our first question; we’ll report with an answer soon)
2. Scholars can help fill in missing parts of the library. If you are interested in contributing articles or academic white papers you have written, please contact ITO.
3. Scholars can mentor students interested in going into higher education. Entering academia can be difficult for conservative, classically liberal, or libertarian. NAS members will have the opportunity (as the need arises) to be mentors to these rising academics.

John Leo, editor of Minding the Campus, published an article on National Review Online called “Code Words.” He links Glenn Beck’s warning about “social justice” to other code words of the campus left, such as “cultural competence” and “sustainability,” words that sound like wholesome ideas but which really have hidden political meanings.

On campus today students are urged to embrace fashionable ideologies; we need to know what lies behind these terms. Leo quotes NAS president Peter Wood’s article “What Does ‘Sustainability’ Have to Do with Student Loans?” which begins to unpack some of the nebulous buzzwords.

At the Pope Center, Jay Schalin has a great article listing 10  discredited ideas propagated by colleges and universities. He says academics “tend to live in a theoretical universe, while the rest of America deals with real things with real consequences.” These are the myths he lists (see original article for his commentary on each):

1. There is no liberal bias in academia.
2. Everybody should go to college.
3. Academia is more noble than the business community.
4. Diversity makes everything better.
5. All faculty research is necessary and/or important.
6. Academic freedom means anything goes.
7. Higher education drives the economy.
8. Natural aptitude doesn’t matter.
9. Morality is relative.
10. All cultures are equally good.

As we have seen with Marxism, after radical movements lose credibility and die in the world at large, they remain in higher education and continue to shape the worldview of rising generations. This will also most likely be the case with the rising “sustainability” trend on campus.

So reports Robert Shibley at FIRE. He writes:

[T]his serves as evidence that the emphasis of the modern university seems more and more to be on regulating students (not just their behavior, but their expression) and correspondingly less on educating them, at least in the traditional sense of the university as a marketplace of ideas where credentialed, highly educated teachers educate through interactions with young scholars. If this trend continues, such interactions will get rarer and rarer, and students will be poorer for it.

NAS has also been keeping tabs on the growing imbalance. Last week we observed that higher education’s financial trouble stems largely from such administrative bloat:

There has been a bewildering expansion of supernumerary administrative positions, including diversity officers, identity group deans, directors and staff of women’s centers, sustainability officers, residence life curriculum developers, outcomes assessors, and campus therapists of every conceivable brand.

We join FIRE in recalling why the university exists in the first place.

We just received a press release from our friends at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) with some good news:

Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, has just been appointed to the newly-reconstituted National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. NACIQI makes recommendations to the U.S. Secretary of Education regarding the fitness of higher education accrediting bodies, without whose seal of approval colleges and universities cannot receive federal funds.

Congratulations, Anne. We know you’ll use your appointment to help uphold integrity in higher education.