Cover Free Speech in Peril College—Where You Can’t Say What You Think pg. 1 MindingtheCampus.org Title Page FREE SPEECH IN PERIL College: Where You Can’t Say What You Think MINDING THE CAMPUS pg. 2 MindingtheCampus.org TABLE OF CONTENTS One: Exploiting Diversity as a Political PAGE 07 Wedge TK essays describing how once well-intentioned policies became corrupted by identity politics and bloated administrative staffs. The articles, like all others in this publication, were written primarily by professors and educators. Two: Rejecting the First Amendment PAGE 124 Today’s colleges and universities have mastered the art of intimidation—not only silencing students who might deviate from the current orthodoxy on campus, but also making it clear that professors risk their tenure if they don’t toe the political line. Three: Silencing Conservatives PAGE 207 In a powerful essay, author Charles Murray describes how protestors tried to stop him from speaking about his new book at Middlebury College, despite being invited by students. His experience was mirrored by many other conservative professors and analysts, including Heather Mac Donald and Professor Amy Wax. Four: Indoctrinating Students PAGE 260 It’s clear from the moment they set foot on campus that students have entered a monoculture. Everyone must believe in the same basic tenets—that if something or someone makes you “feel bad,” it’s evil. pg. 3 MindingtheCampus.org INTRODUCTION By John Leo “If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.” — George Washington, first U.S. president For the past 12 years, Minding the Campus has been a small but fierce watchdog of the changes taking place in higher education. A college degree that is conferred used to mean that the person was educated in language, literature, mathematics, science, and the arts. Some students do excel in the liberal arts, but the push to ensure that all Americans get a college education has opened the doors to many who are not qualified for higher academic work yet still receive a degree. The idea of striving for excellence and having a common culture has disappeared on most campuses for two reasons: Excellence in the liberal arts suggests embracing the original precepts of the Greek philosophers who defined Western culture as those subjects or skills considered essential for a free person to know in order to take an active part in civic life, pg. 4 MindingtheCampus.org something that included participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and importantly, serving in the military. In an interview about his new book, The Assault on American Excellence,” Anthony Kroman, a professor at Yale Law School, commented on affirmative action, “This means that the extraordinarily talented young people, of every complexion and ethnic origin, who arrive on Yale’s campus each fall, are encouraged, even before they have begun to get their bearings, to think of themselves as members of a group, first, and individuals second. They are steered, by the culture of the school, toward the affinity groups that today define the balkanized terrain of college life. As a result, the value of the very opportunity that programs of affirmative action were originally meant to enhance is lost or reduced.” Today, however, Western culture is under assault from within the very institutions originally founded to promote that culture. The reason: racial and sexual identity groups, which seem to dominate the discourse on campuses, blame white culture for what they perceive to be unfair treatment. And they act out with support from the bias teams that are hired to ensure not only fair treatment but an absence of “feeling bad” because of a book that might have been assigned, a quote that might have been cited, or simply an alternate opinion to their own that made them feel “unsafe.” Nearly 90 percent of Pomona College students surveyed in a Gallup-Knight Foundation poll believe that the campus climate prevents them from saying something others might find offensive. The poll, conducted by Gallup for the college, reached about 35 percent of students and 65 percent of faculty. The Claremont Independent, the campus conservative paper, says the poll reported that a mere three percent of students and four percent of faculty are conservative. Half of the students who are liberal and 75% of those who identified as very liberal supported certain speech restrictions. One rising sophomore told the Independent on the condition of anonymity that “[more than being afraid of saying things that others could find offensive, I think a lot of people on campus, including myself, feel like if they say anything that goes against the surface level campus culture dogma, they could be socially shunned.” At the outset, people thought, “It’s kids—they’ll change when they get jobs and face the real world.” But the opposite seems to be true: in their efforts to appeal to millennials and generation Y, businesses are pandering to “the kids.” Nike took the postage-stamp-sized Betsy Ross flag off the back of its sneaker because Colin Kaepernick, their spokesperson, said it represented slavery. Gillette created a “toxic masculinity” ad that made white males look like fools. Both companies lost sales but bounded back. pg. 5 MindingtheCampus.org Are a white person’s values so different from a black person’s? Or an Asian’s? Or a Latino’s? We all want our kids to thrive, and most of us know that means getting a good, well-rounded education that could give our kids the mobility they seem to want. A friend of mine who edits The New York Times crossword puzzle once said he worried about finding clues that were shared across generations. If we don’t read some of the same books, listen to some of the same music, or hear some of the same news, we, too, can become clueless. John Leo, author of Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police and Incorrect Thoughts is also editor of Minding the Campus. pg. 6 MindingtheCampus.org One Exploiting “Diversity” as a Political Wedge What Happened to Our Universities? By Philip Carl Salzman, October 31, 2018 As extensively documented, our universities have been swept up into a new cultural movement, the so-called “social justice” movement. “Social justice” ideology is based on the Marxist vision that the world is divided into oppressor classes and oppressed classes. Unlike classical Marxism that divides the world into a bourgeois oppressor class and a proletarian oppressed class — that is capitalists oppressing pg. 7 MindingtheCampus.org workers — neo-Marxist “social justice” theory divides the world into gender, racial, sexual, and religious classes: male oppressors and female victims; white oppressors and people of color victims; heterosexual oppressors and gay, lesbian, transsexual, etc. etc. victims; Christian and Jewish oppressors and Muslim victims. “Social justice” ideology leads to the rejection of oppressive institutions such as capitalism and Western Civilization. Universalistic criteria such as merit, achievement, and excellence are rejected today in universities and beyond because they allegedly disadvantage members of victim categories. Preferential measures on behalf of victims have been adopted as the overriding and primary purpose of universities today. Course topics, course substance, course references, recruitment of students, provision of special facilities and events for “victim” categories, hiring of academic and administrative staff, all are aimed to benefit members of “victim” categories and to exclude and marginalize members of “oppressor” categories. Sociology, anthropology, political science, English, history, women’s and gender studies, black studies, social work, education, and law have all jettisoned their traditional fields of study to become “social justice” subjects, vilifying men, whites, heterosexuals, the West, capitalism, and advocating for women, people of color, gays etc., and Muslims. Now there is a full-throttle attack on the natural sciences and on STEM fields to infuse them with “victims,” whatever these “victim” preferences and abilities might be, and to turn STEM into “social justice” fields, so that there would no longer be “science,” but “feminist science” that is “socially just.” How did all of this happen? What brought about this almost universal change in institutions of “higher learning”? It was and is, in fact, the most normal thing in the cultural world: a return to the default of a closed, moralistic worldview. Human psychology favors secure and comfortable closed, moralized cultures. In most societies throughout history, the always fragile and vulnerable set of cultural understandings were framed in absolute and unchallengeable terms, so as to bolster them, justifying them in terms of the requirements of religion, race, history, or justice. The ancient Hebrew tribes divided people into those who followed one God, and those who worshiped idols. The Catholic Church defined good and evil in terms of its theological precepts and sent those who disagreed to hell to burn in eternity. pg. 8 MindingtheCampus.org Following the inspiration of the Holy Inquisition, American Protestants sought out witches for extermination. Islam divided the world into Muslim worshippers of Allah, and infidels, targeting infidels for slavery, conversion, or death. The Nazis saw the world as a struggle between the pure race and the inferior races, and they sent those they considered inferior to a hell the Nazis themselves created. The Communists divided the world into those who sided with “the people,” the Communists themselves, and other “people” who were political opponents or members of oppressive classes, and other non-people were drugged in insane asylums, worked to death, starved to death, or executed.