In this 20-minute video, Bari Weiss makes two points. First, the testimony of the MIT, Harvard, and Penn Presidents before a House committee was antisemitic and reprehensible, and reflects a widespread lack of “moral leadership” in universities. Second, this moral leadership requires the elimination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in higher education.
Weiss points out what was really reprehensible in the Presidents’ testimony, which was their arrant hypocrisy in having a history of enforcing lesser violations of speech codes, not the fact that their speech codes apparently called for First Amendment-style freedom of speech (I’m not sure that they do). Insofar as such codes should reflect the First Amendment, then, yes, calling for the genocide of Jews is allowed in most cases, though the courts’ interpretation of the Amendment deems such speech impermissible on some occasions, like promoting predictable and imminent violence. (And of course real violence violates all university behavior codes. But you can’t start enforcing freedom of speech right at the moment that it’s calling for genocide of Jews.
In that sense, then, the Presidents were right in answering “it depends” when asked whether their speech codes permitted calls for genocide of the Jews. It’s unfortunate that their answers were given in such a wooden and stiff way—probably the result of coaching by lawyers—and that adherence to institutional neutrality may have prevented them from expressing their own personal opinions, though in such a forum I think that giving their personal take would be okay. And, of course, they all have to fix their speech codes so that permitted speech not only comports with how the courts construe the First Amendment, but that speech regulations are enforced uniformly.
Where Weiss goes amiss, I think, is when she pronounces that Liz Magill and the other Presidents really did “do something wrong.” What was that? Magill, says Weiss (and presumably the other Presidents, though they’re not mentioned here), failed in this way (7:53):
“failed the very basic duties that [Magill’s] role and responsibilities required of her, because the job of a university president is not merely to point out the basic Constitutional rights of student to scream for a violent uprising against Jews or anyone else—and of course the students have those legal rights—but is pointing out obvious legal rights why we have university presidents? Is their job simply to remind us that people are allowed to shout terrible things, and that the First Amendment protects them from doing so?. . .
“The job of a university president is not merely to point out what is and isn’t legally permissible. The job of a university president is to offer leadership—intellectual leadership, of course, but also moral leadership.
“. . . Can anyone look at these three people and say that they offer the kind of inspiring leadership and moral clarity that the country so desperately need at this moment. I think that those questions answer themselves?”
Weiss offers as her remedies “committing to intellectual freedom, not ideology. . hiring based on merit. . .doing away with double standards based on speech”, and not sending your kids or checks to schools that betray truly liberal values.
This is all good stuff, except that if one expects college presidents to exert moral clarity leadership by condemning speech that they find reprehensible, or making political pronouncements—something that Weiss implies but doesn’t state directly—then that violates an important principle for promoting free discourse: intellectual neutrality. That is, schools should not make any official pronouncements on moral, ideological or political issues.
That principle, which is the opposite of universities providing “moral clarity,” is embodied in the Kalven Principle of the University of Chicago, a principle embraced by only two other of the several thousand American colleges. We should not expect college Presidents to condemn Hamas or offer similar “moral leadership” as part of their regular jobs, for that violates institutional neutrality, chilling the speech of those who disagree.
You can’t fix a free-speech problem by placing more limits on speech. (Those limits, of course, will change over time, and are largely subjective.) The administration of the University of Chicago has made no public pronouncement on the morality involved in the Middle East war (see here for our statement), and we’ve come to no harm because of that.
Real moral leadership should be exercised by getting university to adopt those principles that promote the functions of a university: teaching, learning, and the free discourse that promotes these things. The other day I described Steve Pinker’s Fivefold Way: five principles that, if adopted by a school, can create the kind of climate that Weiss wants. These five are free speech, institutional neutrality, the prohibition of violence (already in place and already illegal), viewpoint diversity, and disempowering DEI.
These last two principles have not been enacted, but are necessary for The Good University. Weiss doesn’t mention viewpoint diversity, but at 11:58 she does begin her clarion call for dismantling DEI, for she argues it imposes an injurious ideology on universities. Pinker shares her views, as do I: DEI is divisive, sucks up lots of money without producing results, reduces viewpoint diversity, is racist in some ways, values ethnicity above merit, and quashes dissent. Those are not liberal principles.
Here’s what Pinker said about DEI in his Boston Globe op-ed, as of the five parts of his Fix the Universities plan (I’ve given a screenshot since it’s impossible to cut and paste):
With the exception Weiss’s call for university presidents to exercise “moral clarity and leadership”, then, her discussion is eloquent and correct. I hasten to add that she doesn’t really specify how “moral leadership” is to be exercised. The best way is to put in place and then adhere to the five principles outlined by Pinker.
Will that happen? I’m not confident that universities will launch policies of institutional neutrality, start dismantling DEI, and begin enforcing viewpoint diversity. Very few are moving in even one of these three directions. But they’ll never do so unless people like us press for these changes.
h/t: Rosemary
Too many ridiculously-remunerated apparatchiks are far too comfortably ensconced in the nomenklatura of academic DEI for there to be much, if indeed any, chance of its being dismantled, and “viewpoint diversity” is the one and only form of diversity not currently encouraged and promoted.
They won’t, unless they are made to. This is why we should support state legislators forcing publicly-funded universities to do so.
Some Republican-led states are moving in that direction, and people who care about the proper mission of universities should perhaps support this, even if Republicans are generally anathema to them.
I think people care mostly about getting free stuff, Coel. In both Canada and the United States, voters fed up with the incumbent Leftist parties will stare into the abyss of the consequences of voting for a Rightist party that can only try to reassure voters that it won’t really end free stuff. They will choose the sure thing, and let the universities go to Hell.
Once again, de Tocqueville is spot on.
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
True enough, except that the government bribes a whole bunch of voting Pauls with the money of one taxpaying Peter (or his grandchildren in the form of sovereign debt which has to be serviced even if never repaid.) If the voters were also the taxpayers, as in de Tocqueville’s day which preceded universal male suffrage, they could figure out what Congress was doing and tell them to stop. Today, as every year more and more voters drop off the tax rolls and aren’t likely to be conscripted into the Army as compensation,………
South Africa has 7 million citizens paying tax and 23 million citizens receiving government handouts.
What would you predict about the trajectory of their economy and their society as a whole? (You’d be right.)
Dialectical Epistemic Inversion
A relevant book title to illustrate :
The World Upside Down – A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Yang Jisheng
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2016
Her podcast was excellent. Will it happen? It’s hard to say. Surely the movement is getting a black eye thanks to the pathetic performance of the presidents and the unbecoming and utterly stupid behavior of the students. The scourge of McCarthyism was abolished, but that was largely led and personified by one man.
DEI will be more difficult. It’s more like Communism, in that it has pervaded everything even to the point of people not even knowing that they are sleeping with the enemy. I’m here referring to the myriads of Jewish congregations that proudly claim their fealty to “social justice”—despite the rampant antisemitism of the movement—and to the millions of well-meaning innocents out there who are unaware that their adherence to the superficially laudable goal of “equity” is actually a gift to DEI authoritarianism. It can be dismantled, but it will take a generation.
All that said, the content and conversation in this web site is helping. We’re doing what we can.
Off topic, but posting here to increase views to my question re: compelled diversity statements within the UC system. Please see my question at bottom of page here:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/06/01/the-legality-of-diversity-statements/#comment-2072681
It’s a passionate speech she makes against DEI, which is her main point. To hear the same message coming from Bari Weiss and Steven Pinker, both moderates, is powerful, and it now needs more and more people to speak out against the DEI machine in whatever forum they can. If Bari Weiss’ video is a good one to point to, to make the case against DEI, what are the positive tools for promoting a universalism to replace identitarianism? Books have been powerful in spreading the divisive identitarianism ideology. I suggest Coleman Hughes ‘The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America’ might be one of the antidotes to diAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’. Something new in a couple of UK universities (UCL and Cambridge, not really off the ground yet though) is promoting ‘how to disagree well’ through workshops. Should there be a bureaucracy that replaces EDI and if so what should it be called? Is it best to get rid of it completely, because it just presents an opportunity to meddle, and then to limit staff training around compliance with the law, or could it be replaced with something like ‘People and Culture’? In the UK the core of EDI has been chasing rankings and awards (Gold/Silver/Bronze) from external organisations (Stonewall, Advance HE). These organisations started well, but became captured by activists. It would be better for groups of universities to organise their own standards and training.
From Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th ed. (2001), pp. 216-217. Below he is writing about the fractionalization of the academic guild. I post without further comment:
Fractionalization also increases over differing convictions about social justice, over whether it should be defined as equality of opportunity or as equality of results, the latter often taking the form of equality of representation. This may turn out to be the penultimate ideological battle on campus. The ultimate conflict may occur over models of the university itself, whether to support the traditional or the “postmodern” model. The traditional model is based on the enlightenment of the eighteenth century—rationality, scientific processes of thought, the search for truth, objectivity, “knowledge for its own sake and for its practical applications.” And the traditional university, to quote the Berkeley philosopher John Searle, “attempts to be apolitical or at least politically neutral. The university of postmodernism thinks that all discourse is political anyway, and it seeks to use the university for beneficial rather than repressive political ends . . . The postmodernists are attempting to challenge certain traditional assumptions about the nature of truth, objectivity, rationality, reality, and intellectual quality.”
The conflict between adherents of the traditional and the postmodern university is just beginning. It might come to tear apart some of the humanities and some of the social sciences. I note that those most neglected by the modern university, including the literature departments, seem to be the most frequent supporters of the postmodern university, which adds to the tensions.
Any further politicization of the university will, of course, alienate much of the public at large. While most acknowledge that the traditional university was partially politicized already, postmodernism will further raise questions of whether the critical function of the university is based on political orientation rather than on nonpolitical scientific analysis. Since the traditional university is a child of the Enlightenment and, in fact, is also its major instrument of advancement, any effective attack on it by the proponents of the postmodern university will be enormously important.
Remarkably prescient given the date.
An excellent summary of the situation.
Nice speech.
The Ian Ferguson article she references is here:
https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-treason-intellectuals-third-reich
It comes from the Free Press journal which it seems Weiss the speaker founded. That journal too might be worth bookmarking.
One misunderstanding of the role of universities is in how students are thought of. For the most part, they are adults who are free to have their own opinions, and it’s not the universities’ job to dictate what those opinions should be. Of course, there have to be some rules dictating civility and harassment, but beyond that it’s imperative that administration and faculty not use their positions to demand adherence to any political position if the university is to fulfill its role in education.
It’s disappointing that this even needs to be said. All schools should adopt some version of the Kalven Principle.
What is the point of having a university president, anyway? My college president was essentially invisible and had absolutely no effect on student life. I could scarcely remember at the time what his name was. His job was schmoozing alumni donors. Leadership? No one cared what he said. But faculty and students were there to teach and learn, not to signal virtue.