Confusion at Barnard about free speech, institutional neutrality, and academic freedom

January 25, 2024 • 11:15 am

According to the New York Times, Barnard College is in a big kerfuffle involving free speech, institutional neutrality, and academic freedom. The problem is that they’re conflating them all, so the campus is full of stress and argument that, with some good will, could be avoided. Here I proffer a simple solution to the College’s woes.

First, some terms. These are my takes, so others might disagree. Free speech is the ability to express yourself without censorship. The First Amendment protects your speech from being censored by the government, but not necessarily by anybody else, including your boss on the job. Public colleges and universities, however, must adhere to the courts’ construal of the First Amendment (they’re considered arms of the government), while private colleges need not. In my view, however, they should, for free speech is seen by many academics as the best way to get to the truth, with everybody able to discuss issues without being quashed. The University of Chicago, a private school, adheres to the First Amendment in our Principles of Free Expression, also known as the “Chicago Principles,” and these have been adopted by more than 100 colleges.

In contrast, institutional neutrality in academia means that colleges and universities remain neutral on political, moral, or ideological issues, and make no “official” statements about them. (Faculty and students, of course, are welcomed to express their personal views.) Thus, at Chicago, which adheres to institutional neutrality, you will (or rather “should”) find no department or unit of the university making any kind of statement about politics or ideology on its websites. This is an adherence to our Kalven Principles (also see here), which allow exceptions to neutrality only when the issues at hand are intimately connected with the mission of the University. Sadly, only a few schools in the country, including Vanderbilt and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have officially adopted institutional neutrality, though I think all of them should. That’s because the purpose of Kalven is to not “chill” speech by avoiding intimidating people who want to speak up against positions that might be construed as “official”. Kalven and the Principles of Free Expression are designed to buttress each other.

There is, of course, a difference between free speech and institutional neutrality. You can have free speech without institutional neutrality, so that individuals can speak their minds but departments and universities can also take “official” positions. (I can’t imagine, however, having institutional neutrality without free speech, as the former makes sense only if you have the latter.) The problem with Barnard College, as outlined in the NYT article below (click to read), is that it has adopted free speech but isn’t trying that hard to be institutionally neutral. And this is causing problems.

As for academic freedom, that’s usually construed as the freedom of academics to teach and do research on what they want without interference. In other words, it is a freedom of inquiry. This is somewhat connected with freedom of speech (can a professor say whatever she wants to in a classroom? Nope.), but it’s not the issue at hand today, though both Barnard and the ACLU are conflating freedom of speech with academic freedom and with institutional neutrality. If they adopted the Chicago Principles and Kalven, they wouldn’t be in trouble. But there are lots of faculty who think that departmental websites, official emails, and other official venues should be able to express political opinions, and that’s where they get in trouble.

Click to read, though you may be paywalled:

First, Barnard College (in New York City, affiliated with Columbia University) has adopted the Chicago Principles, and so has free speech (NYT text is indented).

The Barnard faculty also held a vote in December affirming the “Chicago Principles,” a commitment to free expression, several professors said.

It’s in the institutional neutrality issue where they get balled up, because the professors cannot refrain from making political statements on official websites:

Three weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College in New York posted a statement on its departmental website in support of the Palestinian people.

Below the statement, the professors posted links to academic work supporting their view that the struggle of Palestinians against “settler colonial war, occupation and apartheid” was also a feminist issue. Two days later, they found that section of the webpage had been removed, without warning, by Barnard administrators.

What happened next has sparked a crisis over academic freedom and free expression at Barnard at a time when the Israel-Hamas conflict has led to tense protests on American college campuses and heated discussions about what constitutes acceptable speech.

“Acceptable”, however, means “speech that can appear on departmental websites”. The departmental statement was removed because, at least for this issue, Barnard was enforcing institutional neutrality, which is good. (The claim that the Hamas/Israel war is a feminist issue is the way department always try to get around these restrictions. In fact, I’d argue that if you’re a feminist, you’d want to support Israel, which doesn’t oppress women or gays. But I digress.)

Asked to explain why the page was removed, college administrators told the department that the statement and links were “impermissible political speech,” a statement from the department said.

And if that applied to all “official” political, ideological, and moral issues, that would be great. Barnard would then be like the University of Chicago. The problem is that Barnard College seems to have taken it upon itself to judge whether some “official” political/ideological speech is okay, and other speech isn’t. And that puts them in the position of being, as W. said, “The Decider.” What speech is acceptable, and what is not.

The Barnard administration then, in late October and November, rewrote its policies on political activity, website governance and campus events, giving itself wide latitude to decide what was and was not permissible political speech on campus, as well as final say over everything posted on Barnard’s website.

And so we get stuff like this:

At both Columbia and Barnard, an all-women’s college that is formally part of Columbia University but has its own leadership and policies, administrators have asked the community to refrain from slogans and words that others may find hurtful. Both institutions have also issued reworded administrative rules that officially apply to everyone. But critics say that in reality, they are being used to curtail views the college does not want aired.

Under new rules Barnard emailed to faculty on Nov. 6, for example, all academic departments must submit changes to the content of their websites to the Office of the Provost for review and approval. All content on the college’s website may be amended or removed without notice, a related policy states.

Arthur Eisenberg, executive counsel with the N.Y.C.L.U., said that the policy gives the administration discretion to determine what is permissible academic discourse on the website. “And that’s the problem,” he said.

While the pro-Palestinian statement was taken down, for example, a statement by the Africana Studies Department decrying anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned violence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020 was permitted to stay up.

No “hurtful” speech? Trying to maintain a position like that is asking for trouble.

At Chicago, statements about George Floyd, structural racism, state-sanctioned violence, and Black Lives matter on departmental websites was taken down, simply because these were political statements that had nothing to do with the mission of the departments who issued them or our University.

And now the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) is warning Barnard that institutional neutrality amounts to “censorship”, not realizing that it is intended to prevent chilling of ideas. The problem is when you are trying to draw lines between “hate speech” and “other speech”. It’s best to just adopt Kalven and not permit any official speech on politics or ideology.

Apparently, the NYCLU doesn’t understand that, nor does it understand academic freedom:

The moves caught the attention of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which wrote a letter to Barnard’s new president, Laura Rosenbury, in December, warning that the website and political speech policies violated fundamental free speech principles and were “incompatible with a sound understanding of academic freedom.”

“Such a regime will inevitably serve as a license for censorship,” the letter said.

In a statement, the Barnard administration said that it had barred college resources from being used for political activity for at least a decade. Another policy barring political signs from being posted on campus was not directed at any ideology, it contended.

But the statement about George Floyd and “state-sanctioned violence” above is certainly a political statement. It would be barred here and, if Barnard adheres to its principles, it should be barred there. As for the ACLU defending “academic freedom”, that’s simply not what’s at issue.

The upshot seems to be that Barnard will approve of some political speech on department websites, but not all such speech. Sure, it’s fine to have the administration decide in advance what additions to department websites should be made, but they should simply ban all additions that make political, ideological or moral statements.

This kerfuffle is easily resolved:

Dear Barnard College,

The solution to your problems is this: adopt both the Chicago Principles of Free Expression, which you’ve already approved, but also the Kalven Principles of institutional neutrality.

Cordially,
Jerry Coyne
(University of Chicago

The big impediment is that some professors are so bursting with political bombast and feeling of virtue that they INSIST that their political views must be broadcast on their departmental websites. One example:

The Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies has now created its own website that is not administered by the college, and posted its pro-Palestinian statement and resources there. It has for the past two months been in discussions with Barnard’s provost office about permitting a link from its official website to this website, Dr. Jakobsen said.

Fine, have your unofficial website. But the answer to whether this should link to the departmental website is “NOPE!” If Barnard says it’s okay, then they’re opening Pandora’s box.

Trigger warnings don’t work

December 29, 2023 • 9:15 am

Trigger warnings are now a staple of academic life. Many college or secondary-school courses (nearly all non-STEM courses in some schools) offer a caveat on their syllabi or before class, letting students know when there is material that may be “triggering”: that is, could reactivate student traumas around violence sex, or things like food—or even create those traumas. The object, of course, is to preserve the students’ psychological health.

But do these warnings work? In the new issue of Skeptical Inquirer, which is moving into areas where political ideology creates empirical falsehoods, psychologist and author Stuart Vyse gives a definitive “no”, based on recent research on the topics. This conclusion about trigger warnings has been bruited about for some time, though I don’t know the literature. Here we get some new data.

First, the meta-analysis in Clinical Psychological Science Vyse cites below gives a very brief history of trigger warnings:

Trigger warnings emerged in the early days of the Internet on feminist message forums (e.g., Ms Magazine) and were attached to posts to help readers prepare for or avoid material likely to remind them of memories of trauma (e.g., sexual assault; Vingiano, 2014). The use of trigger warnings has since expanded to the university classroom (Bentley, 2017; National Coalition Against Censorship, 2015) and media writ large (Wyatt, 2016). The types of experiences that may warrant a trigger warning have also expanded past canonical traumatic events to include a wide array of experiences, including being a member of a historically marginalized group or having experienced less severe events such as microaggressions or teasing (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015; Wilson, 2015).

But although studies show that trigger warnings are useless, and may even be harmful, Vyse sees little chance that they’re going to disappear.

Click to read:

Using Google, Vyse determined that searches for “trigger warning” began to rise in 2013, spiked in August 2016 and December 2018 (no reason is given for those spikes), and then has remained steady ever since. He then summarizes the results of two studies trying to answer the question of whether such warnings really do decrease existing trauma or prevent it from arising.

Both studies came up negative, with one showing that the warnings actually increase “anticipatory anxiety”. Further, putting trigger warnings on material doesn’t deter students from reading or seeing it. Indeed, in a kind of “Streisand effect,” it can increase exposure to supposedly traumatic material. I quote from Vyse:

There has been some doubt about the effectiveness of trigger warnings almost from the start, but as more research has been conducted, the picture has become clearer. The most extensive study to date is a meta-analysis published in Clinical Psychological Science in August 2023 (Bridgland et al. 2023). The authors hoped to answer four questions:

Do trigger warnings change the emotional response to the material?

Do trigger warnings increase the avoidance of the warned-about material?

Do trigger warnings affect anticipatory emotions before the material arrives?

Do trigger warnings affect educational outcomes (e.g., comprehension)?

The paper by Bridgland et al. summarizes the previous studies, concluding that their effects are either mixed or negligible. Therefore a meta-analysis is warranted. There were a dozen studies that provided usable data.

And the outcome of one study—trigger warnings are in general useless, but can have negative effects (bolding is mine):

There has been some doubt about the effectiveness of trigger warnings almost from the start, but as more research has been conducted, the picture has become clearer. The most extensive study to date is a meta-analysis published in Clinical Psychological Science in August 2023 (Bridgland et al. 2023). The authors hoped to answer four questions:

In a preregistered investigation, the authors searched for studies in which a trigger warning was given and one or more of the four effects described above was measured. In addition, the type of warning had to make it clear that the forthcoming material might trigger emotions about past experiences. As a result, more general notices, such as PG-13 ratings or “not safe for work” messages, were excluded. They found twelve studies that fit their inclusion criteria, and in the majority of these (ten out of twelve) some participants had previous traumatic experiences. One study was restricted to participants with a history of trauma.

The results did not support the psychological benefits of trigger warnings. Summing the studies together, the meta-analysis revealed a “negligible” effect of warnings on the experience of the material, when compared to that of participants who were not warned. Similarly, the use of trigger warnings had “trivial or null” effect on comprehension and a “negligible” effect on avoidance of the material, which was typically measured by allowing participants to choose between readings that did and did not contain warnings. One study found that the presence of a warning increased the likelihood of selecting a reading in a kind of “forbidden fruit” effect. The one reliable effect that emerged from the analysis was on anticipatory emotions experienced prior to exposure to the material, and unfortunately it was in the wrong direction. Participants were reliably more anxious in the period after the warning was given but before the material was presented.

. . . And a more redcent analysis:

I found a more recent study, published just five days ago as I write this, that looked at the reactions of students—a substantial proportion of whom had previously experienced sexual assault or unwanted sex—to a nonfiction account of a campus sexual assault drawn from Jon Krakauer’s 2016 book Missoula (Kimble et al. 2023). When warned about the content of the reading and offered an alternative passage without such material, fully 94 percent of participants still chose to read the potentially triggering passage. Furthermore, those who had a previous traumatic experience were no less likely to read the sexual assault passage than those who had not. As might be expected, sexual assault victims had a stronger reaction to the passage from the Krakauer book, but there was no measurable effect of providing a warning.

Here’s that second study, which you can read by clicking on the title below:

The only effect was this (from the paper):

However, unlike the two previous studies, those with a sexual assault history reported more distress right before and just after the reading. They also reported being more emotional during the study.

But again, the warning didn’t lessen these effects. Conclusion: yes, some material does “trigger” people, but a warning about material neither mitigates this effect nor deters people from reading/viewing the “triggering” stuff.

The data, then, all suggest that trigger warnings are useless. I would use them (and so would Vyse) to convey “respect and good manners” if the material is very graphic and could upset even those lacking a history of trauma. For example, I warned people this morning about the graphic descriptions of Hamas’s sexual violence in a new NYT article. But trigger warnings in universities have gone way beyond that—to the extent that Harvard Law students have asked Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen not to teach anything about rape law, because the whole subject is triggering. But that’s palpably harmful, for a lawyer prosecuting or defending people accused of rape won’t do a good job if she hasn’t been taught the law.

Nevertheless, like sightings of Bigfoot, trigger warnings persist. Why? Vyse suggests two reasons: students pay a lot of dosh for their education and want schools to act in loco parentis, and professors, intimidated by the new woke atmosphere in colleges (and the proliferation of anonymous “bias reporting”), will employ trigger warnings as a default to keep themselves from being reported, disciplined, or fired.

Today, parents are paying enormous sums to send their children to college, and for all but the richly endowed elite schools, bad publicity can have serious financial consequences. The loss of just a few students at $70,000 per year quickly adds up. Furthermore, today’s institutions have made it exceedingly easy for students to complain. Many schools now have mechanisms for students to report “bias incidents” to the administration. These programs typically allow for the anonymous reporting of any member of the college community by any member of the college community. See, for example, this program designed to accept anonymous reports of any act or communication “that reasonably is understood to demean, degrade, threaten, or harass an individual or group based on an actual or perceived identity” whether the acts are intentional or unintentional. If you Google the phrase “report a bias incident,” you will find a long list of colleges and universities with similar programs.

In this environment, even the most truth-seeking professor who is fully aware of the research on trigger warnings is likely to feel a strong pull to use them nonetheless. Or to avoid any class material that might conceivably warrant their use.

When Luana and I wrote our long Skeptical Inquirer article on the pollution of evolutionary biology by ideology, some letters came in to the magazine saying that it was going off the rails, deviating from its traditional emphasis on things like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, homeopathy, and spoon-bending. But our piece, like Vyse’s, really is in the purview of the magazine. Although the venue was started to investigate and debunk false claims about the paranormal, Wikipedia notes that its mission later expanded “to include topics less paranormal and more that were an attack on science and critical thinking.” That is what we did, and that is what Vyse is doing. The only new bit is that the attacks on science and critical thinking come from ideology—usually but not always from the Left. When palpable harm to society is wrought by ideology—just like the harm of homeopathy comes from superstition and scientific ignorance—it’s time to call it out. And that’s how Vyse ends his piece:

Out in the real world, we do things for a multitude of reasons. Today, a text or work of art that might make educational sense may not show up in the classroom for reasons that are more political than pedagogical. In the case of trigger warnings, they are likely to remain part of many college courses despite the evidence that they fail at their stated purpose. It is a traditional skeptic’s lament that evidence is often not enough to sway people toward reason, and I am sorry to say that this is one of those cases. Reason and evidence alone will not strengthen our educational system. The political winds need to change before that can happen.

Calls to ban free speech at Auckland University in New Zealand

December 22, 2023 • 10:00 am

Troubles continue at the University of Auckland as it’s being sued by a somewhat off-the-rails professor named Siouxsie (real name Susannah) Wiles. Wiles apparently made some statements about Covid-19 as a public communicator of science, statements that the public didn’t like. The result was that she claimed to be inundated with hate mail and threats. She sued the university for failure to protect her against such hate speech. This is from the November 5 New Zealand Herald:

Appearing in court this morning, Wiles said the University of Auckland’s HR staff told her to stop making public statements on Covid-19 if she wanted to reduce the threats being made against her.

The health and safety advice effectively “victim-blamed” her, suggesting she and her colleagues were responsible for the harassment they were getting, Wiles told a court today.

She gave evidence in her Employment Court case this morning, which is being closely watched because of its significance to academic freedom in New Zealand.

The case centres on Wiles’ accusation that the university leadership failed to protect her against the “tsunami of threats” she received for her public commentary on Covid-19.

. . .Almost immediately after she started speaking out, the threats began, initially about her appearance but becoming increasingly vitriolic and violent, the court heard.

Wiles made her first complaint to the university in April 2020, about three months after her first media comment on Covid.

Stewart said the university failed to act on this complaint and many more. Over the following months, she and her colleagues sent 60 emails about the harassment and threats against her and colleagues, and held seven meetings with human resources staff and managers.

The university did not carry out a threat assessment until June 2022, and that did not include a basic threat assessment, Stewart said. It also took no steps when a conspiracy theorist came onto campus and confronted staff, she said.

During this period, the university used Wiles to promote its success, citing her in annual reports and promotional material as evidence of its academic excellence and critical role during a pandemic.

Yet privately, university leaders were urging Wiles to pull back from her public commentary, the court heard.

“Outwardly, the University of Auckland has clearly enjoyed the prestige of employing such an academic,” Stewart said.

Now I’m not sure of the merits of her case (isn’t it the duty of the police to protect people against threats?), but Wiles doesn’t get a ton of sympathy from me because she was a huge critic of the Listener Letter (see it here), in which seven of her Auckland Uni colleagues argued that “claiming indigenous knowledge (or mātauranga Māori [MM]) “falls far short of what can be defined as science itself.” Since MM is a mixture of empirical observations, religion, morality, legend, and superstition, the authors of the Listener Letter were right: it shouldn’t be taught as science in science classes, though should be taught somewhere because MM is important for perpetuating indigenous culture. Wiles, however, helped organize a group letter calling the Listener Letter “scientific racism.” That led to a pile-on on its seven authors that is arguably worse than the one Dr. Wiles experienced herself (two were investigated by the Royal Society of New Zealand, which also criticized their thesis and defended MM as science). And there were threats, “harm”, and everything else that Wiles gog. In other words, Wiles herself perpetuated exactly the kind of opprobrium she’s complaining about; the chickens came home to roost!

Here’s Wiles (left) from Wikipedia, with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on the right:

Now, a group of Auckland academics has signed a letter arguing that the Wiles issues have mad their workspace is unsafe, and intimating that there should be curbs on free speech at Auckland Uni. Click the secreenshot below to read:

What are they worried about? From the article:

More than 100 academics at the University of Auckland have signed a letter to the leadership that says high-profile staff are not being protected by the university.

Some of the academics said they no longer felt comfortable speaking publicly or to media for fear of threats and harassment.

The open letter, signed by 129 academics, followed an Employment Court hearing in which high-profile microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles argued the university had failed to protect her from a “tsunami of threats”, which followed her commentary on the Covid-19 pandemic.

A ruling has yet to be made in that case. The university has argued its management provided extensive support to Wiles and it did not breach its obligations towards her.

Its lawyers also argued the university cannot control all threats — especially those made on social media — and it is doing its best to minimise and manage them.

More than 100 academics at the University of Auckland have signed a letter to the leadership that says high-profile staff are not being protected by the university.

Some of the academics said they no longer felt comfortable speaking publicly or to media for fear of threats and harassment.

The open letter, signed by 129 academics, followed an Employment Court hearing in which high-profile microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles argued the university had failed to protect her from a “tsunami of threats”, which followed her commentary on the Covid-19 pandemic.

A ruling has yet to be made in that case. The university has argued its management provided extensive support to Wiles and it did not breach its obligations towards her.

Its lawyers also argued the university cannot control all threats — especially those made on social media — and it is doing its best to minimise and manage them.

It’s arguable whether it’s the university’s job to prevent threats to its employees. Here at the University of Chicago, I’ve referred all threats I’ve gotten to the FBI or police, depending on their severity. I wouldn’t complain to the University because it can’t do anything unless the threats come from a University employee.

But here’s the part where the petition seems to segue into calls for censorship, particularly of speech that “harms” minorities:

The open letter to the University Council says in the absence of a court ruling, academics “remain exposed to psychological and physical harm while carrying out our work”.

“As racist, transphobic, antisemitic and Islamophobic hate has been rising globally, we are particularly concerned for marginalised groups including Māori, Pacific, transgender and non-binary colleagues.

“We are also concerned that recent politicised conversation around gun control, free speech, and hate speech legislation, as well as public questioning of equity-oriented initiatives in university education (such as MAPAS), is likely to embolden fringe elements.”

The article below from The Platform, an online, politically independent Kiwi radio station, points out that what’s happening at Auckland Uni are calls for the curbing of free speech on the grounds of “harm” and “hate speech.”.Remember, nobody has actually been harmed yet: they’ve been offended and perhaps threatened (which should be reported to the police). But speech should not be curtailed on those grounds.

A few excerpts (emphasis is mine):

Highly experienced textual analysts have seized on key words in the letter — including the phrase “fields of research politicised in the current environment” to decipher what the academics actually meant. The “current environment”, they surmised, may be code for a new government taking office.

“Fields of research” that have been “politicised” might be an oblique reference to the “indigenisation” of universities and the push to make them “Te Tiriti-centric”, which proceeded apace under the Ardern-Hipkins government. Part of that concern will no doubt be that the election of the Luxon-led administration may ultimately mean university management will not be quite so indulgent of “fields of research” that result from mātauranga Māori being inserted everywhere, including in science courses, and the preference in funding given to applications involving Te Ao Māori.

Other paragraphs in the letter make this analysis seem highly plausible:

“As racist, transphobic, antisemitic and Islamophobic hate has been rising globally, we are particularly concerned for marginalised groups including Māori, Pacific, transgender and non-binary colleagues.

“We are also concerned that recent politicised conversation around gun control, free speech, and hate-speech legislation, as well as public questioning of equity-oriented initiatives in University education (such as MAPAS), is likely to embolden fringe elements.”

The references to free speech and hate speech perhaps get to the nub of the academics’ concerns. As part of its coalition agreement with the Act Party, the National-led government will amend the Education and Training Act 2020 to oblige “tertiary education providers receiving taxpayer funding [to] commit to a free-speech policy”.

Note that the new government insists that colleges and universities must have a free-speech policy. This is why I think the new National Party government is better in many ways than the Ardern Labour government. I was initially enthusiastic about Ardern, but her government became increasingly woke and began engaging in identity politics. National is more conservative, but not at all conservative in the way that U.S. Republicans are conservative. Their insistence on free speech, for example, is excellent.

California community colleges go off the rails with DEI

July 26, 2023 • 9:30 am

This could be a long article if I summarized all the mishigass going on in the community college system of the state of California, but I’ll try to be brief and put the items in numbered form. The upshot is that the system has thrown its hat entirely in the DEI ring, making all faculty and staff pledge fealty not just to DEI, but to the extreme Ibram Kendi-an view of DEi. And if you don’t obey they’re rules for behaving as an “antiracist”, you could be demoted, fired, or denied tenure. To me, this is a clear and wide-ranging violation of both freedom of speech and academic freedom. (Remember the community college system is part of state government and so must obey the Constitution.)

1.) A lawsuit against California Community Colleges (CCC). The editorial board of the WSJ describes a situation that some might dismiss simply because of the newspaper’s conservative op-ed column, but that would be a mistake. Why? Because the facts check out completely, even on the CCC’s website. See below. Click to read:

An excerpt:

Critics of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis argue he has gone too far in trying to root out “wokeness” from public universities, but look to California to see where academic groupthink is going if left unchecked. A legal complaint filed this month by a history professor in Bakersfield says that his community college’s performance and tenure reviews are being used to force faculty to adopt woke progressive values in their classrooms.

Daymon Johnson has been at Bakersfield College since 1993. As he tells it, three months ago California Community Colleges, which serves 1.8 million students at 116 campuses, amended its regulations so employees must espouse its tenets of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA). “Faculty members shall employ teaching, learning, and professional practices that reflect DEIA and anti-racist principles,” the regulations say. Schools must “place significant emphasis on DEIA competencies in employee evaluation and tenure review.”

A detailed baseline explanation of that last policy was soon distributed to faculty, including at Bakersfield College. “The DEI competencies provided in this document are meant to define the skills, knowledge, and behaviors that all California Community College (CCC) employees must demonstrate,” it says, according to the copy attached as an exhibit to Mr. Johnson’s lawsuit. Here are a few of the items it lists as markers of success for faculty and staff:

• “Promotes and incorporates DEI and anti-racist pedagogy.”

• “Develops and implements a pedagogy and/or curriculum that promotes a race-conscious and intersectional lens.”

• “Contributes to DEI and anti-racism research and scholarship.”

• “Articulates the importance and impact of DEI and anti-racism as part of the institution’s greater mission.”

• “Advocates for and advances DEI and anti-racist goals and initiatives.”

• “Leads DEI and anti-racist efforts by participating in DEI groups, committees, or community activities that promote systemic and cultural change to close equity gaps and support minoritized groups.”

• “Participates in a continuous cycle of self-assessment of one’s growth and commitment to DEI and acknowledgement of any internalized personal biases and racial superiority or inferiority.”

Mr. Johnson opposes it all and is suing with help from the Institute for Free Speech. “Professor Johnson cannot satisfy DEIA standards based on the state Chancellor’s DEIA competencies without violating his conscience and surrendering his academic freedom,” his filing says. “Almost everything Professor Johnson teaches violates the new DEIA requirements—not just by failing to advance the DEIA and anti-racist ideologies, but also by criticizing them.”

He doesn’t want to change his “classical pedagogy that stresses the study of ‘truth, goodness, and beauty.’” He doesn’t want to engage in DEIA “self-reflection,” which “he views as religious-like and little more than neo-Marxist re-education on race.” He doesn’t want to “articulate” the antiracism credo, which he believes is “antithetical to Bakersfield College’s mission and the American national ideal not to discriminate and provide equal opportunity for all regardless of the melanin in a person’s skin.”

To see what Johnson is being asked to adhere to, follow the links given below.

2.) The CCC mission as stated on its page (click below):

These seems pretty innocuous at first, or at least in line with the stuff going on in other places, but this is extreme.

The Chancellor’s Office is equipping districts and colleges with the tools and support they need to create equity-centered, anti-racist policies and practices, including:

Embedding DEIA competencies and criteria into employee evaluations and tenure review processes.
Updating the student grievance process to provide clear steps for students to raise concerns and resolve acts of racism, microaggressions and discomfort
Re-evaluate and embed DEIA in district equal employment opportunity (EEO) plans to demonstrate an ongoing, action-oriented commitment to EEO and DEIA.
Encouraging more mentorship opportunities between students and faculty.
Provide professional learning resources focused on institutional bias, structural racism, and their impact on campus culture and student success.

The requirements for faculty and staff are extreme, and their success on the job rests on adhering to a strict form of Critical Race Theory. First, here’s a 4-minute video showing a number of CCC staff discussing the new policy. It starts off innocuously, discussing the pandemic, fires, and other natural disasters. Only then does it get to the bee of DEI (0:39).

What struck me most strongly was the repeated assertion that you need to be surrounded by mentors and faculty in which they “can see themselves reflected.” What they mean is that students require an environment filled with others of their own ethnicity if they are to succeed. This shows clearly that “diversity” here means not just “racial diversity” (forget about intellectual, religious, or socioeconomic diversity), but “racial diversity that can be discerned by looking at peoples’ appearances”.

This is about as far from being “color blind” as you can imagine, but if you check the links below, you’ll see in the definition of “color blind” that Martin Luther King’s plea for ignoring skin color is immediately binned by the CCC. The explicit assumption is that students cannot feel that they belong at a university unless they see many people who “look like them.”

3.) There is an approved glossary of terms on the CCC website. There are too many to show, but check it out. I’ll give but three. This was all distributed to the faculty and staff.

The first two are straight out of Kendi with its emphasis on the ubiquity of structural racism and the claim that if you are not actively opposing racism, you’re a racist yourself

Anti-Racist: Person who actively opposes racism and the unfair treatment of people who belong to other races. They recognize that all racial groups are equal (i.e. nothing inherently superior or inferior about specific racial groups) and that racist policies have caused racial inequities. They also understand that racism is pervasive and has been embedded into all societal structures. An anti-racist challenges the values, structures, policies, and behaviors that perpetuate systemic racism, and they are also willing to admit the times in which they have been racist. Persons that say they are ‘not a racist’ are in denial of the racial problems and inequities that exist.

Anti-Racism: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas. Practicing antiracism requires constantly identifying, challenging, and upending existing racist policies to replace them with antiracist policies that foster equity between racial groups.

If you don’t do constantly engage in such activities, your denying the existence of racism and inequities, and the implication (à la Kendi) is that “if you’re not an antiracist, you’re a racist”).

Color Blindness: Is a racial ideology that assumes the best way to end prejudice and discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible, without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity. This ideology is grounded in the belief that race-based differences do not matter and should not be considered for decisions, impressions, and behaviors. However, the term
“color blind” de‐emphasizes, or ignores, race and ethnicity, a large part of one’s identity and lived experience. In doing so, it perpetuates existing racial inequities and denies systematic racism.

Bye, bye, MLK. Colorblindness is said here to perpetuate racism. I don’t think they understand what “treating individuals as equally as possible” really means in academia. It does NOT mean ignoring differences in background or understanding.

I find this one offensive and patronizing, implying that nonwhite students cannot be judged by merit, but must be held to lower standards.

Merit: A concept that at face value appears to be a neutral measure of academic achievement and qualifications; however, merit is embedded in the ideology of Whiteness and upholds race-based structural inequality. Merit protects White privilege under the guise of standards (i.e., the use of standardized tests that are biased against racial minorities) and as highlighted by anti-affirmative action forces. Merit implies that White people are deemed better qualified and more worthy but are denied opportunities due to race-conscious policies. However, this understanding of merit and worthiness fails to recognize systemic oppression, racism, and generational privilege afforded to Whites.

The site also says that “race” is a pure social construct, and that “there are no distinctive genetic characteristics that truly distinguish between groups of people.” That, of course, is a flat-out lie. The classical human races, or even ethnic groups, are not absolutely distinguishable by single genes, but using constellations of genes allows one to place both ethnicity and geographic origin with substantial accuracy, as Luana and I discuss in our paper. (Of course we deny the assertion of the CCCC that “race presumes human worth and social status for the purpose of establishing and maintaining privilege and power.”

4.) And the CCC’s vision for DEI, mandating how its employees must behave if they’re to succeed. If you look at only one thing, look at this document mandating proper behavior for employees. If you don’t adhere, you’ll disappear.

Here’s the intro:

DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION COMPETENCIES AND CRITERIA The DEI competencies provided in this document are meant to define the skills, knowledge, and behaviors that all California Community College (CCC) employees must demonstrate to work, teach, and lead in a diverse environment that celebrates and is inclusive of diversity (See Table 1). During the evaluation and tenure review process, employees will be able to demonstrate they have met the DEI competencies using concrete examples based on DEI criteria provided in this document (See Table 2). As aforementioned, the subgroup participated in activities to develop the DEI competencies and criteria. In partnership with the Chancellor’s Office, the Success Center analyzed and categorized the subgroup’s responses from activities using thematic coding. Responses that shared a common theme were grouped together under an overarching thematic code, and a description was created for each thematic code. In addition, each competency and criteria was assessed as to whether it applies to faculty, staff (including administrators), or both employee types. The most common themes that emerged for DEI Competencies were Cultural Competency, Self-reflection, and Self-Improvement. The most common themes that emerged for DEI Criteria are Service, Self-assessment, and DEI Environment.

These requirements apply to both faculty and staff except for the third:

Self-reflection
Theme applies to both faculty and staff.

Recommended Description

• Engages in self-assessment of one’s own commitment to DEI and internal biases, and seeks opportunities for growth to acknowledge and address the harm caused by internal biases and behavior.

Self-improvement
Theme applies to both faculty and staff.

Recommended Description

• Demonstrates a commitment to continuous improvement as it relates to one’s DEI and anti-racism knowledge, skills, and behaviors to mitigate any harm caused (whether intentional or not) to minoritized communities.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Pedagogy & Curriculum
Theme applies to faculty.

Recommended Description

• Promotes and incorporates DEI and anti-racist pedagogy.
• Accommodates for diverse learning styles and utilizes holistic assessment methods.
•Participates in training to incorporate culturally affirming pedagogy.

Data
Theme applies to both faculty and staff.

Recommended Description

• Uses data to uncover inequitable outcomes measured through equity-mindedness that calls out racialized patterns in the data, policies, and practices to inform strategies to improve equitable student outcomes and success.

This is not only inapplicable to many people, but also mandates a given result: you must find “racialized patterns in the data” and then fix them. Talk about confirmation bias!

And, finally, the most invidious one.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Criteria Themes Service (e.g., service to the institution or community, or professional service)
Theme applies to both faculty and staff.

Recommended Description

• Advocates for and advances DEI and anti-racist goals and initiatives\
• Leads DEI and anti-racist efforts by participating in DEI groups, committees, or community activities that promote systemic and cultural change to close equity gaps and support minoritized groups.
• Contributes to student life on campus and supports diverse students beyond the classroom.
• Includes a DEI and race-conscious pedagogy and/or curriculum in campus activities for students, faculty, and/or staff.
• Understands and applies asset-based student-centered practices and activities that recognize students’ lived experiences, strengths, and capabilities and empowers students to take ownership of their learning experience (e.g., Competency Based Education, Credit for Prior Learning, etc.).
• Commits to the success of minoritized students by providing specific opportunities to access educational pathways and opportunities for academic and career success (including academic and non-academic advising, mentorship).
• Develops and implements student programs and activities that incorporate a raceconscious and intersectional lens and equips students to engage with the world as scholars and citizens.
• Creates an inclusive learning and working environment by valuing differences among colleagues and students and recognizing the ideological disproportionate impacts on historically minoritized racial groups.
• Contributes to DEI and anti-racism research and scholarship.

It’s not surprising that Daymon Johnson is suing the CCC for forcing him to adhere to these behaviors. They’re not only compelled speech, but compelled thought. That violates freedom of speech. Further, by mandating that faculty have to incorporate antiracism into their curricula in specific ways, it also violates academic freedom. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t prevail in the lawsuit.

Once again we see public colleges being transformed into instruments for Social Justice. It seems sufficient to me to say that a school does not discriminate on the grounds of race, ability, gender, religion, and so on, and add that the college prizes diversity attained within the law.

NYT claims that a course on “The Problem of Whiteness” tests the University of Chicago’s commitment to free speech

July 3, 2023 • 12:20 pm

What we have in this NYT story is an outraged conservative being peeved after finding out that there was going to be a University of Chicago anthropology course on “The Problem of Whiteness”. The student put information about the course, including publicly available information on the instructor’s photo and email address, on social media. It of course went viral among a certain set of The Easily Offended that does not include me.

Naturally, the instructor was harassed big time. She complained to the University about it—twice. While one dean characterized the social-media onslaught as “cyberbullying,” eventually the University dismissed the instructor’s complaints. She postponed the course one quarter (she not on tenure-track here, but a teaching instructor and a new Ph.D. looking for a job). Then, with University’s security and support, she taught the course twice.

The student who “doxxed” the instructor was not punished or sanctioned in any way. The University took this affair as a pure matter of freedom of speech, with no First Amendment violations committed by anyone. Of course we’re a private university and don’t have to abide by the First Amendment, but our well known Principles of Freedom of Expression (adopted by about 80 other universities) ensure that we do.

Click below, or find the article archived here.

A few details:

Rebecca Journey, a lecturer at the University of Chicago, thought little of calling her new undergraduate seminar “The Problem of Whiteness.” Though provocatively titled, the anthropology course covered familiar academic territory: how the racial category “white” has changed over time.

She was surprised, then, when her inbox exploded in November with vitriolic messages from dozens of strangers. One wrote that she was “deeply evil.” Another: “Blow your head clean off.”

The instigator was Daniel Schmidt, a sophomore and conservative activist with tens of thousands of social media followers. He tweeted, “Anti-white hatred is now mainstream academic inquiry,” along with the course description and Dr. Journey’s photo and university email address.

Spooked, Dr. Journey, a newly minted Ph.D. preparing to hit the academic job market, postponed her class to the spring. Then she filed complaints with the university, accusing Mr. Schmidt of doxxing and harassing her.

Mr. Schmidt, 19, denied encouraging anyone to harass her. And university officials dismissed her claims. As far as they knew, they said, Mr. Schmidt did not personally send her any abusive emails. And under the university’s longstanding, much-hailed commitment to academic freedom, speech was restricted only when it “constitutes a genuine threat or harassment.”

Schmidt sounds like a bad piece of work, but Journey’s photo and email address are freely available on the Internet, so he didn’t do anything but disseminate publicly available information. Not that I think the course is great, but if the University approved it, we can’t really beef. Nor can we say that Schmidt violated our principles of free expression.

Mr. Schmidt has found himself in adversarial roles before.

Over the last year or so, he actively supported Kanye West, the artist now known as Ye, for president — work that he promoted with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier. Mr. Schmidt declined to comment on his political activism or his dealings with Mr. Fuentes.

In his first year at the university, Mr. Schmidt was fired from The Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper, after his editors said that he had repeatedly antagonized another columnist on Instagram, and encouraged others to spam her. Mr. Schmidt said he was simply “calling out a public figure.”

After he was also fired from a conservative campus publication, Mr. Schmidt turned to his own website, College Dissident, which featured articles like “Time to Fight Anti-White Hatred on Campus.”

His activism has helped fuel an industry dedicated to accusing universities of liberal orthodoxy. Websites like Campus Reform and The College Fix have for years trained students to report on campus controversies, hoping that conservative news outlets like Fox News, Breitbart and The Daily Caller will whip out their own stories.

All three publications ended up writing about Dr. Journey’s class.

And after the course catalog said the class was canceled for the winter, Mr. Schmidt celebrated. “This is a huge victory,” he tweeted.”

What we seem to have is a professional kvetcher who comes down on liberals, but again—he didn’t do anything that violated the law or accepted university principles of free speech.

And here’s the support that Dr. Journey got from the University, which is important, and something that (as Greg notes below) the NYT didn’t make a big deal about. But that is the important part of the story since so many colleges refuse to defend their instructors attacked on social media (remember Hamline University and the Muhammad paintings?):

Administrators had already amped up security. They had moved Dr. Journey’s class to a building that required key-card access and did not publicly list the location. Dr. Journey said the university beefed up security patrols.

Officials also took key steps that supporters of academic freedom say many colleges fail to do: They affirmed Dr. Journey’s right to teach the class and did not distance the institution from her.

I sure as hell wouldn’t do what what Schmidt did, though in the past I have occasionally put up contact information for what I see as egregious circumstances. But a course doesn’t fit that description; it’s a course, and even if it be woke, I can write about it; but it’s rude and bad form to sic a bunch of angry conservatives on a new Ph.D. looking for a job.

I think that Geof Stone of the Law School, one of our big free-speech advocates, has the right take on this situation:

Professor Stone, who wrote the Chicago statement [of Free Expression], agreed that the student’s actions could have a “chilling effect” on speech. But, he asked, who determines the difference between, say, a newspaper reporting on an individual and Mr. Schmidt’s actions? Both can result in hate mail and threats, he said.

The university, as a private institution, could change its policies to say that students, staff and faculty cannot post material that is intended to be intimidating, Professor Stone said.

But such a move — which he does not recommend — would run afoul of the First Amendment if the university were public, and would bring its own complications, he said.

“It’s very hard for either law or institutions to monitor those sorts of things,” he said. “Your administrators may be biased in terms of who they go after, and who they don’t go after.”

And while a strong case could be made that Mr. Schmidt’s intent was to intimidate, Professor Stone said, “Do you really want to get into the business of trying to figure out what the purpose was?”

Finally, here’s Greg Mayer’s take on the whole business, quoted with permission.

Complaining about the class is fine, including identifying the instructor. If Schmidt did tweet out her email address, that’s unkind and uncalled for, and someone should talk to him about etiquette. It would also clearly NOT fall under one of the exceptions to the First Amendment, though: as Jerry noted to me, there was no call for imminent lawless action. Schmidt probably, though, hoped to generate a Twitter mob, which I guess he did.

Political ads that call for people to harass a politician are standard these days. (“Joe Biden wants to take away your Medicare. Call Joe Biden now and tell him to keep the government out of Medicare! Call xxx-xxx-xxxx now!”)

The University could have rules that are more restrictive than the First Amendment. But fashioning them could be difficult– what would cross the University’s (as opposed to the First Amendment’s) line? Name-calling? Incivility? But how to define these?

The U of C did stand by the instructor, which I think is the key here: the institution resisted the Twitter mob. Policing individuals is tough, in part because of the problem of defining where the “line” is; and there are so many individual miscreants one could go after. But having those in charge stand up for the academic freedom of the instructor is a rarity these days, and is the real story, which the Times barely mentions.

The course sounds like a real stinker– an exercise in the cultural typological essentialism which is sort of the guiding principle of neo-racism. But, as Voltaire didn’t say, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

JAC: I agree with everything Greg says, except that if someone “talks to Schmidt about etiquette”, it should be one of his friends, not a University official. The University has no business chilling speech through “a talk about etiquette.”

Chronicle op-ed gives arguments for institutional neutrality

June 28, 2023 • 12:00 pm

If you’re an academic and your college or university has issued a ringing statement in favor of political, ideological or moral positions, that might make you feel good. But in the long run it’s bad, for taking institutional positions (as opposed to personal ones) acts to chill the speech of others. As I’ve said many times, institutional neutrality is the position of the University of Chicago, codified in the 1967 Kalven Report. While some “stands” are allowed by the University and its units and departments, those are limited to positions that further the university’s educational mission. You can see, for example, a 2020 pro-DACA statement issued by our former provost, and its rationale as part of the University’s mission. Of course, Chicago encourages its members to speak freely as individuals, but not as official units or representatives of the University. I can say what I want about Trump, but my department or the University cannot.

For decades, we were the only university in America that had this policy, but now we’re joined by an enlightened University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That’s two—out of nearly 4,000 degree-granting institutions in America—and that’s pathetic. Schools just can’t restrain themselves from proclaiming their political and moral virtues, but it’s at the cost of stifling free speech. That’s the rationale for Kalven. I’ll bet that if you’re at a “progressive” school like Berkeley, Oberlin, Harvard, or Smith, you’ll have seen these statements all over the place in the last five years.

This short op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education by David Bell, a history professor at Princeton, gives the arguments for institutional neutrality as they apply to colleges and universities. But the policy could usefully be applied in many institutions.

Here are the kinds of statements that universities and departments make:

The claims about moral obligation are eloquent, passionate, and heartfelt, and often invoke shameful aspects of a discipline’s political past. For instance, the “Statement on Anti-Racism” issued by the Princeton English department after the killing of George Floyd decried “literary study’s long history as a prop to the worst forces of imperialism and nationalism, and its role in underwriting crimes of slavery and discrimination.” The department of religious studies at the University of Iowa promised: “We will work to acknowledge and expose the racist histories of our discipline and of the religions that most of us have studied and taught.” A statement from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health lambasted the role of public-health professionals in promoting “slavery, Jim Crow, scientific racism, eugenics, and other structural atrocities.” Taking a slightly different tack, the department of classical studies at Boston University spoke to the present day, condemning “the appropriation of classical antiquity as a tool of white supremacy, nationalism, and gender or class-based discrimination.”

The supposed rationale and the problems it raises:

By invoking their discipline’s political histories and uses in this manner, the statements imply that taking a stance on current affairs constitutes a self-evident and morally necessary corrective, a form of reparation for past political sins. The statement by the Princeton English department, for instance, asserts that the discipline’s history “compels us … to actively dissociate literary studies from their colonial and racist uses.” But in taking this stance, the statements leap over several crucial questions. Why should academic units of a university, as opposed to individual scholars or disciplinary organizations, be making these pronouncements? What if certain members of the unit do not agree with them, or consider them factually flawed? What if they feel that their unit should be issuing statements about a different issue than the one chosen, or disagree about the language of the statement and the specific actions called for? What if something in the statement violates their moral convictions?

And why universities should NOT be making these statements. I’d think this would be self-evident, but it’s clearly not, because we have to keep making these point over and over again—even at Chicago!

The statements I have quoted mostly do not bear individual signatures and say nothing about the process by which they were produced. They generally use the first-person plural and leave the impression that they express unanimous, collective sentiments.

I am sure that in many cases they have indeed expressed unanimous viewpoints. But how can anyone be sure? Imagine a case in which a department chair and the most senior, influential, tenured professors all insist passionately that their department needs to issue a statement on a burning issue of the moment. How likely is it that a pre-tenure or non-tenure-track professor would dare to oppose them? We do not need advanced cultural theory to understand how intimidating it can be for an untenured instructor to speak out against powerful senior colleagues.

Public statements become still more problematic when they go beyond expressing a view on a current issue, and pledge members of the unit to engage in particular sorts of academic work — for instance, scholarship that exposes the racist histories of major religions, or classroom teaching that is explicitly antiracist. The Princeton English department, for instance, pledged to “strive for active antiracism in our classrooms and our scholarship as a means of raising awareness and changing consciousness.” To be sure, vulnerable junior scholars are always going to feel pressure to write and teach in ways that their senior colleagues approve of. But formal statements issued in the name of an entire department, program, or school increase this pressure. And while academic work itself may indeed always have potential political stakes, the choice of political stance says nothing about the quality of that work. Public statements that commit a unit’s members to do certain sorts of work blur this distinction. They can create the impression that the subject scholars choose to work on, and the stance they take on it, will matter as much as how well they do the work when it comes to promotion and tenure.

At the end Bell brings up Kalven again:

It may well be naïve to think that a university can ever be a wholly neutral space, and that it can maintain, as the Kalven Report put it, “an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.” It is not naïve, however, to recognize that universities host scholars with different, often conflicting beliefs, and that these differences need to be respected and protected. Allowing academic units to issue public statements on current affairs erodes that respect and those protections.

Is that so hard to realize? Or do people want universities in which everybody agrees on everything? I’m baffled by the failure of fellow academics to see this simple point: you can make personal statements all you want, but official ones put a damper on the open discourse essential to a university. Maybe I should put it in simple language by writing a children’s book: “The Little Professor’s Guide to Free Speech”.

Or, as Stanley Fish already wrote in a book for adults, “Save the world on your own time.”

Have we reached peak woke?

June 26, 2023 • 9:30 am

This article from The Liberal Patriot Substack has been making the rounds, perhaps because it argues, using data, that—regardless of efforts from both the Right and Left to quash free speech and academic freedom— higher education “seems to have turned a corner” on wokeness. (If you don’t like the word, suggest another.) The university culture, says Musa Al-Gharbi, is getting less woke.

Click to read:

As for whether it’s “too late”—that is, have universities and their bureaucracies established wokeness so entrenched that it can’t be reversed, Al-Gharbi thinks not: it’s “not too little, not too late.” (He is, by the way, a graduate student and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology at Columbia University.) Note that he blames both the GOP and Democrats (or leftists) for the problem, but also worries that if it’s fixed from within, the GOP will get unearned credit.

First, some of the unwelcome developments Al-Gharbi limns:

Rather than serving as bastions of free exchange of ideas or rollicking debate, most campuses remain significantly more inhibited expressive environments than most other places in society—and have only grown less free in recent decades.

Aspirants who decline to color within the lines can still get admitted to grad school or hired and promoted as faculty (case in point!), but there is evidence that they often face discrimination in committees and as a result often get placed lower on the prestige totem-pole than their comparably qualified peers.

Work that diverges from institutionally-dominant views can be published. It often faces bigger hurdles with respect to institutional review boards, peer review, and garnering citations from other academics, while work that is useful for advancing the preferred narrative often faces insufficient scrutiny. What’s more, there are sometimes politicized calls for retraction when inconvenient findings are published. Meanwhile, there are demonstrable systematic biases published social scientific research analyzing the types of people who are less present in colleges and universities—i.e., the poor and working class, devoutly religious people, rural folks, and Trump voters, among others.

These are very real problems. They undermine the quality and impact of teaching and research. However, they are also longstanding structural issues. The kinds of policies advocated by Republicans today—such as slashing university budgets or banning Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, and DEI programming—would do precisely nothing to address any of the problems described above. Proposed bids to eliminate or weaken tenure protections would probably make many of these problems worse.

. . .It wasn’t just students who grew more radical, though. Faculty and administrators got in on the action, too.

Alongside the student unrest came significant changes in institutional structure and culture. There was a rapid growth in university administrators who often sought to justify their roles by meddling in research and teaching, imposing and enforcing myriad new restrictions on what people could do and say on campus, and significantly undermining academic freedom and faculty governance in the process.

Sex bureaucracies surveilling and policing sexual relations between consenting adults proliferated, often punishing people with little evidence or due process. Bias Response Teams sprouted up, allowing people to anonymously spur investigations against anyone without any substantiation at all. Faculty and students began hijacking these apparatuses to sink competitors, punish exes, settle personal vendettas, and much else besides.

So what are the data showing that wokeness has peaking and is heading down? Here are a few graphs.

However, a range of empirical data suggest that the post-2010 “Great Awokening” may be winding down. For instance, Heterodox Academy recently released the results of its 2022 Campus Expression Survey. It shows that students today feel more comfortable sharing their perspectives across a range of topics than they did in previous years.

But look at the data above (there are no error bars or indications of statistical significance. Between 2021 and 2022, reluctance to discuss has dropped only 0.8% for gender (and is higher than in 2019), has risen 1.2% for politics, dropped 4.9% for race, dropped 3.2% for religion, dropped 1.4% for sexual orientation, and dropped 1.6% for “non-controversial topics”. These are small changes, though they may reflect the beginning of a trend. But beyond the one year, no general trend is evident over time except that general reluctance to discuss controversial topics is higher since 2019. There is a general trend to be more willing to discuss “non-controversial topics,” so any decreases in the other areas might reflect a more general trend, perhaps a willingness to discuss anything.

Nevertheless, the chilling of speech is obvious, as the bars are much higher for the five topics on the left than for “non-controversial topics.” This reflects a general reluctance to speak freely on touchy subjects, something that we should surely be worried about. It will take a few more years, though, to see if this reluctance is really dropping rather than the 2021-2022 data being a fluke.

The data below on sanctions imposed on academics is a bit more convincing, as several forms of professorial sanctions have dropped over the last two years, and all dropped in between 2021 and 2022. But they’re still a LOT higher than in 2000.

It may be that contemporary students feel less need to self-censor because the objective conditions have changed at colleges and universities. You can see this, for instance, in data on “cancel culture” events. Incident trackers compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) show marked declines in attempts to punish scholars for their speech or views across all measures (the drop in “targeting incidents” is particularly large—over 30%.

Below are data from three sources on cancel culture incidents. The sources differ considerably in what they count as such an incident, but two of the three sources show a fairly large drop over the two years (2020-2022), though the National Association of Scholars (NAS) show a drop lasting only one year, with incidents rising between 2020 and 2021.

FIRE’s data is not an outlier. We see apparent declines in attempts to censor uncomfortable speech on campus across a range of datasets.

Finally “woke scholarship” is shown below.

And professors, too, seem like they’ve calmed down a bit. The intense scholarly focus on identity-based bias and discrimination seems to have cooled, for instance.

The drop, however, has only occurred over a year in two of the four areas. Again, we see something that is suggestive, but the data aren’t taken over a long enough period to see if we’re on a long-term downhill (i.e. ideologically “uphill”) slide.

Al-Gharbi concludes first that there’s a big ideological gulf between academics and “the rest of America”:

The sociological and ideological distance between academics and the rest of America has always been wide. Since 2010, however, the gulf between highly-educated Americans and everyone else grew much larger—primarily due to asymmetric polarization within the educated class itself. These differences also grew more salient as radicalized professors, students, and college-educated Americans aggressively sought to impose their values and priorities on everyone else and confront, denigrate, marginalize, or sanction those who refused to get with the program.

One core consequence of this radicalization has been reduced public trust in higher ed. Most Republicans today believe that universities, on balance, do more harm than good. A majority of Americans across partisan lines believe higher ed is moving in the wrong direction, and most believe that what they get from attending colleges and universities may not be worth the cost. This is not idle sentiment: enrollment in colleges and universities dropped precipitously during COVID and has not recovered.

Thus the authoritarian Left has, says Al-Gharbi, given Republicans some big impetus to raise funding and win elections (e.g. the governorship of Virginia) by summoning the specter of rising wokeness”. And even if academic is reforming itself, as Al-Gharbi thinks we are (I don’t really see it), Republicans will take credit for any changes like those described above. This worries him (he seems to be a Leftist), but the first thing to do is admit that a problem exists. Those of us who call attention to it, however, are described as “alt-righters”, racists, or other unsavory names. There are reasons why academics keep their heads down about this. Al-Gharbi:

Colleges and universities are not just capable of reforming themselves; they are already reforming themselves. Positive trends should be recognized, and ongoing efforts should be encouraged and supported.

But doing so would require more in academia and on the left to explicitly admit that there are real problems of bias and parochialism in institutions of higher learning. It undermines our own credibility to dismiss concerns about the culture and operations of educational institutions as an empty moral panic. Ordinary people can see with their own eyes that that’s not the case, and no one will trust us to effectively fix a problem if we won’t even acknowledge it exists. We can’t talk about progress while insisting there’s nothing wrong.

“Nothing to see here” is a non-starter. “There’s something to see here, and it’s a positive trend” is much more promising. Let’s run with that.

Yes, I see the “this is an empty moral panic” stuff constantly coming from those who are woke, but if you look at what’s happened in the last 20 years, and if you value free expression and academic freedom, it’s not in the least “empty”. Something bad has happened to the atmosphere in colleges and universities, something inimical to the very purpose of those institutions.

All it will take to reverse any trends that do exist, however, is one triggering incident—something like the murder of George Floyd. Right now, I’m not that optimistic that we’ve reached “peak woke”, but I generally go by the principle, “a pessimist is never disappointed.” Stay tuned.

Why universities should remain viewpoint neutral

June 16, 2023 • 12:16 pm

The Atlantic, which used to be pretty woke, is getting more and more sensible. The article below, which you can access for free by clicking on the screenshot (I also found it archived here), explains why universities and their departments should should not make official pronouncements about morality, ideology, or politics. This has been one of the foundational principles of the University of Chicago since the famous Kalven report of 1967, but it was an informal practice well before that. I’ve written about it many times (see collection here).

And it’s been enforced, even in the last few years when deans and departments were falling all over themselves to issue statements of political fealty. The administration made those statements disappear. In short, the reason why administrators, departments, and the University cannot take official stands on public issues is to keep speech free. If, say, a department takes a political stand on something like the perniciousness of Donald Trump (something I absolutely agree with), it might chill the speech of students, faculty (especially untenured ones) or other members of the university, people who don’t want to get demonized by disagreeing with what seem to be University-endorsed issues. Since official positions might change over time depending on the political climate and who runs the university and its departments, it’s best just to not make any statements “official”.

This policy should be enforced as widely as the Chicago Principles of Free Speech, which have now been adopted by over 80 colleges. But as far as I know, only one other school has formally adopted the principle of institutional neutrality: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Ceiling Cat bless them!). There are some exceptions allowed for us: our university can take official stands when those stands are necessary to enforce our own goals and principles. We endorsed DACA, for example, because it goes against policy to report students who came here illegally, and we also don’t want to lose the academic advantages that such students give us.

I should add that individual faculty are welcome to speak about anything on their own behalf, even using their title, so long as they make clear that they’re speaking for themselves. (It goes without saying that statements by top administrators like the President and Provost might blur the lines between public and private utterances, and so they generally keep mum.)

Now Robert P. George, a professor at Princeton, a legal scholar and philosopher, and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions (a conservative program) has written a piece in the Atlantic which explicitly explains and endorses Kalven:

Princeton itself sometimes violates the Kalven Principles, for they’re not official policy there. Here’s an example, one that wouldn’t stand at the University of Chicago:

After the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization early last summer, Princeton University’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies issued a statement fiercely condemning the ruling. The director stated that the program stood “in solidarity” with the people whose rights had been allegedly stripped away by five conservative justices doing the “racist” and “sexist” bidding of the “Christian Right,” causing women to endure “forced pregnancies,” and waging an “unprecedented attack on democracy.”

It might have been unanimous, but it doesn’t matter, for it could chill the speech of any opponent who would join that department, or even the University. George gives an example of what would happen if conservatives or pro-lifers controlled a department. (I fully agree with the statement above, but I would fight hard to keep it from becoming an official policy statement of my university.)

I am myself the director of an academic program at Princeton—the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. A majority of those associated with the Madison Program believe that elective abortion violates the rights of unborn children. So: Would it have been appropriate for the program to put out the following statement?

The James Madison Program of Princeton University applauds the Supreme Court of the United States for rectifying a long-standing constitutional and moral atrocity. The so-called constitutional right to abortion, which had been imposed on the nation by the Supreme Court nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade, lacked any basis in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution of the United States. It was “an act of raw judicial power,” to quote Justice Byron White’s dissent in Roe, which deprived the American people of their right to work through constitutionally prescribed democratic procedures to protect innocent children in the womb from the lethal violence of abortion. The Supreme Court has, finally, relegated a tragic error to the ash heap of history alongside such similarly unjust and ignominious decisions as Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell, and Korematsu v. U.S.

The Madison Program put out no such statement. Nor did I, as director, consider even for a moment issuing such a statement or asking my colleagues to do so. My understanding of what is proper was and is that, although I may certainly speak for myself, and identify myself as a Princeton faculty member while doing so, it would be wrong for me and my colleagues to identify the university or one of its units with a view of the rightness or wrongness of the Dobbs decision, or to make sweeping pronouncements on the justice or injustice of abortion.

George clearly realizes the reasons why such statements should be forbidden, and it’s beyond me why any public college or university that claims to promote free speech hasn’t adopted Kalven. (Religious schools, which require fealty to certain moral or religious views, might be exempted.)

A few more quotes from George, for I am weary with duck rescuing and have run out of steam:

No one in the university or any of its departments should be made to feel like an “insider” or “outsider” depending on his or her views about abortion or the moral status of unborn human life. No one should be counted as “orthodox” or “heretical” in the Madison Program or in any other department or program of the university for his or her views—whatever they happen to be. We are, after all, a university—an academic institution—not a political party, or a church, or the secular ideological equivalent of a church. And especially in a moment when American society is deeply polarized and people of different political perspectives are more likely to demonize than to engage one another, universities like Princeton must provide a model for a healthy community where people of different viewpoints can engage each other in a civil manner and coexist.

And then he quotes Kalven. I really think more people need to learn about this principle, for it really undergirds the principle of free expression by freeing people from the fear of punishment if they say “unapproved things”:

To my mind, the University of Chicago arrived at the right answer more than 50 years ago, when it adopted, in the midst of the Vietnam War controversy and other matters of contention, the report of a committee chaired by the law professor Harry Kalven. The Kalven Report committed the university and its various units to institutional neutrality on political questions, encapsulating its rationale in the helpful dictum: “The University is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” The Kalven Report did not forbid faculty, students, or staff in their individual capacities from stating their opinions publicly, or even from identifying themselves by their academic titles and affiliations when doing so. It did, however, generally forbid anyone from committing the university or its departments and offices to particular points of view on controversial political questions.

The Kalven Report embodied a particular understanding of the role of the nonsectarian university and of the conditions required for it to play that role. The university and its departments serve the cause of truth-seeking by providing a forum for members of the community to have full, fair, and open debates on fundamental issues without any institutional influence. Political tribes or sects can form within the university and its departments, but no tribe or sect may take control and make itself, in effect, the established religion on campus.

It is also a strong argument against committing the university and its units to a particular position unless doing so is absolutely necessary. (That would be a rare occurrence, perhaps a state law forbidding universities from hiring people who hold certain views or banning, say, the promotion—or “teaching”—of certain ideas. It would not extend to such matters as the Israel-Palestine dispute; the Ukraine War; abortion; the death penalty; how a jury ought to decide, or ought to have decided, in a criminal or civil trial; marriage and sexual morality; fracking; or whether to defund the police, legalize drugs, move to a single-payer health-care system, or abolish the FBI, etc.—all issues on which departments at Princeton or other nonsectarian institutions have released statements in recent years.)

You get the point, and I guess The Atlantic does, too. If you are in any position to suggest that your university adopt a principle of institutional neutrality (with limited exceptions as outlined above), and you agree with the principle, don’t just sit there: suggest it to the Powers that Be!

Oh, and you might want to read Geof Stone‘s person story about Kalven when he dean at at our Law School, “Darfur and the Kalven Report: A Personal Journey.” (Geof later became Provost, but now is back at the Law School.)

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