We all know that some universities, when they espouse an allegiance to free speech and open debate, really mean they want only speech that doesn’t offend anyone, and only want debate about issues that aren’t controversial (but then why have a debate?). Fortunately, that’s not true of all universities—my own is a welcome exception. But the lip service to free speech combined with hand service slapping down offensive free speech is going on in an invidious way at one school, the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) in Greeley.

Reports at Heat Street, as well as at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), detail how two UNC professors were investigated—simply for asking students to discuss and debate controversial topics. In both cases, student complaints triggered (sorry for the pun) inquires by the school’s “bias response team,” a group devoted to sniffing out and punishing incidents of offensive speech.  Heat Street obtained the records of these investigations simply by using the Colorado version of the Freedom of Information Act.

Here’s one described by both sources (wording from Heat Street):

In one report reviewed by Heat Street, a professor, whose name was redacted, had asked students to read an Atlantic article entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind,” about college students’ increasing sensitivity and its impact on their mental health.

The professor then asked his students to come up with difficult topics, including transgender issues, gay marriage, abortion and global warming. He outlined competing positions on these topics, though he did not express his personal opinion.

In a report to the Bias Response Team, a student complained that the professor referenced the opinion that “transgender is not a real thing, and no one can truly feel like they are born in the wrong body.”

“I would just like the professor to be educated about what trans is and how what he said is not okay because as someone who truly identifies as a transwomen I was very offended and hurt by this,” the student wrote.

A member of the Bias Response Team met with the professor, the report says, and “advised him not to revisit transgender issues in his classroom if possible to avoid the students expressed concerns.” The Bias Response Team also “told him to avoid stating opinions (his or theirs) on the topic as he had previously when working from the Atlantic article.”

Now that’s bizarre. I’ll take the professor’s word, as reported by FIRE, that he was simply inciting debate (I did that all the time when lecturing as a creationist in my “Creation vs. Evolution” course at the University of Maryland), but it’s unconscionable to tell the professor to avoid stating opinions expressed in the article itself. In fact, the Atlantic article by Jon Haidt and FIRE president Greg Lukianoff, which I’ve mentioned before, would be a great thing for students to debate. It should be required reading item during the fall “indoctrination period” given to incoming first-years at nearly every American college.

Here’s the second report from Heat Street (my emphasis):

In a separate incident, a professor, whose name was also redacted, asked his students to choose from a list of debate topics, some of them regarding homosexuality and religion.

The Bias Response Team’s notes summarized: “Specifically there were two topics of debate that triggered them and personally felt like an attack on their identity (GodHatesFags.com: is this harmful? Is this acceptable? Is this Christianity? And Gay Marriage: should it be legal? Is homosexuality immoral as Christians suggest?)”

The student, whose name is redacted and who is referred to as “they” in the report, complained that “other students are required to watch the in-class debate and hear both arguments presented.”

“I do not believe that students should be required to listen to their own rights and personhood debated,” the student wrote. “[This professor] should remove these topics from the list of debate topics. Debating the personhood of an entire minority demographic should not be a classroom exercise, as the classroom should not be an actively hostile space for people with underprivileged identities.”

The Bias Response Team wrote that while this incident “did not reach a level of discrimination,” members still contacted the professor to “have a conversation… [and] listen to his perspective, share the impact created for the student and dialogue about options to strengthen his teaching.”

The Bias Response Team wrote that once the conversation was completed, they wanted a full report of “the outcome of your time together. . . so I can document and share with the student that outreach was completed.”

I really feel sorry for that professor, who has Big Brother looking over his shoulder and is apparently expected to grovel.

In fact, these students are going to go out into a world in which many people think homosexuality is immoral, and that gays shouldn’t marry. Shouldn’t they discuss this issue before they do? (I presume this was taught in a course in which the issue was relevant.) Asserting that “gay marriage is a right,” which is presumably what this student would say, isn’t much of an argument, for assertions of rights are meant to shut down debate. They’re not reasoned arguments. Why are they considered rights? This is the kind of thing students should be pondering.

If I were teaching a class on the use of evidence, for instance, an appropriate topic would be Holocaust denialism, for it’s a pervasive topic and held by many. It is, in fact, the topic of a new book that I have, Denying History by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman. Shermer has written about this before, and I found the topic fascinating. I suppose, as a secular Jew, I should be offended by such a debate, but that’s absurd. The arguments held by denialists were unfamiliar to me, as was much of the evidence refuting them. I learned a lot from that chapter in one of Shermer’s earlier books, I look forward to reading about the issue at greater length.

Here’s another topic worthy of debate: Peter Singer’s argument that infants with incurable deformities or diseases should, in some cases, be euthanized. That is, it’s a form of post-birth abortion of life. I think there’s a case to be made for that, and it would be fascinating to put students on teams to debate the issue. (When I taught my course in Maryland, the last assignment was such a debate, but I put all the evolution-accepting students on the pro-creationist side, and the creationists on the pro-evolution side.)

If we are going to discourage debate in the classroom, or limit it to topics that can’t offend anyone, then we do the students a disservice. It’s a hard world out there, and lots of people have opinions you’ll find completely misguided. (42% of Americans, for instance, are young-earth creationists.) If we’re to function in a democracy, we have to be able to state our positions clearly and defend them rationally. What UNC is doing is shutting down that avenue, perpetuating a generation of coddled adolescents who can’t stand to even hear an opinion differing from theirs.

To see other things the UNC Bias Response Team has investigated, go here. One student filed a report when the student health center asked her if she needed birth control!

Finally, here’s the logo for the UNC Bias Response Team. Note the dissonance between “valuing intellectual and academic freedom and open exchange of ideas” and fostering “well-being and inclusiveness”. As the incidents above show, these ideals are incompatible.

Here’s UNC’s mission statement, which pretends to value “diversity of thought and culture”:

Values: The University of Northern Colorado believes that its distinctive service to society can only be offered in a student-centered atmosphere of integrity that is grounded in honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility. For this reason, the University is committed to promoting an environment in which:

1. academic integrity is valued and expected;

2. excellence is sought and rewarded;

3. teaching and learning flourish;

4. diversity of thought and culture is respected;

5. intellectual freedom is preserved; and

6. equal opportunity is afforded.

h/t: Barry

UPDATE: A whole bunch of news from CNN:

Multiple breaking and developing stories are underway in the U.S. and around the world.

Here is a special breaking newsletter with the latest:

GERMANY THEATER ATTACK:

An assailant who attacked a German cinema has been killed, a German official said. Authorities said police responded to an early report of shots fired by a man with a rifle.

SUPREME COURT:

The high court issued rulings on two pressing issues: affirmative action and immigration.

In the immigration case, the justices delivered a crushing blow to the White House. The court’s 4-4 ruling on President Obama’s executive actions on immigration means that a lower court ruling blocking the programs will remain in effect. Obama expressed disappointment, saying the decision “takes us further from the country that we aspire to be.”

The Supreme Court also upheld the University of Texas practice of using applicants’ race as a factor in admissions. The 4-3 ruling greenlights the limited use of affirmative action policies by schools.

FREDDIE GRAY CASE:

The Baltimore police officer driving the van when Freddie Gray was fatally injured in April 2015 was found not guilty on all charges. The officer, Caesar Goodson, faced the most serious charges of all the police charged in the case. Goodson opted for a bench trial presided over by Judge Barry Williams, rather than a trial by jury.

HOUSE SIT-IN:

Republicans tried to shut it down, but the Democrats’ now 24-hour-long sit-in protesting the lack of action on gun control after the nightclub massacre in Orlando is still going strong. The protest started Wednesday morning, and House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi later said the sit-in would continue “until hell freezes over.”

EU REFERENDUM:

Meanwhile, voters in the UK are deciding if Britain will remain in the European Union.

All I know about this comes from Reuters, as this incident is in progress:

(Reuters) – A masked man with a gun and ammunition belt opened fire in a cinema complex in the small western German town of Viernheim, near Frankfurt, injuring between 20 and 50 people and barricaded himself inside, German media reported on Thursday.

Bild daily and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that elite police were on their way to the scene.

The Darmstaedter Echo said 20 to 50 people had been injured.

Police were not immediately available to comment.

I’m not sure what I think of the new book How I Changed My Mind about Evolution: Evangelicals Reflect on Faith and Science, put out by BioLogos (and edited by Kathryn Applegate and J. B. Stump) in the group’s continuing effort to gather evangelical Christians into the Darwinian fold without endangering their faith. (Note: I haven’t yet read the book; I’m simply commenting on what the authors and editors have said about it.) On the one hand, it can’t hurt to have more people accept evolution, for the more who do, the less opposition we face to teaching the truth about biology.

On the other hand, for what is a man profited, if he shall accept evolution, but reject naturalism? For, according to an article on the book at Religion News Service (RNS), and the précis of the book at BioLogos (below), the book is a farrago of naturalism and supernaturalism.  Some of the authors, for instance, accept the historicity of Adam and Eve, whose existence—at least as the progenitors of all humanity—has been soundly disproven by population genetics.

Others appear to espouse theistic evolution, the doctrine that in some way God impelled the evolutionary process, usually toward Homo sapiens.  Now religionists differ in what they mean by theistic evolution. The most scientific of its advocates come close to being deists, claiming that God created the laws of physics (or the Universe itself), and then let everything roll without intervention. Then, in increasing order of divine intervention, there are those who claim that God created the first life form, and then it evolved naturalistically; others who say that God created special mutations when needed to allow life to get to its acme (us); and still others, like many Intelligent Design advocates, who accept a limited form of purely naturalistic evolution—but then argue that God created some entire lineages de novo.

Can we say that theistic evolutionists are down with the kind of evolution we teach in schools? No, and for three reasons. First, the entire concept, whether it be the “let it roll” or “constant intervention” brand, invokes God’s intervention, a violation of naturalism. And it’s a violation for which there is no scientific evidence, so right away we have a mixture of evidence-based science and revelation-based faith. It’s as if we espoused physics to religious doubters by saying that yes, the law of gravity keeps the planets orbiting the Sun, but God’s hand allows that to take place (“theistic physics”). The only reason we don’t have theistic physics, or theistic chemistry, is that neither chemistry nor physics violate Scripture or attack the view that humans are the special creation of God.

Second, these theories are all teleological, invoking a directionality to the evolutionary process: “upwards” to Homo sapiens. Yet there’s not the slightest evidence for such teleological guidance: mutations are, as far as we can see, random (and mostly either neutral, having no effect on fitness, or deleterious), evolution appears to operate in any direction that confers reproductive advantage, even if that makes you less complex (tapeworms, becoming parasitic, have lost their digestive and most of their reproductive systems). And then there’s the wastage of evolution and natural selection: the thousands of individuals who die a painful death, and the 99% or more of lineages that went extinct without leaving descendants. Why did God do it that way?  Theists have no answer except to invoke the Mystery of God’s Ways. But if God’s ways are that mysterious, how do they know that God is good, or powerful—or anything?

Finally, one of the great wonders of evolution is the very fact that a mindless, purposeless process, natural selection, drove the marvelous adaptations that we see in plants and animals—adaptations that, before Darwin, constituted strong evidence for God’s existence. After all, before Darwin what other explanation did we have for those adaptations? But Darwin and Wallace, in one huge blow, dispelled the strongest evidence for God that we had from “natural theology”, showing that the diversity of life could all be explained by the simple sorting of hereditary variation in populations.

It is this fact that makes evolution so marvelous: that when you see a squirrel, a sequoia, or a shark, you realize that these fantastically intricate creatures are the products of evolution over billions of years, starting only with a few inanimate molecules, and that nothing guided that save the exigencies of the environment. There is a reason why Darwin called it “natural selection” rather than “supernatural selection.”

Thus, I bridle when I see statements about the book like this one from Deborah Haarsma, president of BioLogos and author of the book’s foreword, quoted in the RNS article:

[Haarsma] treasures Genesis, she said, because she reads in it the message that “God is continually sustaining the universe he created with intention and for a purpose.” Science, she wrote, doesn’t replace God, “it gives us a human description of how God is creating and sustaining.”

Maybe a “how”, but surely not a why! As I noted above, it would be a cruel and capricious God who would create through evolution and natural selection. The onus is on theists to tell us why God used evolution rather than de novo creation.

Well, they are, of course, simply making a virtue of necessity. If these evangelicals were, as the book notes, forced to the conclusion that evolution is true because of the pervasive evidence, why aren’t they forced to give up the idea of Adam and Eve because of the lack of evidence? In other words, the book attempts to reconcile an evidence-based scientific conclusion with a brand of Christianity based solely on ancient scripture, revelation, and wish-thinking.

In the end, that’s why I don’t like this form of reconciliation, for while it touts the science, it dilutes it with superstition and enables faith-based “truths” at the same time. Is our goal simply to have people sign on to Darwinism, or is it to have them adopt a scientific attitude towards evidence? I prefer the latter, for its implications for society are far more profound.

The BioLogos description of the book underscores its problems:

We hope this book can serve both of these purposes. Undoubtedly, some people reading these pages are deeply suspicious of evolution. Perhaps they’ve seen Richard Dawkins, that ardent defender of evolution, sneer at religion and call it a “virus of the mind.” Or maybe they’ve heard Ken Ham, a young-earth creationist with an audience of millions, warn that “evolution and millions of years”—what he summarily dismisses as “man’s word”—are baseless ideas that contradict the clear message of Genesis and inevitably lead down the slippery slope to atheism, or worse, liberal Christianity. More nuanced views are often drowned out by the polarizing rhetoric at either extreme.

BioLogos represents another choice. Our mission is to invite the church and the world to see the harmony between science and biblical faith as we present an evolutionary understanding of God’s creation. Some of us are believing scientists who find the weight of evidence for evolution so strong we would do injustice to God’s message in creation if we didn’t speak out. Others are biblical scholars and theologians—including some who argue passionately for the historicity of Adam and Eve—who see no scriptural warrant for rejecting biological evolution, even of humans. They are grieved by the way Scripture is often forced to answer twenty-first century questions that it was never intended to address. Pastors and educators in our community see firsthand the devastating impact of the false creation-or-evolution dichotomy our Christian subculture has embraced so thoroughly. They see young people encountering compelling evidence for evolution and feeling forced to choose between science and faith.

If they accept Adam and Eve—presumably based on “scriptural warrant”—why do they reject creationism, based on exactly the same scriptural warrant, indeed, the same bit of scripture containing the Adam and Eve fable? As for having to choose between science and faith, well, yes, the rational person should. You can’t accept scientific evidence based on one set of criteria, and simultaneously accept religious stories as true based on a completely different set of criteria. In Faith versus Fact I develop the argument that the Abrahamic religions, and others as well, are indeed grounded on assertions about the world and cosmos, and thus potentially susceptible to empirical testing—or rejection if there’s no evidence for them. I quote many theologians, including Francis Collins and Karl Giberson, the cofounders of BioLogos (Collins has a chapter in this book), saying this: “Likewise, religion in almost all of its manifestations is more than just a collection of value judgments and moral directives. Religion often makes claims about ‘the way things are.'”

More from the book description at BioLogos:

. . . It doesn’t take long for the reflective Christian to realize that neither science nor Christianity has all the answers. Science can’t tell us much about Jesus Christ or the way to have a relationship with God; you can search the Bible from Genesis to Revelation and you won’t find any descriptions of DNA or quantum mechanics! Some questions are obviously scientific and some are obviously religious. The difficulty comes when both seem relevant, as in the question of humanity’s origin. For cases like this, the way forward is to allow science and faith to dialogue with each other. Learn the best science. Talk to religious thinkers you trust. Give grace to everyone, remembering that our human attempts at knowing are finite and provisional.

A related theme you’ll see surfacing again and again throughout these stories is the commitment that all truth is God’s truth. Whether truth is found in Scripture or through careful study of the natural world (even when that study is undertaken by unbelieving scientists!), our contributors see God as the ultimate source of all truth. This gives us unshakable confidence that there will ultimately be no contradiction between science and theology. God is the author of both. Sometimes this is referred to as the “Two Books” model of revelation. Psalm 19 captures both of these: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (v. 1) and “The law of the Lord is perfect” (v. 7). They are complementary.

This assumes, of course, that religion does tell us the “truth” about Jesus Christ and the way to have a relationship with God. But Islam gives us completely different “truths” from Christianity. Which one is right? Science has a way of adjudicating these issues; religion doesn’t.

In the end, that’s why a dialogue between science and faith is futile. Or rather, it’s a one-way dialogue—a monologue. Science can tell religion which of its claims are false, but religion can’t tell science which of its claims are true. And it is this asymmetry that compels a rational person to choose between science—construed as a combination of evidence, observation, agreement, and reason—and faith.

Just some lagniappe from reader Jonathan, who sent me this photo today with the note:

Thought the attached might appeal to you.  It is of the cats guarding theentrance to the Carreras Cigarette Factory Building at Mornington Crescent in London.  The building, which is now used for other purposes, was built in the
1920s in Egyptian-themed art deco style.  My picture, which was taken with my phone from the top deck of the number 29 bus as it drove past, does not really do the building justice but you can find more info and photos about the building on-line.

And of course I did. I love Art Deco, and of course I love cats. What a pleasure to find them together!

First, Jonathan’s photo:

And indeed, there’s an extensive Wikipedia article on the building, constructed between 1926 and 1928 and restored in 1996. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in London, much of it in Camden Town, and I can’t believe I didn’t know of this building’s existence.  Here’s part of what Wikipedia says (indented):

The Carreras Cigarette Factory is a large Art Deco building in Camden, London in the United Kingdom. It is noted as a striking example of early 20th Century Egyptian Revival architecture. The building was erected in 1926-28 by the Carreras Tobacco Company owned by the Russian-Jewish inventor and philanthropist Bernhard Baron on the communal garden area of Mornington Crescent, to a design by architects M.E and O.H Collins and A.G Porri. It is 550 feet (168 metres) long, and is mainly white.

The building’s distinctive Egyptian-style ornamentation originally included a solar disc to the Sun-god Ra, two gigantic effigies of black cats flanking the entrance and colourful painted details. When the factory was converted into offices in 1961 the Egyptian detailing was lost, but it was restored during a renovation in the late 1990s and replicas of the cats were placed outside the entrance.

Dominating the entrance to the building were two large 8.5-foot (2.6 m)-high bronze statues of cats, stylised versions of the Egyptian god Bastet (or Bubastis, or Bast), which had been cast at the Haskins Foundry in London. The image of a black cat was a branding device which Carreras used on the packets of their Craven A range of cigarettes. The building had thus been conceived as a “temple” to Bastet, and the architects’ original drawings reveal that it was to be named Bast House (the name was dropped due to unfortunate similarities to derogatory words in English). [JAC: Is this some British term I don’t know?]

Why a cat on the logo? The post “London Cats” (if you’re a London ailurophile, be sure to read it) gives the answer:

The Carreras company logo had been a black cat ever since 1886 after customers at the original tobacconist’s in Wardour Street grew accustomed to the sight of the shop cat curled up in the window. The black cat logo is also a repeated feature across the front of the building.

And here is the repeated feature:

The cats stood guard over Arcadia Works until 1959 when Carreras merged with Rothmans of Pall Mall and moved to a new factory in Basildon, Essex. The cats were removed from the building and separated; one was transported to Essex to stand at the Basildon works, the other exported to Jamaica to stand outside the Carreras factory in Spanish Town.

This photo from Wikipedia is labeled “The biggest cats in London.”: