In response to the uproar caused by free-speech advocates such as FIRE’s Robert Shibley, Greg Lukianoff, and Harvey Silverglate over an amazingly expansive definition of sexual harassment in a ruling issued May 9 concerning events at the University of Montana, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has just issued another statement best described as “damage control” or even “weasel words.”
FIRE quickly issued a comeback, including some choice words from Lukianoff:
“The Office for Civil Rights’ weak attempt to walk back its disastrous May 9 letter is too little, too late,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. “OCR’s belated lip service to freedom of expression following a national firestorm of criticism is hardly sufficient to undo the damage of a 47-page ‘blueprint’ that doesn’t once mention the First Amendment or freedom of speech. FIRE calls on OCR to immediately issue a swift and detailed retraction and clarification to every college and university in the country.”
“OCR argues that a broad definition of sexual harassment encourages reporting, but mandating that state and private employees must report protected expression to authorities as ‘harassment’ is no more acceptable than requiring the reporting of ‘unpatriotic’ speech as treason,” Lukianoff continued. “In just over two years, OCR has reduced due process protections for students accused of serious misconduct, issued dangerously vague guidance on ‘bullying,’ and is now mandating a definition of sexual harassment that will render virtually every student and faculty member guilty of harassment. The agency is out of control. OCR must reverse its attack on student and faculty rights before it is forced to do so by courts, legislators, and universities themselves.”
Once upon a time college was for things like learning and job training — shaping of the mind. Nowadays, you can get so much more — like shaping of the genitals. Gender-reassignment surgery is the latest luxery item to be added to the bloated list of educationally irrelevant services offered by our nation’s costly, debt-funded universities.
A number of elite private institutions, such as Duke and Yale, have recently added sex-change operations to the list of covered health-care procedures, raising student fees in order to pay for it. The operations and treatments can run higher than $50,000 for a single student.
Public universities have a special public-interest mandate. Therfore, asking students and taxpayers to fork over more money to pay for such extragevantly expensive elective surgery strikes me as truly extraordinary — especially at a time when tuition costs and student debt levels are crippling the finances of countless American families.
When the winds of political correctness blow, college administrators are often the first to bend in obseisence. Politics, not public interest, is the motivating force. Meanwhile, parents and taxpayers are expected to pay for it all, no questions asked.
Neal McCluskey writes here about a big, gushy event Obama has planned where he’ll surround himself with college students and say how concerned he is about them and the interest rate on their federal student loans. Neal sees right through the theatrics — this is just another in the endless procession of special-interest issues politicians rely on to build support for themselves by promising benefits concentrated on a few and ignoring the costs dispersed among the many.
Check out this video. Students at the University of Colorado gladly signed a “thank you, IRS” card, showing their approval of the abuse of law to stifle groups they don’t like.
I’d like to see some polling on this matter: What percentage of Americans think it is all right to use the power of the law to selectively attack people who disagree with the policies of the incumbent administration? Suppose the question were: “Do you approve of using the IRS to impede groups that would probably attack President Obama’s agenda of transforming America to make it a more wonderful, prosperous, and fair place?” I fear that a pretty large percentage would answer in the affirmative.
Civilization erodes when people start to abandon neutral rules of law and embrace the attitude “our side must win no matter what.” We’re far down that slippery slope.
And isn’t college supposed to make people better, more civic-minded citizens? These Colorado students must have slept through that part.
Does the doctor love going into the hospital to see a patient in the middle of the night? Does the firefighter love entering a burning building? Does the teacher love trying to control a classroom full of disrespectful children? Not likely. But the work is performed with a sense of purpose that “love” doesn’t capture.
This message is not just for grads; it should be heard much earlier in school — when students choose their majors, or even when they decide whether to go to college. Too many students base their paths of study on what they “like” or what is “fun.” Colleges double down on this problem when they do not align curricula with the realities of the job market.
I know that ideally college is not vocational prep, but in reality, most students see it that way. Thus, they need to hear advice that helps them avoid spending their 20s and beyond in The Red.
A dispute has arisen over a science course taught at Ball State University. Some scientists argue that it crosses the line over into non-scientific religious concepts, specifically intelligent design.
In a Pope Center Clarion Call, University of Wisconsin professor Donald Downs, who has previously written for us on academic freedom, explores the issues involved.
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was writing briefs arguing against sex discrimination in the 1970s, her secretary objected to repeated use of the word “sex” in the documents. The secretary’s objection was that the predominantly male judges of that time would be so distracted by the word “sex” that their thoughts would turn to matters far from the merits of the case. Ginsburg substituted the word “gender,” and thus our contemporary misuse of that term was born. I think of this when I read articles in which the writer displays his PC credentials by using the feminine pronoun when the generic pronoun is required. Imagine, Ginsburg feared that all those sobersided judges and justices steeped in the dry intricacies of the law might be set to percolating by mention of sex, recalling their youthful forays into burlesque houses or whatnot. So likewise, when the feminine pronoun appears where it doesn’t belong, many readers will think of sex where it doesn’t belong. A writer may think he is being modish when he writes, for example, “a lawyer has to consider her client’s wishes,” but the effect on the reader may be to imagine a full-lipped honey in a short skirt.
Nathan Harden has an excellent essay on Minding the Campus about the constant ratcheting up of student fees to pay for a variety of things that have scant educational content.
The problem is the common one of special-interest groups’ asserting themselves to bring about actions that benefit a few at the expense of the non-organized and thus quiet majority. Whenever you have a pot of common pool money, it’s almost inevitable that the more aggressive members of the society will get to that pool an drain away most of it for things they desire. The cost of the raunchy stuff is spread over the whole student body rather than confined to those who want it enough to pay for it. If indeed there will be a higher-education revolution that unbundles the contemporary college experience, that would end this problem. Under true laissez-faire, you can’t make others pay for things that you want. Ending student fees exploitation will be another good side effect of the impending revolution.
Intuition and common sense tell us that college should be harder than high school. But a funny thing has happened on our way to the perfectly equal society in which everybody has a college degree. Many college classes have been dumbed down in order to make sure passing them isn’t too much of a challenge. At the same time, school districts have been forced to create more and more AP classes and magnet schools, largely because the better students want to be challenged.
In a piece for the Pope Center, one UNC–Chapel Hill rising sophomore tells how his high-school teachers were right when they said he would get a rude awakening when he went to college for the first time. Only, it wasn’t quite the same lesson they said he would get.
His sort of “upside-down” academic experience might be a major reason why many recent studies, such as Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift, suggest that many students gain little or no intellectual added value in college.
One of the problems of having a big, powerful bureaucracy is the potential for “legislation by regulation.” Now, the federal Departments of Education and Justice went one better than that, according to the senior VP of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Robert Shibley. In a Pope Center article, he writes that the federales “effectively repealed the First Amendment for college students and faculty members” in a ruling concerning a controversy over sexual assault at the University of Montana.
The ruling appears to be a thinly veiled power grab, using a remarkably broad definition of sexual harassment as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” to stifle political speech that touches on sex, such as expressing an opinion on gay marriage.
Shibley said that it can pretty much make an entire campus guilty of harassment, as anybody who is “unreasonably offended by hearing (or overhearing) anything having to do with sexual or gender-based topics” will be able file a harassment charge against the speaker.
Fortunately, the free-speech advocates at FIRE are all over this one. And there may not be a lot of popular support for government encroachment on our fundamental rights of expression at the moment, given the scandals about politicization of the IRS and spying on reporters. Still, it’s one more step in a frightening direction that could take years to sort out.
Yes, I get the for-profit thing. But, given the questionable benefits of college-for-all in 2013, why should anyone go into debt for the college experience? Is it a good idea for a 40-year-old office manager to still have to make payments on beer-pong tournaments and gender-studies classes, even if those payments are $100 a month?
Although it surprised many, Phillip Roth’s retirement from writing fiction could be seen as a while in coming. For one thing, there was the change in how he used his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, in more recent novels. Where the earlier Zuckerman, as in the Zuckerman Bound group, had been an insatiably sexual and vital if also frustrated actor in his own life, the later Zuckerman, impotent at that, is more or less passive, an observer and narrator of the stories of others.
The device was not unfruitful by any means and produced at least one remarkable novel, American Pastoral, about the wreckage of the Sixties counterculture. But it was as if Roth could go no further with his examination of his own experience. When he finally did allow the impotent Zuckerman to be again the main actor in the story, in the anemic Exit Ghost, the last Zuckerman novel, it was to bring his character to the dead end that emphasis on sexuality had become for him. In the penultimate Zuckerman, The Human Stain, a professor rejects his African-American roots and passes for white and Jewish, only to be ensnarled in political correctness and anti-Semitism.
Both the protagonist-professor and the narrator-Zuckerman find that they are ultimately impotent to affect the course of events or even to understand them fully. It’s as if Roth had been acknowledging for some time that his approach to fiction and the intellectual limits he accepted for himself fell short of encompassing the truth.
Rich Vedder has an essay on Minding the Campus in which he wonders why there is so much lying on college campuses. The main answer, I think, is that college officials know they can usually get away with it.
To his list, I would add the lying about educational content, especially “critical thinking.” Rarely are college students required to learn anything of the sort. Those who use critical thinking to resist leftist platitudes and manias, however, can get in trouble.
I have recently finished the new book by Neil Gross, Why are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? In it, he tries to sell readers on the idea that even though most professors are liberal, they “play it straight” and don’t try to influence students. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence of courses that are clearly slanted toward “progressive” analysis and statist notions. Jane Shaw writes about one at NC State that a student brought to her attention in this week’s Clarion Call.
Islamic extremeists have been known to incite riots and carry out violent attacks and assasinations when Mohammed is depicted in cartoon form. Amazing how much more open to the principles of free speech and expression they become when it comes to denigrating Jews.
Today, for example, the Hamas Student Union in Gaza published a disturbing cartoon, depicting a stick-figure arrayed in the Palestinian flag throwing the star of David into a trash can. Arabic text below the image reads as follows: “Keep the world clean.”
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