American higher education used to embrace controversy, but these days anyone who says something to offend the “progressive” zealots on campus is apt to find himself or herself facing an academic lynch mob. Those people have power and like using it to punish their opponents.
In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Richard Vedder looks at this troubling trend. He writes, “It is interesting but depressing to me that the more eminent a college or university is perceived to be, the more outrageous are efforts by administrators to stifle individual expression and enforce a numbing conformity of ideas reminiscent of universities in the old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.”
Indeed so. We find a “party line” on many topics today that insists on conformity to official beliefs. Woe betide anyone who dissents — such as Penn law professor Amy Wax. A mob of students and fellow faculty members wants her gone, and the administration is going along with them.
Vedder continues, “Professor Wax apparently has a very low tolerance for ‘snowflakes,’ students whose extremely fragile state of mind leads them to want to be protected from hearing uncomfortable words. Amy dares to say in class, for example, that, on average, some racial groups fare better in college than others, a factually accurate statement but one that many view as impermissible because it isn’t ‘inclusive.’”
The law school’s dean, rather than telling the students to behave like adults in a professional school, has decided to side with them. Higher-ed administrators once prided themselves on defending academic freedom for all, but now academic freedom is reserved for those who say the right things.
What is to be done? Vedder concludes, “The ultimate solution likely involves reducing financial support for the aggressively woke suppression of ideas, along with the creation of new institutions that are aware of the problems mentioned above—schools like the new University of Austin, which, one hopes, will tolerate brilliant if eccentric and controversial scholars like Amy Wax.”