NOW IS THE TIME TO RESTORE A STATE OF GOOD REPAIR.

In the wake of the Congressional hearings that exposed the Diversity Corollary to the Peter Principle in the Ivy League, people with bigger platforms than mine have been reacting and reflecting.  We'll start with Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball, whose thinking on the academic monoculture has influenced mine throughout the years.

It was a clarifying moment, wasn’t it? The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testifying for the House Education Committee about the wave of rabid antisemitism on their campuses. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked the same question of UPenn’s Liz Magill, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your campus’s rule of conduct, yes or no? That was the question.

You might think it was a pretty simple question. Stefanik, exhibiting a mixture of incredulity and barely contained rage, stressed: “This should be be the easiest question to answer,” as one president after the next emitted a pained I-can’t-believe-this-unenlightened-pol-is-asking-me-me-the-president-of-Harvard/MIT/Penn-this-stupid-question.” Each in turn reverted to a script they must have worked out with their handlers/lawyers. “It all depends on the context.”

“Context.” It was the weasel word of the moment. We’re all champions of free speech, don’t you know, so we wouldn’t dream of intruding upon our flock’s exercise of that sacrosanct right in pursuit of their dream of self-congratulatory moral perfection — unless, of course, that dream involves some prohibited attitude, criticizing St. Anthony Fauci, for example, or St. George Floyd, or, heaven forfend, supporting Donald Trump or expressing skepticism about the 2020 election or January 6. Then, of course, it’s open-season on “free expression.”

I almost felt sorry for those three women. Almost. There they were, emanating the self-righteous demeanor they had perfected over years, and, bang, an angry congresswoman exploded that cheap facade in minutes. The upshot was not obvious to them immediately. But the world’s outrage at those moral pygmies instantly washed over the PR offices of those obscenely rich bastions of self-entitlement. “Uh, oh: the girls really stepped in it this time.” That was the universal reaction.

The way those presidents all acted for a do-over the next day, abasing themselves in the fashion of the grade-grubbing student attempting to wheedle a grade bump, or perhaps, as the populist websites have characterized it, in hostage videos strongly suggests either they, or their handlers, suspected that the common room commonplaces weren't going to cut it on Capitol Hill.

It might be, as Reason's Robby Soave suggests, that the hearings were political theater, with fact finding at best of secondary importance.

On Tuesday, the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of Pennsylvania appeared before the House of Representatives to answer questions about antisemitism on campus. They were very much of the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife variety.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.) repeatedly demanded that Harvard's Claudine Gay, MIT's Sally Kornbluth, and UPenn's Elizabeth Magill give "yes or no" responses to complicated questions about whether calls for genocide against Jews would violate university policies. The presidents consistently explained that their answers were context-dependent; it mattered whether the speech was directed at specific individuals, whether it was severe and pervasive, and whether it was accompanied by prohibited conduct.

That might be, although given the broad scope of those codes of conduct (anybody else remember "inappropriately directed laughter" or posting a picture of sorority girls reading Mein Kampf, the example the representative offered was a violation.  The context, he continues, ought to be the vapidity of the conduct codes, not the winking at calls for genocide.

It's fair to criticize university administrators for too often abandoning these lofty free speech principles in recent years. Campus authorities have routinely failed to defend free speech when said speech is deemed hateful by some offended party. Hundreds of U.S. campuses erected bias reporting systems, which allowed students to report each other for saying unkind things, even inadvertently. Over the course of the 2010s, universities erected safe spaces trigger warnings (which do not work) for the explicit purpose of discouraging supposedly hateful speech.

If critics want to charge that university administrators are hypocrites for only sticking to principle when the scrutinized speech is anti-Jewish, they can do so—but of course, both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel activism has been suppressed on campuses.

In any case, pressuring university presidents to come down harder on legal speech is not a very good idea. Anyone who has paid close attention to the happenings on college campuses for the last two decades (or more) should be wary of empowering administrators to engage in censorship. Universities do not need any encouragement on that front, least of all from Congress. Hypocrites should be denounced when they fail to protect speech—however odious—not when they stick to the First Amendment.

That's correct, and as we'll see, there's still a lot of interest in the academy in preserving speech codes and selectively checking privilege.  We look no further than a roundup of observations that Inside Higher Ed put together.

As the metaphorical smoke cleared, we wanted to know what the remarkable hearing—which has already spurred more calls for the three presidents to resign—could mean for higher education writ large. Colleges and universities have faced growing skepticism among the American public over the past several years. Just 36 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup poll released this summer. Meanwhile, higher education has increasingly come under political attack from conservatives who say colleges and universities aren’t worth the federal investment and are too uniformly liberal to be in touch with everyday Americans.

That "loss of confidence" might reflect disgruntled graduates who only later discover how little they learned, or disgruntled managers who are discovering how incompetent the Distressed Material being issued degrees are, but politically correct thinking has long contributed to that state of affairs.

Where are we now?  Regular "college bubble updates" on Pajamas Media.  A political economy of inequality that touches on tax cuts at the same time the U.S. News problem suggests a flight to perceived quality of higher education, a flight that I fear is more about being able to mingle with and form networks of high achievers, rather than to hear from the very best Mr Chips regularly.

But when Harvard becomes a place for mingling with and forming networks of jihadis, maybe it's not worth the trouble.  That might be on the mind of Wesleyan's president, Michael Roth.

On the one hand, I’m appalled to see antisemitism used as a prop, as it obviously was by the Republicans. At the same time, the presidents made it too easy for them.

I was embarrassed and chagrined that the presidents could not say more than their lawyers told them they should say about condemning a belief that all Jews should be killed. I know it’s a challenging time for higher ed, but I don’t think we rose to the challenge yesterday.

What we saw yesterday is what it means when we play defense, when we’re just sitting there getting attacked for four hours. We need to actually be out there making our case. We need to convince our fellow citizens that we are giving our students the opportunity to make thoughtful choices about the world and have skills that will help them succeed. This hearing is going to make that harder.

The presidents were under the impression they could get away with that spin.  They couldn't.  That reality is dawning on Association of American Colleges and Universities president Lynn Pasquerella.

It became clear from the presidents’ testimony that higher education must play a leadership role in addressing antisemitism and all forms of racial and social injustice. In each case, the president sought to balance the mission of their institutions—that are grounded in the free exchange of ideas and the unfettered pursuit of the truth—with their duties to ensure that their campuses are not only safe, but also places of welcome and belonging.

Many things were troubling, but one of the aspects that was most troubling is that much of the questioning seemed intent on presenting a monolithic portrait of American higher education as liberal indoctrination.

I think this has the potential to have a profound and lasting impact on higher education. We talk a lot about this moment posing an existential crisis for higher education because of that politicization, the proliferation of educational gag orders and the growing mistrust in higher education, accompanied by a precipitous drop in enrollment, especially among those who could benefit most from access to higher education.

This is a moment when we’re seeing completion rates at four-year colleges at 60 percent and two-year colleges as low as 30 percent. We need to ensure that not only people have access to college, but they’re completing college. And this creates new impetus for this disinvestment in higher education at a moment when it’s needed more than ever.

Who knew that the deconstruction of bourgeois norms would finally bite the higher education establishment in the ass?  Want a safe place of welcoming and belonging?  Expect students and faculty to conduct themselves like ladies and gentlemen.  And use a hearing involving the Ivy League to make a case for more people going to college and completing college?  The retention and completion problem is the consequence of admitting unprepared people and calling it access.

Michigan State professor of education Brendan Cantwell properly noted the fundamental problem with speech and harassment codes.

Another thing that was notable: voices from the right, including congressional voices, have been strongly in support of free speech. They have often decried what they perceive as efforts to silence conservative speakers because of their viewpoint. They’ve been very concerned about that, but it’s clear that concern runs in one direction. They’re interested in protecting the speech of people who they see as ideologically aligned with them and not so interested in protecting the speech of people who disagree with them.

That is one way of understanding what those representatives were doing, although none of the university presidents took the opportunity to note that using the Critique of Pure Tolerance to structure their speech and harassment codes was wrong, not during the hearings, not when their handlers sent them out with new instructions.

[I]f you're going to suggest that open inquiry and tolerance of opposing points of view is repressive, because it gives people doing things you dislike the opportunity to defend those things, even (or especially) if you view yourself as on the side of the angels, or whatever their secular equivalents are, and they are standing in your way, and you therefore have the obligation to suppress them and their arguments, sooner or later the suppressors are going to come for you.

It's not that I didn't warn them. "Is anybody surprised that denying coherent beliefs might generate incoherence, or counterrevolution?"  Let the counterrevolution, or the restoration of a state of good repair, begin.  Never mind that the president of the American Association of University Professors, Irene Mulvey, sees the status quo as fine.

Freedom of expression in colleges and universities can and must co-exist with maintaining the safety of all members of the campus community. Academic freedom—protecting free and open inquiry—is a cherished value that has helped establish the U.S. educational system as a model for higher education across the world. Academic freedom protects a wide range of expression inside and outside the classroom, including controversial ideas that some may consider wrong or offensive.

At the same time, colleges and universities have enforceable codes of conduct that prohibit speech that crosses the line into threats of harm or that constitutes harassment against individuals because of characteristics such as race, gender, religion, national origin or disability. And so, colleges and universities can and should enforce these limits on speech in ways that protect the safety of the campus community while also upholding faculty and student rights to engage in heated debates and disagreement about difficult and controversial ideas.

Tuesday’s hearing illustrates the difference between the kind of nuanced and thoughtful conversations on these priorities that take place on college campuses and the prosecution-type hearings that take place on Capitol Hill. The hearings will have the effect, perhaps intended, of further polarizing an already polarized nation, fanning the flames of intolerance and further demonizing higher education in the public’s mind.

First, the hearings were not about jihadi-friendly professors in Victim Studies departments, they were about the failure of the universities to enforce those codes of conduct.  There are no "nuanced and thoughtful conversations" when mobs are yelling "from the river to the sea" and Jewish students are hiding in the library attic or covering themselves with baseball caps rather than the more traditional headwear.  There's a tension between protecting expression of controversial ideas and calling the expression of controversial ideas a "threat of harm."  Whenever I sound off about Distressed Material, I surely am promising harm to the delusions that people who can't handle the material should get degrees.  That should be obvious, but apparently you get to be president of the professors' guild by ignoring the obvious.

Our universities are being run by terminally stupid people.

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