LIFT THE INTERNAL LIMITATIONS THAT TRAMMEL INQUIRY.

Those smug, smirking Ivy League presidents surely poked a bear, didn't they?  Well into the semester break, the pile-on continued.  In Minding the Campus, Richard Vedder got straight to the cause of the anger.  "The Cost of Ignoring First Principles."

I think the fundamental problem is that these presidents—all women, of course, given the intense anti-male hostility prevalent in the academy—largely ignored two First Principles, embodied in The Ten Commandments and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

More precisely, the presidents seemed to equivocate and waffle on the importance of moral imperatives such as the biblical “thou shalt not kill” when they failed to unconditionally condemn the genocide generated by Hamas when it started its current war with Israel. They did so because they did not want to inflame a large pro-Palestinian campus constituency. Kowtowing to campus wokeness trumped adherence to the Ten Commandments. American higher education began largely as an exercise in promoting Christian morality, and on the eve of the American Revolution, roughly one out of four students at America’s nine colonial colleges were studying to be ministers, and promoting virtue was considered a major if not the dominant reason for colleges.

Oh, the promotion of virtue is still there, only it is now the virtue of transgressivity and the creed of intersectionality.  Perhaps that works to train future government bureaucrats, but even government bureaucrats are subject to reality checks.

That might be where the First Amendment protections come in.

And college presidents must navigate those limits. Necessarily, there may occasionally be gray areas—has provocative speech gone too far by potentially criminally endangering people or property?

While Holmes was a significant name in American legal history, so was University of Chicago law professor Harry Kalven (1914-1974). Kalven in 1967 chaired a committee of seven distinguished scholars (i.e., John Hope Franklin and George Stigler) that produced the report regarding the university’s role “in political and social action.” I think a vast majority of the campus brouhahas of today could have been avoided or at least mitigated by adopting and following the principles of the Kalven Report. To quote from it: “The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement and dissemination of knowledge …The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is … a community of scholars … it cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness.” How wise, how correct.

Unfortunately, fifty to a hundred years of avant-garde, or perhaps stinky hippie, deconstruction of bourgeois norms makes it difficult to expel students for not behaving like ladies and gentlemen — that, perhaps being more effective than criminal sanction as a check on being provocative to the extent that the rabble are roused.  That higher education, by taking stances on the expediency of the moment, or in the hopes of placating the loudest voices, has squandered whatever moral authority the enterprise had, has long been under way.  Now, perhaps, they're finished.

Hence, if I were one of the presidents at the House hearing, I would have said, “Our university adheres to the Kalven principle that universities are merely academic villages, communities of scholars. We provide resources and space in which members of that community express themselves, but we ourselves as an institution do not take positions on issues of the day. We do this, however, mindful of the laws of the broader community, laws to which we adhere.”

There is another issue: the quality of presidential leadership. All three presidents testifying were in only their second year of leadership. At least one prominent Harvard alumnus and major donor has asserted that at least at Harvard, the President, Claudine Gay, received her job only after being vetted by the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy that are powerful at virtually all major universities. Interestingly, she rose swiftly to becoming a named full professor of political science despite never publishing a book—exceedingly rare at Harvard (she does have several fairly highly cited journal articles). Of the nine current presidents of Ivy League schools plus MIT, seven are women, and no man has been appointed president for a decade, consistent with the view that DEI vetting of top administrators has probably become a de facto unwritten requirement—since no DEI administrator would likely ever consent to a straight white male as president.

Vicious sex, race, and viewpoint discrimination is dramatically narrowing the pool of qualified leaders. It showed at the recent Congressional hearing. The Penn board of trustees went into an emergency meeting after hearing the damage that President Liz Magill had done in less than two years to a school already reeling from significant donor rebellion against a progressive agenda, as followers of the Amy Wax—Penn Law professor—inquisition are aware. Ironically, Magill is now becoming a Penn Law professor at the same time it is trying to oust Wax, whose big crime was offending Penn’s Woke Supremacy. Is higher education needing a more comprehensive auto-da-fe, a cleansing of the collegiate environment? For starters, shouldn’t we eliminate DEI bureaucracies from campuses?

Sour grapes, Professor Vedder? No doubt there are defenders of business as usual who would suggest as much.  Unfortunately, those box-possessing-checking presidents claimed to be advocates for free speech and inquiry despite the Congressional inquiry having ample evidence of the very speech codes that would be used to bring a sensitivity inquisition against a heretic.  Reason's Robby Soave brings the receipts, concluding,  "When elite university presidents claim that even hateful speech should enjoy ironclad protection on college campuses, they are absolutely correct. But if they are asserting that speech characterized as hateful currently enjoys ironclad protection on their campuses, they are blind."  He says "blind," I say paid lackeys without character or knowledge.  Under other circumstances, Inside Higher Ed contributor Alex Small, a Cal State physicist, might merit an entry in a Friday short takes post for noting, "The problem here is a deficit of bravery, not a surplus of bigotry. Administrators fear the campus consensus more than they fear being sued over free speech violations," which reinforces the "without character" part of my impression.

His post, however, considers a hypothetical campus demonstration calling for ... illegal aliens to be deported.  (The weird way in which the past few years have developed, I can't help but contemplate such a demonstration, maybe at some community college or regional four-year.)  He's being outrageous to make a point, the point being that the full weight of Institutional Disapproval would come down on such demonstrators.

[M]aybe I’m wrong, and universities would not put their thumbs on the scales against a rally supporting mass deportations. However, if I am wrong, my mistaken impression comes less from academia’s right-wing critics and more from universities’ actions and investments. Ubiquitous statements responding to high-profile police shootings and racial incidents, coupled with extravagant spending on bias response teams and diversity offices, create an impression of vigilance against bigotry. Institutions strive mightily to portray themselves as anything but neutral on incidents or controversies that intersect with group identity, particularly for groups that have historically faced discrimination.

However, empathetic opposition to mobs goes out the window when demonstrators call for mass displacements of Jews from Israel. Administrators instead dust off their previously misplaced copies of the First Amendment. I wish I could celebrate their rediscovery of such a crucial text, but I have no optimism that they’ll rush to the defense of other disagreeable speech. Their free speech commitments rest entirely on a preponderance of sympathy for Palestinians over Jews in the campus political consensus and administrative fears of defying consensus.

It's not remarkable that he's suggesting the best response to speech is more speech. It is remarkable that the house organ for Belonging, Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Nonsense all the time posted his article.

Compact's Greg Conti, a Princeton political scientist, reinforces both Professor Vedder and Professor Small.

Universities should tolerate no disruption or intimidation; but as far as speech alone goes, they must cease to see its supervision as within their remit. They should protect the rights of students to have nonpolitical spaces on campus (like libraries and dorms) and should remember that the opportunity to study and work in the absence of political intrusions is a great part of what the university exists to provide. They should promote faculty and evaluate students without respect to demography or ideology, seeking to abide not just by the letter, but the spirit of our nondiscrimination laws, including the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action; and if the fact that in a liberal-democratic society it is deeply corrosive for powerful institutions to find ways around aspects of the law they happen to disagree with is not compelling enough reason to do so, then they should remember that these discriminatory policies are deeply unpopular across all racial groups.

It would also be wise for universities and their administrative subunits to stop making pronouncements in their corporate capacity on public affairs, no matter how certain they may feel that they are in the right and, instead, follow the wisdom of the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” They should always bear in mind that the academic vocation consists not of activism, but teaching, learning, and research.

Most generally, university leaders must recognize that an organization that pontificates about everything can be trusted about nothing. They should remember that it is not a deficiency but a virtue in a great institution of civil society to limit its mission, to stay within its sphere. For the more total such an institution becomes, the less it can defend a degree of autonomy from the state and the less well it works to provide one of the necessary conditions of a functional free society: a variety of venues in which different kinds of important activity can be pursued, with each clearly devoted to its specific purposes, such that the public can understand its missions and trust them to fulfill them.

To take this approach would require giving up a certain kind of power and influence. It would undoubtedly cause universities’ grip on their most devoted adherents to loosen; it would mean accepting that there are many social goods that have to be served by institutions other than the university. It would require self-restraint and a renewed commitment to a more specialized sense of vocation. But this is the path back to being a true univers-ity, one that serves and can be trusted across our pluralistic nation and, indeed, by the republic of scholars that transcends borders.

Well, yes, that sounds a lot like encouraging that continuing and fearless sifting and winnowing, to repeat a phrase, as well as distinguishing your work from that of a conditioning station for docile citizens, even if they qualify for high appointive office.

First, though, the poobahs of higher education have to lose their affinity for speech codes.  Heterodox Academy's John Tomasi, after suggesting what a full-throated defense of scholarly inquiry before a Congressional inquiry would sound like, concludes, "Of course, claiming the high ground of free speech and open inquiry would be more effective if one’s institution actually lives those values. Here, too, today’s college presidents will find that opportunities for leadership abound."

That's only the beginning.  Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds notes,

The proposals by various critics to regulate campus speech in response are a bad idea, though there is one upside:  The strong support for campus free speech that used to exist was basically developed as a tool to protect leftists on campus from populist or conservative retribution.  Perhaps this will have a similar effect.

But if you’re looking for policy changes in response to the despicable behavior of a surprisingly large number of Ivy League students, treating speech is treating the symptoms; the actual disease is elsewhere.  The real problems are layers of corruption that have built up at the university level.  And while they’re worse at the elite institutions, the corruption extends farther.  So here are some more constructive suggestions than reverse speech codes.

Five suggestions follow, all of them familiar to regular readers of Cold Spring Shops, all worth raising with fund-raisers for your alma mater the next time they call begging for money.