ROOTING OUT THE EDUCATIONAL MALPRACTICE.

There are still U.S. citizens held hostage by Hamas, and there are still fans of the jihad on campus.  A year after Hamas terrorists started this war, let us at least take stock of the reckoning for higher education.

Universities were damned if they cracked down on protests and encampments, damned if they didn’t, and damned by conservative pundits and politicians even if they reached a peaceful resolution to end encampments. Those that had become accustomed to taking official stands on political and social justice issues found themselves in a particular bind—while facing intense pressure from donors, politicians and others to both eradicate antisemitism from their campuses and embrace institutional neutrality.

That's from an Inside Higher Ed roundup of statements of assorted deanlets and senior administrators.

I had reason to be contemptuous of those administrators a year ago.

I hold the position that university officials be circumspect in issuing statements about Matters of Public Import.  At the time, I noted, "Too often, those statements make the professional protest communities within the university comfortable with their prejudices."

It doesn't do us any better to have the deanlets or the senior administrators issuing statements that set off the professional protest communities.

The column features a variety of perspectives.  Benjamin "Fall of the Faculty" Ginsberg sees what the Militant Normals saw.

The events of the past year shed a harsh light on university governance and revealed to the general public something college faculty have long known: Some of America’s great universities are not led by the best and brightest. The testimony presented to Congress by the three stooges (the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT) who could not decide whether calls for the genocide of the Jews violated their institutions’ speech codes was shocking to most Americans. The nation expects some measure of moral leadership and intellectual clarity from the presidents of elite universities. We saw, instead, cowardice and witlessness. The way forward is a larger role in college governance for other campus stakeholders, including faculty, alumni and trustees.

He also puts a marker down for making thinking great again.

It was widely reported that many of the students chanting “from the river to the sea” could not identify the river or the sea in question. This is an illustration of the validity of Hannah Arendt’s observation that we live in a “post-truth” society in which feelings have become decoupled from facts. Some students accept as true what they believe or feel. In seminars, these individuals will begin a comment by saying, “I feel that …” A feeling requires no evidentiary foundation but, rather, creates its own reality. Parents must be delighted when they discover that their tuition dollars have helped their children learn to validate their feelings.

Carleton historian Amna Khalid also sees the value of careful thought.

Protecting one group’s sense of belonging and inclusion meant infringing on the other group’s freedom to express their feelings and views.

The discourse of harm, which undergirds most institutional initiatives to further diversity, inclusion and belonging, can and will be weaponized and wielded by all sides to silence their opponents. This discourse is the lingua franca of a model of education that prizes safety and security above all else—not physical safety, but emotional and psychological safety. The working assumptions here are that students are intellectually and emotionally vulnerable when confronted with challenging content; that identity-based harm is particularly pernicious; and that some ideas are so dangerous—so harmful to individual psyches, so detrimental to society at large—that they must be banished from public school classrooms altogether, from kindergarten to college.

Those on the progressive left who were trafficking in the discourse of harm to advocate for restricting speech on campus prior to Oct. 7 saw their rhetoric boomerang and limit their own speech. On the other side, politicians and donors of a certain persuasion, who posed as champions of freedom of expression, were suddenly leveling claims of harm to push for campus speech to be more tightly regulated.

This is not an environment where open inquiry or learning can flourish. Nor is it conducive to fostering diversity and talking across differences—a prerequisite for addressing the wicked issues (complex, thorny problems that don’t have clear solutions and where values are in conflict) we face, of which the conflict in the Middle East is but one.

Predictably, people whose salary depends on continuing the therapeutic delusion disagree.  Consider Brett Sokolow, who heads up the trade association for Title IX administrators, who can't even come up with a coherent policy on boys pretending to be girls in sports.  But that class of grifters is part of the diversity bureaucracy, and they have to keep the speech code hustle going.

The “protest contagion” of 2024, where similar and simultaneous protests and counterprotests spread from campus to campus, has pitted warring factions against each other. International students whose families (and ancestors) have been locked in sectarian struggles around the world have found those struggles now perpetuated in their campus environments, attracting allies and opponents to plights that may be rooted in colonialism, occupation, liberation, self-determination and genocide. These clashes and campus responses raise important questions about competing values and the balance between free speech and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that are yet to be reconciled.

Before Oct. 7, 2023, campuses—especially public universities—viewed themselves as forums for social issues. They allowed encampments, held back on engaging law enforcement and even incorporated protests into academic discourse. Yet, it did not take long for colleges to reconsider this openness in light of the impact of the protests. Shutting down campuses, canceling classes, moving to remote instruction and eliminating commencement ceremonies hits at the core of what colleges are and do. Colleges realized that while protests could enliven the academic enterprise, they could also fundamentally interfere with it or even shut it down (temporarily).

If colleges are faced with an existential choice about whether to be forums for public debate or forums for academic exploration, they have to choose academic exploration. Otherwise, they cease to be colleges. Many colleges have now recentered their positions and missions to encourage speech and protest, but only to the extent that it does not threaten the educational mission. The threshold for what is acceptable has been recalibrated. As we head into 2025 and beyond, there will be tolerance for free speech and protest—but not of foment, unrest, vandalism and violence. Protests must fit within, not supplant, those mission-centric functions, and many campuses learned this lesson the hard way.

What remains? The clash of free speech and Title VI is the next frontier. Courts demand protection of free speech while the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights expects protection from hostile environments created on the basis of ethnic characteristics and shared ancestry.

The professional protest communities have carried off a neat conjuring trick, using complaints about "hostile climates" to create climates hostile to learning.  That he can in all seriousness talk about "recentering positions and missions to encourage speech and protest" is beyond parody.  When university administrators bother with mission and vision statements in the first place, then privilege protest in them, dear reader, that does not disabuse me of my claim that our universities are being governed by truly stupid people.  Perhaps, thirty years on, it is time for a remake of P.C.U.

For the Old Time Religion, though, there's Trinity Washington president Patricia McGuire.

Among all places in American life, university campuses should be galvanizing venues for learning about human rights and liberation—essential lessons for our future citizen leaders. Our quads, classrooms and libraries should rock with urgent debates on the profoundly complicated issues at stake in the ongoing construction of the most diverse society in human history as a polity committed to achieving freedom and justice for all.

But on some campuses, after the crises of the past year, the idea of the university seems to be shrinking into itself, squandering the university’s right and responsibility to teach students how to form and express their beliefs with knowledge and purpose. The very idea of fostering a climate of passionate activism has become a potential disciplinary nightmare for students, a repressive risk for faculty, a career-threatening episode for presidents.

Universities themselves need liberation in this fractious moment. We need liberation from the political pressures to “crack down” on student protests. We need liberation from the fear that someone will say or do something offensive; the offensive word or act will surely occur, more than once, and that is where true teaching and learning begins. Whether the topics be genocide or antisemitism, terrorism, the oppression of Palestinians, or the disgraceful history of racial injustice in the United States, universities must be unafraid and unapologetic in teaching the truth, undaunted by any politicians or pundits or donors who want to suppress the right and freedom of the university to teach what it chooses, as it must.

Universities should confront the rising authoritarianism in this nation by modeling a vigorous commitment to free speech and academic freedom, rather than embracing the very tools of authoritarianism to silence protest. University presidents, in particular, need to come out of the bunkers of neutrality and raise our voices to reclaim the high ground for higher education as one of the great counterweights to government in a free society. Today’s protesters will be tomorrow’s leaders; let’s teach them how to do civic leadership with courage and grace.

That's quite the bundle of points, isn't it?  Are the universities producing future managers of the government, or "counterweights" to government?  Are the offensive words and ideas proscribed, or do faculty and deanlets model ways to engage and defang them?  Is she willing to consider the possibility that maybe we got a few things right, or is everything that exists oppressive and due for deconstruction?

For, dear reader, that way of thinking gets you more Trump.

If Trump takes the White House in November his administration could abolish the Department of Education, as called for by Project 2025; levy fines on universities and use them to fund an online university called American Academy; replace college accreditors as part of their crusade against the “radical left;” roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion and implement a host of other disastrous measures.

While many academics have sounded the alarm about Trump’s plans to gut academia, Trump is not without supporters in higher education. I have studied 198 leading conservative professors and found that 109 support Trump: “academic Trumpists.” These are professors who advocated and voted for Trump in 2016, supported his administration despite all its turmoil, and challenged the legitimacy of Biden's win in 2020. A few even supported the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol. They are overwhelmingly white, male and tenured. Some, like Marshall DeRosa, Professor of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University, express their support in blunt terms. In 2016 he said, “I’m looking forward to voting for Trump, because I see him as a wrecking ball and I want to see those sons of bitches squeal in Washington, to be quite frank.” Trump now gives every indication that he will take his wrecking ball to higher education and, if he does, he’ll find some professors there to welcome him.

That's David Swartz in Salon, and what he's hysterical about I might well welcome.  Predictably, a grifter who invokes "January 6" will also squeal about the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

They participate in and benefit from a vast conservative network beyond the academy. Three-fourths of the academic Trumpists affiliate with prominent conservative and powerful think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, the Independent Institute, and the Federalist Society. A few Trumpists affiliate with smaller neo-Confederate think tanks such as the League of the South, the Abbeville Institute, and Stephen D. Lee Institute, which embrace white nationalism. The Claremont Institute stands out as the network hub. Eighteen of the academic Trumpists affiliated with the institute also have ties to 32 other conservative think tanks. There is no similar clustering of anti-Trumpist conservative professors around such right-wing centers.

Resident intellectuals with Heritage probably disagree more than agree with those affiliating with the  Independent Institute, and name-checking Claremont in the same sentence with the League of the South is a smear worthy of Joe Göbbels.  That undermines Mr Swartz's closing call for consensus.

Right-wing populism—the kind that Trump evokes when he condemns higher education as a bastion of sinister elites—is the key dividing line. The academic Trumpists support it, the anti-Trumpists professors do not. In their book, Passing on the Right, Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn noted that “conservative professors…look askance at the populism that has shaken up the Republican Party in recent years.”

It is these conservative professors who liberal academics must unite with to stand against Trump’s increasingly strident attacks on academia. Our political differences may be vast, but we agree on the value of higher education and understand that to lose it would be devastating for generations of Americans to come.

I deliberately quoted all those deanlets from Inside Higher Ed first, as their words illustrate that people within higher education might have different understandings of its value, that is, if they haven't been complicit in destroying its value.  And thus does Donald Trump earn renomination.  Recall, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley also denounced Palestinian terrorism during the primary season, which began in 2024.