HIGHER EDUCATION HAS LOST ITS WAY.

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time, with no sense of irony or embarrassment, calls for "Creating Space for Disagreement on Campus."

Um, that used to be the campus.

The late Richard "Underground Grammarian" Mitchell put it directly.  And that’s what a university is, if it is a university, and not a jumped-up trade school, or a conditioning station for docile citizens, or a pulpit of ideology. It is a place devoted to the study and preservation and nurture of whatever human wisdom can be found that pertains to everybody who lives, or has lived, or ever will live, on Earth."

Implicit in that "study and preservation and nurture" is, of necessity, a lot of disagreement.

Maybe, just maybe, it's time for the careerists who run the universities to rediscover their proper calling. "Faculty members who have been especially focused on defending their freedom of speech need to be paying more attention to the quality of it."  If the donors are shopping for favorable mentions in the curriculum, they're not that serious about the proper role of the university, are they?

That's where the public get a say.  Use your academic status to make a silly argument, on a non-private platform or wherever, brace yourself for the incoming. "We don't refute people like this. We mock them. And we pity the students in their classes."

And perhaps we pity the donors who labored under the impression that dispassionate inquiry was the way of the universities.

Never mind any of that, Inside Higher Ed's "Student Success Reporter," one Ashley Mowreader, who has written for The Thousand Oaks Acorn, is on the job, with a full reservoir of ideas.  "Forty-three percent of Student Voice survey respondents think a designated area on campus for civil dialogue would help with free expression."  Because their predecessors with their non-negotiable demands and calls for relevance served the academy so well, didn't they?

Somewhere, George Orwell is nodding.

Inside Higher Ed compiled four examples of physical forums and other constructive spaces on campus to promote free expression and learning among college students.

Free speech zones: Some college campuses have created free speech zones, which restrict protest or other expressive activities to a designated space.  Critics of these spaces have compared them to quarantines, pushing speakers to the fringes of campus, and they take issue with college leaders’ pre-approval of any public political expression.

Recent legislation introduced in Congress this past year would eliminate free speech zones and require institutions to disclose their free speech and freedom of association policies to campus community members, among other requirements. The bill passed in the House in September.

They are quarantines, and Cold Spring Shops will not mourn their abolition.  That a populist Congress might be conditioning continued appropriations of federal money on disclosing speech codes and abolishing free speech zones is excellent theater, as that is precisely how the Diversity Boondoggle was imposed on the universities in the first place.

That second example?

Physical spaces: Towson University in Maryland is home to the Freedom Square, which provides community members the opportunity to express and deliberate issues of civic concern, according to the university’s website. Within the square, students can hang out or study on one of the stone benches or share their thoughts on two large chalkboards. The university established the space in 2011.

Otis College of Art and Design and Pepperdine University are both institutions that have a designated Freedom Wall for students to engage in civic dialogue via creative expression.

What ever happened to the dorm room bull session?  How destructive has the Student Affairs curriculum been? I repeat, the campus ought be the space for disagreement.  Student Voice participants don't recognize how close they came to getting it right.

Free speech forums: Other institutions are investing in academic centers that can promote civic discourse and constructive dialogue among learners.

Arizona State University will launch an annual Free Speech Forum this spring, housed in the university’s Center for Free Speech, which “will engage students, faculty and the broader community and bring in national speakers on free speech,” according to a university press release.

Once upon a time, visiting speakers, whether politicians, other academicians, entertainers, or preachers were part of the university experience.  It is a shame that cancel mobs of all stripes have turned the bringing in of "national speakers" into a setting more like soccer hooligans interacting.  Such an academic setting is unedifying.  Perhaps the first step toward restoring a state of good repair is to recognize that scholarly discourse can be contentious but does not have to be impolite.