HIGHER EDUCATION, PERSISTING IN MAKING THINGS MORE DIFFICULT THAN NECESSARY.

A week ago, the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, offered the worst deflection of all time from the professors' trade union.  "The American Association of University Professors president told the Commission on Colleges and Universities that institutions shouldn’t 'be expected to prioritize intellectual pluralism on settled scholarly questions.'"

The commission in question is a Trump administration task force, which taints it as the work of the Devil before a single intern makes the coffee.

Among the commission’s roughly 30 proposed standards is a new one, titled “Intellectual Pluralism.” If the commission enacts this standard, it will begin assessing whether colleges publish “policies designed to support, promote, and prioritize intellectual diversity and affirm the respectful, civil exchange of ideas and viewpoints,” and whether those institutions measure “student and faculty perceptions on the range of viewpoints and perspectives offered by the institution or program.”

The draft standard doesn’t define intellectual pluralism or intellectual diversity, or further explain how the commission would assess whether policies are sufficient in this area. The accreditor emailed a general statement but didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed interviews Thursday or answer multiple written questions.

Todd Wolfson, president of the AAUP—which is both a left-leaning faculty union and an over-century-old professional association that wrote landmark definitions of academic freedom and tenure—told the commission in a letter this week that his group is “deeply troubled” by the new standard.

“Institutions of higher education should not be expected to prioritize intellectual pluralism on settled scholarly questions,” Wolfson wrote, “even if certain interests would prefer that their favored opinions be more widely represented on campus.”

Dear reader, does "settled scholarly questions" refer to the motte, where nobody is seriously arguing to teach phlogiston theories in chemistry or flat earth models in geography, or is this defending the full bailey, where the "certain interests" might want scholars who work in or teach critical studies to treat its core premises as assumptions leading to testable propositions rather than as tight priors?

Nor is there anything new to that question.  I vaguely recall an article, either in The Atlantic or Harpers, some thirty years ago when it was The Closing of the American Mind and Imposters in the Temple generating the heat, where one of the defenders of what trafficked under the rubric of "political correctness" or "rooting out insensitivity" said something to the effect of anyone raised in a privileged environment had been exposed to racist or sexist concepts and it was beyond debate that such a person was racist or sexist.  "He/she simply is."  That sort of rigid thinking is still with us.  See "How Do You Know If You're 'Really' Racist or Sexist?" and "You're probably more racist and sexist than you think."

Those are more like testable propositions than "settled scholarly questions," no matter how much the Student Affairs types sputter and protest.

The pooh-bahs of higher education, however, are more likely to sputter and protest and fort up in the motte and do everything to blame somebody else, whether it's Donald Trump or the Cubs bullpen, rather than grant that they have a problem.

And thus, despite the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression noting illiberal elements to that commission's activity, its Greg Lukianoff notes that higher education's pooh-bahs will fort up in the motte and then point at the witch's hut on chicken legs.  That is, until a Yale self-study noted that, well, maybe, we are forting up in the motte and we're becoming a laughingstock.  "The report confronted problems FIRE and I have been talking about for much of my twenty-five-year career: political homogeneity, free speech, self-censorship, grade inflation, administrative bloat, academic rigor, and the increasingly murky question of what all this enormous institutional machinery was actually for."

The beginning of a protracted, by-subscription report follows.

But what had me cheering was the premise underneath the report, which was that maybe the public had noticed something.

This sounds like a very low bar until you’ve spent a quarter century watching higher education respond to criticism. I’ve often joked about what I call the Silver Spoon Rule. The name owes a little to the Golden Rule, but much more to the rules preferred by the silver-spoon set: It can never, ever, ever be elite higher education’s own fault… even when it obviously is.

And to my delight, Yale had broken the Silver Spoon Rule.

I found it genuinely moving. Vindication is pleasant, particularly after years of being told that things you could plainly see were exaggerated or somehow your fault for noticing. But vindication wasn’t really the emotion that had me making noises at strangers in Boston. It was hope. Ten professors at one of the world’s most powerful universities had been willing to consider that their institution, their profession, their colleagues, and perhaps they themselves had gotten some important things wrong.

That willingness is rarer than intelligence.

I came away thinking that maybe genuine reform of American higher education was finally possible. And then I thought about the headwinds and the many interests that want higher education to continue, or even deepen, its status-quo downward spiral.

And then I may have made an even worse decision: I decided to write a wee, little article about the chances for reform and how the higher-education mega-industry will protect itself. How badly could that go?

That is, until some of higher education's best brains, or at least higher education's people who consider themselves to have the best brains, did what they are best at and found that witch hut on chicken legs to point at.

I don’t want to have to wait for another catastrophe before universities take seriously what they (and everyone) already know.

So I read obsessively. I went back to the campus culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, to Neil Gross, John K. Wilson, Donald Downs, and, of course, Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate’s The Shadow University — essentially FIRE’s founding document. I reread work I had been arguing with for decades and chased down new research on faculty politics, academic standards, grade inflation, governance, and how this gigantic industry protects itself. Then came the reports from Yale, Harvard, Vanderbilt and Washington University, and Cornell. I would find a study, chase its footnotes, and emerge hours later with three more books to read.

Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth’s It’s Not Free Speech was particularly clarifying, though hardly in the way its authors intended. I had long favored giving faculty more power over academic governance instead of leaving everything to administrators. As I’ve written before, Bérubé and Ruth convinced me, rather abruptly, that some influential faculty weren’t the least bit interested in fixing the problems at all and would make them much worse if given greater authority to decide which views and which scholars were acceptable.

We’ve known an enormous amount about what needed fixing for fifty years, and I have spent my entire career talking about it. What I wanted everyone else to understand this time was why so much evidence, so many warnings, and so many perfectly foreseeable failures had produced so little lasting reform. The answer is that largely vested interests within higher education are incredibly skilled at kicking the can down the road, accusing their opponents of political cooties, and otherwise obscuring problems that everyone knew higher education had back when I was in grade school, aren’t really problems and… hey, everybody look over there!

The project kept growing. The article became a short book, threatened to become a long book, shrank into a proposed feature article, and then grew again because every round of cutting seemed to take away some of the best points and language.

Put simply, if the tight priors of the culture studies types are so entrenched in the curriculum committees that a quorum will view those priors as settled, and higher education's failures will continue.  "A quarter century ago, the spats were in a few of the social sciences.  Is higher education better off now that mathematics is oppressive, and hegemonic masculinity taints the technical disciplines (and everything else?)"

That's when, Mr Lukianoff argues, higher education rediscovers the very values of "no final say" and "nothing is settled," all in the service of the priors of the Student Affairs types and their enablers in area studies and the visual and performing arts and anthropology and sociology.

Working through this history kept bringing me back to two connected ideas. One is Home-Field Advantage. Higher education is a trillion-dollar industry that produces, certifies, and polices much of what our society treats as authoritative knowledge. Its own experts often get to decide which criticisms of the industry count as serious, and far more powerfully which topics should be largely ignored or forced to jump through so many hoops that the critics just give up. And its customers include an extraordinary number of genuinely happy alumni, many of whom now occupy positions of power throughout American society. The institutions have enormous prestige, money, influence, and sentimental loyalty on their side. Try arguing against your own alma mater when half your friends went there, your boss’ name is on a building, and everyone is wearing the sweatshirt.

The other idea is what I call the Academic Filibuster. When critics document political bias, censorship, ideological conformity, or institutional dysfunction, defenders of the status quo can demand more evidence, a better methodology, a different denominator, another survey, or another committee to assess the last committee. FIRE has been clearing every hurdle only (to badly mix a metaphor) to see the goalpost moved gradually closer to infinity. When the standard of proof keeps changing in only one direction, skepticism becomes a highly effective instrument of delay.

A university doesn’t have to vote against reform. It can simply declare the ones demanding reform are, well, icky (an anti-intellectual habit if there ever was one). Or it can simply schedule another meeting. And when the people with the home-field advantage are also the referees, the meeting can last a very long time.

But something has shifted. Now some of the country’s most influential universities are finally acknowledging problems they spent decades minimizing. Will serious change actually follow, or will the same machinery run down the clock again?

To borrow an Insta Pundit line, should the Militant Normals encourage the government and the accrediting agencies to require the universities to acknowledge and work those problems, higher educations pooh-bahs, particularly Esteemed Scholars in the humanities, will blame it all on anti-intellectualism, likely leavened by fascism.

Let that hard rain fall.