The Economics of Political Correctness - WSJ

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One morning, chatting with Harvard undergraduates just before my class, I reminisced about my own college years in the late 1990s—debating religion in our residence hall or arguing about the role of discrimination in America in common rooms.

Those conversations were uncomfortable and even heated at times. But they were positive experiences for me and I’m pretty sure everyone else. Grappling with different views helped us understand one another, and that helped me understand, and sometimes change, my own outlook.

I asked a student in the front row: With all this technology and social media, where do you have these types of conversations? She looked up from her turquoise notebook and replied: “We don’t.” I looked around the amphitheater and asked, “Really?” A hundred heads nodded in unison.

I thought they were exaggerating until a student in another class dared to ask if racial disparities are due to systemic racism or differences in work ethic. He happens to be black and from a disadvantaged background, and he earnestly wondered why, in his neighborhood growing up, it seemed to him that black immigrants worked harder than American-born blacks. A white woman a couple of rows behind him called him a “white supremacist.”

If my dorm-mates and I had the threat of academic censure hanging over our heads back then, would we have been as forthcoming with each other? I’d like to think so, but I doubt it. We weren’t courageous; we lived in a world where the cost of information was higher and the cost of asking the “wrong” question was essentially zero, so debate was an efficient way to learn.

In my college dorm’s common room, I met an Indian woman who thought arranged marriage made more sense than dating. I found her arguments baffling for the obvious reasons—and besides, economists typically think more choice leads to better outcomes. She didn’t question my motives for asking; she simply pulled out data on divorce rates across the two continents to prove her point. That common room was the first place I debated chapters of the Bible with an atheist. The first time I had a chance to ask delicate questions of a gay man about his experiences.

A decade ago, I still interacted with dozens of undergraduates and doctoral students who were asking important and provocative questions about race and sex in America. But now students invite me to lunch and ask if their research idea is too risky; they wonder out loud what they are allowed to “say in public,” as though they are in the situation room discussing nuclear launch strategy rather than pondering the economics of policing in an overpriced cafe.

Some are turning to an app called Sidechat, where they can frankly debate others in the Harvard community without revealing their names. It’s good that these conversations are happening somewhere; it’s distressing that they require a veil of anonymity.

The issue affects research in economics, hardly known for its far-left politics. When I used artificial intelligence to evaluate all the race- and sex-related papers published in the top six econ journals since 2006, asking the algorithm to score how liberal or conservative the conclusions leaned, I found a more than 2-to-1 leftward tilt overall.

There were particularly big gaps in the late Obama years and the early 2020s. Did empirical output lean particularly to the left at those times, or were political-correctness pressures especially strong?

Realistically, either journal editors are refusing to publish controversial results, or academics are too cowardly even to do the research. One notable exception—a recent American Economic Review paper finding that children’s academic outcomes improve when parents are incarcerated—met with censorious derision from others in the field on social media. My own work on race and policing, which was published in a top peer-reviewed journal in economics, was labeled “hate speech” by (pre-Elon Musk) Twitter.

Even if stone cold economists have fallen prey to self-censorship, economics can tell us why. A brilliant analysis by Stephen Morris—a formalization of early ideas developed by Glenn Loury—develops the basic economics of political correctness. Here is an example:

Suppose there is an informed professor advising a less informed politician as to whether diversity, equity, and inclusion policies help minorities. If the professor says DEI is harmful, the politician might interpret the recommendation as the honest findings of an unbiased researcher. But he also might interpret it as the motivated reasoning of a racist, and might even stop asking the professor for advice.

Mr. Morris demonstrates mathematically that if the professor is sufficiently concerned about being thought a racist, he will lie and recommend DEI even when he knows it’s a bad idea for minorities. And if he does tell the truth, his advice may come across as tainted by bias. The implications are unsettling for anyone trying to make decisions based on academics’ recommendations.

A similar dynamic is at play on any socially sensitive topic, and social media turbocharges it. Online activists have major incentives to call out even obscure academic work they deem beyond the pale; doing so can help them shore up their own progressive bona fides and build their followings. And there are few penalties for misconstruing the target’s argument or being plain wrong.

The question is what can be done. First, we need to take a careful look at how we hire and promote faculty. Instead of having them sign statements swearing fealty to DEI, perhaps they should promise to tell the truth. Second, we need high-powered incentives for people who are correct regardless of politics. If someone scientifically demonstrates that systemic racism is the main factor in racial disparities in America, this should be celebrated. If someone finds that health disparities are driven by genetics rather than social factors—that too should be celebrated. We need something like the MacArthur Fellowship or the X Prize for telling the truth about data.

I am gravely concerned about the rise of political correctness on college campuses, its effect on the type of analysis that is being published and being taught, and how this will undermine, among many other things, efforts to help the marginalized in America. Such efforts will succeed only if they are rooted in the truth.

Mr. Fryer, a Journal contributor, is a professor of economics at Harvard, a founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The Gender Gap in Censorship Support

Research shows that women favor inclusive environments while men favor protecting academic freedom.

Psychology Today

• In a 2019 study, 59% of women said protecting free speech was less important than promoting an inclusive society, while 71% of men felt opposite.
• Two recent studies of online adults revealed that women were more censorious than men.
• This gender gap appears smaller among young adults, with both young men and young women having censorship preferences similar to adult women.

Across decades, topics, and studies, women are more censorious than men. Compared to men, women support more censorship of various kinds of sexual and violent content and content perceived as hateful or otherwise offensive to minorities.

Women are more supportive of illegalizing insults of immigrants, homosexual individuals, transgender individuals, the police, African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, Jewish people, and Christians, and are more supportive of banning sexually explicit public statements and flag burning. In contrast, men evaluate free speech as more important than do women.

One likely reason for this pattern is that women are more averse to interpersonal harm and have a relatively stronger concern for protecting others. Indeed, women believe sexual media content has more harmful effects on the self and others, and women view hate speech as more harmful and violent than do men.

Although support for censorship is often associated with authoritarianism, it likely is motivated—at least in part—by desires to protect others from harm. In the communications literature, the third-person effect refers to a tendency for people to view others (compared to the self) as particularly vulnerable to media content, especially for negative or potentially harmful media. And those with larger self-other vulnerability gaps tend to be more supportive of censorship.

The higher sensitivity to harm among women likely influences how women weigh the tradeoffs regarding freedom of expression vs. the protection of vulnerable others.

For example, in a 2019 report by the Knight Foundation, 59% of women said that promoting an inclusive society is more important than protecting free speech, whereas 71% of men said that protecting free speech is the more important value. Moreover, 58% of college men said it is never acceptable to shout down a speaker, whereas only 41% of women agreed that it is never acceptable to do so.

Of greater consequence for the pursuit of truth and rigorous scholarship, this higher sensitivity to harm among women likely influences how women weigh the tradeoffs regarding academic freedom vs. the protection of vulnerable others.

For example, a majority of men believe that colleges should not protect their students from offensive ideas, whereas a majority of women believe colleges should. Male students rated advancing knowledge and academic rigor as higher in value and social justice and emotional well-being as lower in value relative to female students. And in a 2021 report by Eric Kaufmann, female scholars in the US and Canada were more likely than men to support firing a scholar for controversial research.

I have observed similar patterns in some of my own work. For example, in a very recent study I conducted with 440 online adults (I will add a preprint link when it is available), participants rated the offensiveness of excerpts from the discussion sections of five published (and potentially or demonstrably controversial) scientific papers.

These papers included findings that (1) female protégés benefit more when they have male than female mentors; (2) there is no evidence of racial discrimination against ethnic minorities in police shootings; (3) activating Christian concepts increases racial prejudice; (4) children with same-sex parents are no worse off than children with opposite-sex parents; and (5) experiencing child sexual abuse does not cause severe and long-lasting psychological harm. Note all these studies were published in high-impact scientific journals, but two of them have since been retracted and one was officially condemned by Congress.

Women found all scientific findings more offensive than men, except for the same-sex marriage findings (which both men and women rated as not at all offensive). And broadly, women reported stronger agreement with the statement that some scientific findings should be censored because they are too dangerous.

In an ongoing project, I have found that this gender gap in censorship support might be smaller among young adults, with both young men and young women having censorship preferences similar to adult women.

In one study with 559 online adults, participants read five passages from books (that were made up for purposes of this study) and reported their desires to censor those books by indicating their agreement with statements like, “They should remove the book from the library” and “A professor should not be allowed to require the book for class.” The passages included one containing swear words, one containing a gory description, one arguing that there are evolved sex differences in leadership ability, one arguing that certain religions inspire violence, and one arguing that there are race differences in intelligence test scores. Across all five statements, women were more censorious than men.

A follow-up study replicated these exact methods with 1,057 young adults (a mix of undergraduates and online young adults). In this study, women were more censorious of the swearing and gore passages, but there were no gender differences in support for censorship for the passages regarding gender differences, race differences, or religion and violence. Young adults were more censorious than older adults overall, but this difference was larger among men, such that young men support censorship at levels similar to women.

It is unclear whether this is an age effect (i.e., whether men come to support censorship less as they age), or whether this is a cohort effect (i.e., whether younger generations hold censorship views more similar to women’s).

Balancing support for academic freedom with support for an inclusive and protective environment is an old and persistent challenge. In an ideal world, the two would never come into conflict and we could fearlessly pursue truth without ever stumbling upon information that offends others or makes them feel unwelcome.

Given ongoing conflicts and concerns about academic freedom, it seems we do not inhabit this ideal world, and thus people must weigh this complicated tradeoff and make decisions in borderline cases. In such cases, women may be more likely than men to favor protective and inclusive environments, whereas men may be more likely to favor protecting academic freedom.

Higher education isn’t daycare. Here are the rules we follow on free speech and public protests.

Gainesville, Fla.

Higher education has for years faced a slow-burning crisis of public trust. Mob rule at some of America’s most prestigious universities in recent weeks has thrown gasoline on the fire. Pro-Hamas agitators have fought police, barricaded themselves in university buildings, shut down classes, forced commencement cancellations, and physically impeded Jewish students from attending lectures.

Parents are rightly furious at the asinine entitlement of these activists and the embarrassing timidity of many college administrators. One parent put it bluntly: “Why the hell should anybody spend their money to send their kid to college?” Employers watching this fiasco are asking the same question.

At the University of Florida, we tell parents and future employers: We’re not perfect, but the adults are still in charge. Our response to threats to build encampments is driven by three basic truths.

First, universities must distinguish between speech and action. Speech is central to education. We’re in the business of discovering knowledge and then passing it, both newly learned and time-tested, to the next generation. To do that, we need to foster an environment of free thought in which ideas can be picked apart and put back together, again and again. The heckler gets no veto. The best arguments deserve the best counterarguments.

To cherish the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly, we draw a hard line at unlawful action. Speech isn’t violence. Silence isn’t violence. Violence is violence. Just as we have an obligation to protect speech, we have an obligation to keep our students safe. Throwing fists, storming buildings, vandalizing property, spitting on cops and hijacking a university aren’t speech.

Second, universities must say what they mean and then do what they say. Empty threats make everything worse. Any parent who has endured a 2-year-old’s tantrum gets this. You can’t say, “Don’t make me come up there” if you aren’t willing to walk up the stairs and enforce the rules. You don’t make a threat until you’ve decided to follow through if necessary. In the same way, universities make things worse with halfhearted appeals to abide by existing policies and then immediately negotiating with 20-year-old toddlers.

Appeasing mobs emboldens agitators elsewhere. Moving classes online is a retreat that penalizes students and rewards protesters. Participating in live-streamed struggle sessions doesn’t promote honest, good-faith discussion. Universities need to be strong defenders of the entire community, including students in the library on the eve of an exam, and stewards of our fundamental educational mission.

Actions have consequences. At the University of Florida, we have repeatedly, patiently explained two things to protesters: We will always defend your rights to free speech and free assembly—but if you cross the line on clearly prohibited activities, you will be thrown off campus and suspended. In Gainesville, that means a three-year prohibition from campus. That’s serious. We said it. We meant it. We enforced it. We wish we didn’t have to, but the students weighed the costs, made their decisions, and will own the consequences as adults. We’re a university, not a daycare. We don’t coddle emotions, we wrestle with ideas.

Third, universities need to recommit themselves to real education. Rather than engage a wide range of ideas with curiosity and intellectual humility, many academic disciplines have capitulated to a dogmatic view of identity politics. Students are taught to divide the world into immutable categories of oppressors and oppressed, and to make sweeping judgements accordingly. With little regard for historical complexity, personal agency or individual dignity, much of what passes for sophisticated thought is quasireligious fanaticism.

The results are now on full display. Students steeped in this dogma chant violent slogans like “by any means necessary.” Any? Paraglider memes have replaced Che Guevara T-shirts. But which paragliders—the savages who raped teenage girls at a concert? “From the river to the sea.” Which river? Which sea?

Young men and women with little grasp of geography or history—even recent events like the Palestinians’ rejection of President Clinton’s offer of a two-state solution—wade into geopolitics with bumper-sticker slogans they don’t understand. For a lonely subset of the anxious generation, these protest camps can become a place to find a rare taste of community. This is their stage to role-play revolution. Posting about your “allergen-free” tent on the quad is a lot easier than doing real work to uplift the downtrodden.

Universities have an obligation to combat this ignorance with rigorous teaching. Life-changing education explores alternatives, teaches the messiness of history, and questions every truth claim. Knowledge depends on healthy self-doubt and a humble willingness to question self-certainties. This is a complicated world because fallen humans are complicated. Universities must prepare their students for the reality beyond campus, where 330 million of their fellow citizens will disagree over important and divisive subjects.

The insurrectionists who storm administration buildings, the antisemites who punch Jews, and the entitled activists who seek attention aren’t persuading anyone. Nor are they appealing to anyone’s better angels. Their tactics are naked threats to the mission of higher education.

Teachers ought to be ushering students into the world of argument and persuasion. Minds are changed by reason, not force. Progress depends on those who do the soulful, patient work of inspiring intellects. Martin Luther King Jr., America’s greatest philosopher, countered the nation’s original sin of racism by sharpening the best arguments across millennia. To win hearts, he offered hope that love could overcome injustice.

King’s approach couldn’t be more different from the abhorrent violence and destruction on display across the country’s campuses. He showed us a way protest can persuade rather than intimidate. We ought to model that for our students. We do that by recommitting to the fundamentals of free speech, consequences and genuine education. Americans get this. We want to believe in the power of education as a way to elevate human dignity. It’s time for universities to do their jobs again.

Mr. Sasse is president of the University of Florida.

Is DEI Collapsing?

"The pervasive cloud of weird, semi-threatening tension which swirls around a modern faculty corridor does a disservice to a long and venera

AIER

Higher ed is certainly facing its reckoning — “reaping the whirlwind” comes instantly to mind. As I watch Harvard squirm under the international spotlight, I find it difficult to be very sympathetic. According to an email I received from its new interim president, Harvard is being “subjected to an unrelenting focus,” a “persistent scrutiny” that has pushed the college into an “extraordinarily painful and disorienting time.” All I can honestly say is, I know how you feel…

I graduated from Harvard years ago and can’t pretend to have kept my finger perfectly on the pulse of campus politics there. Nevertheless, I am a newly minted PhD from a mainstream university and I can easily extrapolate. My experience on campus these past few years has, I do not doubt, mirrored exactly the kind of shenanigans that has gotten Harvard into such “painful” straits. And without wishing to sound too gleeful, I admit to feeling a certain sense of gratification at watching academia reap what it has sown.

I entered my doctoral program in history in a fit of innocence. I genuinely sought a community of the mind — a place where ideas could be freely exchanged and interesting knowledge gleaned. While the experience was not altogether miserable, I have to say my overarching sensation after getting the degree was one of relief. Yes, yes, everyone is relieved to finish a doctoral degree, but there was something else compounded on top: the sense of finally not having to watch what one says, the feeling I imagine one would feel on leaving a political reeducation camp. No more eyes, no more veiled threats, no more biting your tongue.

I had been ostracized, for instance, at the very outset by a clique of the exquisitely sensitive for my attempts at open conversation about gender politics. I wondered aloud if the au courant trans-movement might itself be a “social construct” and was told that my questions were “violent” and could not be tolerated on campus.

During my portfolio exam, when I was declaiming on the perennial ‘Man vs. Nature’ tension, I had a tenured professor stand up and order me to “STOP saying man” and to only use the word “human.” The incident was so embarrassingly egregious, it derailed my exam. It even caused a neutral member (a paleontologist, bless him) to submit a formal complaint to the dean. The complaint went nowhere of course.

After a few years, I didn’t even bother to apply for most of the choicest scholarship opportunities, since they overtly proclaimed that “preference will be given to historically disadvantaged students.” I didn’t presume that “historically disadvantaged” meant someone like me — rural, mid-life, veteran, and leftist-nonconforming… 

Not that it is any kind of revelation, but the growing chorus of concern over out-of-control Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) thought-control is well earned. In none of my classes could students or faculty engage in anything like open inquiry about race or gender. A discussion about the history of enslaved Europeans alongside the history of enslaved Africans? Crickets. A contextualization of gender roles that defied the standard “oppression” narrative? No. 

After years of reading my work with nothing but praise, my advisor suddenly required me at the eleventh hour to replace the word “Indian” with something more palatable (ludicrously, the Spanish “Indio” would suffice). Another member of my committee offered to take umbrage at my comparisons of documented ethnohistoric rituals on Native Americans’ behalf, a patently paternalistic and insensible thing to do.

Look, I’m not claiming to have been surprised. I knew what I was getting into and had harbored suspicions from the outset. Moreover, I am quite prepared to admit that some of the disaffections with my academic experience were self-induced. But to ignore the pervasive cloud of weird, semi-threatening tension which swirls around a modern faculty corridor does a disservice to a long and venerable academic tradition. Students like me have not been well supported or encouraged intellectually these last years. Academic activism has squandered the talents of an entire generation and appears hellbent on doing so again. 

Yet, for all that, there is an optimistic silver lining. Now, for the first time in recent memory, the hyper-politicized woke orthodoxy is being successfully challenged. The cracks in the ivory tower have become fissures for the whole world to see. My warning to my college-aspiring children that I won’t spend a brass farthing on tuition seems to be an increasingly widely shared sentiment. Meanwhile, The Harvard Business Review, attempting to make sense of the precipitous collapse of DEI initiatives, now advises companies to “explore DEI actions that are identity-neutral but remove bias from the workplace. Examples include creating structured recruitment and promotion processes with clear, transparent, merit-based criteria…” In other words, “enough with the racism already.” Maybe the lunacy is coming to an end.

Harvard’s high dudgeon over outside scrutiny is indicative. And despite all the “painful and disorienting” turmoil at being held to account, the message seems to be getting through. The interim president tells us that “[r]ededicating ourselves to free inquiry and expression, in a climate of inclusion and a spirit of mutual respect, has never mattered more. Upholding a paramount commitment to academic excellence has never mattered more. Pursuing the truth has never mattered more.” Indeed. Maybe the reckoning higher ed faces will begin the long course-correction it so badly needs. Maybe it will even return to the sort of place I had hoped to go.

Andrew Doyle: Now, a huge story in America over the new year was the resignation of the Harvard president Claudine Gay, who was forced out over accusations of plagiarism after her extremely unconvincing performance in front of a congressional committee when discussing anti-Semitism on campuses.

Some commentators have portrayed her downfall as a blow for DEI, or diversity equity and inclusion, policies designed to increase diversity in the workplace. Or are they? Well, here to join me to talk about this is a man with a his finger on the pulse of the issues, the author and philosopher Peter Boghossian.

Peter, now tell us. Claudine Gay, it's been identified and she's been accused of of plagiarism in her doctrinal thesis. The response from various bodies has been to sort of protect her and deny it. The Associated Press said that plagiarism is now a weapon in the culture war from the right. What on Earth is going on? Isn't plagiarism just wrong full stop?

Peter Boghossian: Correct. So, plagiarism is basically taking ideas that are not your own and crediting them and -- one thing that's so crazy about this story is, she even plagiarized her acknowledgments. Like, she plagiarized her thank you's.

But it was-- here's the the main deliverable to this. It's not about Claudine Gay. It's about widescale, massive institutional corruption. Harvard, other institutions are now hiding dissertations so nobody can access those, because they know that the problem is endemic.

Doyle: Now, you think this is happening.

Boghossian: Oh, I know for a fact it's happening, because I know people who are pulling the dissertations, and they're going -- I'll put you this way: I wouldn't be surprised if they went after Jill Biden. Jill. Biden. Who has an EdD. They're going after everyone. I predict to you that in the very near future, the default will be, unless you can prove that your dissertation was not plagiarized, the assumption is it's going to be that you're a fraud.

Doyle: As you know, I mean, we both come from academic backgrounds and we know that the one thing you just never do is plagiarize. You don't try to pass off other people's work as your own. If you have an idea that you want to take from someone else, you credit them for that and say that.

Boghossian: Correct.

Doyle: But why would someone reach the position of president of Harvard, of all places, one of the top universities in the world, and not observe that basic rule?

Boghossian: Well that's -- okay, well, there are multiple answers to that question. One, she only had 11 publications, and for those who aren't familiar with academia, 11 publications is nothing. But even beyond, that we could talk about merit, when whether she was hired because she was a black woman, which is things nobody wants to speak honestly about.

But the problem is that the institutions themselves are complicit in the corruption. And so she was found innocent of an internal investigation of plagiarism before they even investigated. So, they didn't even do the investigation. And they lawyered up. Their lawyers threatened the [New York] Post, they had stories withdrawn and retracted about the plagiarism, Barack Obama came to her defense. But it's not about Claudine Gay. This is a question of widescale corruption in an institution. So many people have done this now. Like it is ubiquitous.

Doyle: But clearly people are seeking to protect their own for ideological reasons. You wouldn't see this kind of protection for someone who maybe had a conservative worldview within the institution.

Boghossian: No, but we don't have to worry about that or even think about that because the last -- depending on the department, the ratio of conservatives to liberals is like 98 to 1.

But, I mean, you could think about it -- forget about academia, think about the fire department. Think about just like random -- I don't know whatever board or industry you wanted. If corruption was shown, for example in the materials that it took to build bridges, why wouldn't you want to root out the corruption so people wouldn't die when they went over the bridge? I mean, it doesn't even any sense. But they're hiding -- again to pull the analogy further -- they're hiding the fact that materials, like bridges were made out of balsawood, or materials that couldn't sustain weight.

So, one of the consequences of this is not only will this further delegitimize our academic institutions, it will further delegitimize the people. The corruption is so wide scale.

Doyle: This is coming from a a sort of ideological group that believes that meritocracy is inherently a kind of racist idea, and that that really what you need to prioritize is this idea of "diversity, equity, inclusion." Can you just explain very quickly what "diversity equity and inclusion" is all about?

Boghossian: Diversity, equity and inclusion" is taking the voices of people who that have not been historically forwarded or have oppression variables, for example, the descendant of slaves and giving equity. Giving a either a balance of a proportional representation, so if African Americans are 13% of the population you have 13% of the population in the mix.

Doyle: So, what's wrong with that?

Boghossian: Well, let me just -- so if you just looked at the data at Harvard, for example, well it's what's wrong with that briefly, is it presupposes it's not a zero sum game. So, for example, if there are 100 spots and if you took the top 10% in Harvard the Asians would be over 51% of applicants but they're not they're downgraded. If you're Asian, it's just, there is systematic discrimination. It's against Asians, whites would drop a little bit, Hispanics would plummet, but African-Americans would go from 13 point - I think 2 or 3 - percent to 0.9, under 1%. So the idea is that you match the percentage of people in a population racially, we take that demographic and graft it on.

Doyle: So, equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.

Boghossian: Correct. And to achieve that, the only way to achieve that is widescale corruption. And systemic discrimination against Ashkenazi Jews, for example. Or cold-climate Asians.

Doyle: So, yes, exactly, racial groups that will just do better, it's harder for them to get into Harvard. That's right.

Boghossian: Well, correct, which if you were, you should just say, "this is not a meritocracy, we don't find the best people, we don't hire the best people, we hire people or we matriculate students on the basis of race."

Doyle: Yes. And this is of course -- Claudine Gay's resignation was largely precipitated not just by the plagiarism, but her saying in Congress that the idea of calling for the genocide of Jews was context dependent. Whether that would violate the hate policy,

Boghossian: The very same people who were freaking out about microaggressions and trigger warnings and safe spaces, and you know, you you can't even say, "where you from?" That's a microaggression. They have Bias Response Teams, you could be brought up for a thought crime, basically. At my former employer, Portland State University, they have weaponized offices of diversity equity and inclusion against people.

Doyle: They've been punishing people for microaggressions. But calling for the genocide of Jews, that depends on the context.

Boghossian: Well, yeah, you have to understand the ideology for that. The ideology is that Jews are not looked at as an oppressed class, they're looked as "white adjacent." And "white adjacent" you're looked at as the oppressor. And so you're part of the system that keeps down African-Americans, in specific, keeps certain people, certain racial groups, from achieving. Or sexual identity groups, like trans.

Doyle: So, in short, because I know we don't have much time, this is a massive topic.

Boghossian: A massive topic.

Doyle: It feels as though what you're describing are institutions that are just no longer fit for purpose. They are no longer exercising the objectives that the universities were set out to achieve.

Boghossian: That's probably the best thing you can say about it. The best thing you can say about it is that they don't discharge their primary mission. The more honest thing to say about it is that there is a wide-scale endemic racism, and the infrastructure that supports that racism, is fraud and corruption. And they know it and they have to hide it.

Doyle: So is it on the verge of collapse?

Boghossian: Well it's on the verge of complete delegitimization. So, they will have no legitimacy anymore.

Doyle: Fascinating. No bad thing.

Boghossian: No, and it will come, my prediction is that will come to the UK at Cambridge and Oxford in a year and a half.

Doyle: Very interesting, well, we don't have much time unfortunately, so Peter Boghossian, thank you for joining us.

To rebuild, Harvard needs to reform DEI culture - The Boston Globe

The events of Harvard’s tumultuous year are rooted in the school’s inability to accommodate heterodox viewpoints.

BostonGlobe.com

If Harvard University wants to avoid more scandals like the ones that felled president Claudine Gay — and improve the educational experience on campus at the same time — the solution is straightforward: It needs to rebuild a culture on campus in which many points of view can be aired freely, whether the subject is affirmative action, transgender issues, Israel and Palestinians, or Harvard’s own decisions.

Conservatives, moderates, and even many liberals have been warning for years that Harvard has been drifting into dangerous ideological conformity, with progressive nostrums about race and gender identity promulgated as gospel, chilling what ought to be open debate over what are actually highly contested ideas. And now the university’s failure to do so has come home to roost.

Like a strong immune system, a healthy environment of open debate might have helped Harvard respond more effectively to its challenges over the past year — or maybe even to have avoided them in the first place.

Rebuilding that culture of open debate also means, inevitably, reforming the one that has increasingly taken its place. The university has created a diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy that, despite its anodyne name, has had a pernicious effect on campus speech. Gay was part of that effort, dating to her tenure as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences.

What DEI offices like Harvard’s do can be hard to pinpoint and often sounds relatively innocuous. And some are, like diversifying “the portraiture of white men” on campus, which Gay’s Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage sought to do. But DEI also promotes a specific ideology that treats contentious ideas and terms — “white fragility,” for instance — as settled questions, and as part of the university administration, its diktats then carry a sense of authority.

From the outrage over Harvard’s admissions practices that essentially discriminated against Asian American students, to Harvard being ranked worst in free speech, to the bungling of the response to the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, to Gay’s resignation, the events of Harvard’s tumultuous year are rooted in the school’s inability to accommodate heterodox viewpoints. Who was going to raise questions about Gay’s academic record — which might have prompted the university to scrutinize it more carefully before hiring her as president — when that would mean risking being labeled a racist or fragile under the university’s own DEI framework?

Sometimes faculty are hounded for stating science. Carole Hooven, a professor in Human Evolutionary Biology, was lambasted on campus for saying in 2021 that “there are in fact two sexes … and those sexes are designated by the kinds of gametes we produce.” The Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported that backlash included “some arguing Hooven’s remarks set back Harvard and the department’s diversity and inclusion efforts.” Hooven retired from Harvard and joined the American Enterprise Institute.

Gay, a progressive academic who appointed the first dean of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, was initially shielded from criticism by the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing board, which should have investigated allegations of plagiarism as soon as they received them in October.

But Gay isn’t the sole offender. Harvard professor Steven Pinker told me she has been “caught up in a mess not of her own making.” That the board didn’t correct course sooner reflects a stubborn adherence to the school’s prevailing progressive agenda and the hubris of an institution that sees itself above criticism. Seemingly keeping Gay, a champion of the school’s progressive orthodoxy, was more important than enforcing rules of academic excellence.

To be clear, Harvard’s commitment to ideals like diversity and inclusion is good — when done correctly. Fostering a racially diverse, gender-balanced community helps to create nuanced conversations that enhance education and critical thinking. But as DEI has become the main priority of institutions of higher education, it has eclipsed the end that it is meant to serve: a well-rounded education that challenges students to think critically not only about their own ideas but the scrutiny of others.

What should institutional reforms look like? Pinker offered five good starting points in these pages, including adopting a “clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom” and stopping students from disrupting events by exercising “a heckler’s veto, which blocks the speech of others.” Crucially, he encourages Harvard to “incentivize departments to diversify their ideologies” and to “disempower DEI.” I’d add reconfiguring job applications at Harvard to change or remove “DEI statements.” As the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard describes them, such statements ask applicants to lay out “one’s accomplishments, goals, and process to advance excellence in diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging as a teacher and a researcher in higher education” — a clear directive to mouth progressive policies.

All hope isn’t lost for Harvard. Pinker described this year as Harvard’s annus horribilis, evoking the term Queen Elizabeth II once used to describe an especially rough year for the British royal family. Even in the aftermath of her annus horribilis, though, Queen Elizabeth described the scathing critiques she received as “an effective engine for change.” Such change, she said, must “be incorporated into the stability and continuity of a great institution.” The first step is to create a place where such conversations can take place openly.

Trigger Warnings: Discredited but not Discarded | Skeptical Inquirer

Many social programs are implemented with the best of intentions and later discovered to be either ineffective or, in the worst cases, count

skepticalinquirer.org

Many social programs are implemented with the best of intentions and later discovered to be either ineffective or, in the worst cases, counterproductive. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and ’90s, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program was used in 75 percent of American schools at a taxpayer expense of an estimated $200 million, but subsequent evaluations revealed that it didn’t work. Drug abuse was just as high in schools that received the program as those that did not. To add insult to injury, in the 2010s, the iconic D.A.R.E. t-shirt was adopted as an ironic emblem by members of the drug subculture (Wright 2017).

Similarly, after a decade or more of use, there is growing evidence that trigger warnings in college classes do not work as intended, but, for reasons I will explain later, I don’t think they are going away soon.

Trigger warnings, content warnings, or content notes are “alerts about upcoming content that may contain themes related to past negative experiences,” and they are designed to “protect individuals whose unique experiences have left them emotionally vulnerable to specific material” (Bridgland et al. 2023, 1). Supporters of the use of such warnings suggest they empower vulnerable students1 to prepare for or avoid altogether the negative material. Critics argue that trigger warnings violate free speech, promote weakness, and sustain mental health problems in a generation of young people who are suffering at alarming rates (Lukianoff and Haidt 2015). Interestingly, these are directly opposing views of the psychological effects of these warnings: both the proponents and critics suggest their views promote mental health.

Although they have received some backlash, particularly in the conservative media, trigger warnings seem to be as popular as ever. The Google Trend graph in Figure 1 shows a steady—perhaps slightly increasing—number of searches for the phrase “trigger warning” over the past ten years. The anecdotal observations of one Chapman University faculty member suggest that student concerns about triggering material increased during the pandemic with the shift to spending many hours online “where the use of Trigger Warnings (TWs) and Content Warnings (CWs) on social media, particularly on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, have made the conversation far more visible” (Read-Davidson 2023). In addition, many university documents about trigger warnings can be found online. Most of these make a nod to the professor’s academic freedom by not requiring the use of warnings, but these documents also give extensive guidance on how and when to employ trigger warnings and strongly suggest that instructors should use them. For example, this statement from the office of the provost at the University of Connecticut includes the following: “These resources are for faculty use if you deem their benefit appropriate to your learning objectives and the classroom culture you seek to establish. This language is in no way intended to impede academic freedom, but to offer another opportunity for you to support your student’s ability to learn and engage in your class.”

This passage is followed by several paragraphs of recommendations for “best practices” in the use of trigger warnings and examples of warnings for use on the course syllabus. After reading this statement, I know that if I were an untenured professor at the University of Connecticut, I would feel all but compelled to use trigger warnings for any course material that might conceivably upset a student in my class. More about this later.

There has been some doubt about the effectiveness of trigger warnings almost from the start, but as more research has been conducted, the picture has become clearer. The most extensive study to date is a meta-analysis published in Clinical Psychological Science in August 2023 (Bridgland et al. 2023). The authors hoped to answer four questions:

• Do trigger warnings change the emotional response to the material?
• Do trigger warnings increase the avoidance of the warned-about material?
• Do trigger warnings affect anticipatory emotions before the material arrives?
• Do trigger warnings affect educational outcomes (e.g., comprehension)?

In a preregistered investigation, the authors searched for studies in which a trigger warning was given and one or more of the four effects described above was measured. In addition, the type of warning had to make it clear that the forthcoming material might trigger emotions about past experiences. As a result, more general notices, such as PG-13 ratings or “not safe for work” messages, were excluded. They found twelve studies that fit their inclusion criteria, and in the majority of these (ten out of twelve) some participants had previous traumatic experiences. One study was restricted to participants with a history of trauma.

The results did not support the psychological benefits of trigger warnings. Summing the studies together, the meta-analysis revealed a “negligible” effect of warnings on the experience of the material, when compared to that of participants who were not warned. Similarly, the use of trigger warnings had “trivial or null” effect on comprehension and a “negligible” effect on avoidance of the material, which was typically measured by allowing participants to choose between readings that did and did not contain warnings. One study found that the presence of a warning increased the likelihood of selecting a reading in a kind of “forbidden fruit” effect. The one reliable effect that emerged from the analysis was on anticipatory emotions experienced prior to exposure to the material, and unfortunately it was in the wrong direction. Participants were reliably more anxious in the period after the warning was given but before the material was presented.

I found a more recent study, published just five days ago as I write this, that looked at the reactions of students—a substantial proportion of whom had previously experienced sexual assault or unwanted sex—to a nonfiction account of a campus sexual assault drawn from Jon Krakauer’s 2016 book Missoula (Kimble et al. 2023). When warned about the content of the reading and offered an alternative passage without such material, fully 94 percent of participants still chose to read the potentially triggering passage. Furthermore, those who had a previous traumatic experience were no less likely to read the sexual assault passage than those who had not. As might be expected, sexual assault victims had a stronger reaction to the passage from the Krakauer book, but there was no measurable effect of providing a warning.

The stated purpose of trigger warnings in the classroom is to promote the psychological wellbeing of vulnerable students, but a growing body of evidence suggests they are ineffective at that goal and, in the case of anticipatory anxiety, do more harm than good. Given this track record, one might expect widespread calls to eliminate them from college campuses. Indeed, some people have made these calls. Writing in The Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (2015) argued that “universities should also officially and strongly discourage trigger warnings.” In a statement against the use of warnings, the American Association of University Professors suggests “the presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.” Nonetheless, as I suggested at the beginning of this article, there is little evidence that trigger warnings are going away soon, and their importance may actually be growing.

I am speculating here, but I think the use of trigger warnings is supported, in part, by changes in the power structure on college campuses, and as a result their use is more about campus politics than it is about student mental health. Before going further, I should say that, in my view, some forms of warnings can communicate respect and good manners. For example, a simple statement on the first day of class that some of the material in the course will be potentially upsetting can communicate an appropriate concern for students without promoting a kind of victim status. Similarly, I have no objection to statements at the beginning of a radio news piece, such as “this story contains discussions of rape.” I can think of any number of reasons—other than having been raped in the past—that might make someone averse to hearing that story. Such warnings can be simply a matter of politeness and good taste. But the more elaborate use of trigger warnings is likely to continue despite the mounting evidence that they are ineffective.

Today college students have far more power on campus than they did in previous eras. In the distant past when I went to college, it seemed all but unthinkable to complain to the administration about something in my classes. The only time I can recall doing so was when a group of graduate school classmates approached the chair of the department because our professor was not addressing any of the topics listed on the syllabus. He would just come to class and ramble on about whatever was on his mind that day. Furthermore, as dramatic as that case seemed to us, the department chair brushed us off, saying there was nothing he could do, and that was the end of that. Of course, this was long before the age of the internet and social media.

Today, parents are paying enormous sums to send their children to college, and for all but the richly endowed elite schools, bad publicity can have serious financial consequences. The loss of just a few students at $70,000 per year quickly adds up. Furthermore, today’s institutions have made it exceedingly easy for students to complain. Many schools now have mechanisms for students to report “bias incidents” to the administration. These programs typically allow for the anonymous reporting of any member of the college community by any member of the college community. See, for example, this program designed to accept anonymous reports of any act or communication “that reasonably is understood to demean, degrade, threaten, or harass an individual or group based on an actual or perceived identity” whether the acts are intentional or unintentional. If you Google the phrase “report a bias incident,” you will find a long list of colleges and universities with similar programs.

In this environment, even the most truth-seeking professor who is fully aware of the research on trigger warnings is likely to feel a strong pull to use them nonetheless. Or to avoid any class material that might conceivably warrant their use. A recent study of criminal justice professors found that the majority used trigger warnings, and among those who did, the most popular reason was “to allow students to prepare for upcoming material.” However, 27 percent of those who used trigger warnings said they did so “to protect against student complaints” (Cares et al. 2022, 604). Furthermore, if you are an instructor in a vulnerable untenured position, even the full embrace of trigger warnings may not save you. A recent example of this was the Hamline University art history professor who gave extensive warnings before showing a fourteenth-century painting of the Prophet Muhammad and still lost her job when a student complained to the administration. So much for the free expression of ideas.

My hypothesis about the power structure in higher education is further supported by recent events in elementary and secondary education where the power is coming from the right rather than the left. In several red states, a new focus on parents’ rights has had a similarly chilling effect on instruction, but the protected group is primarily white students rather than minorities or trauma victims. According to the Washington Post, a parent in a North Carolina school objected to a reading about Christopher Columbus’s treatment of Native peoples because it would make her white son feel guilty. The parent contacted the school administration, and an administrator told the teacher to “stop pushing your agenda” (Natanson 2023). The same article reported on an Iowa law passed in 2021 that prohibited teaching “that the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist.” In light of this law, Greg Wickenkamp, an eighth-grade social studies teacher, asked his district’s superintendent: “Is it acceptable for me to teach students that slavery was wrong?” The superintendent was unable to say whether that statement was allowed or not under state law.

Of course, these are only the cases we hear about because the teachers involved were among the few to question authority or stick to their lesson plans. Undoubtedly many others quietly altered their lesson plans to avoid anything that might anger a conservative parent.

Out in the real world, we do things for a multitude of reasons. Today, a text or work of art that might make educational sense may not show up in the classroom for reasons that are more political than pedagogical. In the case of trigger warnings, they are likely to remain part of many college courses despite the evidence that they fail at their stated purpose. It is a traditional skeptic’s lament that evidence is often not enough to sway people toward reason, and I am sorry to say that this is one of those cases. Reason and evidence alone will not strengthen our educational system. The political winds need to change before that can happen.

Note

1. Although trigger warnings and similar kinds of notices are used in many other contexts, in this article, I am primarily concerned with their use in secondary schools and universities.

Harvard President Claudine Gay Hit With Six New Charges Of Plagiarism

Harvard University president Claudine Gay was hit with six additional allegations of plagiarism on Monday in a complaint filed with the univ

Washington Free Beacon

Harvard University president Claudine Gay was hit with six additional allegations of plagiarism on Monday in a complaint filed with the university, breathing fresh life into a scandal that has embroiled her nascent presidency and pushing the total number of allegations near 50. 

Seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been impacted by the scandal, but the new charges, which have not been previously reported, extend into an eighth: In a 2001 article, Gay lifts nearly half a page of material verbatim from another scholar, David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.  

That article, "The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California," includes some of the most extreme and clear-cut cases of plagiarism yet. At one point, Gay borrows four sentences from Canon’s 1999 book, Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts, without quotation marks and with only minor semantic tweaks. She does not cite Canon anywhere in or near the passage, though he does appear in the bibliography. 

Beyond that, Gay’s first two footnotes are copied verbatim from Canon’s endnotes.

Canon, like several of the scholars Gay has quoted without attribution, insisted that she had done nothing wrong.

"I am not at all concerned about the passages," Canon told the Washington Free Beacon. "This isn't even close to an example of academic plagiarism."

Though Harvard's governing board, the Harvard Corporation, said in mid-December that it had reviewed Gay’s published oeuvre and found several cases of "inadequate citation," it did not identify any of the examples described in the new complaint, which was submitted to the school’s research integrity officer, Stacey Springs, and obtained by the Free Beacon. 

The discrepancy raises troubling questions not just about the scope of Gay’s plagiarism, which appears to afflict half of her published works, but also the thoroughness and seriousness of the Corporation’s probe, which the board described as "an independent review by distinguished political scientists."

The review was completed in just a few weeks—far less time than the 6 to 12 months typical of other plagiarism investigations—and the Corporation has refused to disclose the names of the academics who conducted it. A Harvard spokesman, Jonathan Swain, did not respond to a request for comment about whether the school has reviewed all of Gay’s work, and, if so, how it missed the examples unearthed on Monday.  

"The board’s review of Gay’s work was too brief to inspire confidence," the complaint reads. "So we now know for certain that the board’s investigation was a sham."

The allegations filed Monday also include more material from Gay’s dissertation, which has already received three corrections. In one of the new examples, Gay, who works in quantitative political science, lifts a full sentence from her thesis adviser, Gary King, to describe a mathematical model. She does not cite King in parentheses or put his words in quotation marks.

While some of Gay’s defenders have claimed that technical descriptions do not require attribution in the social sciences, since there are only so many ways to explain a method or a formula, a Harvard handbook from 1998—the year Gay completed her dissertation—says otherwise.

"Citing tells your readers that the strategy or method isn’t original with you and allows them to consult its original context," the handbook states. King, who has downplayed previous charges against Gay, did not respond to a request for comment.

The rest of the new examples center on a 1996 paper by Frank Gilliam, "Exploring Minority Empowerment: Symbolic Politics, Governing Coalitions and Traces of Political Style in Los Angeles," that Gay repeatedly quotes without attribution, changing just a few words here or there. Those passages describe big-picture findings and do not include technical verbiage. Gilliam, now the chancellor of the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, did notrespond to a request for comment.

The new complaint comes as an increasing number of Harvard students are speaking out against Gay, arguing that she has been held to a lower standard than the average undergraduate. One student on Harvard’s honor council, a jury-like body that adjudicates allegations of plagiarism and cheating, wrote in an anonymous op-ed that students are routinely suspended for doing what Gay did. Some students have called on Gay to resign, and others seem reluctant to defend their embattled president.

"President Gay Plagiarized, but She Should Stay," read the headline of a Harvard Crimson editorial. "For Now." The paper says the allegations of plagiarism are focused on "her PhD dissertation and two of her 11 published journal articles," leaving out the many allegations relating to articles that were not peer-reviewed.

The paper's qualified editorial position -- "for now" -- represents a shift in tone from the paper’s editorial board, which previously opined that—for the sake of a "free democracy"—Gay "must not yield" to "partisan attacks" in the wake of her disastrous testimony on anti-Semitism.

Gay’s most outspoken defenders have been her faculty colleagues. Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor, told the New York Times that the plagiarism charges were ginned up by "professional vilifiers" and "bad faith" actors—and went on to suggest the university may not cooperate with the congressional investigation underway into its adjudication of Gay’s work. 

Another Harvard lawyer, Charles Fried, was more explicit, describing the allegations as an "extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions."

"If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence," he told the Times. "But not from these people."

Harvard said in December that Gay’s "duplicative language," while "regrettable," did not constitute research misconduct because it was not "intentional or reckless," citing a policy that only governs faculty and is less stringent than the rules for students. 

But as more allegations have surfaced, some professors have begun to break ranks. A few told the Boston Globe in December that Gay’s treatment reeked of hypocrisy and double standards. And Omar Haque, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and a member of the university’s Council on Academic Freedom, said that the sheer breadth of the examples—especially those from the pre-word processor days—made it hard to fathom that everything was unintentional.

"Gay's alleged plagiarism in the 1990s may be more serious than in in recent years," he told the Free Beacon, "because prior to the use of computers to highlight and copy/paste text in seconds, plagiarism was more likely to be non-accidental and intentional and reckless."

Haque, who said he was speaking only in a personal capacity, added that it took "greater effort" to plagiarize with a typewriter. 

The blowback has been exacerbated by the Harvard Corporation’s feckless response to the allegations, which it initially tried to squash with a legal threat to the New York Post—and to the unnamed whistleblower who brought those allegations to the Post’s attention. 

Through the bellicose litigation boutique Clare Locke, Harvard said in October that it would sue for "immense damages" if the Post published a story on the charges. It also "threatened to use legal means to out who had supplied the comparisons," according to the paper’s reporting.

That person, a professor at another university, whom the Free Beacon has identified and granted anonymity, is behind the Monday complaint to Harvard, as well as a separate complaint last month alleging around 40 cases of plagiarism. While several Harvard scholars have faced plagiarism allegations since the early 2000s, none have seen such a large percentage of their work implicated.

Beyond outlining the new charges against Gay, the latest complaint -- 25 pages of which are devoted to outlining the various examples of Gay's alleged plagiarism -- argues that Harvard’s legal saber-rattling violated its research misconduct policy for faculty, which forbids retaliation against complainants. 

"At one point Gay and Harvard asked the Post, ‘Why would someone making such a complaint be unwilling to attach their name to it,’" the Monday complaint reads. "I was unwilling because I feared that Gay and Harvard would violate their policies, behave more like a cartel with a hedge fund attached than a university, try to seek ‘immense’ damages from me and who knows what else."

Psychologists: ‘There is no alternative to free speech’ | Cornell Chronicle

Psychology’s extensive study of bias offers an important lens through which to view and reduce conflicts about free speech and hate speech,

Cornell Chronicle

Colleges and universities across the country are struggling with the question of who decides what is acceptable speech on campus. When does a controversial topic become hate speech? When should it be allowed as free speech?

Two Cornell researchers say psychological science’s extensive study of bias offers an important lens through which to view these conflicts, as we strive to understand and reduce them.

There is no alternative to free speech, say co-authors Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams in “Who Decides What Is Acceptable Speech on Campus? Why Restricting Free Speech Is Not the Answer.” Their analysis appeared May 2 in Perspectives in Psychological Science as the lead article in the issue.

“There is no alternative to free speech, because every controversial topic has a substantial group of people who view it as hate speech,” said Ceci, the Helen L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology. “If we define unacceptable speech in terms of topics students say should be banned because they make them feel marginalized or uncomfortable, then we remove all controversial topics from consideration.”

Added Williams, professor of human development: “Feeling discomfort and angst at hearing words is not a legal reason to shut down other people’s rights to say those things.”

Since the 1950s, psychological science has demonstrated that many types of bias can prevent opposing sides from accepting the validity of each other’s arguments, the authors say.

Selective perception makes opponents on an issue literally see things differently. In 1954, researchers showed a film of a 1951 football game – Princeton versus Dartmouth, well-known for its competitive, rough play – to two groups: one of Princeton fans and the other of Dartmouth boosters. Each team’s supporters saw the majority of flagrant violations as having been committed by opposing players.

For people with selective bias, “it’s not just that they interpret their perceptions differently; they actually see different things,” Ceci said.

In “myside” bias, people look for evidence that supports their opinions and ignore or downgrade evidence that contradicts them. “Blind-spot bias comes from deep identification with a cause. We believe we are especially enlightened, while our opponents’ affiliation with the opposite side leads them to be biased,” Ceci said. Similarly, naïve realism makes people feel their views are grounded in reality but their opponents’ are not.

These and many other biases explain why a sizable percentage of students favor banning nearly every controversial topic, the authors said.

For example, a Cato Institute survey of 3,000 Americans with university experience found:

• 40 percent would ban a speaker who says men on average are better than women at math;
• 51 percent would ban claims that all white people are racist;
• 49 percent would ban statements that Christians are backward and brainwashed;
• 49 percent would ban speech that criticizes police;
• 41 percent would ban speakers who say undocumented immigrants should be deported;
• 74 percent said universities should cancel speakers if students threaten violent protest;
• 19 percent said violence is justified to stifle speakers who might make others uncomfortable;
• and 51 percent said it was OK to prevent others from hearing a speaker.

“In such a climate, the heckler’s veto reigns supreme and any expression that is offensive to any subgroup on campus would be banned,” Williams said.

College experiences should involve challenging our beliefs, even when those experiences go beyond our comfort level, and no campus group has the right to determine for the entire community what can be discussed, the authors said.

Universities can take several steps to help students avoid the biases that prevent them from valuing other points of view and to reduce extremist views and confrontations, they said.

Just as colleges require that freshmen understand codes of conduct for sexual harassment, plagiarism and intoxication, they could require freshmen to understand the differences between free speech and hate speech, between First Amendment protections and speech codes, and the meaning of “evidence.”

Role-playing exercises could be woven into controversial seminars in which supporters of each side are asked to switch sides. And universities could organize civil debates on controversial topics.

Students should be made to understand they are entering a place that believes deeply in the importance of dialogue and free speech, Ceci said.

“Free speech isn’t just for opinions that we all share. That kind of speech doesn’t need protecting,” he said. “It’s for expressions that can be vile and hateful and disgusting. That has to be part of the cultural understanding.”

Three Ivy League presidents made international headlines when they told a recent congressional hearing that calls for the genocide of Jews would only contravene their bullying and harassment policies “depending on the context”.

In response to their testimony – which went viral – wealthy individuals cancelled donations in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and one of the presidents, Liz Magill, has since tendered her resignation letter. Another scandal has erupted over Harvard president Claudine Gay, as it has emerged that she has quoted other scholars without citation (also known as plagiarism) throughout her career.

The scandal has been a PR fiasco worthy of study at Harvard Business School. And it is a sign that the Ivies are losing their prestige. But the reasons are complicated and belie any simple analysis.

In short, over the course of a few short decades, the universities presided over by these presidents have undergone a transformation in moral culture. At one time, they recognised everyone’s equal human dignity and held the principle of free speech as sacrosanct. However, they have now shifted towards elevating victimhood as the highest virtue while encouraging hypersensitivity to perceived injustice.

According to sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, victimhood culture – colloquially known as “wokeness” – emerged from America’s Ivies first before spreading outwards into mainstream society.

Like a poison apple, victimhood culture looks perfectly fine from the outside, encased in euphemisms such as “diversity”, “equity” and “inclusion”. But it has a toxic core.

Its toxicity emerges when people are encouraged to see themselves as perpetual victims, and are rewarded for nurturing and prosecuting endless grievances. It was on these campuses that this ideology first spread (among some of the most privileged people in the world) and it was there that its maxims were first put into practice. Protected groups were given special status through affirmative action and other forms of positive discrimination, and students in the humanities were taught to weigh “lived experience” over objective truth.

As these ideas took hold, they manifested in tangible ways within university settings. It has culminated in the past decade in the widespread use of trigger warnings, safe spaces and microaggressions. Young adults came to behave like divas at luxury resorts, rather than students expected to study and learn. This poisonous culture seeped out into the rest of the world. Into media, corporations and Silicon Valley, and spreading all the way to Australia’s shores.

But this is where it gets complicated. Slogans such as “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are protected by the First Amendment – even though they are threatening to many people. And in an ideal world, universities should be trying to adhere to the First Amendment. Freedom of expression is a foundational principle of the university.

Nevertheless, universities must grapple with the fine line between protected speech and incitement to violence. Do such chants as “From the river to the sea” cross the line? Reasonable people may disagree. What is not OK is the physical intimidation and harassment experienced by Jewish students around the world since October 7. Students have been punched and spat on. And students around the world, including in Australia, report feeling scared.

It’s worth engaging in a thought experiment here. If neo-Nazis marched through Harvard under banners with swastikas emblazoned chanting “Heil Hitler”, would the president of Harvard remind us that such chants need to be understood in “context”? Would she defend the free speech of neo-Nazis’? A genuine commitment to the First Amendment would require it. In reality, neo-Nazis would more likely be escorted off campus by security or police.

The problem is that the culture that created the concept of “microaggression” is now blind to very real macroaggressions against students attending its institutions.

But it’s a complex moral conundrum, because victimhood culture should be repudiated. It is a road to nowhere except grievance and conflict.

And, despite the very real instances of intimidation and assault, it would be a mistake for Jewish students to adopt a hypersensitive approach that interprets ambiguous messages as hostility.

Balancing the rejection of victimhood culture with fair treatment for Jewish students is not easy. A responsible administration would ensure all students are free from intimidation and the threat of physical and verbal attacks, while reminding students that they should expect to be made to feel uncomfortable in the classroom. The job of colleges is to keep students physically safe, while challenging them intellectually.

At the same time, however, it is only natural for beleaguered Jewish students to want to be treated fairly. Other student groups at colleges have successfully had statues removed, buildings renamed, academic events cancelled and speakers deplatformed, because of distant connections to slavery that they find offensive. Is it too much to ask people to stop chanting genocidal slogans in the days and weeks after a genocidal terrorist attack?

Such demands for fairness raise important questions about the treatment of different groups on campuses. If universities had consistently upheld the principles of free speech over the past two decades, scholars who investigate controversial questions related to sex and race differences would not have faced marginalisation.

Conservatives and pro-life advocates would have the freedom to host seminars for students, and feminists who argue that men cannot become women would not face deplatforming. Many other speakers whose views may be considered offensive to “woke” sensibilities would also be welcomed on campus. However, this hasn’t been the case, and universities are only now realising the importance of free speech when they find themselves in need of it.

The Ivies’ current dilemma is a consequence of their own making. They want to reject victimhood culture in this particular instance where they have failed a minority group that has legitimate grievances. However, to do so, they are appealing to principles that they abandoned long ago. In 2023, Harvard received the worst-ever free speech ranking for an American college (as judged by FIRE, an American legal non-profit).

The Ivies need to understand the principle of free speech is not one that can be applied selectively. It applies to everyone, or it does not apply at all.

Thread by @TheFIREorg on Thread Reader App

@TheFIREorg: 🧵: In every crisis is an opportunity. As confidence in higher ed reaches historic lows, it is time for campus leaders to re-est

threadreaderapp.com

In every crisis is an opportunity.

As confidence in higher ed reaches historic lows, it is time for campus leaders to re-establish their institutions as communities devoted to the discovery, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge.

Here’s where they should start ⬇️ 

1. Stay true to the college’s mission

The search for knowledge is at the center of higher education’s purpose.

When controversy strikes, institutions must reflect on their truth-seeking mission and use it to ground their response. College leaders who stray from their institution’s mission and try to please everybody, please nobody. 

2. Protect free speech in policy

For knowledge generation to occur, free speech and academic freedom must flourish.

Colleges must cultivate an environment where students and faculty are free to “think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” This freedom is essential to root out error, confirm truth, and establish trust.

Public colleges, as government actors, are bound to protect free speech and academic freedom under the First Amendment, while private colleges should look to the First Amendment’s wisdom in drafting their policies. 

3. Protect free speech in practice

Even institutions that protect free speech and academic freedom in policy too often fail to do so in practice.

When demands for censorship arise, college leaders must remind their campus community that free speech is essential to the mission of the college. When leaders do this loudly, clearly, early, and consistently, censorship demands dissipate.

When leaders fail to do so — or when they give into demands for censorship — the demands grow and future calls for censorship are incentivized. 

4. Adopt institutional neutrality

College administrations and departments should not adopt institutional positions on contentious social and political issues.

When colleges adopt official institutional positions on issues outside their mission, they risk establishing a campus orthodoxy that chills speech and undermines the knowledge-generating process.

By not tethering itself to a particular position, on the other hand, the neutral college welcomes the fullest range of views — and reaps the benefit of the wisdom produced by the resulting debate. As the @UChicago's “Kalven Report” puts it, “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. 

5. Center free speech values in hiring and admissions

Student and faculty applicants must understand that practicing and defending scholarly values is central to a college’s mission.

Curiosity, dissent, devil’s advocacy, thought experimentation, and talking across lines of difference are all essential to a liberal arts education. Institutions should clearly explain and prioritize these values in the hiring and admissions processes so there is not a mismatch between expectations and the reality of a liberal education. 

6. Teach a scholarly mindset from day one

Colleges must inspire students to be scholars and teach scholarly values from the moment they arrive on campus.

Students must take seriously the possibility that at any moment, and on any matter, their understanding of the world might be wrong.

Censorship assumes certainty, whereas free speech, academic freedom, and open inquiry allows for the discovery of our own ignorance and enables the project of human knowledge to succeed. Colleges should teach this scholarly mindset throughout a student’s time on campus. 

7. Prohibit disruptive and violent conduct

Disruptive conduct is often used to enforce orthodoxy and punish dissent on campus.

Violence, shout-downs, vandalism, classroom occupations, and blocking passageways are all examples of unprotected conduct that threatens an institution’s values of free inquiry.

Too often such behavior goes uninvestigated and unpunished — or is even encouraged by college administrators. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. Colleges must have the greatest tolerance for opinion and no tolerance for violence. 

8. Eliminate political litmus tests

Rules that force an individual “to declare a belief” and “to utter what is not in his mind” serve to “strangle the free mind at its source.”

In recent years, colleges have required faculty and students to demonstrate their commitment to politicized concepts of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” These requirements too easily function as ideological litmus tests that threaten enrollment, employment, and advancement opportunities for those who dissent from prevailing views.

Attempts to require fealty to any given ideology or political commitment — whether “patriotism” or “social justice” — should not take root at any college committed to expressive freedom. 

9. Collect data on the campus climate

Leaders of scholarly institutions should not simply guess whether their campus reflects the values their institution wishes to inculcate.

As a community of scholars, colleges are uniquely capable of collecting data using quantitative and qualitative measures — including through surveys, focus groups, and other means — to ensure all within the community feel free to inquire, speak, and learn. 

10. Cut administrative bloat

Students and faculty are the lifeblood of a college’s intellectual mission. But, in recent years, the administrative class has ballooned.

Administrators now outnumber full-time faculty at America’s colleges and universities. At Harvard, there are 1.35 administrators for every one student. When colleges act more like giant corporations and less like educational institutions, student and faculty rights suffer. Massive administrative bureaucracies lead to initiatives that undermine and distract from a college’s core mission and result in violations of free speech and academic freedom rights. 

As colleges and universities look to regain trust, their leaders should recommit to their institutions’ core values. They can start with these 10 common-sense reforms. FIRE stands ready to assist in any way we can! 🔥

For College Administrators

FIRE’s works with college administrators to evaluate and revise free speech policies and disciplinary procedures to foster free expression o

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Liz Magill's Hypocrisy on Free Speech

The firing of Penn president Liz Magill, along with the embattled status of her peers at MIT and Harvard, owes to an irony: they are being c

City Journal

Liz Magill was forced to resign Saturday as president of the University of Pennsylvania—by all indications because, at a congressional hearing, she could not bring herself to declare that calls for the genocide of Jews are punishable speech. She would more justly have lost her job for being a bald-faced hypocrite when it comes to campus free expression. The future of higher education depends on which of these motives governs such decisions in the future.

Magill was part of a triumvirate of college presidents who testified before a House committee last week. Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay, and MIT president Sally Kornbluth had been called to discuss the anti-Israel hatred embroiling their universities since the October 7 terror attacks on Israel. To call their performance robotic would insult robots. When asked a repeated question after their first evasion did not satisfy the questioner, these intellectual role models repeated their first evasion verbatim, maybe adding a cryptic non sequitur.

Congressman Jim Banks (R., Indiana) grilled Magill, for example, about a conference on Palestinian culture that the University of Pennsylvania had hosted two weeks before the Hamas terror attacks. Critics had demanded that Penn cancel the conference, due to the presence of alleged anti-Semites among its speakers. Penn allowed the gathering to continue, however, citing academic freedom.

Banks focused on invitee Roger Waters, founder of the rock group Pink Floyd and a vocal proponent of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement: “Why in the world would you host someone like that on your college campus to speak?” he asked.

Magill: “I appreciate the opportunity to discuss this. Antisemitism has no place at Penn.”

Banks: “Why did you invite Roger Waters? What did you think you would get out of him?”

Magill: “Antisemitism has no place at Penn, and our free speech policies are guided by the United States Constitution.”

It was on the question of condoning the “genocide of Jews” that the presidents were not only robotic but breathtakingly duplicitous.

Congressman Elise Stefanik (R., New York) parlayed this line of interrogation into national fame. Stefanik to Harvard president Claudine Gay: “Can you not say here that [calling for the genocide of Jews] is against the code of conduct at Harvard?”

Gay: “We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment.”

Stefanik: “Is that speech according to the code of conduct or not?”

Gay: “We embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression, even of views that are objectionable.”

The other two presidents took the same substantive position: whether speech constitutes actionable conduct depends on the context, including whether it is targeted at specific individuals.

Stefanik to Magill: “I am asking, specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment,”

Magill: “If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.”

Stefanik: “So, the answer is yes.”

Magill: “It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.”

Stefanik’s questioning was relentless, but was it fair? As MIT president Kornbluth noted plaintively, she was unaware of anyone at MIT calling for the genocide of Jews. Stefanik was extrapolating from the ubiquitous student chants of “intifada” to explicit calls for Jewish genocide, but the former expression is more ambiguous, especially in the mouths of ignorant American students.

Nevertheless, Stefanik’s interrogations went viral. “American college presidents tongue tied regarding the genocide of Jews!” was the common takeaway, even among liberal defenders of academia, such as Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

And this failure to agree that alleged calls for the genocide of Jews should be banned appears to be what did in Magill. (Penn’s chairman of the board also resigned on Sunday, a shake-up as momentous for the future of university governance as Magill’s departure.) Sensing her imminent peril, Magill released a video a day after the hearing reversing her position on punishable speech. A “call for genocide of Jewish people [is] harassment or intimidation,” she stated—and thus, subject to prior restraint or retroactive sanction.

The problem, Magill explained, was the Constitution: “For decades, under multiple Penn presidents and consistent with most universities, Penn’s policies have been guided by the Constitution and the law. In today’s world, . . . these policies need to be clarified and evaluated.” Penn would be initiating a “serious and careful look” at those constitutionally inspired limits, in order to provide what Magill called a “safe, secure, and supportive environment [where] all members of our community can thrive.”

In other words, though Penn had heretofore chosen to abide by constitutional norms (though as a private institution, it was not mandated to do so), it would now put those norms aside to ensure that students feel “safe.”

The presidents’ refusal to declare hypothetical calls for the genocide of Jews punishable conduct has been portrayed as the greatest scandal of the hearing. It was not.

The real scandal was the presidents’ duplicity in citing a “commitment to free expression” as the reason why they needed to give “wide berth to . . . views that are objectionable,” as Gay put it.

GOP congressmen demolished the presidents’ protestations of free speech loyalty, providing example after example of faculty members and outside speakers who had been muzzled, punished, or banned because of views contrary to campus orthodoxy. Those views included the assertion that sex is biological and binary, that racial preferences harm their beneficiaries, that the diversity bureaucracy inhibits academic freedom, and that an open-borders immigration policy damages the country.

It was those fantastically counterfactual assertions of loyalty to academic freedom that should have doomed Magill and the other two presidents. On any common understanding of truthfulness, their claims to protect “objectionable” views were flagrantly contrary to the facts. Having been exposed as hypocrites, dissemblers, and enforcers of politically correct thinking, they should all be fired as unfit to lead institutions ostensibly dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of knowledge.

Ironically, however, it was their one correct stance during the entire hearing debacle that put them in peril. However woodenly they asserted their alleged reason for not shutting down the pro-Hamas demonstrations, that reason should have been controlling. Speech should be protected unless it crosses the line into direct threats to individuals or incitement to imminent violence. Student parroting of Islamist slogans does not meet those tests. Allowing a central authority to ban speech that it declares injurious to the common good is a license for precisely the abuse of power that has been the norm throughout human history, a norm that the Founders were so insistent on overturning. Moreover, it has been in the name of creating what Magill called a “safe, secure, and supportive” campus “climate” that universities have suppressed unwelcome facts and unpopular speakers.

Of course, even the presidents’ explanation for why they tolerate the pro-Hamas demonstrations is likely a lie. The real reason for their equivocation is fear of the campus Left—or, in the case of the diversity bureaucrats who often took the lead in responding to the terror attacks—agreement with the campus Left that anti-Israel terrorism is merely a matter of Palestinian self-defense.

Critics of the American university have seized on what they perceive as the most efficacious means for discrediting academia. But though accusations of tolerance for the genocide of Jews guarantees the most media coverage, conservatives are making a mistake in highlighting that alleged tolerance as the main reason to revamp the university. This mistake will come back to haunt them.

Absent a complete turnover of university personnel, a renewed authority to limit speech will be used overwhelmingly against conservatives. Even now, Penn is weighing sanctions against law professor Amy Wax for her challenges to campus orthodoxy. Had the public consensus been that the universities’ mistake was in not extending the same tolerance they showed to the pro-Hamas demonstrators to dissenters from leftist nostrums, Wax could have argued that she is entitled to the same protections for controversial speech. Now, with renewed support, even from the right, for student “safety,” Penn can argue that its newfound concern for Jewish student safety requires it to intensify its solicitude for the “marginalized” groups whom Wax allegedly jeopardized with her contrarian opinions.

A colleague of Wax’s has published an op-ed in the Washington Post unironically headlined: “To fight antisemitism on campuses, we must restrict speech.” “Isn’t it time for university presidents to rethink the role that open expression and academic freedom play in the educational mission of their institutions?” asks law professor Claire Finkelstein. However fanciful the question’s premise—that universities currently honor academic freedom—it is chilling that the answer is increasingly affirmative, even from many on the right.

2024 College Free Speech Rankings

For the fourth year in a row, FIRE and College Pulse surveyed college students about their perceptions and experiences regarding free speech

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

1. Michigan Technological University is the top-ranked school in the 2024 College Free Speech Rankings. Auburn University, the University of New Hampshire, Oregon State University, and Florida State University round out the top five.
2. Harvard University obtained the lowest score possible, 0.00, and is the only school with an “Abysmal” speech climate rating. The University of Pennsylvania, the University of South Carolina, Georgetown University, and Fordham University also ranked in the bottom five. 
3. The key factors differentiating high-performing schools (the top five) from poorly performing ones (the bottom five) are scores on the components of “Tolerance Difference” and “Disruptive Conduct.” Students from schools in the bottom five were more biased toward allowing controversial liberal speakers on campus over conservative ones and were more accepting of students using disruptive and violent forms of protest to stop a campus speech. 
4. Deplatforming attempts that occurred at schools ranked in the bottom five had an alarming 81% success rate.
5. More than half of students (56%) expressed worry about damaging their reputation because of someone misunderstanding what they have said or done, and just over a quarter of students (26%) reported that they feel pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics in their classes. Twenty percent reported that they often self-censor.
6. When provided with a definition of self-censorship, at least a quarter of students said they self-censor “fairly often” or “very often” during conversations with other students, with professors, and during classroom discussions, respectively (25%, 27%, and 28%, respectively). A quarter of students also said that they are more likely to self-censor on campus now — at the time they were surveyed — than they were when they first started college.
7. Almost half of the students surveyed (49%) said that abortion is a difficult topic to have an open and honest conversation about on campus. A notable portion of students also identified gun control, racial inequality, and transgender rights, respectively, as topics difficult to discuss (43%, 42%, and 42%, respectively).
8. Student opposition to allowing controversial conservative speakers on campus ranged from 57% to 72%, depending on the speaker. In contrast, student opposition to controversial liberal speakers ranged from 29% to 43%, depending on the speaker.
9. More than 2 in 5 students (45%) said that students blocking other students from attending a speech is acceptable to some degree, up from 37% last year. And more than a quarter of students (27%) said that using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable to some degree, up from 20% last year. 
10. More than 1 in 5 students (21%) reported that their college administration’s stance on free speech on campus is not clear, and more than a quarter of students (27%) reported that it is unlikely their college administration would defend a speaker’s right to express his or her views if a controversy occurred on campus.

Harvard is named worst school for free speech — scoring zero out of possible 100

Harvard comes is last in new rankings from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The school is in a “crisis time,” acc

New York Post

Harvard University is officially 2023’s worst school for free speech.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released its annual college free speech rankings on Wednesday, which dubbed the state of free speech at the Ivy League school “abysmal.”

“I’m not totally surprised,” Sean Stevens, director of polling and analytics at FIRE, told The Post. “We’ve done these rankings for years now, and Harvard is consistently near the bottom.”

Despite being the most acclaimed academic institution in the country, Harvard received a 0.00-point free speech ranking on a 100-point scale — a full 11 points behind the next-worst school.

FIRE says the dismal score was “generous,” considering Harvard’s actual score was a -10.69, according to its

Harvard’s score was dragged down by the fact that nine professors and researchers there faced calls to be punished or fired based on what they had said or written — and seven of the nine were actually professionally disciplined.

“I thought it would be pretty much impossible for a school to fall below zero, but they’ve had so many scholar sanctions,” Stevens said.

The score is calculated based on factors including how strong the school’s policies in favor of free speech are and how many professors, students and campus speakers have been targeted by authorities for their speech.

Bonuses are applied if the school’s administrators stand up for the rights of those whose free speech was threatened.

The rankings also take into account student sentiment about free speech based on polling FIRE conducted in partnership with research firm College Pulse.

Harvard’s lowest rank comes despite the fact that more than 100 of its professors banded together earlier this year to form a Council on Academic Freedom to defend open inquiry on campus.

“We are in a crisis time right now,” Janet Halley, a Harvard Law School professor and member of the council, told The Post in April. “Many, many people are being threatened with — and actually put through — disciplinary processes for their exercise of free speech and academic freedom.”

Second-worst on the list was the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, followed by the University of South Carolina in Columbia, Georgetown University in DC, and Fordham University in the Bronx and Manhattan.

Although Columbia University took the prize of worst school for free speech last year, it ranked 214th out of 248 this time around.

The number one school for free speech was Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan. The school earned 78.01 out of 100 possible points. 

“I’m not necessarily surprised that a technological school has a better speech climate, primarily for the reason that they don’t really talk as much about controversial topics,” Stevens said. “They’re there to make things work as engineers.”

Auburn University, the University of New Hampshire, Oregon State University and Florida State University rounded out the top five.

FIRE’s survey of 55,000 current students from 254 universities also yielded some staggering results.

Fifty-six percent of students worry about getting canceled for something they said, and 27% said it’s acceptable to use violence to stop campus speech in some circumstances.

As FIRE continues to be inundated with allegations of free speech violations, Stevens says the erosion of campus discourse should concern everyone.

“I’d say the state of free speech on campus is stagnant at best, and possibly a little worse than last year.”

“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system. The history of our study of our solar system shows us clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong, and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources.” -- Carl Sagan

LAWSUIT: FIRE sues to stop California from forcing professors to teach DEI

The California Community Colleges’ regulations force professors within the California Community College system to espouse controversial view

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

• The California Community Colleges’ regulations force professors to espouse controversial views about “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”  • FIRE filed a lawsuit after the chancellor’s office ignored our warning that the regulations violated professors’ First Amendment rights. • The regulations dictate how professors teach the approximately 1.8 million students enrolled in California community colleges.

FRESNO, Aug. 17, 2023 — Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to halt new, systemwide regulations forcing professors to espouse and teach politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Each of the professors teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the California Community Colleges system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching. 

The regulations explicitly require professors to pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.” Faculty performance and tenure will be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of the government’s viewpoints.

“I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction?” asked Reedley College professor Bill Blanken. “What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?”

“These regulations are a totalitarian triple-whammy,” said FIRE attorney Daniel Ortner. “The government is forcing professors to teach and preach a politicized viewpoint they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary, indiscernible line.”

DEI requirements are controversial within academia. FIRE’s research indicates that half of professors believe mandatory diversity statements violate academic freedom. The sole mention of academic freedom in California’s model framework frames it an inconvenience, warning professors not to “‘weaponize’ academic freedom” to “inflict curricular trauma on our students.”

“Hearing uncomfortable ideas is not ‘curricular trauma,’ and teaching all sides of an issue is not ‘weaponizing’ academic freedom,” said Loren Palsgaard, a professor of English at Madera Community College and a plaintiff in the suit. “That’s just called ‘education.’”

An official glossary of terms released by the state makes plain that the “anti-racist” views it mandates are highly ideological. Indeed, the definition for “anti-racism” states that “persons that say they are ‘not a racist’ are in denial.” California declares that “color-blindness,” or the belief that “the best way to end prejudice and discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible, without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity,” is itself a problem because it “perpetuates existing racial inequities and denies systematic racism.”

Even a professor saying something as benign as “I grade my class based on merit” is suspect under the regulations. “Merit is embedded in the ideology of Whiteness and upholds race-based structural inequality,” the glossary claims. “Merit protects White privilege under the guise of standards … and as highlighted by anti-affirmative action forces.”

FIRE first expressed concerns with the California regulations when they were proposed in 2022, warning in a public comment that the new rules would “unconstitutionally require faculty to profess allegiance to and to promote a contested set of ideological views.” The response from the chancellor’s office was woefully inadequate, denying that the chancellor or the board of governors could ever violate a professor’s academic freedom. The regulations are now in effect in the State Center Community College District, and FIRE’s clients have already been forced to change their syllabi and teaching materials, lest they face repercussions.

FIRE’s California suit comes almost a year after FIRE filed a lawsuit against Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” as it applies to college classrooms. In that case, Florida’s legislature, like California Community Colleges, sought to dictate what views public university professors can express when teaching. In November 2022, a federal court granted FIRE’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the Stop WOKE Act, calling it “positively dystopian.” 

“Whether it’s states forcing professors to teach DEI concepts or states forcing them not to teach concepts that lawmakers deem ‘woke,’ the government can’t tell university professors what views they are or aren’t allowed to debate in the classroom,” said FIRE attorney Jessie Appleby. FIRE is representing professors James Druley, David Richardson, Linda de Morales, and Loren Palsgaard of Madera Community College, Bill Blanken of Reedley College, and Michael Stannard of Clovis Community College. The defendants are California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian, the State Board of Governors, State Center Community College District Chancellor Carole Goldsmith, and the District Board of Trustees.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE recognizes that colleges and universities play a vital role in preserving free thought within a free society. To this end, we place a special emphasis on defending the individual rights of students and faculty members on our nation’s campuses, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience.

Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.”