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Henry F. Haidar
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Out of all the faculty The Crimson recently surveyed, only one percent described their political beliefs as very conservative. Think about that: someone is three times more likely to get into Harvard than to encounter a conservative faculty member here.
Much can be — and has been — said in favor of viewpoint diversity in higher education. Yet those decrying the relative lack of conservative faculty overlooks a basic point: The structure of universities themselves lends itself to a professoriate whose politics do not perfectly map on to that of the public writ large. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Michael Regnier
Free The Inquiry, Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: More than a week after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the shock waves are still rolling through higher education. Kirk’s murder, on a college campus, in the act of open debate, was committed by a killer who reportedly believed that “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Although the assassin was a college dropout, his apparent logic was very familiar on campus: some ideas are just “hate,” and the normal rules don’t apply.
But those of us doing campus programming should look in the mirror before we mention dialogue programs in the same breath as Charlie Kirk. As Redstone points out, Kirk “was pro-life, he supported the police, he questioned systemic racism, and he believed there were only two genders.” These are all squarely mainstream, and in some cases majority, viewpoints in the United States, yet scandalous on many campuses.
Greg Lukianoff
New York Times
Excerpt: If you’re a free-speech lawyer, you face a choice: Either expect to be disappointed by people of all political stripes — or go crazy. I choose low expectations.
Again and again, political actors preach the importance of free speech, only to reach for the censor’s muzzle when it helps their side. If, like me, you defend free speech as a principle rather than invoke it opportunistically, you get distressingly accustomed to seeing the same people take opposite positions on an issue, sometimes within the space of just a few months.
