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Ilya Shapiro
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason
Excerpt: As I wrote on Monday in my introduction to Lawless, the crisis in higher-ed is different than the decades-old complaint about the liberal takeover of the academy. Instead, university officials placate, facilitate, and even foment illiberal mobs, with everyone else keeping their heads down to avoid the cancellation crossfire. And that's a story of growing bureaucracies.
In the 25 years ending in 2012, the number of professional university employees who don't teach grew at about twice the rate of students, while tuition at public colleges more than tripled. Those trends have only accelerated, though useful statistics are hard to come by as surveyors change methodologies and the government fails to collect or disclose uniform data.
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The protests that greeted Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival a UCLA School of Law in April were not surprising. Law students, especially at highly ranked schools like UCLA, have become notoriously intolerant of disfavored speakers coming to campus — and few institutions are quite as polarizing as DHS in the “Abolish ICE” era. It was striking, however, that the students who organized the interruptions of Percival’s presentation — with heckling, hacking coughs, cellphones, and the occasional profanity — did exactly what “snowflake” students have been ridiculed and denounced for doing when encountering someone they don’t agree with.
What happens when an entire profession can’t see what’s hiding in plain sight in its own data? That puzzle animated Stony Brook University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s keynote at the Heterodox Academy 2026 West Coast Regional Conference, held recently at UC Berkeley.
The deeper problem, he contends, is not bad-faith activism but a structural one: peer review, editing, and committee deliberation only correct for bias when the people doing the correcting actually differ from one another, and the academy and the press increasingly do not. His full speech is transcribed below.
Two years after protests over the Israel-Hamas war roiled college campuses, resulting in the arrests of more than 3,000 students and faculty, a new study finds that students generally oppose punishing “objectionable speech,” unless they consider it “highly harmful.”
The study, conducted by researchers from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Colorado and Stanford and Columbia Universities and published in April in Science Advances, also found that students’ views of objectionable speech depend largely on whom it is targeted at.
