Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

Quin Hillyer
Washington Examiner

Excerpt: A new survey sponsored by Yale University’s Buckley Institute shows again that disturbing majorities of college students have no appreciation for liberty and, worse, that they can’t even think logically.

This year, for the first time in the nine years of the survey, a plurality agrees it’s OK to shout down a speaker (with another 10% not willing to rule it out). For the first time ever, an outright majority, 51% to 38%, favors “speech codes” to regulate expression on campus.

Audie Cornish
The Assignment With Audie Cornish Podcast

Excerpt: Between student protests, controversial speakers, and debates over “safe spaces,” complaints about free speech on campus are louder than ever. How do school leaders respond to these gripes? And how do they balance freedom of expression – and the idea that speech can be violence?

We have two college presidents from the front lines of this debate: Roslyn Clark Artis of Benedict College and Michael Roth of Wesleyan University. Both schools are part of the so-called “Campus Call for Free Expression.”

Mark Berkson
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: It has been almost one year since the classroom incident, and despite the damage to the university’s image, there has been no internal inquiry. Not a single administrator has issued an apology or taken responsibility. Instead, Hamline’s administration — after having had a long period to reflect on the media response, the AAUP report, and the statements of outraged faculty — organized “Academic Freedom and Cultural Perspectives: Challenges for Higher Ed Today and Tomorrow.”

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: A Texas public school fired an eighth-grade English teacher who assigned the reading Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, a graphic version of Anne’s unforgettable diary. The adaptation is particularly contentious because it depicts passages in which Anne describes her genitalia, expresses curiosity about the female body, and talks about menstruation.

Perhaps most egregiously, it’s a simplification that dishonors the care that Anne devoted to her writing. The issue is not whether teenagers are prompted to engage with her explicit passages; it’s whether they’re prompted to engage with her writing at all.

Michael B. Poliakoff (President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni)
New York Times Letter to the Editor

Excerpt: Editors Note: This article is a collection of letters to the editor. Poliakoff’s letter is the last of the seven included.

This article prompts the hypothetical question whether a latter-day Albert Einstein would have a chance of employment at Berkeley or a number of other University of California campuses.

When asked about his commitment to diversity, that world-class physicist would likely give a response along the lines of these words he once said: “I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.” That fails, on Berkeley’s scoring rubric, to indicate sufficient alignment with the ideology the college expects all faculty to share. And that would be the end of the applicant’s candidacy in almost every instance.

Jonathan Kay
Quillette

Excerpt: In his new book, the German-born American political scientist authoritatively traces the evolution of the “identity synthesis” (Spoiler alert: that’s the term he’s come up with to describe the ideology formerly known as wokeness) by reference to the ideas of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Noam Chomsky, and other influential leftist thinkers.

At its root, Mounk argues, the identity synthesis is an illiberal intellectual movement that rejects liberalism’s focus on colorblindness, free speech, individualism, and ideological pluralism—while also rejecting Marxism’s utopian promise of a better future in which society’s class-based divisions are healed.