College

The freedom to debate ideas in our nation’s colleges and universities is under attack. That much is well known. The only group on campus that can push back against the tide of censorship and silencing of speakers on campus are the students themselves. Higher education is supposed to be a place of intellectual discomfort, and students should object when their institutions silence dissenting ideas. The latest round of administrative overreach and censorship in response to unpopular views comes courtest of Middlebury College in Vermont and is instructive. Middlebury’s administration canceled a lecture last week that would have featured Ryszard Legutko, a controversial professor of philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Poland and a member of the European Parliament.

Last year Peter Thiel argued that American universities were as corrupt as the Catholic Church was 500 years ago. Thiel, stretching the analogy somewhat, suggested that bloated legions of college administrators are like the layabout priests of the old Church. The practice of paying indulgences was analogous to the runaway tuition fees of today. Reform is the only route to salvation, he wrote: ‘We need a sort of reformation. I’ve often described the universities as the atheist church. It’s not going to reform itself from within. The reformation will come from without.’ In the past few days it has become clear what this reform looks like when it comes from within. Though it has a $1.

Graduation season is almost upon us and since not a single high school had the foresight to ask me to give their commencement address (probably because I dropped out of college in my first semester), I thought I’d share the speech the Class of 2019 really needs to hear... Hello graduates. I’ll keep it brief because I know your attention spans have been decimated by social media; I realize I’m not a meme or a gif and I’ve got approximately four seconds to grab your attention, so here goes. Don’t go to college. It’s a scam. Before you or your well-meaning ‘tiger parents’ who buy into the prevailing wisdom that a college degree is necessary to be successful in life take to Twitter to rile up a mob and ruin my life — hear me out.

Sarah Lawrence College claims that its mission is to graduate students who are, ‘diverse in every definition of the word.’ Unfortunately, recent events which have been in the national eye, suggest otherwise. And this story involves me. Seizing on an op-ed I wrote for The New York Times a few months ago, in which I questioned the lack of ideological balance of the school’s extracurricular programming, a group of student protesters calling themselves the Diaspora Coalition labeled me a racist misogynist. They demanded that my ‘position at the College be put up to tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of color.

We knew Felicity Huffman from Desperate Housewives, but we didn’t know how desperate a mother she was until now. Huffman and Lori Loughlin of Full House are the two celebrities caught in the Operation Varsity Blues dragnet, along with 31 other individuals who paid as much as $500,000 per dimwit child to one William ‘Rick’ Singer, all so their pampered, ignorant, SAT-flunking little darlings could get into ‘good’ schools where they could snort Xanax, butt-chug ketamine, and slob around in sweatpants and flip-flops like inmates in a mental hospital — just like their more intelligent peers, apart from the Asians, who actually study and are America’s last chance. Let us count the ways in which college admissions are corrupt.

While so much of higher-education in the United States is dominated by politically active and overwhelmingly liberal college administrators – the ever growing professional class of administrators who call the shots outside the classroom – it turns out that that not every college looks like those in New England which has a 25:1 ratio of liberal to conservative administrators. As warnings about the diminution of viewpoint diversity become louder, understanding where and why there are some schools that are not completely progressive in orientation should be better understood and one explanation for this is geography: America’s institutions of higher education are deeply embedded in and influenced by the local communities where they are spatially situated.

Three female students are suing Yale and several campus fraternities for ‘alleged gender discrimination and for fostering a sexually hostile environment,’ reports the Yale Daily News. The lawsuit fits into a broader, national conversation happening on college campuses around the country about the role of fraternities, sororities, and any on-campus organization that discriminates on the basis of sex. Increasingly, campus activists — and, in the case of Harvard, sometimes college administrators — are calling for single-sex institutions to be forcibly integrated. I’m biased on this issue, but so are the plaintiffs, whether they recognize it or not.

A little row at Ohio State University, which Cockburn would like to document, if he may. Victor Espinosa, a lecturer in sociology at Ohio State University, has been telling students that they are forbidden from using the term ‘illegal immigrant’ to describe immigrants who did not enter the country through the legal method. Because – drum roll – it is offensive. Mr Espinosa has written to at least one student telling them they ‘will not be allowed to use the term illegal to refer to an unauthorized immigrant’ because it ‘dehumanizes, marginalizes and racializes the people it seeks to describe.

It’s well known that the question of who can speak and on what topics has become a flashpoint for controversy on our nation’s college and university campuses. I experienced intimidation firsthand after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times in which I questioned some of seemingly liberal, lopsided programming at Sarah Lawrence College (one of the most proudly progressive schools, where I am a tenured professor). I suggested that more balance was needed given our polarized times and reiterated my concerns about collegiate ideological echo chambers. Within hours, my office door and surrounding corridor was vandalized. Pictures of my family were taken and bumper stickers that I had placed on the door to create a welcoming environment for students were stripped off.

In nearly every state, the legislature is nervous about the public universities it finances. And fair enough. Apart from sports, the state colleges in America tend to make the national news only when protests break out, and protests tend to be driven by a radicalism that reveals the school protesters are far to the left of the legislatures of even the more liberal states. Such national news embarrasses the legislators, who send querulous letters to the school officials, with distant threats of cutting state funding. Which tempts those officials to surrender preemptively to activists, in the hope of avoiding protests. Conservatives in America typically blame the radicalism of college administrators for, say, the academic banning of conservative speakers on campus.

What’s gone wrong with the American university? Everything, really: politicised teachers — agit profs, we might call them — inciting know-nothing students; pusillanimous presidents cringing before mobs of ‘activists’; teaching standards hollowed out, with classes taught by grad students and adjuncts; the ‘mission’ turned from teaching something useful to Social Justice, the healing of a universe sullied by white capitalism, and the endless milking of alumni for donations; and all of it at a cost that’s been rising ahead of inflation every year since 1980, while teaching standards and the value of a degree have been steadily dropping. Take Yale University, for instance.

Across the street at the Museum of Fine Arts, there is an extraordinary collection of Georgian furniture and paintings from Boston just before the revolution. It all seems a lot more sumptuous than the sort of thing that would have been found in a contemporary English town of 15,000. The colonials were, of course, more lightly taxed than the British, yet they rebelled. Might it have been to do with sovereignty and ‘taking back control’? I suppose it worked out for them. Still, when I asked my study group at Harvard’s Kennedy School whether Brexit was a good idea, not a single hand went up.