Universities

Campus debates over free speech have raged through the pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in recent years, as columnists turn their sights upon university quads. With all this attention, President Trump signed an executive order in March to limit funding for schools failing to support freedom of expression. To learn more, Cockburn stopped by a debate on Tuesday on the resolution, 'Are college campuses eroding free speech?'.Hosted by the McCain Institute, Robby Soave, associate editor of Reason, and FIRE vice president Samantha Harris argued in the affirmative, while Wesleyan University president Michael Roth and Georgetown’s Free Speech Project director Sanford Ungar argued — somewhat — against the proposal.

As President Trump ponders restrictions on Chinese tech company Huawei, the FBI is warning American universities about espionage by Chinese researchers and academics. The FBI now advises research universities to track and observe Chinese students and faculty for signs of intellectual property theft. In the last year, the federal government has voided or re-evaluated the visas of 30 Chinese academics for this crime. In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray commented on China’s intelligence operation. China, Wray said, has 'pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation any way it can, from a wide array of businesses, universities, and organizations'.

I agree with Bernie Sanders, at least to a point. It is lamentable how students are expected to pay back an average of almost $40,000 in debt after they graduate from college. Frankly, it might be a good idea to cancel it, and if the money can be raised from Wall Street, well, so much the better. Yes, I know the conservative arguments against this move. Does it not penalize people who have paid off their debts? It makes no difference to them. Should conservatives oppose the cutting of regressive taxes because people have already been paying them? A more challenging argument was made in a blunt form by Matt Walsh: 'I guess I'm meant to cry tears of sympathy for all of these college grads with student loan debt. Somehow I just can't muster a single tear.

Higher education is dominated by liberal professors and progressive impulses. Conservative professors like me are often apprehensive about teaching in the dominant method, lecture based classes. It’s in the humble seminar, with students and professor debating around a table, that viewpoint diversity can thrive, and discussions of conservative thought survive.Colleagues tell me that they are regularly afraid of the scenario when their class spirals out of control and blows up. In the safe-space, trigger warning, micro-aggression climate of the campus, a professor’s intentions and statements are easily mischaracterized.

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.