Universities Must Make a Choice

Only one option will preserve the central mission of the university

Yesterday's House hearings demonstrated the bind that university presidents are in as American college campuses are buffeted by protests relating to the events in Israel and Gaza. University leaders want to point to their free speech policies when students, donors, and politicians demand that they take action against antisemitic speech, but everyone knows that they have frequently cast aside any concern with free speech, academic freedom, and institutional neutrality when such principles seemed inconvenient. Even now, universities seem unable to bring themselves to enforce their existing policies on harassment and the time, place, and manner of expressive activities on campus.

In my new piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I sketch out the choice before us.

One path is suggested by Stanford University's provost, Jenny S. Martinez. After student protesters at Stanford Law School shouted down a federal judge last spring, Martinez, who was then dean of the law school, issued a striking public letter rebuking the protesters, reaffirming the school's commitment to free expression and open discourse, and firmly rejecting the view that a commitment to diversity necessitated suppressing some speech or speakers. As provost, Martinez has similarly emphasized that colleges must tolerate even extreme and hateful speech, while taking action against actual harassment or threats. Moreover, she and Stanford's president announced that they believe the university should "generally refrain from taking institutional positions on complex political or global matters that extend beyond our immediate purview." Institutional neutrality would best secure an environment in which diverse scholars could develop and express their own individual ideas.

A quite different path is suggested by the University of Pennsylvania's president, M. Elizabeth Magill. Magill has come under particularly intense pressure to address perceived antisemitism on her campus. In her testimony to the congressional committee, she emphasized that "Penn's approach to protest is guided by the U.S. Constitution" and gives "broad protection to free expression — even expression that is offensive." But when confronted with questions about whether calls for genocide violated university policy, Magill and her fellow presidents stumbled in their replies. As a result, Magill released a short video. There she repeated that "Penn's policies have been guided by the Constitution," but she added that "in today's world … these policies need to be clarified and evaluated." She promised a "serious and careful look at our policies" with an eye to ensuring a "safe, secure, and supportive environment." She will, she promised, "get this right."

Magill's implication is clear: The university's policies need to be revised so that they do not so closely follow the Constitution; they should instead prioritize students' sense of safety. Protections for free expression and perhaps even academic freedom might well be pared back in the process.

Read the whole thing here.

Comments

[Kristian H.]

Given the Stanford previous stance, including some action against a Stanford employee (ignoring that a student leader of the protest is now part of the search(?) committee), I'd be willing to accept, "That is atrocious. Dumb kids. What are you gonna do? Let's hope they grow the f up." from them. Not from Penn or any number of schools firing tenured profs or subjecting profs to discipline re: speech.

[Brett Bellmore]

"Only one option will preserve the central mission of the university"

Are you sure they agree with you about their central mission? Maybe they think their central mission is churning out a generation of Red Guard to radically alter America society whether it wants to be altered or not.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

That's respecting their integrity too much. Easier for me to believe they just want as many student loan dollars as possible, and that means accepting more and more marginal students who don't belong in college and won't do anything useful with what little education they do get. That requires more and more marginal fields, taught by more and more marginal professors, and that's where all the woke fields come from.

Used to joke about degrees in basket weaving for the marginal students. Now it's gender studies and intersectional stupidity.

[ducksalad]

Whittington and the UPenn administrators both fail to understand the central purpose of a university. And most of the commenters here, including unfortunately your usually very intelligent self, fail to understand what the utterly overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and taxpayers think the mission should be.

The central mission of the university is to get people some training and education so they can get better jobs. And contrary to the accusation here, about 90% of students and 90% of faculty believe that, and students and faculty spend the majority of their effort working on that (excluding, of course, of time spent partying or slacking, respectively).

Seeking essential truths? Challenging orthodoxy? No, Professor Whittington, that's not the central thing. You are wrong. It sounds nice and so people talk it up but in reality about 1% of the total effort goes into that, and 1% of that 1% has merit. Stop imagining we're suppressing Galileos. There are no Galileos here.

And you, Brett, are flat wrong about the communism. Out of about 1000 people teaching here, maybe a single digit number actually spend any visible time on that, and the rest of us think they are tiresome cranks. They teach in obscure departments of grievance studies that have a total enrollment of (literally, really) 0.5% of the university. Nutpickers hunt them down and then falsely claim that's the university.

It's the end of the semester and I'm working lots of extra hours to haul y'alls kids across the line so they can go get jobs at Raytheon and Northrup. I get a fifteen minute break, try to relax by coming here (mistake) and see the usual fucking lie that we're teaching communism. It's enraging.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Then why do so many academics self-classify themselves as Marxists?

"Oh, they're not really Marxists."

They want the world to think they're Marxists, and if you can't see that, then you are one of them, just as "good" cops who don't rat out bad cops are themselves bad cops.

As for training them to get better jobs, I believe that about STEM fields. I do not believe it about any other. Too many of them only need that sheepskin attesting to have wasted four years of their lives. The college education does nothing for them. I've worked with those idiots for years and years, and they learned nothing useful in college. If you really truly believe your compadres are teaching 99.5% of them something useful, then you need to get out into the real world where degrees are nothing for four year day care certificates.

[y81]

My experience is limited to the somewhat rarefied heights of both academia and employment, but both Goldman Sachs and Harvard Law School have plenty of room for humanities majors from the top 25 or so universities. I'm not sure about Microsoft and Google. But absolutely New York kids major in humanities with the expectation of obtaining a good job or a good professional school admission upon graduation.

[ducksalad]

"So many". OK, agreed that even one Marxist is too many. However, what do you think the real percentage is, and what is your evidence?

No cheating by only sampling the social science departments, and no cheating by only sampling Oberlin College. You need to count the business school, the ROTC faculty, the engineering faculty. You need to count Houston Baptist, Grand Canyon, Pensacola Christian also.

I'd guess I personally know a few hundred professors. Zero use the word Marxist to describe themselves, although I would concede that a handful are probably on the Marxist spectrum. The vast majority - really, honestly, at least 90% - studiously avoid discussing politics at all. They really deeply truly don't want to get involved.

It only takes 0.1% of a student body (30 out of 30,000) to fill a room and act obnoxious when a conservative law prof shows up.

As for your recommendation that I should go around rooting out the political ideas of colleagues who just want to teach their chemistry or biology classes and go home, so I can expose them as communists and get them fired....no. Fuck that. Bad idea.

[Please, Daivd, Seek Help]

I suspect the parent commenter is conflating professors who teach Marx (or later thinkers responding to Marx) as part of a curriculum with professors who are Marxists (intellectually).

In the same way, Freud and Jung are taught in psychology departments as part of courses on historical thinkers in psychology, but few psychology professors would call themselves doctrinaire Freudians.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

You suspect wrongly. I refer to polls and surveys which occur often enough, with similar results.

[ducksalad]

Seriously, man, what you need to back up your original claim is:

- a survey that actually covers a representative sample of all college instructors nationwide. Not liberal arts colleges.

- with a result that shows some significant fraction of them self-identifying as "Marxist". I'm not super picky, I'll also accept "communist", "socialist", "Maoist", "liberation theologist", etc.

- However, I'm not buying something where you translate "liberal" or "Democrat" into "Marxist". Even if you believe that, and even if it's true, your claim was that they self-identify as Marxists and that's what you need to prove.

[Brett Bellmore]

The sample size was only 630K.

The Prevalence of Marxism in Academia

Here's a Wayback Machine link to the actual survey. The table concerning Marxism in Academia is on page 41. Social sciences were 24% "radical", 20.6% "activist", and 17.6% "Marxist".

In academia as a whole, it was just 11.2%, 13.5%, and 3%

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

I just cannot get over the smug self-satisfaction of this statement.

The central mission of the university is to get people some training and education so they can get better jobs.

What's your job at that university, writing brochures for high school students? Yeah, that's rude, but smug self-satisfied bureaucratic statements like that deserve a raspberry or two. That's like me calling myself a Vietnam vet; I was a supply clerk on an aircraft carrier after the war was winding down, but Congress decided after the fact that we had been in a combat zone for a few days, and bestowed the ludicrous title on me of "Vietnam era veteran". What a joke.

Don't pat yourself on the back too much, don't want you breaking your arm.

[Sarcastr0]

Why are you being such an asshole?

That's a legit mission for a school to have. It's not the mission of every school, but what even sounds smug about it?

[Commenter_XY]

Who is the asshole here?

[ducksalad]

Is this better: The “central mission” of the university is that every person is in it for some selfish reason. I get paid, administrators get paid, students get a stamped piece of paper that allows them to put a degree on their resume that will get it past the AI that autoscreens them before a human hiring manager ever sees it. And the state likes that third part, because it makes parent-voters happy, and the labor pool draws in businesses they can extract taxes and donations from, so they (a very not-Marxist state legislature) give us quite a bit of your taxpayer money to make it all happen.

Which is all the same as what I said the first time, really.

I understand you’d most rather we just disappear and you got your tax money back, which is a very fair thing for you to want. However, given that we already took the money, is there something different than what I described that you’d rather we do with it?

[Both Sides]

Ducksalad is correct. But that reality is no fun for partisans and self-styled grand theorists of both sides, so I expect his/her comment will be pooh-poohed by folks who just KNOW what really goes on at colleges and universities.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

You too ignore polls and surveys where so many academics self-identify as Marxists.

[Sarcastr0]

Bring a source. And don't dodge by sticking to one discipline. No new goalposts.

[Rossami]

Outside the STEM fields, I see no evidence whatsoever that ducksalad is correct. Based on both observations of students still in school and recent graduates in their first jobs, I see no focus on skills useful for productive jobs. Instead, I see mostly inertia on the part of students (staying students because it's all they know) and disdain on the part of professors.

In defense of the professors, it's human nature to think that 'I have a self-interest in justifying my own life choice, therefore people who make the same choice (to stay in academia) are better than those who do not'. But the fact that a bias is understandable does not make it correct.

In criticism of the professors, if ducksalad's belief were correct, you'd see professors actively working to figure out what kinds of skills and training actually matter to better jobs, publishing articles on that topic and reorganizing their class materials to align to those goals. Again with the exception of the STEM fields, that just doesn't happen.

[Sarcastr0]

Kids these days has been a refrain since ancient Greece.

You're just doing an Athenian against Socrates all over. And it's just as unthinkingly knee jerk stupid.

Profs have chosen a field and teach knowledge does not mean they must not be preparing people for the professional world.

You're also pretending our universities are monoliths. They are not And R1 is not and R2 is not an R3 is not a TCU or an HBCU. They are all utterly different institutions with utterly different goals.

[ducksalad]

OK, around the break room we do mock all the non-STEM fields with the usual jokes. But to be fair:

(a) I’d say the quantitative parts of the business school and all the health disciplines with the possible exception of public health are trying to offer “skills and training [that] actually matter to better jobs”.

(b) As for the arts and social sciences, you’ve got students that want to study those, and professors that want to teach it. And they’re more likely to make Whittington-type claims of seeking something more noble that just getting career training. Nevertheless, statistically they get better paying jobs, because (i) they’ve proven they have some minimal ability to show up and do something other people want them to do, and (ii) they can now read and write at the HS level, on the average.

[ducksalad]

Also, two other cases:

You probably agree with me about the usefulness of law schools and education schools to society. They probably have net negative value.

However, they are reasonably successful at what I claimed: getting their students higher salaries. In the case of Ed school, it’s a modest salary. But nothing very hard will be required, you do your time and then you are guaranteed at least a lower-middle class lifestyle. For the law school, it’s a crap shoot but with a decent chance of hitting it big.

[Dr. Ed 2]

I would agree that IS their mission....

[Bob from Ohio]

Let's just end their tax exemptions and tax their endowments. Then we don't have to worry about what they do.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

“One path is suggested by Stanford University’s provost, Jenny S. Martinez.”

She gives us something we can hold on to. For the price of tuition we can always turn to her.

[Drewski]

". . . but everyone knows they [bad things]. . . "

Ah, not even going for a pretense of a serious article. This sort of thing should stay in grade school.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

That's one serious comment, full of insightful details.

[TwelveInchPianist]

Sigh. How about "....but everyone except Drewski knows they [bad things]. . ."

Better?

[Longtobefree]

They have made their choice.
All that remains is to remove all taxpayer funding from all colleges.

[Snorkle]

After student protesters at Stanford Law School shouted down a federal judge last spring, Martinez, who was then dean of the law school [...]

This starts from false facts, so I have trouble taking any of this seriously.

The "Federal Judge" intentionally created that situation to start a media narrative. It was an escalation of the media tactic employed by flavor-of-the-month reactionaries to gin up violence elsewhere.

Universities actually have two problems -- the very real conflict mirroring that in the middle east, and opportunistic authoritarian reactionary shitbags spewing lies to gaslight the public about it.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Did you see the short robe that judge was wearing? He left nothing to the imagination!

[David Nieporent]

.

The “Federal Judge” intentionally created that situation

He forced people who didn't have any interest in listening to what he said to show up at his talk and disrupt it?

[Sarcastr0]

He came loaded for bear with cameras awaiting.

But also students have agency. Crazy but true!

[Don Nico]

Nice blaming the victim.
Say, is it okay to display the Confederate flag on the Stanford or Harvard campus? Present your evidence, if you think that is actaully permitted.

[Sarcastr0]

I guess it flew over your head when I said 'students have agency' if you thought I was blaming the judge.

I talk below about line drawing. It applies to flags too.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"I guess it flew over your head when I said ‘students have agency’ if you thought I was blaming the judge."

"Students have agency" was all you needed to say.

Not sure what the point of, "He came loaded for bear with cameras awaiting." was other than to signal something.

[Don Nico]

I notice that you could not answer with a simple “yes” or “no” about the flag. Which is it? In one word please.

Instead you had an irrelavent statement "students have agency." You and they bear the consequences when they bully and intimidate others

[Commenter_XY]

He came loaded for bear with cameras awaiting.

Really? Whjat does that mean? He came to a law school, prepared to answer questions. In Sarcastro's world, this is a bad thing.

[Area Man]

To repeat my comment from the David Lat thread, saying that you don't think trans-women (biological males) should compete against cis women (biological females) is not the same as saying you think all trans-people should be killed. Saying you don't think Native Americans should have their own lands or special benefits under the law is not the same as saying, "Let's finish what we started in the 1800s and kill all the Native Americans." Saying you think gay people are sinners is not the same as saying gays should be hung from trees. Etc., etc., etc.

The question at the congressional hearing was whether calls for genocide of the Jewish people were harassment of Jewish students. I think such calls clearly are. I think most people would agree. And they would most certainly agree under the very tight restrictions on free speech set by these universities. This might come as a shock to some, but people don't feel comfortable when you say that they and everyone who shares a similar trait should be killed. If a bunch of students cheered on the killing of George Floyd and said, "Yeah! Kill the rest of them too," everyone--or every rational person--would agree that is harassment of the black students on campus. It should be no different here.

[Sarcastr0]

I actually like the idea of talking about line drawing and nuance about viewpoints and consequences.

But lets not pretend it's easy. Context matters. But so do bright lines. Those two things are in tension.

And unless you make those lines bright and way far out, you've added a powerful weapon to the culture wars.
I've been accused of cheerleading genocide on here, and I'm not some hotheaded undergrad horny for righteousness.

[Area Man]

Line drawing can be difficult. This isn’t. Genocide is the quintessential crime against humanity. If calling for it isn’t harassment, nothing is. Certainly not the shit many of these universities have claimed is harassment in the past. And if “Jews” had been replaced with nearly any other group in the question, these university presidents would have immediately said, “Yes, of course that’s harassment.”

[Sarcastr0]

But that's facile to the point of being a useless exercise - 'I know it when I see it' is not a standard.

if “Jews” had been replaced with nearly any other group in the question, these university presidents would have immediately said, “Yes, of course that’s harassment.”
Also not helpful is hypothetical hypocricy. A lot of folks claim that, but the best evidence has been a pretty ordinary Title IX training course.

Maybe there is a double standard. It would very much not surprise me. But ya gotta come with evidence of it.

Or, better yet, don't strain to attack higher education and just engage with what policy you want them to have and how it differs from what they actually demonstrably do now.

[Commenter_XY]

Are you = I’ve been accused of cheerleading genocide on here, and I’m not some hotheaded undergrad horny for righteousness.

[Don Nico]

" best evidence has been a pretty ordinary Title IX training course."
Obviously the 3 ivy presidents failed theirs

[Don Nico]

Explain the bright line about the Confederate flag.
I thought you were a champion of the 1st Amendment

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Which universities, Prof. Whittington?

You seem to be ignoring campuses controlled by your fellow conservatives -- the hundreds of low-quality, superstition-based, censorship-shackled, academic freedom-flouting, strenuously discriminatory, science-disdaining, bigotry-infused, dogma-enforcing institutions operated by Republicans, right-wingers, and conservatives.

And not for the first time.

Feel free to snipe at our strongest institutions -- operated by and for the reasoning, modern American mainstream -- but recognize that better Americans are unlikely to be in the market for pointers from conservatives on how to operate a legitimate educational institution.

One need only glance at Wheaton, Liberty, Brigham Young, Biola, Bob Jones, Regent, Ave Maria, Cedarbrook, Franciscan, Grove City, Hillsdale, Ouachita Baptist, and dozens upon dozens like them to understand that conservatives have little to no credibility or entitlement to offer tips in this context.

Carry on, clingers. Without the respect of the American mainstream, though.

[ducksalad]

Oh, and by the way….why do too many college presidents act like cowardly hypocrites?

Because the legal and administrative system is set up so that presidents and their institutions can be screwed in court, or the federal DoEd, or in the next funding cycle, if

(a) a student claims a hostile environment was created by a professor’s opinion, or (b) a professor claims they were fired for expressing that opinion.

Those two things overlap in the middle leaving little or no safe space.

You want fewer displays of cowardice, create some non-overlapped space between (a) and (b).

A space in which a president could tell a prof who does some BLM or MAGA in math class to stop, and simultaneously tell the student complaining about it to grow up and learn to be more tolerant. And tell both to accept the decision or leave. And neither the prof nor the student would have any grounds for litigation.

[SiaGomez]

In an era marked by technological advancements and evolving educational needs, universities must make a choice between traditional methodologies and innovative approaches to cater to diverse learning styles. The emergence of online education, collaborative platforms, and adaptive learning tools presents a challenge to conventional models. Universities face the decision of embracing these changes or maintaining established structures. For instance, consider the Sonotube Calculator,https://calculatorarea.com/sonotube-calculator/ an online tool that disrupts traditional methods of learning structural engineering. It enables students to simulate and analyze concrete column designs interactively, fostering a hands-on learning experience. This illustrates how universities must decide whether to integrate such transformative technologies into their curriculum or adhere to traditional teaching methods, shaping the future of education in the process.