Graduating Harvard University students celebrate their graduate degrees in public health during Harvard commencement ceremonies, Thursday, May 25, 2023, on the schools campus, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Steven Senne) Steven Senne/AP

End the gravy train for anti-speech universities

Washington Examiner September 11, 12:01 AM September 11, 12:01 AM Video Embed

University administrations still aren’t getting the message that colleges should be bastions of free inquiry. If they want to avoid losing big money in lawsuits, maybe they should pay heed to the newest, comprehensive free speech rankings of colleges nationwide.

Parents and students, too, should look askance at institutions that trample free speech, and taxpayers and voters should respond more energetically against policies such as student loan forgiveness that subsidize the repressive regimes.

PENNSYLVANIA UNIVERSITIES RANKED LOWER ON FREE SPEECH SCALE

The new rankings from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression paint a dismal picture, especially of some of the most storied universities in the land. At the five least-free colleges identified by FIRE, for example, attempts to “deplatform” speakers showed a frightening 81% success rate.

Those five worst institutions, starting with the worst, are Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of South Carolina, Georgetown, and Fordham. Harvard earned FIRE’s first-ever “zero” rating, and indeed arithmetically earned a negative 10.69 rating, but FIRE decided zero was the lowest allowable score. Out of nine deplatforming attempts in five years, Harvard actually sanctioned speakers seven times, including three terminations of faculty members, the revocation of a conservative student’s admission, and a canceled speech invitation to a feminist scholar apparently still not leftist enough for campus commissars.

The survey, by the way, was massive, with 55,102 students taking part. It showed that tolerance for opposing views on campuses nationwide, not just at those five worst colleges, is remarkably low. Nearly half of students (45%, up from 37% last year) said it is acceptable at least to some degree to “block” other students from attending a disfavored speech, with 27% saying even violence is justified for that end.

Both faculty and the students themselves are generally at fault, but it is the responsibility of administrators and faculty to set expectations and create an atmosphere of unfettered intellectual expression. Obviously, the supposed adults on many campuses are doing a terrible job on this front.

In his treatise The Idea of a University, the great John Henry Newman put it plainly: The “enlargement” of mind a university should inculcate, he wrote, cannot occur “unless there be a comparison of ideas one with another” in an “analytical, distributive, harmonizing process.” Students, he wrote, should be “keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and observant,” and “able to learn from one another.” (Newman became a sainted Catholic cardinal, by the way, so it is particularly galling to see the Jesuit universities Georgetown and Fordham among the five schools rated the worst violators of this central educational mission.)

When this open-minded learning is replaced by a stultifying orthodoxy, neither the students nor society benefits. This is all the more reason why it is so objectionable for President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats to redistribute wealth — from people who haven’t attended college, to so many of those attending some of the most expensive universities in the country — all while not enlarging their minds but instead shouting down and shutting up the few brave souls who question the reigning, usually left-wing, orthodoxies.

Those with graduate degrees earn a full twice as much on average as those without any college degree at all, yet it is those same advanced degree holders who owe the most debt, at an average of more than $100,000 each. These people, the ones who can be expected to make the most money, are the ones who would most benefit from Biden’s insistence on forgiving federal student loans — at the expense, as Education Secretary Miguel Cardona put it, of forgoing “deficit reduction” and instead asking “taxpayers” to foot the bill.

What FIRE’s new rankings show is that taxpayers not only are not getting good returns on their forced subsidies, but actually are paying to create a phalanx of people trained to act as thought police, completely alien to the American democratic tradition.

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Unless university administrators and faculty change course, and soon, a massive backlash is likely to occur. Reputationally and financially, the universities may be made to rue their own thought totalitarianism.

As well they should.

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