To Defeat Campus Craziness Don’t Just Treat Symptoms, Cure the Disease

By David French

Monday, September 18, 2017

Let’s take a bicoastal tour of one week in campus insanity. Out west, Berkeley had to spend approximately $600,000 to guarantee the safety of a campus speaker, my friend Ben Shapiro. Local “anti-fascists” had targeted as a “white supremacist” a Never Trump writer and an Orthodox Jew who received more anti-Semitic hate from Trump-supporting Twitter accounts than any journalist in America. Thanks to the security lockdown, the event was peaceful, but genius students did chant this bit of idiocy:

“Speech is violent, we will not be silent!” Students protesting #BenAtBerkeley. pic.twitter.com/49V6DD9OI7

— Sophia Lee Sohyun (@SophiaLeeHyun) September 15, 2017

Also out west, professor Bret Weinstein settled a lawsuit against Evergreen State College. In exchange for a buyout of $500,000, he and his wife will resign their faculty positions and leave campus. Weinstein, a progressive faculty member, had faced a campaign of threats and intimidation after he objected to a planned “day of absence” protest where students of color were demanding that white students and white faculty leave campus.

Moving east, John Jay College of Criminal Justice suspended a professor who tweeted, “Some of ya’ll might think it sucks being an anti-fascist teaching at John Jay College but I think it’s a privilege to teach future dead cops,” while the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government offered, then withdrew, a fellowship to Chelsea Manning, the nation’s most famous transgendered traitor.

The conservative response to events like these is often counterproductive. Demanding a professor’s termination or the withdrawal of a fellowship, once granted, can violate the law and endanger academic freedom. Professors employed at public universities have a First Amendment right to speak in their individual capacity on matters of a public concern, even if their speech is vile. And if we want to set the precedent that fellowships should be withdrawn after public outcry, then just watch that happen to the relatively few conservatives ever granted that honorific. Remember, we’re speaking about communities often dominated by people who think Ben Shapiro is a fascist.

No, we have to delve a bit deeper here. We have to understand why universities keep producing crazed ideologues and calling them “professors.” We have to understand how our nation’s elite universities have become places where a group of scholars can believe that a traitor like Chelsea Manning should merit recognition — not for his accomplishments, but mainly for his identity. Does anyone believe that Manning would get the same invitation if he was a garden-variety unrepentant “cis” white male? Where’s the love for Aldrich Ames?

Let’s be clear — in department after department and in admissions committee after admissions committee, a progressive ideology (and sometimes obvious progressive radicalism) is treated like it’s an academic qualification. It sometimes can even make up for lack of academic merit. I saw this firsthand when I taught at Cornell Law School and served on the admissions committee. A black applicant with ambitions to join the world of finance was treated as “less diverse” than black applicants who wanted to pursue work in social-justice-related fields. Cuban applicants were “less diverse” than Mexican Americans who proclaimed solidarity with illegal immigrants. Time and again, there was a clear preference for applicants who exhibited some sort of “social conscience.”

These sins are committed at scale, and applicants are well aware of the standards. Our elite colleges and universities are overwhelmingly populated by politically progressive students. Yet does anyone think that a random sample of high SAT scores would yield pools that are 90 percent or greater progressive? And just like the proverbial fish that doesn’t know it’s wet, members of the committees are often unaware of their own biases. They live so deeply in the progressive cocoon that they often have no clue about the lives of top-achieving conservative applicants — how their lives often just look different from the those of the young progressives who’ve been aiming for Harvard since birth.

Let’s take, for example, a conservative Christian student from the South. On paper, his application may look far worse than that of a progressive peer from the Upper East Side. The conservative has a 1550 SAT, plays basketball, and is active in his church youth group. That’s it. That’s his life. His progressive rival, by contrast, has his own 1550, but he’s got awards for excellence with the violin, he’s a star rugby player, and he’s a member of Allies for Sexual Justice, started a high-school club called SUAMI (Students United Against Mass Incarceration), worked as a student canvasser in a mayoral campaign, and volunteered regularly for three national progressive nonprofits that are familiar to the members of the committee.

Which student is more impressive? Which one is more well-rounded? Well, if you know nothing of youth-group life in a serious church, you’d pick the New York rugby player. You’d be wrong. A student who’s a committed member of a church will do more volunteer work, often spend more time abroad, and do more to help our poorest and most vulnerable members of society than will the school’s most “woke” applicants. But the committee will likely look at his profile and just think, “Bible-thumper.” I know. I’ve seen it happen.

The bias that applies to students applies a hundred-fold to professors. Social conservatives are nearly extinct in the humanities and social sciences. The result is a nearly impenetrable ideological cocoon in which almost no idea is too bizarre to publish. You would not believe the extraordinarily stupid, extraordinarily inane work that too often passes for “research” in the politicized academy. I’d encourage you to follow “New Real Peer Review,” a Twitter account dedicated to exposing radical and nonsensical university scholarship. For example, there’s this:

Female rugby players are problematic (n=15) https://t.co/KM66geOuo6 pic.twitter.com/ebZ5eImpfY

— New Real Peer Review (@RealPeerReview) September 18, 2017

And there’s this:

Gender scholar is so alarmed by a girl wanting to be a mother she wants to disassociate from womanhood altogether https://t.co/45RcQoarak pic.twitter.com/e1Ysa4Ug8I

— New Real Peer Review (@RealPeerReview) September 18, 2017

All of this insanity is the natural and inevitable outgrowth of a process that’s been ideologically biased for decades. Conservatives can play unconstitutional whack-a-mole all they want with outrageous professors, but taking scalps will do nothing to cure the underlying problem. Far from it. By sometimes demanding that schools violate the First Amendment rights of their radical professors, they create First Amendment martyrs and reaffirm the view that the academy is the heart of the #Resistance.

Consider a recent controversy. Harvard University’s history program attempted to offer a doctoral admission to Michelle Jones, a woman who beat her four-year-old son, left him alone “for days,” then came home and found him dead — an act of unspeakable cruelty. She allegedly reformed herself in prison, earned two degrees, and conducted research critical of Catholic institutions that housed alleged prostitutes. Now? She’s a near-miss at Harvard (university leaders ultimately rejected her over “concerns that she played down her crime in the application process”), the subject of fawning media profiles, and a new Ph.D. student at New York University.

Let’s imagine that Ms. Jones was a white child-killer who dedicated her life to Christ, earned degrees in prison, and then conducted research on, say, the lower percentage of single-parent Catholic-school graduates in prison compared with single-parent public-school graduates. Is there the same interest? Is the nation’s best university engulfed in a bitter dispute over whether she deserves admission to the prestigious Ph.D. program?

Let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that Ms. Jones’s work is so formidable and her redemption so complete that she deserves admission to the best schools. The problem, however, is that those who know college admissions also know that you simply cannot trust the process. The temptation toward radicalism is just too strong.

To be blunt, there will be no lasting academic reform without reform to the hiring and admissions process. Yes, you can protect the free-speech and due-process rights of students through lawmaking and litigation (and that’s valuable), but the academy will continue to be broken so long as the gatekeepers keep breaking it. The bias starts from the beginning. It’s time to diversify hiring and admissions committees. It’s time to end ideological bias at the front end. Any other solution is a band-aid on academic wound that will never heal.