By Jorm Sangsorn @Adobe Stock
Violating Codes of Conduct
Friction at U/Penn illustrates the growing divide between those inside and outside elite universities, such as the sharp decline in confidence in America about higher education. Makes you wonder, as James Freeman does in the WSJ, are robust and consistent protections for free speech about to make a comeback on campus?
The Rot Goes Deep
The brouhaha over anti-semanticism at America’s colleges perfectly illustrates what’s going on: According to the editors of the WSJ, ˆAccountability,” tore the mask off the intellectual and political corruption of much of the American academy.
The world was appalled by the equivocation of the academic leaders when asked if advocating genocide against Jews violated their codes of conduct. But the episode merely revealed the value system that has become endemic at too many prestigious schools.
Misplaced Concerns over Free Speech
A trio of university presidents (Harvard, MIT, UPenn) voiced their concerns about free speech, even though Harvard’s Title IX training says using the wrong pronouns qualifies as abuse. Harvard was 248th out of 248, and Penn was 247th, in the annual college ranking by the free-speech Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. As the WSJ notes, anyone paying attention knows, these schools don’t protect speech they disagree with. “They punish it.”
- Harvard President Claudine Gay has presided over the ouster of professors for speech that violated progressive orthodoxy, as Elise Stefanik wrote in the WSJ on Friday. Also in the wings is more clamoring:
Is Gay in more trouble than she realizes? How did Gay, wonders NRO, unlike any previous president of Harvard, produce almost zero actual scholarship — a mere 10 pieces in boutique academic journals since acquiring her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1998, no monographs or extended scholarly works to her name, and nothing whatsoever since 2016?
- UPenn President Elizabeth Magill has resigned, along with board of trustee chairman Scott Bok, in an attempt to placate angry donors. That’s fine as far as it goes. But if the accountability ends there, nothing much will change.
The schools may attempt to mollify the fury by adding Jews to the classes deemed oppressed. That may make antisemitism less tolerated on campus. But it won’t change the deeper rot of anti-American, anti-Western instruction that dominates so many campuses. And it won’t root out the “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) policies that use race, gender, and sexuality as political weapons to enforce intellectual conformity, dictate tenure decisions, and punish dissenters.
How to Get Children Admitted
Will the board of trustees appoint presidents who will stand up to the DEI censors and require intellectual diversity among the faculty?
Donors will also have to follow through on boycotting schools until they do. Too many trustees and donors are happy to settle for getting their names on buildings and their children admitted.
The Truth: Deep, Abiding Damage
Gerard Baker in the WSJ accuses the three university presidents of replacing “Truth” with the “monomaniacal ideology” of the “My Truth” crowd:
The discomfiture, humiliation and even removal of a university president or two caught demonstrating their dishonesty are welcome developments.
But the damage is deep and abiding. It is far from clear whether it can ever be repaired.
