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The New American Academy: Break Out the Crayons and Play-Doh
The idea of a campus “safe space”—a university-sanctioned oasis where students can go to destress and feel at ease—has had its share of ridicule. And it’s not hard to see why: It is often hard to distinguish between a college safe space and a preschool daycare.
For example, in April 2019, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hosted a “Week of Balance” for students. The week’s events were packed full of therapeutic activities including “coloring and origami therapy,” “sweet treats,” “yoga and crafting,” and engaging in a “cathartic primal scream” followed by an ice cream outing.
But safe spaces aren’t just temporary rooms that disappear after the semester ends. Entire centers on university campuses are often designed as permanent safe spaces for select student groups. In fact, former UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor Carol Folt and many others believe that entire campuses should be a safe space. And “safety” doesn’t just mean protection from violence or abusive behavior; for an environment to be safe it must also protect students from stress and discomfort.
At first, the existence of campus “safe spaces” might seem laughable or excessive, but ultimately harmless. However, as the new documentary No Safe Spaces shows, the ideological forces driving the calls for university-wide safe spaces are anything but benign.
No Safe Spaces is narrated by comedian Adam Carolla and radio talk show host Dennis Prager. With hints of comedy and entertainment, the film highlights some of the most egregious affronts to free thought on and off college campuses.
The documentary, which has been in the making since 2017, premiered on October 25, 2019. The first week of its release at a single theater in Arizona, the film had a record-breaking opening. The film is now in 71 theaters, including in Fayetteville, Greensboro, and Greenville, North Carolina.
The film’s description reads:
The First Amendment and the very idea of free speech are under attack in America today. A growing number of Americans don’t believe you have the right to speak your mind if what you have to say might offend someone, somewhere. They advocate for “safe spaces” in which people won’t be offended by ideas they may find troubling. But is that what America is about?
One of the film’s central aims is to demonstrate how college activists’ zealous censorship of unpopular ideas and frantic need for comfort has infected nearly every facet of American culture. Fittingly, the documentary’s tagline is: “What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus.”
The film consists of interviews with academics, authors, celebrities, and journalists who have been silenced or faced backlash for expressing their views.
Many of those who appear in the film may be familiar faces, such as Cornel West, Tim Allen, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and Ben Shapiro. Each one has faced protests, sometimes violent, by radical activists who attempted to shut down their speaking engagements altogether. In 2017, for example, the University of California at Berkeley had to spend about $600,000 on security so that Shapiro could speak on campus.
Former Evergreen State University professors Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying also make an appearance. In the film, they relate how student activists threatened them with physical violence when Weinstein refused to be forced off campus because of the color of his skin.
The film also highlighted the unfair treatment of Canadian student Lindsay Shepherd who was chastised and shamed by diversity administrators at Wilfrid Laurier University for showing a video of Jordan Peterson in her class. By playing the video, which featured a debate about the use of transgender pronouns, Shepherd was accused of violating the university’s gender and sexual violence policy.
When Shepherd asked how she violated the policy, she was told that she harmed transgender students by encouraging discussion and remaining neutral on the issue. In their view, Shepherd should have prefaced the video by stating that Peterson’s ideas are wrong and unethical. During the tense exchange, which Shepherd recorded, one administrator told her:
[This] has created a toxic environment for some of the students… These are very young students. Something of that nature [debating transgender pronouns] is not appropriate for that age of student; they’re very young adults; they don’t have the critical tool-kit to be able to take it apart. This is one of the things we are teaching them. This is why this is something that has to be done with a bit more care.
Dave Rubin spoke about the documentary on his show The Rubin Report: “It was like watching all of the things I’ve been talking about [on the Rubin Report] for the last couple years— all pieced together,” he said.
During an interview with Prager in the documentary, Rubin warns that the censorious tendencies of activists don’t just target conservatives. He pointed out that even though Brett Weinstein and Lindsay Shepherd are left-leaning, they are nevertheless “purged” when “they say one thing that upsets the left.” He continues:
If there’s someone watching this right now who is a hard-core progressive… guess what? If you have any spark of individualism in you; if you have anything about you that is interesting or different, they will come to destroy that, too.
To provide comic relief and tie together all the interviews and commentary, the film also features cartoon and parody clips. Unfortunately, the film was given a PG-13 rating partly due to a 30-second cartoon segment featuring an animated embodient of the First Amendment named “Firsty.” During the segment, Firsty sings a little ditty about the rights he protects. At the end of the song, however, Firsty suffers a violent death from a drive-by shooting. The clip, of course, illustrated how people’s First Amendment rights are frequently violated.
“We’re making this movie, but the truth is it’s impossible to parody what actually takes place,” Prager said on Tucker Carlson’s news show. He pointed to how Harvard University stopped charging students a library late fee—which is 50 cents a day—because they “have witnessed firsthand the stress that overdue fines can cause for students.”
But Prager could have just as easily pointed to the infamous “cry closet” at the University of Utah. The closet was an art exhibit in which stressed-out students could have a ten-minute cry with stuffed animals. Since then, some have suggested that cry closets be installed in colleges across the country.
As No Safe Spaces demonstrates, mob violence, political correctness, and suppression of speech often go hand-in-hand with a campus culture that infantilizes college students. In the end, No Safe Spaces captures the essence of the argument made by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, authors of The Coddling of the American Mind:
Attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for the students…bad for the workplace…bad for American democracy…Rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control.
Indeed, as Corolla said before Congress, placing someone in a zero-gravity environment—free of contradictions and struggles—only sets them up for failure. If our higher education leaders truly want to prepare a generation of responsible leaders, it’s time to put away the crayons.
SOURCE
A new mob at Sarah Lawrence College
Hope for Gen Z?
Samuel J. Abrams
Last year, a progressive student mob came for my job and the faculty and administrators of Sarah Lawrence College did not support me. This week, a student mob again encircled my office — this time because they craved viewpoint diversity.
The media portrays America’s students as overwhelmingly ‘woke’ activists obsessed with social justice protests. In reality, Gen Z college students look far more positive. America’s students are intellectually curious, and they want more from college, than is offered by the progressive monoculture encouraged by some professors and many administrators.
After my 2018 op-ed documenting the liberal imbalance of our college administrators and calling for more viewpoint diversity on college campuses, a group of anonymous students, the Diaspora Coalition, took over a building at Sarah Lawrence. They demanded I apologize for my op-ed’s purported harm to the community, and that my tenured-professorship be ‘put up to tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of color’.
I never issued any form of apology for my research, my data or for raising valid and real concerns about the lack of viewpoint diversity at Sarah Lawrence and on college campuses generally. I did, however, want to better understand the political outlook of students, to see if this ‘coalition’ was typical. It turns out that most students are nothing like this group.
My research shows that the vast majority students are not interested in learning how to be social activists. Under 10 percent of incoming students think that they will participate in protests or demonstrations. Instead, they prefer various forms of community service. Further, survey data demonstrates that incoming students are not ideologically monolithic. Just 6 percent identify as ‘far-right’ or ‘far-left’. The majority of students are ideologically middle-of-the-road and centrist. Extreme they are not.
Large numbers of students regularly state that they cannot freely express unpopular opinions. But in a recent survey, over two-thirds of students agree with the idea that ‘dissent is a critical component of the political process’. A similar number of incoming students believe they possess ‘openness to having [their] own views challenged’ and an ‘ability to discuss and negotiate controversial issue’. Overall, this suggests that students not only know that there is a problem with the progressive, ‘harm’ narratives that now pervade the campus. The students also want to empathize with and understand others.
These empirical findings about moderation and openness to ideas translated into real world behavior at Sarah Lawrence this week. Despite the incidents at Sarah Lawrence regarding my writings about intellectual diversity, almost 10 percent of the student body visited me in our 48-hour ‘shopping period’, asking about how to register for my upcoming course on the 2020 election.
The course, which is open to the entire school with no pre-requisites, is designed to tackle big questions about the sociopolitical state of the nation, and ask how various narratives will play out in the upcoming election cycle. The readings are deliberately designed to bring in contrasting ideas and world views from a range of scholars and commentators, from J.D. Vance and Sarah Smarsh to Charles Murray and Arlie Russell Hochschild, as well as Tim Carney, Thomas Frank, Jose Antonio Vargas and Thomas Chatterton Williams.
In each information session, the room was mobbed. Students filled the chairs. They sat on the floor five rows deep. They spilled out into the hallway. This happened in each session for two full days.
The students weren’t worried about last year’s progressive horde, or how they would be viewed for taking a class with me. In fact, many students directly addressed the question of viewpoint diversity head-on in emails and statements to me, such as: ‘I want this class because I don’t want to be told what and how to think’, and ‘I know there is more to the story, I want to see both sides of the political world.’
In addition to social science students, I had aspiring dancers, artists and poets come by. Almost all shared in a variation on the refrain, ‘I want to make sure I’m educated on both sides of the political spectrum especially in our current situation.’
I responded by telling the students that politics is more complicated than a binary choice, and that I looked forward to exploring this with them. The fact is, students wanted to learn from a multiplicity of authors and be exposed to more than one narrow leftist view. This response reflects the openness of Gen Z. Their hearts and minds are still up for grabs. Their openness presents a direct challenge to the extreme liberalism and progressivism of administrators and many faculty.
This new ‘mob’ gives me hope for higher education. The young people at Sarah Lawrence and elsewhere know that something is wrong and that a correction is absolutely necessary. Students have successfully demanded and compelled change in past eras, and I hope they demand intellectual and ideological balance more often now and in the future. Given their interest in hearing from all sides, it appears that they are poised once again to shift our colleges and universities in the right direction.
SOURCE
Preventing Suicide by Higher Education
From the birth of the modern conservative movement, dissidents concerned with civic and liberal education have tried almost everything to reshape America's universities: from refusing to donate to their alma maters (as William F. Buckley prescribed), to funding tenure-track positions, forming independent centers on campuses to host outside speakers, organizing external supplementary seminars to make up for what students do not get in the classroom, and creating new academic departments. Despite 70 years of increasingly sophisticated efforts, conservatives are now begging on many campuses merely to be heard.
America's universities have been progressivism's most important asset, its crown jewel. For over half a century, they have served as the left's R&D headquarters and the intellectual origin or dissemination point for the political and moral transformation of the nation, especially through the sexual revolution and the identity-politics revolution. Universities have trained the new elites who have taken society's helm and now set its tone through the other institutions thoroughly dominated by the left: the mainstream press, mass entertainment, Fortune 500s, and tech companies. Universities have also brought to rural and suburban America these moral revolutions, converting generations of young people to their cause. Universities are arguably the most important institution in modern democracy — no other institution has such power to determine the fate of democracy, for good or ill.
Universities were meant be the one fixed place in democratic society insulated from the ceaseless motion of democratic life, with its petty passions, consumption, and moral and intellectual fashions. They were meant to serve as the guardian of the mind and its greatest fruits. In previous eras, segments of society (especially the clergy and the aristocracy) were devoted to protecting learning and a tradition of books. But democracy does not support such classes, and it was originally hoped that the universities would assume this role. Regrettably, they are no longer animated by their original purpose of serving republican self-government or the freedom of the mind. As such, they must be treated as political entities.
That the freedom of speech is under attack on many campuses should not be surprising, given that the freedom of the mind, of which speech is the expression, is rarely understood as their purpose any longer. Without that purpose, most American universities no longer serve the public good for which they were created and for which they continue to be publicly funded. Their transformation, which in turn has led to the transformation of the nation, has taken place with the unwitting assistance of American taxpayers — and amounts to defrauding the public. If citizens are compelled to pay for others to go to college, it should be to the benefit of the entire nation — forming good citizens and advancing useful sciences, rather than teaching the rising generation that the nation is irredeemably evil. Taxpayers have funded the research, bankrolled the student loans (including generous forgiveness programs), and allowed the universities and their enormous endowments to operate without paying taxes. These funding sources are the operational life blood of universities, but they can no longer be justified. In fact, it seems likely that the nation would be better off if the vast majority of America's more than 3,000 colleges and universities closed down.
An executive order signed by President Trump on March 21, 2019, gives administrators in 12 executive-branch agencies that issue research grants broad discretion to withhold funding from universities that suppress "free inquiry" and "undermine learning." This is a worthwhile half-step to chastening them. But given where things stand, bolder, more aggressive action is needed. If the universities are going to be rebuilt, only external force, rather than pleading or slight policy modifications, will work. Success in this could bring generational change.
THE PURPOSE AND THE PROBLEM
Modern democracies have a special need for universities in a way that other regimes do not. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theater concludes with a scene from Sparta where three generations — the frail, those in full bloom, and the young — sing together a song whose verses articulate the place of each generation in their ancestral order. Such a people does not need modern universities, as their existence is ordered by their traditions, laws, and gods. Our Enlightenment-informed republic, however, requires the production of citizens in accord with it. We cannot be a nation of war-like men guided by ancestral gods; we need citizens capable of commerce, modern science, rights-based self-rule, and political prudence. Perhaps most critically, our universities must actively correct certain vices stemming from the nature of our regime, seeking to forfend the mass production of souls modeled on mass tastes, suited mainly for intellectual and moral conformity, consumption, and industriousness alone.
The first traditional purpose of our colleges and universities is civic education, which aims to preserve the nation by creating citizens suited to it. Through civic education, citizens are prepared for political self-rule by developing rational habits of mind, the capacity for forming political judgments, and a moral character capable of self-restraint and toleration. Civic education also teaches reverence for something beyond the very strong forces silently guiding democracies, especially public opinion, with its overwhelming capacity to determine all tastes, objects of worship, and moral horizons. Civic education thus attempts to preserve images of human greatness against the sea of intellectual and moral conformity, while instilling at least a modicum of reverence and affection for the nation and the tradition upon which it is built — its history, its greatest individuals, and its contributions. Individuals are thus trained to become parts of a whole. Our natural-rights republic does not require mindless assent but can (and should) be defended rationally.
The second purpose of our universities is modern natural science. The origin of this goal is found in the works of René Descartes and Francis Bacon. Modern natural science, distinct from ancient science, is concerned with two different ends according to its inventors. The first is unlocking the inner secrets of material nature in order to increase human powers and thereby relieve man's estate. The second is articulating a comprehensive opinion of the material world and thereby ridding man's mind of reliance on natural and conventional prejudices.
The scientific enterprise requires large institutions, public respectability, and the employment of a multitude of minds that would otherwise be badly used in what Descartes calls scholastic "disputations." Moreover, because of the brevity of a single life, Descartes writes, "one man alone cannot perform all the experiments that can be useful." Generations of scientists must accumulate and build up scientific knowledge in order to penetrate more deeply the laws of matter. And since no one man is sufficiently wealthy to take on this expensive enterprise, entire nations must be engaged.
The power of the new nations created on the basis of Cartesian and Baconian Enlightenment depends on the new power of science. Alexander Hamilton, second only to Benjamin Franklin in his understanding of this aspect of the modern project, discusses in the Federalist Papers the extent to which industrialization and commerce, based on science, will be America's main comparative advantage against other nations, since conquest and empire, which contradict the natural-rights teaching, are not feasible sources of wealth and power for republics.
Science applied to industry is for Hamilton both defensive and offensive: It compels other traditional nations to compete on America's terms — scientific and commercial — a battleground on which we have great advantages. It is defensive because the effectual truth of science and industry will weaken other nations' attachments to traditional pieties, which can inflict harm on us. Moreover, since the genie of modern science is now out of the bottle, and other nations, some of them enemies, possess it and threaten to out-compete us, the United States has no choice but to succeed in this area.
But modern science is not and should not be the university's highest goal. In important ways, modern science exists uneasily alongside both civic education and liberal education, the highest goals of the university. Liberal education is concerned primarily with philosophical self-knowledge, which consists in confronting our own contradictions and errors: the prejudices that come from our own times (like the authoritative opinions that order the lives and self-understanding of most), and the prejudices given to all by nature. This purpose includes the quiet questioning of the modern scientific account of material nature as the final, comprehensive view. In this sense, the university's duty is to resist becoming merely utilitarian; that is, devoting itself wholly to serving the public's needs or demands, and thereby becoming its flatterers.
Today, these three ends are either corrupted or on their way to corruption in the great majority of America's universities. In their confusion about or open rebellion against these ends, America's universities too often create students in the opposite vein: ideologues with technical skills, despisers of tradition without insight (not to mention wisdom), or scientists without perspective. These problems are hardly new and have been the centerpiece of the conservative critique of higher education for more than half a century. What is new, however, is the thoroughness of the corruption, the impossibility at this point of changing course through conventional means, and the extent of the pernicious effects of these institutions on the nation as a whole.
DO OUR UNIVERSITIES UNDERMINE THE COMMON GOOD?
Allan Bloom's remarkable 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, is still unmatched in its treatment of the problem of America's universities. According to Bloom, beginning in the 1940s but blossoming in the 1960s, many American academics superficially and gleefully appropriated the tenets of Friedrich Nietzsche and his followers (especially Freud and Weber) in adopting a thin relativism suitable for democracy. Moral and intellectual relativism, these academics argued, would lead to a tolerant and open social order called multiculturalism. But relativism had two effects. The first was the thinning out of all cultures and opinions to make them serve the genuine goals that guided these academics: moral permissiveness and a conflict-free existence. The second, unanticipated, though truer outgrowth of relativism — which yielded the opposite of its first goal — was the elevation of "commitment," or unyielding moral attachment in the absence of an intelligible justification of its truth.
The contemporary manifestation of commitment is called "identity," and it is expressed especially through race and sexuality. Identity, as it is broadly understood today, is an unfalsifiable, self-created opinion of oneself or one's group that others must recognize, accommodate, and celebrate. Identity has become sacred, placed beyond questioning or criticism. But the sacredness of identity applies only to allegedly oppressed or marginalized groups. These are allowed to possess an identity, while the alleged oppressors must not only be denied an identity but must perpetually atone for the oppression stemming from it. Herbert Marcuse's goal of getting universities to teach that "history was the development of oppression" has not only succeeded — it is now publicly financed.
These doctrines stand in stark contrast to natural rights, the foundational teaching of America. Natural rights mean that human beings belong to a common humanity, not to an identity group. As such, all human beings have the same rights, which can be grasped rationally. Since all human beings possess rights, a political common good is possible, as is mutual understanding and rational persuasion. Deep commitments, to the contrary, imply real conflict.
A generation after Bloom's writing, identity fanaticism, having first gained institutional support in the universities, and now in the Democratic Party, has turned to demanding conformity and punishing dissenters. The next logical outgrowth of identity politics is suppression of free speech, as speech is the expression of a free, questioning mind. An example of this fanaticism is captured in a letter written by Williams College students to faculty members who supported the adoption of the University of Chicago statement in defense of free speech on campuses. For these students, enforcing the freedom of speech is merely a reflection of "white fragility" and "discursive violence," and is thus primarily supported by "white faculty," the oppressor group. This letter reflects beliefs widely held by faculty and students across the nation's universities. If universities once understood their purpose as seeking intellectual clarity, now rational questioning of identity theories is itself an act of violence.
In fact, raising the basic contradictions of dangerous and anti-republican theories in the spirit of honest intellectual inquiry has become impossible on most campuses — perhaps the only place in American society where such thinking could take place. How it is, for example, that deeply meaningful identity can emerge from an act of will remains unanswered. Nor can one ask why marginalization itself leads to a special knowledge of justice, rather than to distortion; and if marginalization grants access to the truth about justice, marginalization would then imply superiority in terms of human goods like moral purity and knowledge. Nor can one ask how meaningful identity can be present during the struggle against identity-denying oppression without identity being defined exclusively in terms of opposition and therefore lacking positive content. Finally, as these doctrines are applied to politics, should one conclude that the rights of the oppressor group should be taken away?
Without the moderating force of reason, fanatical identity attachments often terminate in anger and the desire for punishment. Since rational inquiry (or perhaps religious belief) could have once openly moderated these passions, in its absence, the new identities become these passions, and come to dominate the nation. The net effect is fanatical group attachments without a common good.
Writing in the late 1980s, Bloom's book presumed a high concentration of scholars devoted enough to seeking the truth in their fields — scholars whose minds were sufficiently open to the value of truth — so as to care about liberal education. These regrettably have largely disappeared. And Bloom did not witness the radicalization of university administrators, beginning in the early 2000s, who have doubled down on the identity-politics project. Indeed, the purpose of such university administrators, now found on nearly all campuses, is to forcefully secure the dogmas of identity politics and spread them to the nation by teaching students obedience to them.
Not only students' minds but their characters are formed by these new doctrines. Liberal education should cultivate the capacity for self-criticism, the opposite of self-satisfaction, which coheres with republican citizenship or opens them to philosophical self-knowledge. But teaching that all of history is merely oppression has the opposite effect: It creates the sense that the allegedly liberated individual or group is somehow on the cusp of history, and therefore possesses deep knowledge and insight, and it promises that rebellion leads to inner wholeness and honor. This spirit forecloses the capacity for subordinance to higher reason or belief in a political common good.
Moreover, asserting that human happiness is gained through non-rational identity creation — rather than self-exploration, attachment to one's nation, family, or romantic love — creates no wisdom for life, let alone philosophic wisdom, and leaves many young adherents confused and unhappy. Future citizens, statesmen, and free minds cannot emerge from such teachings. For instance, neither love nor families form as a result of teachings about a global patriarchal conspiracy against women. What forms instead is a war between the sexes, an ethic of using and being used, which, in turn, fails to form the virtues of character that are the groundwork from which love grows. Having destroyed any sense of belonging to a just order, what remains is anger and vengeance, the satisfaction of which determines one's self-respect. Students are often left to understand that there is no nation, love, or even gender — only open self-creation and, ironically, dogmatic conformity to this doctrine.
Institutions that aggressively advance such teachings and form young people on such a model are intensely hostile to the core ideals of American life. And such institutions should not be supported with public funds. Universities' tax-exempt status, we might recall, is granted only on account of the promise that they serve the public good. By this criterion, it is time to reconsider that status. The condition of our universities has degenerated to such a degree that action is required. Those still concerned with civic and liberal education have two specific levers of power at their disposal at the federal level: Federal research money can be revoked, and student loans can be returned to the private domain.
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