I'm beginning to collect pieces on campus speech issues for a future essay.
- Johns Hopkins suspends an adjunct for racist jokes. Does so using a process that does not seem to have been clear to anyone. Prof says he was just joking around.
- UCLA prof gets mad at someone on Facebook and says she'll do less for disabled students as a result. I have a query in. Right to be a jerk on Facebook is protected by academic freedom.
- Nick Kristof does zero minutes of research on who students are, taunts Oberlin, RTs only famous white guys who share his opinion (Scarborough, David French, Larry Summers, Ron Fournier)
The students who populate these campuses are clearly not what your piece suggests as a study on higher education reveals: “The National Center for Education Statistics reports that of the 17.6 million people enrolled in college in the fall of 2011, only 15 percent were attending a four-year college and living on campus. Thirty-seven percent were enrolled part time, and 32 percent worked full time…More than a third were over 25, and a quarter were over 30. By 2019, the percentage of those over 25 is expected to increase by more than 20 percent.”
In other words, the college campus of which you write is an outlier. It is not typical. The new traditional student is not eighteen, probably commutes to school, may not attend full-time, and would find the college campus you describe to be quite alien.
- Robby Soave, education reporter for Reason who spends most of his time taunting liberal students (way to fight for freedom, Robby!), cheers on Bernie Sanders for attacking "political correctness."
- I find the claim - DON'T POLICE SPEECH TOUGHEN UP - matched with Soave's - DON'T SAY RACIST - ironic.
- My problem with libertarianism, generally, is that it creates principles devoid from attention to the realities of power. So a CEO's speech needs just as much protection as a homeless non-white college student. Specifically, the great threats to academic freedom come from adjunctification, the corporate takeover of college, the defunding of public college, and more. Many libertarians realize this and craft a practice based on principles but responding to threats. At some point I'll go look through a few hundred Soave columns, but today is not that day.
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