EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION: Typically sympathetic conservatives find it harder to care as schools with multi-billion endowments cry for continued federal funds.
Once again, our alleged big university brains are having conniptions about (alleged) lost freedoms and “dangers” to American democracy — because of the bad Orange Man.
As the ’80s band Level 42 once sang, in another time, another place many libertarians and conservatives would be sympathetic to many of their complaints.
But this sort of crap — soooo emblematic of American universities — just keeps on happening: A mandatory UC San Diego training instructs students that questioning transgender ideology “creates a hostile environment.”
Nevertheless, a week ago at Brown University its Democracy Project hosted the event “Academic Freedom: What Remains?” to ponder “threats from the federal government, administrators, donors and board members.”
According to its website, the DP envisions democracy as including “a political and moral orientation toward equality and fairness for citizens/residents that depends on robust opportunities for voice, affirmation, mobilization, and dissent.”
The DP’s first big event a few years back featured a keynote talk by “public intellectual” Eddie Glaude who, as noted previously by The Fix, blamed a racially motivated shooting in Florida on “critics of critical race theory and equity,” claimed the U.S. “must be refounded” due to whiteness, and said the 2020 presidential race was close due to same (along with “selfishness”).
The Brown Daily Herald reports Democracy Project co-founder Juliet Hooker (“a political theorist specializing in racial justice, Black political thought, Latin American political thought, democratic theory, and contemporary political theory,” via her faculty page) noted in typical academese that a “main goal” of the DP is to “‘interrogate the politics and conditions of equality in democratic settings’ by creating ‘collective spaces of reflection and action where we can have important conversations as a campus community.’”
Hooker said the “Academic Freedom: What Remains?” talk was “especially relevant in light of recent national debates” about free speech. But of course it was!
Panelist Isaac Kamola of Trinity College (pictured), whose research and teaching “focus on the political economy of higher education, African anticolonial theory, and critical globalization studies” according to his website, made use of the ridiculously over-utilized term “existential threat,” in this case the alleged danger to universities.
Kamola claimed academic freedom is “the oxygen that makes it possible for [academics’] work to exist,” and that threats are “coming from every direction,” including “online trolls, right-wing governments, foreign governments, donors and more.”
He added “We are living through a multi-decade moral panic that’s been manufactured against higher education.” (Kamola isn’t a big fan of The Fix, but most especially Campus Reform, and even started a website to help peers deal with right-wing “outrage stories.”)
The current crisis [is] ‘genuinely terrible.‘
McGill University’s Jacob Levy said the “current [academic freedom] crisis” is “genuinely terrible,” and added there’s been “a growing skepticism about the government’s willingness to uphold and abide by” academic freedom since the beginning of the year (which just happens to coincide with the start of Trump’s second term. Also, McGill is in Canada).
Meanwhile, in line with what the Democracy Project speakers were yammering about, Yale sophomore Penelope Day claimed in a student paper op-ed that Donald Trump will be coming for your speech next — because late-night “comedian” Jimmy Kimmel briefly was taken off the air “in response to pressure” by the FCC and the president.
Day wrote “Whether or not you agreed with Kimmel’s original statements, it is undeniable that the Trump administration’s recent pressure on national media corporations threatens the sanctity of the First Amendment.”
(Kimmel had said “the MAGA gang [was] desperately trying to characterize th[e] kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” An Ivy Leaguer should know lies are not protected by the First Amendment.)
It’s easy, unfortunately, to understand why Day, at least initially, may not have known the facts about Kirk’s killer. She likely only checks left-leaning websites and social media, and possibly has MSNBC and CNN on the tube. Maybe she even took a class taught by Ethnicity, Race, and Migration/Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies professor Fatima El-Tayeb (whose works “deconstruct structural racism in ‘colorblind’ Europe and center strategies of resistance among racialized communities, especially those that politicize culture through an intersectional, queer practice”), the author of this, er, gem from a couple of weeks ago.
But Day’s column was written weeks after Kirk’s murder and subsequent Kimmel imbroglio. Such also sends a message to potentially sympathetic conservatives that folks like her don’t really care about free speech and censorship.
At the end of the day, though, Day is still a student. Returning to the Brown powwow, the director of the school’s Cogut Institute for the Humanities seemed to (unintentionally) make the case for why your average joe (conservative or otherwise) shouldn’t care much about the panelists’ apocalyptic pronouncements.
Amanda Anderson (pictured) said if Brown agrees to Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” it would “receive benefits including ‘substantial and meaningful federal grants’ in return for complying with a list of demands” that includes “limiting grade inflation, capping international undergraduate enrollment and requiring applicants to take standardized tests, among others.”
Such demands, according to Anderson, are “a direct attack on University autonomy and academic freedom.”
Consider the average joe hearing this and thinking Tying federal grants to the limiting of grade inflation and a mandate for standardized testing is … an “attack”?? The joe then might point out how the issue could be resolved immediately: Don’t take federal money. Like Hillsdale College.
Brown has plenty of money — an endowment of over seven billion dollars. That’s right, “billion” with a “b.”
MORE: No sympathy: College administrators and professors finally reap what they sow
