Michael Barone
I am old enough to remember when America’s colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America’s colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society.
Colleges and universities today almost universally have speech codes, which prohibit speech deemed hurtful by others, particularly those who are deemed to be minorities (including women, who are a majority on most campuses these days).
They are enforced unequally, so that no one gets punished when students take copies of conservative alternative campus newspapers left for free distribution and dump them in the trash. But should a conservative student call some female students “water buffaloes,” he is sentenced to take sensitivity training — the campus version of communist reeducation camps. The message comes through loud and clear. Some kinds of speech are protected, while others are punished.
Where did speech codes come from? There certainly weren’t many when I was in college or law school. So far as I can tell, they originated after college and university administrators began using racial quotas and preferences to admit students — starting with blacks, now including Hispanics and perhaps others — who did not meet ordinary standards. They were instituted, it seems, to prevent those students from feeling insulted and to free administrators from criticism for preferential treatment — treatment that arguably violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (although Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the swing vote in the 2003 Supreme Court case on the subject, said they could continue another 25 years).
Racial quotas and preferences continue to be employed, as a recent article on UCLA makes clear, in spite of state laws forbidding them, and university administrators seem to derive much of their psychic income from their supposed generosity in employing them. This, even though evidence compiled by UCLA Professor Richard Sander suggests they produce worse educational outcomes for their intended beneficiaries and even though Justice Clarence Thomas makes a persuasive case in his book My Grandfather’s Son that they cast a stigma of inferiority on them.
Of course, college and university administrators insist they aren’t actually using quotas when in fact they are, as O’Connor’s decisive opinion in 2003 invited them to do. The result is that one indispensable requirement for being a college or university administrator is intellectual dishonesty. You have to be willing to lie about what you consider one of your most important duties. So much for open inquiry and intellectual rigor.
2 comments:
...one indispensable requirement for being a college or university administrator is intellectual dishonesty. You have to be willing to lie about what you consider one of your most important duties.
Telling the Pravda, the whole Pravda, and nothing but the Pravda depends on the end to be achieved.
There were 88 professors who defended the Duke "rape" accuser and called for the heads of those three boys on a silver platter, but to this day no one has stepped forward to disavow their consensus, because their high-tech lynching was a evil means to a "good" end (as viewed by the profs).
The National Organization for Women went with Slick Willie over Bob Dole despite his incessant womanizing and adultery because Bob Dole would have appointed John Roberts types instead of Ruth Bader Ginsberg types, once again an evil means to a "good" end (as viewed by the feminists).
The result of all this is to expose their real cirriculum of conditioning young minds to accept and propagate lies in the service of an ideology. Perhaps they think in the brave new world they create, the need for such lies will fall away and truth will reign again. In reality, they will have generations of liars who will continue to do what they have been bred to do: lie.
Well said! Well said!
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