Category Archives: culture

Free Speech at the Universities

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Kent Fuchs, University of Florida President, and Glenn Altschuler, Cornell Professor of American Studies, have some…interesting…thoughts on this in their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Public universities that choose to grant access to speakers who are not invited or affiliated with the institution are legally obligated to accept all such speakers. As a result, they may become hostage to Nazis or other extremists—forced to stand by as these groups capitalize on their university’s visibility and prestige to amplify their vile messages.

Fuchs and Altschuler wrote that as if it were a bad thing.  I have to ask: why are they so terrified of a contest of ideas in an open, public forum?

And:

[A] partial solution [to handling costs] could entail a new Federal Extremist Speakers Fund to help universities with their exorbitant security costs. That would shift the financial burden of following the First Amendment to the government that requires universities to do so.

Wow.  Apparently, Fuchs and Altschuler slept through their eighth-grade Civics class.  Government isn’t making universities do anything here.  We the People, through our 1st Amendment, are making the government protect free speech in all public forums.

And:

Meanwhile, when openly racist and virulently anti-Semitic speakers show up on campus, we need to deprive them of attention and confrontation, the oxygen on which they thrive, by shunning them.

Certainly.  And that will happen pretty much automatically over the course of the ideas contest of which Fuchs and Altschuler are so terrified.

“Fear of Violent Protests Raises Cost of Free Speech on Campus”

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That’s the title of Douglas Belkin’s piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal.  However, it’s inaccurate.  What is feared by college/university management is the thugs who protest free speech with violence and others who protest free speech with noise and interruptions and venue entrance blockings that prevent the speaker from speaking.

Schools have struggled to come up with a consistent answer to requests to speak, pitting their free-speech ideals against security concerns.

Schools are being disingenuous when they pretend to these concerns, and the WSJ is misunderstanding the problem when it characterizes the schools as having free-speech ideals. The existence of the schools’ trading off security for free-speech demonstrates the lack of ideals regarding free-speech.

Were the schools’ managers truly concerned, they would understand the greatest violence is done to liberty when they cravenly trade free-speech for security, when they cravenly force disfavored speech into school-mandated “free speech” zones, when they cravenly allow “protestors” to prevent disfavored speakers from speaking, when they cravenly, despicably, allow “protestors” to dictate to others what speech those others will be allowed to hear.

“We have a non-negotiable commitment to provide safety and security for our guests and the public at large and we have an equally unwavering commitment to free speech,” said Mr [UC Berkeley Assistant Vice Chancellor, Dan] Mogulof. “That puts us between a rock and a hard place; we can’t step back from either one.”

Mogulof is being disingenuous. There’s no need to step back from either—allow the one, and provide the other. Worried about cost? Get serious about dealing with thugs who masquerade as protestors blocking speech of which the thugs disapprove. Get serious about snowflakes who pretend to being “triggered” when they hear speech they claim frightens them.

What’s plainly of distant secondary importance to these managers is actual free speech.  With their timidity, these managers fail to seriously defend the free speech rights of the speaker and, worse, fail to defend the free speech rights of others to make their own choice of what speech they will hear.

A Blow for Standards

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And it’s struck by California’s state Supreme Court, yet, which is the controlling factor in setting the passing score, the cut score, on the State’s bar exam which prospective lawyers must pass in order to practice in California.

The Court has decided to keep the cut score at its current level, which is the second highest in the US.  The State’s law school deans are in an uproar over that; they wanted the cut score significantly lowered.  They’re complaining that

many competent graduates will continue to suffer the consequences of not being able to become certified to practice….

The deans decline to explain how are “graduates” can be considered competent if they can’t pass the test that assesses their competency.

Their excuse for wanting the standard lowered is risible.

Bar-exam-passage rates for incoming lawyers have plummeted in California in recent years, in parallel with similar drops in other states….

Of course, this couldn’t be a degradation in the quality of teaching through lowered standards of expertise credentialing, or of students through lowered admission standards, or both.

Never mind that UCLA’s first-time pass rate of 82% proves that the current cut score is not too high.  Gotta lower standards, the deans say, to meet declining performance rather than requiring the hard work of elevating performance to meet standards.

Here’re a couple of thoughts: do a better job of teaching. It looks like an old jibe that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach, is thriving in California.

Also: do a better job of selecting students for admittance. Not every snowflake who takes a notion to be a lawyer should be one.

Media Bias

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Media “critic” Howard Kurtz says he decries it.  In a recent piece about media credibility he noted that, according to a Morning Consult/Politico survey, 46% of voters think the media makes up stories about President Donald Trump.  Even 20% of self-identified Democrats think that.

Then he wrote this.

In short, the president’s constant “fake news” attacks are working.

It couldn’t possibly be that the “media” really do make stuff up about Trump.  They don’t ever publish stories containing only rumors claimed by carefully unidentified sources, with nary an on-the-record bit of corroboration, like journalism standards used to require.  Nossir.

He also noted this outcome from the poll:

[I]n light of Trump suggesting scrutiny of TV licenses, the poll says 51% think the federal government shouldn’t have the power to revoke broadcast licenses of fabricating networks—not exactly a ringing endorsement.

It’s true enough that communications licenses shouldn’t be based on content.  But Kurtz wrote that in the context of his larger piece that while the media often are unfair (the token nod to another side of his argument), they don’t as a matter of routine fake the news.  It couldn’t possibly be that faint-praise damnation is because the media do, in fact, routinely make stuff up.  Uh, uh.

Talk about media bias.  Jeez.

Integration

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It seems a New Jersey high school, Cliffside Park High of the town of Cliffside Park, has a teacher who insists English—or as she put it, American—be spoken in her classroom.

…men and women are fighting. They are not fighting for your right to speak Spanish. They are fighting for your right to speak American[.]

Of course, she’s being called a racist for insisting that folks assimilate into American culture rather than our culture be bent into the home country’s—every home country’s—culture.

Never mind that the reason folks come to the United States is for the advantages our culture offers compared to the country they’re leaving.  Altering ours to match the home country culture not only would defeat the purpose of the trip, it would destroy our nation for us citizens already present.

None of which means we require lock-step adaptation.  One of the strengths of our American culture is that we absorb—we culturally appropriate—the best practices of those old country cultures.  But there’s a critical directionality to that absorption.  Marvin Moreno, an alumnus, displayed the magnitude of the failure of our public school system with his objection to the teacher’s objection:

You go to school to learn, you don’t go to feel attacked by someone you believe is an educator[.]

Confusing being taught uncomfortable things with being attacked is itself strongly instructive.