Discourse, Off Course
Some weeks it seems as if free speech is breathing its last on college campuses. Recently Williams College and California State University at Los Angeles both wrestled over appearances by right-wing speakers, and Vassar College got pummeled in The Wall Street Journal for allowing a talk by Jasbir K. Puar, a Rutgers University associate professor of women’s and gender studies who said some provocative things about Israel.
Any discussion of Israel can be contentious. What’s surprising here, though, is that Vassar’s pummeling was delivered by Mark G. Yudof, former president of the University of California, former chancellor of the University of Texas, and former president of the University of Minnesota. He is now the board chair of an organization called the Academic Engagement Network, which says it “addresses issues relating to Israel,” and his co-author — Kenneth Waltzer, a professor emeritus at Michigan State — is the organization’s executive director. Their first sentence asserts that “anti-Israel sentiment mixed with age-old anti-Semitism has reached a fever pitch at Vassar.”
“Wild charges against Israel have often been aired on U.S. campuses over the past several years, and their moral perversity pointed out,” they wrote. “But Ms. Puar’s calumnies reached a new low.” And while her appearance was co-sponsored by the college’s Jewish-studies program, they complained that the program’s faculty members remained silent during the event — “a testament,” they wrote, “to the spell that anti-Israel dogma, no matter its veracity, has spread over the campus.”
But Haaretz, a left-of-center Israeli newspaper, contested the idea that Ms. Puar’s speech was anti-Semitic. She made “two particularly jarring claims” for which she failed to provide evidence, and one “cuts close to the bone of blood-libel myths,” the newspaper noted. But it went on to quote Joshua Schreier, an associate professor of history at Vassar who was at the event. “It’s really important to protect free speech and protect academic speech,” he said, adding that “we have a responsibility, as academics, when we talk about speculation, to note … whether it’s substantiated, whether we’re trying to give new life to those rumors, or not. But none of that makes it anti-Semitic.”
Meanwhile, Adam F. Falk, the Williams president, canceled an appearance by John Derbyshire, who had been invited to the campus by a student organization called Uncomfortable Learning. Mr. Derbyshire had previously been dismissed by the National Review after writing what the Review’s editor called a “nasty and indefensible” item, called “The Talk: Non-Black Version,” for another publication. Mr. Falk said in a letter to the Williams community that “at times it’s our role as educators and administrators to step in and make decisions that are in the best interest of students and our community.”
And William A. Covino, president of the Cal State campus in Los Angeles, told the campus Young Americans for Freedom chapter to postpone an appearance last Thursday by Ben Shapiro, who was scheduled to talk about “When Diversity Becomes a Problem.” Mr. Covino said he wanted to “arrange for him to appear as part of a group of speakers with differing viewpoints,” but after students said Mr. Shapiro would come anyway, the president said the university would let him speak.
Which leaves us where? Sure, there’s a danger that, by welcoming someone with noxious views, a college lends credence to those views — at least in the eyes of the world’s tireless corps of bloggers angry about this or that. But if colleges can’t teach students how to make their own judgment calls about a variety of viewpoints, are they really doing their job? If faculty members and administrators don’t feel a responsibility to listen thoughtfully and respond eloquently to people with whom they disagree, even people who give offense, has higher education descended to the level of cable news? Worse yet, of Congress? If colleges aren’t going to demonstrate how to conduct responsible, civil public discourse, who will?
Scalia, Remembered
Speaking of discourse, Georgetown University’s law school has been embroiled in a particularly lively debate over the memory of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who earned his undergraduate degree at the university. The back and forth, covered in detail by The Washington Post, began after the university posted a statement saying the campus was mourning “a brilliant jurist” who was a legal “giant.”
Gary Peller, a law professor, replied in an email to the entire law school: “I imagine many other faculty, students, and staff, particularly people of color, women, and sexual minorities, cringed at [the] headline and at the unmitigated praise with which the press release described a jurist that many of us believe was a defender of privilege, oppression, and bigotry.” Conservative law students then said they had been “traumatized, hurt, shaken, and angry” — especially those “who must now attend class” knowing of Professor Peller’s “contempt for Justice Scalia and his admirers, including them.”
Which prompted black law students to fire back: “If this one email exchange exacerbated frustrations of conservative or libertarian students, imagine the impact of continuous antagonistic classroom lectures and insensitive remarks about issues that directly affect the lives of the black students.” They brought up Justice Scalia’s observation from the bench last fall that some people thought “it does not benefit” black students to attend top-notch colleges, “where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well.”
The black law students said, however, that they would not let the debate distract them. “We will study longer. We will fight harder. We will earn our degrees. We will use the law to fight for progress — to become the next litigator, congressperson, judge, or U.S. Supreme Court justice.”
Fear 101
The University of Houston’s Faculty Senate has been trying to work out practical ways in which faculty members can deal with a new state law, due to take effect August 1, that will require public institutions to let people with concealed-carry permits bring guns into classrooms and many other campus spaces.
No one thought this would be easy. Still, it was disconcerting to come upon a slide in a PowerPoint presentation by the senate’s president, Jonathan Snow, a professor of isotope geochemistry, that suggests faculty members may want to “drop certain topics from your curriculum,” “not ‘go there’ if you sense anger,” switch to appointment-only office hours, and “only meet ‘that student’ in controlled circumstances.” Great, huh?
The presentation also suggests that instructors not “make provocative statements” or ask students whether they have concealed-carry permits. “It’s in your interest and the university’s interest to be very guarded and careful about this issue.
Fired
Last week the University of Missouri’s Board of Curators voted 4 to 2 to fire Melissa A. Click, the assistant professor of communications who earned her 15 minutes of fame by trying to stop a journalism student from filming black protesters on the campus last fall. The move came soon after a second video surfaced in which she is seen yelling, this time at police officers clearing a roadway during another protest, and after the chairman of Missouri’s House Budget Committee — Tom Flanigan, a Republican — proposed eliminating her salary among $8 million in budget cuts for the university next year.
And There’s More
Chicago State University will eliminate spring break and end the semester nearly two weeks early to avoid running out of money before classes end. The university has been hard hit by a monthslong budget deadlock in the state legislature. … President Obama has nominated Carla D. Hayden, chief executive of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, as the next Librarian of Congress. Ms. Hayden would be the first woman and the first African-American to hold the job. … The University of Oklahoma will settle a lengthy dispute by returning a Camille Pissarro painting, “La Bergère,” to the family from whom it was stolen by Nazis during World War II.
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
