ACTA's Must-Reads

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Penn does the diversity shuffle

At the University of Pennsylvania, debate currently rages about a proposed new diversity course requirement. The debate seems to revolve around two perspectives--opponents see it as a politically motivated requirement that attempts to impose an ideological agenda on Penn undergrads; proponents don't. The Daily Pennsylvanian's coverage of the debate documents a garbled dialogue indeed. "Concerned students and faculty initially advocated for an academic requirement that would focus on U.S. minority culture, but some now worry that the focus has become diluted by a political agenda," the DP notes; "At the most recent discussion over the requirement, held last week, many attendees focused on the broader political message that such a requirement could send about the importance of diversity, rather than on its academic merit."

The debate surrounding this requirement appears to be impaled on the horns of the diversity dilemma itself. It is telling that, at least as the DP reports it, dialogue about the requirement rests squarely on a false dichotomy--either the diversity requirement has academic merit or it is a political maneuver. If Penn is to have a productive discussion about the proposed requirement, both opponents and proponents ought to recognize that higher education has thoroughly scrambled the distinction between academic merit and ideological agenda by instituting just such requirements as the one they are considering implementing at Penn. Any academic merit such a requirement would have is grounded in the by-now nearly universal academic assumption that promoting the politics of "diversity" is a legitimate educational agenda. Advocates of the requirement cannot have it both ways; to claim, as Arts & Sciences dean Dennis DeTurck does, that "any new requirement should have a primarily academic purpose and that any political agenda would be secondary," is to descend into the self-rationalizing zone of doublethink.

Posted by acta online at 09:40 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Dartmouth's nosedive

Dartmouth has had a busy year when it comes to clarifying its stance toward governance, free expression, and free association. On the one hand, Dartmouth repealed its speech code last spring--and it did so, to its great credit, voluntarily. On the other hand, Dartmouth required a great deal of public pressure last spring to convince it to comport itself properly when Todd Zywicki and Peter Robinson ran for the board of trustees. Zywicki and Robinson were not the chosen, "inside" candidates of Dartmouth's Alumni Council, but were instead dark horse petition candidates who earned places on the ballot the hard way, by amassing signatures of support, and who supported a platform centering on improving Dartmouth's commitment to free speech and educational accountability. Zywicki and Robinson won, and their victory was hailed as a victory for democratic process and liberal educational values at Dartmouth.

Now there is a new wrinkle in what begins to look like Dartmouth's ongoing struggle to seem to support free speech and transparent procedure while not actually, ultimately, doing so. Instead of recognizing that the victories of Zywicki and Robinson prove the importance of allowing petition candidates to run for trustee, Dartmouth's Alumni Governance Task Force is doing all it can to prevent the sort of grassroots uprising that landed two wild card trustees on the board last year.

The AGTF is now writing a new constitution that would compel petition candidates to conform to the impossibly restrictive requirement that they submit their entire agenda before the Nominating Committee names its official candidates; in other words, the AGTF is planning not only to subject petition candidates to a different set of electoral rules than those governing officially endorsed candidates, but is also, in so doing, undermining the ability of petition candidates to run in reaction to the aims and agendas of their opponents. Needless to say, the very notion of the petition candidate is predicated on the recognition that oppositional candidacy is a legitimate and reasonable thing, something that tends to arise spontaneously, out of felt necessity, when official candidates are felt to be lacking. The new rules that may govern petition candidates render that sort of candidacy virtually impossible, and so weaken what ought to be a vigorous, robust, and open electoral process. That petition candidates are limited to an unreasonably small window of time--thirty days--to amass the necessary number of signatures only underlines the chilling intention of the new constitutional provisions.

To his great credit, Dartmouth undergrad Joe Malchow has been covering the latest Dartmouth debacle in depth. For still more commentary, see FIRE's coverage.

Posted by acta online at 10:29 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Lott's strife

Conservatives may be few and far between on campus, but that doesn't mean there is a smug and secure political consensus among left-of-center faculty. University of Virginia English and American studies professor Eric Lott has just published a book castigating left-wing intellectuals for not being leftist enough; in response, UCLA historian Russell Jacoby has just published a review of Lott's book in The Nation that castigates Lott for being ideologically and intellectually ridiculous. Lott's book, Jacoby writes, "is to stay-at-home tenured radicals what the television remote is to couch potatoes. Without parking hassles or library bottlenecks, you get the latest on unforgettable conferences and pathbreaking journal articles."

Jacoby focusses relentlessly on Lott's feckless assumption that radical politics is synonymous with the self-important, obfuscatory theorizing of pampered academics steeped in Marxist theory. The result is both a withering deflation of Lott's book as well as an acerbic commentary on the intellectual climate of an increasingly insular and narcissistic academy. An excerpt from Jacoby's hysterically funny and eminently readable review suggests both the substance and the style of the debate between Lott-like leftists and Jacoby-like liberals:

Lott seeks more than to guide would-be tenured radicals; he has a mission and an animus. He wants to carve out a space for radicals to the left of detestable "boomer liberals," who have seized the limelight and distorted politics. They constitute "one of the chief obstacles" to a revitalized politics. In fact, Lott's title misleads, and either of his earlier working titles, Boomer Liberalism or The Lost Intellectuals, might have been more accurate. These boomers are the opposite of "disappearing" liberals. They are omnipresent. Who are they? Lott names "a few of the most celebrated of these thinkers": Todd Gitlin, Michael Lind, Joe Klein, Martha Nussbaum, Paul Berman, Stanley Crouch, Greil Marcus, Sean Wilentz and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

For Lott this "new liberal front" oozes with a "piecemeal, reformist self-satisfaction." The new reformers represent a "bone headed degeneration of the radical spirit." They have "created the political fog that obscured the left from view" and buried the "liberal alternative to hawkish conservatism." These liberals pander to state power and American nationalism. They yearn for the "old-boys' left" that was largely white and that claimed to be universal. Their work is "anti-corporate" rather than anticapitalist. (Disclosure alert: Along with Mark Crispin Miller and Thomas Frank, I am listed as suffering from this particular ailment.) They turn politics into adjuncts of the John Kerry presidential bid. They are a "secret sharer of neoconservative ideology," and they legitimate the Bush White House and its politics. They constitute an intellectual and political "disaster."

Lott, on the other hand, writes from a "radical egalitarian perspective" that celebrates "upsurge from below." Instead of liberal wishy-washiness about class and economic inequality, he squarely calls for a "full engagement with working-class hopes" that "necessarily involves a long march through the history of African-American liberation movements, radical women's uprisings, and other insurrectionary energies." The boomer liberals do not understand how "successful activist movements" of "blacks, Latinos, women, queers, and others have transformed" politics. With a self-professed "irony" and polemical zeal, Lott blasts old New Leftists in order to invigorate a new radical politics.

In an era of pallid Democrats and furtive leftists, Lott comes out shouting his revolutionary loyalties. He marches with real working people. So far, so good. Unfortunately, he marches only from the podium to the speaker's table. Sometimes he gets to the library or logs on to hiptheory.com to check out what Etienne Balibar, a French post-Marxist, has written. His radical commitments amount to promoting leftist colleagues in American studies departments and a few European Marxists. Moreover, he wildly inflates the impact of the "liberal front" he is supposedly challenging. With Lott as your guide, you'd think Todd Gitlin and Paul Berman sabotaged the left and ushered in Bush. Were it so simple.

Throughout this tract Lott charges boomer liberals with reformist politics and theoretical simplicity. Even if one grants these points, what does he offer to replace them? He claims the high political ground, but he cannot formulate a single coherent sentence about politics as seen from there. He tosses off phrases about "intersectionality" and "the praxis potential of antinormativity," but politics hardly enters this political book. One might suppose that in the midst of the war in Iraq Lott would take on its liberal supporters, such as Berman, but he never raises the issue. He feels more comfortable flaying Berman for dismissing the Black Panthers and for pining for a '60s before the women and gay "insurgencies challenged the white male hegemony of the baby-boom left." He prefers gabbing about how soft leftists have misinterpreted Clinton or African-American music to explaining how tough-as-nails radicals like him see the world today.

There's much more, and it's all worth reading. Debates about intellectual diversity in the academy tend to assume that in the absence of a significant conservative presence on faculties, academics are united in an exclusive, self-congratulatory society of the likeminded. There is certainly a broad descriptive truth to this claim. But it is true, too, that this society of the broadly likeminded is as given to internal schism as any collective, and that the fault lines drawn by these schisms can tell us a great deal about the weak spots in what has been characterized as an enormously powerful monolith.

Jacoby, who has authored an insightful historical analysis of how the academy came to be so definitively associated with the sort of couch potato leftism he condemns in Lott, is a worthy opponent for activists on both left and right. His debate with David Horowitz last summer about the academic bill of rights is well worth reading.

Posted by acta online at 09:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Fairness is as fairness does

Women currently make up more than 56% of the nation's undergraduates, and the percentage is going up all the time. On some campuses, more than 60% of undergrads are women. But even as men slowly disappear from the ranks of college students, we should not assume that they are not still oppressors, and that the women who are outnumbering them are not still oppressed by the patriarchy. Writing for the New York Times, an admissions officer for Kenyon College explains:

...because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.

We have told today's young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today's most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men. How's that for an unintended consequence of the women's liberation movement?

The elephant that looms large in the middle of the room is the importance of gender balance. Should it trump the qualifications of talented young female applicants? At those colleges that have reached what the experts call a "tipping point," where 60 percent or more of their enrolled students are female, you'll hear a hint of desperation in the voices of admissions officers.

Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.

What are the consequences of young men discovering that even if they do less, they have more options? And what messages are we sending young women that they must, nearly 25 years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, be even more accomplished than men to gain admission to the nation's top colleges? These are questions that admissions officers like me grapple with.

Ending her article with an apology for "demographic realities" to all the fine young women her college has rejected along with their disappointed parents, Jennifer Britz articulates with remarkable candor a style of disingenuous doublethink that speaks powerfully to the ideological agendas at work on campuses--and in their admissions offices--today. Nowhere in her op-ed does she show the concern for young men that she would show for young women if their undergraduate numbers mirrored those of men; everywhere in her op-ed does she evince a determination to describe women as victims in need of special consideration, even when the women she is trying to help are, collectively, clearly succeeding in great numbers and clearly outperforming their male counterparts.

The irony is that Britz brings the logic of affirmative action full circle; in lamenting the lost opportunities of young women who are rejected by colleges in favor of less qualified male applicants, she makes, however unwittingly, an eloquent argument for meritocracy across the board. In this sense, the most compelling thing about Britz' piece--entitled, tellingly, "To All the Girls I've Rejected"--is the manner in which it accidentally makes a case quite other than the one she ostensibly means for it to make.

UPDATE 3/27/06: Much more commentary at Discriminations and InsideHigherEd.com.

Posted by acta online at 09:01 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The lost art of conversation

A new book indirectly suggests a reason for why speech codes have such uncontested traction at so many American colleges and universities: American culture does not value, and hence does not really comprehend, the importance of conversation. In his New York Times review of Stephen Miller's Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, Edward Rothstein explains:

Conversation is one of those acts that require subtle forms of social imagination: an ability to listen and interpret and imagine, an attentiveness to someone whose perspective is always essentially different, a responsiveness that both makes oneself known and allows the other to feel known -- or else does none of this, but just keeps up appearances. It may be, then, one of the most fundamental political and social acts, indispensable to negotiating allegiances, establishing common ground, clearing tangled paths. Conversation may reflect not just the state of our selves, but the state of society.

O.K. But listen to "talk" radio, with its combative recruitment of allies; or "talk" shows in which guests are promoting themselves or their products and hosts are prepared with leading questions; or "talk" news shows in which conversation becomes a form of shouting. Look at our isolating iPods, at text messaging with its prepackaged formulas, or instant messaging with its iconic smilies, so necessary to make sure the telegraphic prose is not misunderstood.

This state of affairs helped inspire Stephen Miller's new book, "Conversation: A History of a Declining Art" (Yale, $27.50). Mr. Miller, who is a contributing editor to The Wilson Quarterly, finds countertrends, as well -- Internet communities that lead to new forms of conversation, diverse gatherings in which disagreements become an expected aspect of conversation. But, he writes, the "forces sapping conversation seem stronger than the forces nourishing it." So Mr. Miller, in response, is recounting another kind of conversation that has taken place over the centuries, one whose subject is conversation itself.

Cicero gave advice about conversation (It ought "to be gentle and without a trace of intransigence; it should also be witty"). Montaigne hailed its pleasures ("I find the practice of it the most delightful activity in our lives"). Henry Fielding praised it ("This grand Business of our Lives, the Foundation of every Thing, either useful or pleasant"). Adam Smith prescribed it (calling it one of "the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity").

There were also those who opposed it, or at least strongly declared other preferences. Rousseau sneered at the chatter in French salons. Wordsworth preferred nature and solitude. The writers of Romanticism shifted the emphasis, preferring to share feelings and perceptions rather than honor conversation for its own sake. Conversation became confessional -- which in many ways, it still is. "Modern writers," Mr. Miller suggests, "tend to dwell on the emotional rewards that come from conversation."

In fact, in Mr. Miller's account, the United States may have played an important role in the evolution of the mode of non-conversation now developing. During the 19th century many European writers scorned American conversation, perhaps too much, Mr. Miller suggests, accusing it of excessive focus on money and commerce. There may have also been an American suspicion of conversation altogether: Thoreau couldn't be bothered with it, and Melville was wary.

Mr. Miller points out that in the 20th century, literary figures were also admired for being laconic. Was this an extension of early Romantic suspicions? A democratic rebellion against the artifice and artfulness of 18th-century conversation? Did it even lead, perhaps, to the self-absorbed focus on self-fulfillment and self-expression that have, in Mr. Miller's view, extended from the years of the counterculture into the present?

Like a well-mannered host, Mr. Miller presents some hypotheses, but also leads the conversation along. For him, the powers and possibilities of conversation were most clearly revealed in the 18th century. Samuel Johnson praised the two key journals of the age, The Spectator and The Tattler; they were being published at a time, he said, "when two parties, loud, restless, and violent, each with plausible declarations, and each perhaps without any distinct termination of its views, were agitating the nation."

The journals, Johnson said, "adjusted" conversation with their "propriety and politeness." That character also helped define London coffeehouses, in which political debate and conversation between varied classes took place. Andrew Marvell wrote: "It is wine and strong drinks make tumults increase/ Choc'late, tea, and coffee are liquors of peace."

But Hume may be the patron saint of conversation here, for though he noted that politeness "runs often into affectation and foppery, disguise and insincerity," he also saw a necessary connection between politeness and freedom. Hume suggested that politeness was not, in fact, "natural to the human mind," but "presumption and arrogance" were. Society depends on artifice. Conversation is an art.

As Mr. Miller suggests, American conversation now prides itself on angry authenticity or on being kind and "nonjudgmental"; it is meant to be "natural" and full of "self-expression." This does not make for great conversation or a vital political life.

I quote at length to show how the review--and ostensibly the book it assesses--connects the history of conversation to the evolving values of modern Western culture; the suggestion here appears to be that while the English have historically understood and appreciated the importance of robust, public, impassioned debate, Americans have, in at least some quarters, valued quite the opposite: a taciturn pose that is associated with unspoken and unspeakable depth of character. As a result, the argument appears to go, Americans have gradually lost the art of actually interacting. We can pose, we can argue, we can confess and attack, but we cannot, as a people, claim to know how to converse.

Historians will have to adjudicate the fairness of Miller's claim (and of Rothstein's portrayal of Miller's claim). But in the meantime, the claims themselves offer an intriguing context for the paradoxical and troubling fact that the vast majority of American colleges and universities seek to regulate student expression in ways that are not consonant with either their institutional purpose (to educate) or with the Bill of Rights. Arguments against campus speech codes always invoke the importance of free inquiry and robust debate, both to the educations of individuals and to the perpetuation of democracy. But those arguments fall on deaf ears with depressing frequency--the proponents of speech codes are unmoved by that argument, so much so that they are typically able to defend their positions out of both sides of their mouths. "Hate speech is not free speech," they say; "I'm all for free speech, but we should not defend speech that attacks and offends others, especially when those others have been historically oppressed." And so on. We tend to see these stalemates as political--the left tends to argue one way, the right the other. But what if we saw the entire phenomenon as cultural? And what if we worked from there toward a historical understanding of how that cultural phenomenon came to be?

Miller's book would appear to offer the beginnings of a cultural-historical explanation for why it has become so possible to discount free speech on campus. If the art of exchanging ideas through conversation is not something our culture truly values--is not something we can even claim, collectively, to comprehend--then nothing is lost, or nothing seems to be lost, when higher education administrators make policies that chill and even punish expression they find offensive. Perhaps the blind spot higher education has about the importance of free speech tells us something about a larger blind spot in our culture; perhaps Miller's book can help explain where that blind spot came from, and, in so doing, can help us begin to think more pointedly about what can be done to counter it.

Posted by acta online at 09:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Tenuring the trained conformist

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, a recently tenured English professor reflects on how the tenure system works to socialize academics in a manner that runs contrary to the ideal of free inquiry that tenure is ostensibly designed to protect:

Professors are, for the most part, people who learned to please grown-ups when they were children -- and sometimes never stop, even after receiving tenure.

Perhaps I have never been "me," since my entire life has been spent seeking approval from teachers, editors, colleagues, and even my students. I find it difficult to think without triangulating my thoughts through the minds of other people.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of tenure is the possibility of slowly and tentatively developing a sense of integrity -- of becoming yourself instead of what you think other people want you to be. But, after a lifetime as a supplicant, it's hard to know where to begin. Is there a "self" within that "construct" who just received tenure?

That pattern of defining oneself in relation to authority figures is so deeply ingrained in academic culture that it may take decades to overcome. How do you know what you believe if you do not allow yourself to think in ways that challenge the values that have made you what you are?

Apart from offering hope for an integrated self, tenure raises the old existential possibility of choosing to be free, of finally taking responsibility for one's actions, instead of blaming one's failings on some oppressive institution. What happens to a self-conscious "outsider" who becomes vested in the garb of the local "establishment"? In time, the pose of exclusion degenerates into the pseudo-embattlement affected by so many privileged and celebrated academic rebels. How does power speak truth to itself when it denies its own power?

The article goes on to rationalize tenure as an opportunity for academics to become active citizens of institutions where previously they were disempowered subjects -- but the rationalizations, eloquent as they are, cannot compensate for the damning portrait of dissociated quasi-intellectualism that the author develops in the paragraphs quoted above. Instead, they raise a series of broader questions about what it will take to fight the well-documented absence of intellectual diversity on campus, suggesting that any analysis of ideological bias in academe, and any program of institutional reform aimed at improving the balance of perspectives represented on faculties and in classrooms, is incomplete without a corresponding analysis of whether--and how--the tenure system selects for and even mandates styles of intellectual (and social) conformity that are incompatible, ironically, with the principle of academic freedom tenure is said to uphold.

It's no accident that the author of the revealingly confessional paragraphs above is an English professor. An analysis of the conformist imperatives of the tenure system would do well to begin with the academic humanities, where one's mastery of one's discipline is increasingly defined in terms of how well one has mastered an accepted political approach to one's discipline.

Posted by acta online at 09:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Free speech on campus

An Oregon State senior uses the occasion of Holocaust denier David Irving's imprisonment to make the only serious case for free speech that can be made. In so doing, she shows a far deeper understanding of what free speech is and why it matters than a great many college students and even college administrators. The classic move on today's campuses is to trumpet the value of free speech and then to qualify it by noting that hate speech is not free speech--hence students who find themselves advocating censorship in the name of defending the First Amendment, and hence, too, administrators who argue that speech codes function to protect free inquiry rather than quash it.

Elizabeth Meyer, an environmental science major who is also a columnist for the OSU Barometer, is smarter than that. "The thing about believing in freedom of speech is that you have to believe in freedom of speech. That means repugnant speech. That means speech that makes your blood boil," she writes:

Only by allowing hate speech and other objectionable expressions can we truly create an atmosphere of equality. If we simply deny the rights of those that offend us, we lose the opportunity to combat the racism, sexism, heterosexism, or other hate that creates that speech.

The first problem faced by the attempt to regulate hate speech is defining it. Hate speech is not hate crimes, or other criminal conduct. The Supreme Court has ruled on several occasions that illegal conduct is illegal, even if it contains speech. Chief Justice Warren wrote that the Court did not "accept the view that an apparently limitless variety of conduct can be labeled 'speech' whenever the person engaging in the conduct intends thereby to express an idea." Harassment, trespass, vandalism, and violent crime are all still illegal, regardless of whatever message the perpetrator may be trying to spread. Hate speech, in the context of this paper, is only the act of speech itself.

Narrowing the definition of hate speech to only include speech, however, does not narrow it very much. The American Heritage Dictionary states that hate speech is "Bigoted speech attacking or disparaging a social or ethnic group or a member of such a group." Even with this seemingly straightforward definition, hate speech is anything but clear cut. For example, what is "bigoted" and what constitutes a "social or ethnic group" and what is "disparaging?" The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in its position paper on campus speech codes, argues that many college campuses have taken the definition of disparaging to the extreme, defining it as any offensive speech to a group based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.

This is problematic because it is so broad. Sensitivities vary. What one woman considers a good-natured joke may be seen as sexual harassment -- and thus hate speech -- by another. While neither woman is necessarily incorrect in her assessment of the comment, the speaker cannot know how the women will take the joke and may face disciplinary action.

If we look specifically to campuses, we see where hate speech, when not well defined, can be used to silence students. Universities argue that the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection to all U.S. citizens, means that they must allow access to all. Hate speech on campus denies this equal protection, they argue, by creating a hostile environment toward some, thus denying them equal access. But when these two values come into conflict, the school ought to err on the side of free speech.

[...]

This doesn't mean that hate speech must go unnoticed by universities. The universities can respond by holding forums, condemning such speech (but still allowing it) and providing support to student groups attempting to educate the campus about such issues. An atmosphere where the university just ignores it can easily be closed to minorities and women. But by simply banning it, the university pushes the problem under the rug only to have it rear its ugly head later, once the bigots are finished with school.

Supreme Court Justice Brandeis argues, "the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones." Our society has decided that for a functioning democracy, we must be able to evaluate ideas on our own. Yet if a university shields its students from offensive speech, the targeted students will never learn to defend themselves and the offensive students will not have their views directly challenged.

One of the strengths of Meyer's piece is the ease with which she shows that the speech codes colleges and universities employ as part of their liberal agenda actually interfere with the very values they aim to inculcate. The case against speech codes has been labelled a conservative one, but this is a misleading misnomer that makes a partisan issue of something that concerns us all.

For more on campus speech codes, see FIRE's Spotlight. Worth noting, too, is FIRE's Speech Code of the Month, which currently features Davidson College. In its misguided effort to sanitize student and faculty expression, Davidson bans, among other things, "patronizing remarks" such as "referring to an adult as 'girl,' 'boy,' 'hunk,' 'doll,' 'honey,'" or "sweetie." Davidson also bans offensive "jokes," "teasing," "dismissive comments," "making [offensive] facial expressions," and "wearing inappropriate or sexually suggestive clothing."

Posted by acta online at 09:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Domino effect in Rumsfeld v. FAIR

Monday's Supreme Court ruling that colleges and universities receiving federal funding must allow military recruiters on campus was not only a triumph for the associative rights of students and a necessary corrective for activist administrators; it was also an implicit challenge to the American Association of Law Schools and the American Bar Association, which require law schools to comply with their own activist agendas if they wish to be accredited. Law schools have argued that they must bar military recruiters in order to comply with their accrediting organization's non-discrimination policies. Now the policies of law school accrediting organizations are themselves coming under fire.

The ABA has recently announced a new "Equal Opportunity and Diversity" criterion that would compel all accredited law schools to produce annual reports documenting the measures they are taking to diversify their faculties, student bodies, and staffs. The new policy couldl attempt to override the laws in states--among them California and Washington--that have outlawed the use of racial preferences as an admissions criteria. The ABA denies that it is attempting to impose a racial quota system on law schools, but critics of the new policy, which will come up for formal approval in August, worry about the slippery ideological slope the ABA is creating. Yesterday, the Center for Equal Opportunity and the National Association of Scholars sent letters to the U.S. Department of Education asking that the ABA's power to accredit law schools be revoked unless it drops the new diversity standard. The Center for Individual Rights was also expected to send a letter.

The positions of these groups are unequivocal, and, in the wake of the wake up call that is Rumsfeld v. FAIR, ought to give the ABA pause. Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, issued a statement saying that "It is outrageous that the ABA should use its accreditation authority to force law schools to engage in politically correct and illegal discrimination," adding that "It would be even more outrageous were the Department of Education to allow the ABA to extort such illegal and unfair behavior." Stephen Balch and Gail Heriot of the National Association of Scholars voices similar thoughts in their letter:

No law school that is up for its seven-year review will fail to recognize the implicit message: A law school must do what's necessary to obtain the undefined, unspecified diversity 'results' that will satisfy the ABA or face the disastrous possibility that its accreditation will be revoked or held up. If that means employing racial, ethnic, or gender preferences that the law-school faculty believes are academically ill-advised, then so be it. Anything is better than de-accreditation. ... It is difficult to avoid the interpretation that the ABA is attempting to pressure law schools into breaking the law. If so, it is highly irresponsible. Doing so under color of authority of the Department of Education is simply appalling.

Strong words -- but necessary ones. The ABA is not likely to be able to lay these very sharply framed concerns to rest without abandoning its diversity requirement entirely. It's also not likely to willingly abandon that requirement simply because a few organizations it regards as political opponents object to it. It will be up to the Department of Education to set the precedent here. This will be one to watch.

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Supreme Court upholds Solomon Amendment

This morning, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges and universities receiving federal funds must allow military recruiters on campus. InsideHIgherEd.com calls the court's unanimous ruling a "slam-dunk rebuke to the nation's law schools," and The New York Times reports that Chief Justice Roberts' opinion takes the foundational illogic of law schools' position to task in resoundingly uncompromising terms:

In his opinion today, Chief Justice Roberts soundly rejected FAIR's assertion that the Solomon Amendment infringed on First Amendment free-speech rights.

"The Solomon Amendment neither limits what law schools may say nor requires them to say anything," he wrote. "Law schools remain free under the statute to express whatever views they may have on the military's congressionally mandated employment policy, all the while retaining eligibility for federal funds."

The Solomon Amendment pertains to conduct more than to speech, the chief justice wrote: "It affects what law schools must do -- afford equal access to military recruiters -- not what they may or may not say."

Chief Justice Roberts rejected the law schools' contention that teachers and students might equate the granting of access to recruiters to an endorsement of the military's views. He noted that previous Supreme Court rulings have recognized that high school students can appreciate the difference between speech that a school sponsors and speech that a school merely permits because it is required to do so under equal-access policies. "Surely students have not lost that ability by the time they get to law school," he wrote.

ACTA has been actively involved in opposing the law schools' case, and has issued the following press release congratulating the Court:

ACTA PRAISES SUPREME COURT DECISION UPHOLDING MILITARY RECRUITERS ON CAMPUS

Colleges and Universities Should Put Student and Public Interests Ahead of Politics

Washington, DC (March 6, 2006)--The Supreme Court decision upholding military recruiters on college and university campuses is a victory for students' right to think for themselves, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni said today.

"This decision puts an end to the blatant hypocrisy of institutions which deny military recruiters while accepting billions in federal funds," said ACTA president Anne Neal. "It's a sorry statement when it takes a Supreme Court decision to show why our colleges and universities need to give students basic information about possible careers and the defense of our country. Trustees should waste no time putting their institutions on record as welcoming military recruiters and respecting the right of students, as individuals educated to think for themselves, to make their own decisions, including supporting or opposing 'don't ask, don't tell.'"

In late 2005, ACTA released data documenting the extraordinary sums that higher education institutions receive from the federal government subject to the Solomon Amendment and launched a national campaign asking trustees to guarantee access to military recruiters on campus. In letters, ACTA called on trustees to ensure that students are able to make informed decisions about whether to pursue a military career, rather than hiding behind faculty and administrators' opposition to military recruiters on campus.

The Solomon Amendment, which requires colleges that take federal money to accommodate recruiters, was struck down last year in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals as violating the First Amendment rights of higher education institutions. Faculty and administrators at a number of elite universities--including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Columbia--had in the past prevented recruiting on campus. These institutions had argued that the government's "don't ask, don't tell" policy violates their anti-discrimination policies.

The Supreme Court rejected these arguments and concluded that the Solomon Amendment neither limits what law schools may say nor requires them to say anything.

Read about ACTA's October report here.

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Why we need civic education

At SUNY Purchase, a student recently appeared on a campus television channel wearing blackface and making comments that some viewers found racially offensive. Debate rages about what to do. It is not a constructive debate -- but it is an informative one. Here is how various students interviewed by the local paper understand (or fail to understand) the issue:

"On some level I feel it's freedom of speech," said student senate member Emily Griffiths of Cutchogue, Long Island. "But on the same level, it's like allowing the KKK to march on Washington, D.C. Why are people OK with that?"

Griffiths defended the Purchase Student Government Association's efforts to quell the controversy, including pulling the offending show and temporarily banning new programming while it creates formal programming standards. Students on both sides aren't well informed about matters of free speech, she said.

"It's weird because it's an arts campus so a lot of the students are about free expression," Griffiths said.

[...]

Several students agreed there should be formal guidelines. Some were OK with restricting speech that could be deemed offensive.

"Our whole reputation is at stake," said Nicholas Freely of Monroe, who is in the design technology program. "I don't want future applicants to look at the campus and say, 'That's the school with the whole blackface thing. I don't want to go there.' "

These are the positions of students that do not understand either what free speech is or what legal obligation their university has to uphold the constitutional rights of its students. If some sort of sense that free speech might be at issue here, they don't sense it strongly enough to be able to register their own illogic when they suggest that offensive speech should be less free than other forms of expression. Others seem neither to appreciate that they are advocating censorhip, nor to grasp that when offensive expression is silenced by a university, something far more precious than reputation is lost. The muddled quality of these comments, made entirely unselfconsciously by students who are acting in what they clearly understand to be the most thoughtful and socially responsible manner they can, speaks loudly to the massive, creeping ignorance of a generation that, as numerous studies have shown, knows a lot more about popular cartoon characters than the Bill of Rights. You can't know what you are losing if you don't even understand what you have.

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D'Oh!; or, How's your civic knowledge?

Can you name the freedoms protected by the First Amendment? Go here to see.

Then behold your place in a disturbing demographic trend in which more Americans are up on the finer points of popular culture than they are on their basic civics. A study recently conducted by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that while 22% of all Americans can name all five members of the animated family Simpson, only one in a thousand knows all five freedoms protected by the First Amendment. Other scary findings: More people can name the three judges on American Idol than can name three First Amendment protections, about 20% of people think that there is such a thing as the right to own a pet, and 38% of people think that the Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate yourself is actually a First Amendment protection. In sum, we are one ignorant democracy when it comes to actually knowing something about how our democracy works.

The McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum is hardly the first to document such a pattern. In 2000, ACTA conducted a survey of high school seniors to see what they did and did not know about U.S. history. The results were dismal--65% failed a basic high school-level history test; while only 23% could identify James Madison as the "Father of the Constitution," 98% knew that Snoop Doggy Dogg is a rapper, and 99% could identify Beavis and Butthead. More recently, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education conducted a study of American college students' and administrators' knowledge of their constitutional rights, and found, essentially, that American undergrads, not to mention college admins, cannot be said to know much at all about their rights: More than 66% did not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of religion and freedom of the press; more than 25% did not know that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech; more than 75% did not know that they had the right to assemble or the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

As Bart himself might say, cowabunga!

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Whither high school English?

ACT reports that of the 1.2 millions high school seniors who took the exam last year, only 51% had the reading skills necessary to begin college or to succeed in a job-training program. This is the lowest percentage in a decade, ACT notes. The numbers get even more disturbing when broken down along lines of race and class: Only 21% of black students were ready for college-level reading, while 33% of Hispanic students were; among students from families with annual incomes below $30,000, only 33% had the reading skills they would need in college.

The results are not surprising, considering that only 25% of college graduates test as "proficient" readers. What is worth noting: tests show that more eighth- and tenth-graders are on track to be ready for college than actually are prepared by the end of high school. In other words, high schools are failing to ensure that they develop students' reading skills appropriately, and they are dropping the ball in earnest during those crucial final two years of college preparation. They are then passing the problem on to colleges, which, we already know, fail dramatically to provide the depth and quality of remediation students clearly need. So clear is it to outside observers that American higher education is dramatically and devastatingly failing its students that the New York Times ran a staff editorial last Sunday calling for colleges and universities to wake up to the problem and to make themselves accountable to the public they are supposed to serve.

But the Times is a lone voice in the wilderness at the moment, even though the current findings on American literacy should be a scandal of national proportions. As Cynthia Schmeiser, senior vice president for research and development at ACT, told the Chronicle of Higher Education, "The states are silent. ... When states aren't communicating what students should know, the bottom line is you can't get what you're not being asked to learn." ACT found that more than half the states in the U.S. don't define reading standards past the eighth grade.

Read the ACT report here.

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