[CHE] A New Group Promises to Protect Campus Free Speech

it's a shame that Dr. Seuss and Pepe Le Pew have no such organization in their corner fighting for their rights

"A New Group Promises to Protect Professors’ Free Speech":

https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-new-group-promises-to-protect-professors-free-speech

A New Group Promises to Protect Professors’ Free Speech
Faculty members should have less to fear from antsy administrators and Twitter mobs.

By Wesley Yang
MARCH 8, 2021

When I spoke to the Princeton University legal scholar and political philosopher Robert P. George in August, he offered a vivid zoological metaphor to describe what happens when outrage mobs attack academics. When hunted by lions, herds of zebras “fly off in a million directions, and the targeted member is easily taken down and destroyed and eaten.” A herd of elephants, by contrast, will “circle around the vulnerable elephant.”

“Academics behave like zebras,” George said. “And so people get isolated, they get targeted, they get destroyed, they get forgotten. Why don’t we act like elephants? Why don’t we circle around the victim?”

George was then recruiting the founding members of an organization designed to fix the collective-action problem that causes academics to scatter like zebras. What had begun as a group of 20 Princeton professors organized to defend academic freedom at one college was rapidly scaling up its ambitions and capacity: It would become a nationwide organization. George had already hired an executive director and secured millions in funding.

In the summer, George emphasized that the organization must be a cross-ideological coalition of conservatives, liberals, and progressives who would be willing to exert themselves on behalf of controversial speakers no matter which constituency they had offended. Though the funding for the organization came from a primary conservative donor, and many of those who feel most besieged in today’s academic environment are on the right, the threats to academic freedom were myriad — and did not threaten only those on the right. A principled defense of core values would require scrupulous neutrality in application and significant participation from across the ideological spectrum. “If we were asked to defend Amy Wax, we would,” he said. “If we were asked to defend Marc Lamont Hill, we would.”

Today, that organization, the Academic Freedom Alliance, formally issued a manifesto declaring that “an attack on academic freedom anywhere is an attack on academic freedom everywhere,” and committing its nearly 200 members to providing aid and support in defense of “freedom of thought and expression in their work as researchers and writers or in their lives as citizens,” “freedom to design courses and conduct classes using reasonable pedagogical judgment,” and “freedom from ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.”

The alliance will intervene in academic controversy privately, by pressuring administrators, and publicly, by issuing statements citing the principles at stake in the outcomes of specific cases. Crucially, it will support those needing legal aid, either by arranging for pro bono legal representation or paying for it directly.

“Universities know,” George told me, “that university faculty can’t afford to fight city hall or the university, so they know they can do anything to these people without any consequences. So we’re going to shift that — so that the university general-counsel offices will know that the university is in the fight of its life if it violates academic-freedom rights.”

All members of the alliance have an automatic right for requests for legal aid to be considered, but the organization is also open to considering the cases of faculty nonmembers, university staff, or even students on a case-by-case basis. The alliance’s legal-advisory committee includes well-known lawyers such as Floyd Abrams and the prolific U.S. Supreme Court litigator Lisa S. Blatt.

When I spoke to him in February, as the date of AFA’s public announcement drew closer, George expressed surprise and satisfaction at the success the organization had found in signing up liberals and progressives. “If anything we’ve gone too far — we’re imbalanced over to the left side of the agenda,” he noted wryly. “That’s because our yield was a little higher than we expected it to be when we got in touch with folks.”

The yield was higher, as George would learn, quoting one such progressive member, because progressives in academe often feel themselves to be even more closely monitored for ideological orthodoxy by students and activist colleagues than their conservative peers. “‘You conservative guys, people like you and Adrian Vermeule, you think you’re vulnerable. You’re not nearly as vulnerable as we liberals are,’” George quoted this member as saying.

“They are absolutely terrified, and they know they can never keep up with the wokeness. What’s OK today is over the line tomorrow, and nobody gave you the memo.” George went on to note that some of the progressives he spoke with were indeed too frightened of the very censorious atmosphere that the alliance proposes to challenge to be willing to affiliate with it, at least at the outset.

Some of the founding members from outside of Princeton include Randall L. Kennedy, Orlando Patterson, Jeannie Suk Gersen, Janet Halley, and Cornel West at Harvard; Brian Leiter and Dorian S. Abbot at the University of Chicago; Sheri Berman at Barnard; and Kathryn L. Lynch at Wellesley.

George also spoke with enthusiasm about the successes the organization had already racked up — even before its existence had been made public. The message that George was keen to convey was that you can indeed fight the administration and win.

He cited the case of Jeffrey J. Poelvoorde, an associate professor of politics and the sole Orthodox Jewish faculty member of a small college in South Carolina. Poelvoorde refused to attend mandatory anti-racism training in the wake of the George Floyd protests — he was the only one of his colleagues to refuse. “My quarrel is not so much with the content of these materials the administration would impose on us, but rather the coercive imposition itself,” Poelvoorde wrote in a letter to administrators at Converse College.

“They told him they would fire him, they would revoke his tenure,” George told me. “He stood up to them, we came in and provided legal and moral support, and after a whole lot of Sturm und Drang, they completely caved, backed down, and exempted him.” “These are the stories people don’t know,” George went on to say. “Everyone knows the stories of people getting destroyed — the struggle sessions, the abject apologies. … But here’s a case where somebody stood up to the bullies and won.”

Nadine Strossen, a New York Law School law professor and former president of the ACLU, emphasized the problem of self-censorship that she saw the alliance as counteracting. “When somebody is attacked by a university official or, for lack of a better term, a Twitter mob, there are constant reports from all individuals targeted that they receive so many private communications and emails saying ‘I support you and agree with you, but I just can’t say it publicly.’”

She hopes that the combined reputations of the organization’s members will provide a permission structure allowing other faculty members to stand up for their private convictions in public. While a lawsuit can vindicate someone’s constitutional or contractual rights, Strossen noted, only a change in the cultural atmosphere around these issues — a preference for open debate and free exchange over stigmatization and punishment as the default way to negotiate controversy in academe — could resolve the overall problem.

The Princeton University political historian Keith E. Whittington, who is chairman of the alliance’s academic committee, echoed Strossen’s point. The recruitment effort, he said, aimed to gather “people who would be respectable and hopefully influential to college administrators — such that if a group like that came to them and said ‘Look, you’re behaving badly here on these academic-freedom principles,’ this is a group that they might pay attention to.”

“Administrators feel very buffeted by political pressures, often only from one side,” Whittington told me. “They hear from all the people who are demanding action, and the easiest, lowest-cost thing to do in those circumstances is to go with the flow and throw the prof under the bus. So we do hope that we can help balance that equation a little bit, make it a little more costly for administrators.”

Whittington, who is the author of Speak Freely, a book-length defense of free speech that was assigned to every incoming Princeton freshman in 2018 as that year’s required “preread,” took a cautious attitude toward the amount of the difference he thought the organization could make.

“I don’t want to be Pollyannish,” Whittington said. “It’s a difficult environment, and university administrators are under pressure to react to these isolated cases. And often university administrators are simply not very committed to academic freedom.”

But he regarded the initial membership yield with satisfaction. “We were hoping to find a few dozen faculty members across the country. We wound up with nearly 200.” He also noted that once the organization establishes a track record, he hopes it can become a mass-membership organization.
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conclusion:

Accompanying the announcement of the alliance’s founding is an essay by one of its members, Lucas E. Morel, professor of politics at Washington and Lee University. Morel observes the intense emphasis placed by the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass on the centrality of free speech to his cause.

When I spoke to him last week, Morel argued that Douglass’s faith that “truth must triumph under a system of free discussion” was at the very heart of the university. It was a terrible irony, he said, that some of the most vehement opposition to open discussion was coming from within the university itself.

Morel cited his own experience participating in a Zoom debate with the Northwestern University historian Leslie M. Harris over “The 1619 Project” as an instance of the erosion of good-faith truth-seeking. The debate summoned up a student petition with hundreds of signatures insisting that the centrality of slavery to the founding of the United States — a position Morel had been invited to dispute — “should not up for debate.”

“These were two tenured professors speaking about what they know about,” he said, noting that the debate was a perfectly civil and collegial exchange of views between himself and Harris — though continually interrupted by students photo-bombing the proceedings with signs bearing denunciations of the very existence of the debate. “If I had to be there physically, who knows what could have happened?”

The peroration of Morel’s essay crisply summarizes the ethos of the organization through the words of the great abolitionist:

“We intend to remind universities of the principal way to fulfill their mission, which is to protect the right of free speech throughout every academic discipline, as well as administrative or staff position. Let us declare with Frederick Douglass, ‘There can be no right of speech where any man … is overawed by force and compelled to suppress their honest sentiments.’”

Correction (March 8, 2021, 12:58 p.m.): This article originally misidentified the workplace of Nadine Strossen. She is an emerita professor of New York Law School, a private institution not affiliated with New York University.​

 

this reminds me of a quote in Vance Bourjaily's book Country Matters:

Not all dogs are fit to hunt nor, in the same way, are all men gratified by it. Nor, for those of us who share this dog's pleasure of hunting (if you will), do I ask special tolerance or understanding. We are as we are, and if we seem to you to act immorally, it is certainly your right to feel so. But I say most seriously that you exceed your rights when you urge that laws be made in the shape of your conscience to block pleasures permitted by mine. When you prevail you commit a crime against freedom, and that is the greatest immorality I know.

Vance Bourjaily, Country Matters
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https://reason.com/volokh/2021/03/08/introducing-the-academic-freedom-alliance/

excerpt:

Today the Academic Freedom Alliance goes public. I am honored to serve as the inaugural chair of the AFA's Academic Committee, and the founding members include some of my Volokh Conspiracy co-bloggers. The group boasts a broad and diverse coalition of over 200 academics from across the country who are committed to upholding the principles of free speech in academia. I am particularly pleased that we were able to pull together faculty from across the political spectrum who recognize a common threat to scholarly inquiry and robust debate on college campuses and who are willing to defend those principles whether individual professors are targeted from the left or the right, from forces on campus or off.
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more at the link

 

http://academicfreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/AFA-Letter-to-UPenn-regarding-Amy-Wax.pdf

 

here is the letter that prompted Amy Wax's response and her response:

Response from George Lee
Dear Glenn,

I viewed your recent interview with Amy Wax, and it set me thinking. A lot!

I usually agree with Amy, but her views on immigration (which she had stated earlier elsewhere) disturbed me. She is definitely onto something, but I also think something is off.

It goes without saying that I oppose illegal immigration. I also affirm that, as a sovereign state, America has the absolute and unconditional right to keep anyone out, with or without stated reason; immigration is not an entitlement.

I further agree with Amy (and you) that culture matters, and it is a bad thing for America to bring in immigrants who oppose America's basic values. But, as you pointed out, race and national origin are very poor proxies for cultural values that should be kept out of America.

As you pointed out, many Jews in the last century were socialists, Marxists, or anarchists, including Emma Goldman, Herbert Marcuse and other leading members of the Frankfurt School, Saul Alinsky, George Soros, and, yes, Albert Einstein. Even if we could agree to keep them out—we didn't—what about the other Jews? Again, no one is entitled to immigration. But do we want to do without, to give a dramatic example, key contributors to the Manhattan Project, like Edward Teller and John von Neumann, when, as it turned out, German physicist Werner Heisenberg was just one calculation error away from a Nazi atomic bomb? Amy herself did come from an immigrant Jewish family.

Similarly, while Asians like Mari Matsuda, Pramila Jayapal, and Saikat Chakrabarti begin to appear in the ranks of the Woke, as Amy warned, Asians also include the Asians of New York City, Northern Virginia, Washington State, and California, who pounded the pavement and hit the airwaves to help stem the tides of racial essentialism and collective judgment in proposed legislation, ballot initiatives, and elections. By many accounts, Asians were key marginal contributors to some of these successes. And as you also pointed out, Asians do contribute to America's scholarly, technological, and economic competitiveness, whose benefits we all share.

Let's also not forget that earlier, the Irish and Italians were thought by many to be a danger to America, because America was meant to be Protestant. As late as 1900, NYC public school textbooks still referred to Catholics as evil. This brings out the second problem with Amy's suggestion, which is that we may not be good at deciding which values will turn out to be harmful to America. The forces that bind us together or tear us apart as a viable culture—and the technologies that enable such forces either way—are dynamic over time. Aspects of Catholic immigration may very well have been real threats to the America of the late 1800s (it is all too easy for the ahistorical to judge condescendingly of the past). Looking forward, I can't think of a way for collective racial judgment to ever become consistent with our Bill of Rights, but I also accept the limitations of my wisdom; perhaps in the future, some resolution between the two may turn up that is orthogonal to my plane of thought. Deciding which cultural values are beneficial and harmful to America is harder than it appears at first, not to mention designing an adaptive implementation that makes optimal trade-offs over time!

Of course we always have the right to say, “In view of all these complications, let's just ban all immigration.” But we've seen that there are costs to that. In fact, America is in a reverse race against the rest of the advanced world heading into population collapse. Thanks to our ability to attract immigrants—with substantial human capital to boot—we are doing better relative to other nations, especially compared to our adversary, China.

I agree wholeheartedly with Amy that we should address the problems that may be forcing us to make otherwise suboptimal trade-offs for immigration: our awful schools that fail our kids in both STEM and humanities, our low fertility rates (which is not just a matter of money; the poor both-parents-working immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York can have more kids than the wealthy occasionally-working-mom family in Darien, Connecticut), our culture war against pervasive anti-American critical theory narratives, our political-social complex that normalizes multi-generational neediness and helplessness, etc. We need to confront these important challenges head on rather than bump against them tangentially through the poor proxy of immigration policy.

I agree that our current immigration system is a sorry mess. The lowest hanging fruit is to stop illegal immigration! And then there are other things to fix in our legal immigration system before we get to the complex, possibly intractable question of connecting immigration with Americanness in policy.

I am thankful, however, for your conversation with Amy. It was thoughtful, courageous, and provocative. Immigration should not be a scared cow.

Thank you, and a Happy New Year to you and your family!

George Lee

Response from Amy Wax
I have great respect for George Lee and his efforts to preserve the admissions requirements for exam high schools in New York City, and I have joined him in this cause. But I think he is too optimistic about the influence of Asians and Asian immigrants on our polity and culture. Although Lee is right that Asians vary in their political views, as do all groups, the important and often overlooked question is “how many?” Enoch Powell asked that question about third-world immigration to Britain decades ago and was excoriated and ostracized for it, but the importance and wisdom of the question prove themselves over and over.

Numbers matter, a lot! In the case of Asians in the U.S., the overwhelming majority vote Democratic. In my opinion, the Democratic Party is a pernicious influence and force in our country today. It advocates for “wokeness,” demands equal outcomes despite clear individual and group differences in talent, ability, and drive, mindlessly valorizes blacks (the group most responsible for anti-Asian violence) regardless of behavior or self-inflicted wounds, sneers at traditional family forms, undermines and disparages the advantages of personal responsibility, hard work, and accountability, and attacks the meritocracy.

I confess I find Asian support for these policies mystifying, as I fail to see how they are in Asians’ interest. We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, mindless social engineering, etc.

Maybe it’s just that Democrats love open borders, and Asians want more Asians here. Perhaps they (and especially their distaff element) are just mesmerized by the feel-good cult of “diversity.” I don’t know the answer. But as long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration. There needs to be more focus on people who are already here, and especially the core (and neglected) “legacy” population, and a push to return to traditional concepts and institutions and Charles Murray’s “American Creed.”

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there is a big difference between academic freedom--what's at stake here--and First Amendment rights. The University of Pennsylvania is a private employer.

 

academic freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_freedom

First Amendment free speech rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First...nstitution#Freedom_of_speech_and_of_the_press

 

nothing you are writing here makes any sense to me. if you want to address the particulars, fine, I'll take a look.

 

sorry, I am pretty pressed for time this week, and you're asking me to identify where you're making no sense. Can't do that.

Sam Fisher asked a question about AFA and Amy Wax. I responded directly to him with a link to AFA's statement on Amy Wax. Those are the particulars. The particulars involve academic freedom. If you want to talk about that case, or AFA's statement, I'm willing to look at that.

 

Amy Wax and the Problem of Right-Wing Double Standards on Immigration
Her support for racially discriminatory immigration policies is just the tip of a much broader iceberg of conservative support for discrimination in immigration policy of a kind they would reject in other contexts..

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/01/1...f-right-wing-double-standards-on-immigration/

excerpt:

University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax faces investigation and possible sanctions from her university, as a result of her statement that "as long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration." Her support for racial discrimination in immigration policy is not an isolated remark. At the 2019 National Conservatism conference, Wax said much the same thing about non-white immigrants generally, arguing for "the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites."

On the issue of sanctions, I largely agree with the Academic Freedom Alliance's letterabout this case, emphasizing the principle that universities should not punish faculty for out-of-class political speech (I am a member of AFA myself, but was not involved in the drafting of this letter). Penn is a private university, so the First Amendment does not apply. Nonetheless, I don't think university administrators can be trusted to enact such speech restrictions or to enforce them fairly. Any attempts to do so is likely to undermine academic freedom, and reduce the quality of intellectual discourse.

That said, Wax's statements on immigration are deeply problematic, and deserve severe criticism. Worse, they are symptomatic of a broader pattern on the right. All too many conservatives support discrimination and injustice in immigration policy of a kind they would reject elsewhere.

Wax and her supporters defend her comments on immigration by emphasizing that her objections to Asian immigrants and non-white ones generally are not about biological race, as such, but merely about their political and cultural values. If Asian immigrants voted for Republicans, rather than Democrats, she would perhaps be happy to take more of them.

But this defense doesn't cut it. Wax is still advocating large-scale racial and ethnic discrimination. The fact that she wants to use race and ethnicity as crude proxies for other characteristics doesn't make it right. Conservatives, including Wax herself, readily see that when it comes to racial preferences in college admissions, defended on the grounds that African-American applicants, for example, are more likely to have been victims of racial injustice or to contribute to "diversity" on campus. The idea that blacks are, on average, more likely to have experienced racism in American society than whites, is likely true. Nonetheless, Wax rejects such rationales for racial preferences, on principle, and instead (correctly, in my view) advocates color-blind admissions.

The very same logic should dictate color-blindness - and rejection of ethnic and national-origin discrimination - in immigration policy, as well. Indeed, racial and ethnic discrimination in immigration policy is a far greater injustice than affirmative action preferences in university admissions. Most victims of the latter still get to go to college in the US, usually at universities only modestly less prestigious than the ones that rejected them. By contrast, many victims of racial and ethnic discrimination in immigration policy are consigned to a lifetime of poverty and oppression in their countries of origin.

If the reason to oppose racial and ethnic discrimination in college admissions is that government and university bureaucrats can't be trusted to craft such policies fairly, the same point applies in spades to immigration policy. Indeed, anti-Asian discrimination in the former is often motivated by the same sorts of crude stereotypes as the latter.

To the extent that (as in Wax's case) discrimination in immigration are based on generalizations about the political views of various racial and ethnic groups, they also run up against principles of freedom of speech. It is striking that many of the same conservatives who advocate viewpoint-based immigration restrictions are also deeply angry about "cancel culture" and government attempts to combat supposed "misinformation" online. If we can't trust government and university officials to properly regulate speech on social media or that of academics like Wax, why should we trust the government to decide which would-be immigrants' political views are acceptable, and which ones have bad cultural values?

That's especially true if we are talking about excluding people not based on their actual views, but merely based on crude generalizations about the views of members of their racial or ethnic group. If Wax ends up getting punished for her statements, it will at least be for things she actually said. It would be much worse if she were sanctioned merely because she is white, and university administrators concluded that whites, on average, are more likely to have reprehensible views on racial issues than members of other groups.
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more at the link