The state of higher education

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ohio-l...of-toledo-568261f9?mod=hp_opin_pos_6#cxrecs_s

Ohio May Start a Free Speech School
Ohio State could soon have a redoubt for free academic inquiry.
By The Editorial Board
May 7, 2023 at 5:32 pm ET

Free speech on campus has been making a modest comeback of late, as more schools look for ways to reintroduce classical liberal principles of civic debate and expression. The latest step forward is in Ohio, where the Legislature is planning a new school for free expression and academic inquiry in Columbus.

Lawmakers on Wednesday introduced a bill to create the Salmon P. Chase center for civics, culture and society at Ohio State University. Named for the former Ohio Governor who was also a Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the school would be an independent academic unit on campus that would focus on the “historical ideas, traditions and texts that have shaped the American Constitutional order and society.”

The school is intended to encourage greater academic diversity. It will “create a community dedicated to an ethic of civil and free inquiry, which respects the intellectual freedom of each member,” according to the legislation. Classes will include lessons on the “books and major debates which form the intellectual foundation of free societies.” A school with a similar writ will be created at the University of Toledo College of Law.

Ohio State’s plan, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Robert McColley and Sen. Jerry Cirino, follows a similar effort at the University of North Carolina, where the trustees this year announced a new School of Civic Life and Leadership. That plan enraged many in the school’s left-leaning faculty who are trying to block the project.

Mr. McColley tells us that Ohio’s effort is aimed at “receentering the topics and experience of higher education.” College was “once known as a place to explore the viewpoints of others around you,” without being subjected to a heckler’s veto, he adds.

The best development would be for school presidents to reclaim instruction and debate from campus censors. But too few are willing to risk their careers or endure harassment to do it. The rise of the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy has also institutionalized the use of race and gender as weapons to claim offense and censor speech that upsets progressive sensibilities.

That leaves the school-within-a-school idea as one way to establish a redoubt for open intellectual inquiry. There’s always the risk that these schools can also be captured, but give Ohio lawmakers credit for trying.

Appeared in the May 8, 2023, print edition as 'Ohio May Start a Free Speech School'.
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https://leiterreports.typepad.com/b...to-deplatform-philosopher-kathleen-stock.html

Students in the UK are still trying to deplatform philosopher Kathleen Stock

It's apparently not enough to have run her out of her job, some of them still can't abide her being invited to speak. The latest incident was at Oxford. Philosopher Jeff McMahan (Oxford) kindly shared the very good letter he and other Oxford academics (including many philosophers [e.g., Timothy Williamson, Joel Hamkins, John Tasioulas, etc.]) sent to The Telegraph. An excerpt (I added bolding to the crucial point):

Professor Stock believes that biological sex in humans is real and socially salient, a view which until recently would have been so commonplace as to hardly merit asserting. Whether or not one agrees with Professor Stock’s views, there is no plausible and attractive ideal of academic freedom, or of free speech more generally, which would condemn their expression as outside the bounds of permissible discourse. Unfortunately, the position of her opponents seems to be that Professor Stock’s views are so illicit that they cannot be safely discussed in front of an audience of consenting and intelligent adults at the main debating society at the University of Oxford. If this were the case, it is doubtful that they could be safely expressed anywhere – a result that, as her opponents are no doubt satisfied to find, would amount to their effective prohibition.​

Anyone who disagrees with the bolded bit is really not fit for university life.

Posted by Brian Leiter on May 17, 2023 at 10:00 AM
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I think the risk of forcing "viewpoint compliance" is the real issue here, not the courses themselves

https://jonathanturley.org/2023/05/...dents-to-take-social-justice-writing-courses/

9 minutes ago
“We Have a Captive Audience”: Boston University to Require Students to Take Social Justice Writing Courses
by jonathanturley

Boston University recently made a new announcement that has rekindled concerns over the rising orthodoxy in our institutions of higher education. The University issued new guidelines for its mandatory writing program that will require all students to write papers with a “social justice emphasis” as a condition for graduation. The key faculty organizers celebrated the new policy and the hiring of non-white instructors as guaranteeing social justice results by making students a “captive audience” with no choice in the matter.

Student will now have to choose among such choices as “Linguistic Justice…Who Cares?: Domestic Labor and the Commodification of Care,” “Asians Are People of Color: Exploring the Controversy and Identity Politics,” “Deconstructing Narratives: Stories of Race and Racism in American Cultural Memory” and “Writing Environmental Justice.”

Gwen Kordonowy, the Writing Program’s associate director, said that the problem in the past was that students had a choice and some did not want to be forced into writing for social justice issues. Instructors and classes could be avoided. Now, they have solved the problem by removing all choice.

She heralded the hiring of non-white faculty to teach the social justice courses, using the first-year requirement to “reach every student at BU.” With that, she explained, “we have a captive audience. We never worry about enrollment.”

Writing Program Director Sarah Hardy said that the “cluster hiring” of minority faculty and the mandatory course requirements are meant to finally end the “predominance of white faculty in academia” by limiting the choices of students.

The BU announcement includes a statement from instructor Swati Rani that she will be teaching students to apply the “language around anti-racism” and emphasized that “all of my students are required to develop a voice of advocacy in their final papers and projects that are directly connected to their intersectional lives at BU.”

There is every reason to celebrate classes that add different perspectives and subjects to the curriculum. It is the mandatory element that is troubling if students will be required to write in favor of approved social justice causes.

What happens to students in this “captive audience” who do not support social justice causes? These are subjects that touch on deep religious, social, and political values in our society.

While many of us have objected to the orthodoxy and viewpoint intolerance on our campuses, there remains some element of choice at most schools that allow students to avoid such classes. The BU program raises the question of whether political orthodoxy among faculty becomes political indoctrination through mandatory graduation requirements.

It is certainly true that students are a captive audience in the sense of having to meet basic requirements for graduation. However, most universities have guaranteed a degree of intellectual and curricular diversity among their course offerings. Indeed, some like University of Chicago focused on the “core curriculum” to lay a uniform foundation in classic subject matters while allowing students to tailor their courses to their interests after the first-year. The thrust was to teach analytical and writing skills separate from political or cultural viewpoints. BU seems to be erasing the distinction between skills and viewpoint development.

Rani explains that in her course “we call out performative wokeness culture by asking ourselves what solutions we have to problems of injustice.” What if a student does not believe that there is “linguistic injustice” or rejects the cited “problems of injustice” in these courses? What if they reject not just “performative” but any form of wokeness?

Once again, some of these courses seem very interesting and I expect would be a draw for many students. However, by making these courses mandatory, BU could be making viewpoint compliance a condition for graduation.

For some of us, it was the reference to students as captives to these courses that was the most jarring.

The university has an obligation, in my view, to assure students and faculty that students are not reduced to mere captives to a type of viewpoint indoctrination. That can be achieved by showing guaranteeing the students are not being graded on their ability to mouth the social justice priorities of instructors.
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White Historian Insists Her Career Would Have Been Easier If She Were Black
Lois Banner made her racist remarks over the holiday weekend during the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.

https://www.theroot.com/white-historian-insists-her-career-would-have-been-easi-1850605969

excerpt:

On Friday, a white retired professor and historian infuriated conference participants as she made racist remarks during a speech. Lois Banner, a USC professor emerita of history, insisted that if she were Black her career would have been easier during an appearance at Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Adding insult to injury, she also wished she was a lesbian “because they were good at building community and organizing,” according to The Daily Beast.

Banner co-founded the event in the 1970s. Her comment upset listeners so much that several of them stormed out from the talk in protest. On Twitter, attendee and PhD candidate Stephanie Narrow explained exactly what happened.
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more at the link

 

https://leiterreports.typepad.com/b...-psychologist-at-harvard-business-school.html

Another case of apparent data fraud, this time by a psychologist at Harvard Business School
From CHE:

Three studies co-authored by Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School, are on their way to being retracted following allegations that they contain fraudulent data.

A trio of academics have been writing a series of posts on their blog, Data Colada, about what they characterize as evidence of fraud in four of the renowned behavioral scientist’s papers. Their findings were sent to Harvard in the fall of 2021, the bloggers wrote, and the university was seeking to have them retracted.

Their allegations, along with their suggestion that “many more Gino-authored papers” could “contain fake data,” have set off a panic among Gino’s dozens of collaborators. Now that Gino is on administrative leave, as The Chronicle reported this month, many researchers are looking with suspicion at the scholar, who rose to prominence for her eye-catching research into — among other things — dishonesty.....

The fourth paper that the Data Colada bloggers examined — and the first that they wrote about — was published in 2012. It found that signing an honesty pledge at the top of a form, rather than at the bottom, decreased cheating. A number of rows in the dataset appeared to have been manually tampered with, the data detectives wrote, in a way that bolstered the result that signing at the top decreased cheating.

But it can’t get retracted — because it already has been. That happened in the fall of 2021, after Data Colada found separate evidence of fraud in the third experiment in the paper. That data had been procured from an insurance company by only one co-author, Dan Ariely of Duke, who has denied being the one who fabricated it.​

As Professor Brian Skyrms, who flagged this for me, quipped: "It seems that data manipulation pays off very well if you don’t get caught."

Posted by Brian Leiter on July 06, 2023 at 07:59 AM
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Americans' Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply

https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx

 

I think this trend is only going to get worse

Reading for fun plunges to ‘crisis’ level for US students

https://thehill.com/homenews/educat...-fun-plunges-to-crisis-level-for-us-students/

 

not so much that it is influenced by higher education but rather the trend will continue to affect higher education. I've seen the changes in each successive cohort of students since ~1990 or so. Students today (as a gross generalization) have a far worse feel for the language than students 30 years ago. While the top students are still very much as good as ever, there seem to be far fewer of them, and I'm not alone in making this observation.

The loss of reading at an early age affects everything from students' ability to comprehend college-level material but also their ability to write and/or organize their thinking.

 

I think this was published today

 

Terry Eagleton

It’s time to abolish the university
Let’s stop pretending academic study is worthwhile

https://unherd.com/2023/08/its-time-to-abolish-the-university/