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| One of the more troubling survey results. Probably. |
Nearly 2/3 of the 257 colleges and universities studied received a failing grade from FIRE, and none got better than a B-. Of course, if what you want to do is to show the need for your organization, you’re likely to paint a rather gloomy picture of the status quo, so perhaps a grain of salt is called for. Still, it’s chilling that FIRE President Greg Lukianoff’s could comment that,
Rather than hearing out and then responding to an ideological opponent, both liberal and conservative college students are retreating from the encounter entirely. This will only harm students’ ability to think critically and create rifts between them. We must champion free speech on campus as a remedy to our culture's deep polarization.
A third of college students surveyed agreed that violence is
acceptable, at least “rarely,” to stop speech.
A majority said they would oppose their school’s inviting any of
six controversial speakers (three from the left and three from the right) to
campus. Note: these are not specific
individuals, apparently, but hypothetical people who are quoted as saying
something controversial, e.g., “children should be allowed to transition
without parental consent” or “transgender people have a mental disorder.” You get the picture, Gentle Reader.
Of course, some of this gets into areas of fungible
definitions. Is grabbing and restraining
someone who is inciting violence (i.e., engaging in non-protected
speech) perpetrating violence against that person? Or is the term limited to punching out
someone you disagree with? Does “rarely”
mean “only in extremely rare circumstances” (such as just described) or just
“not very often”? And what is meant by “invite”? Is that my tuition money that’s being spent
on bringing in this person whose views I abhor, or is it the Young Republicans/Democrats/whatever
footing the bill?
Similarly, it’s also difficult for a university to
legitimately be blamed for students’ reluctance to discuss controversial issues
in entirely social atmospheres outside the classroom. If, for example, a student hears another
student advocating a position on abortion or the conflict in Gaza which is
radically different from their own, choosing not to express a contrary view may
be appropriate if that decision comes not from fear but from simply not wanting
to be bothered.
Similarly, Curmie has three different responses to those who
disagree with his posts, both here on the blog and, considerably more frequently,
on the Facebook page. (No one has really
taken issue with anything he’s posted on BlueSky; that bridge will be crossed
if/when reached.) Usually, the comment
simply remains with no counter-argument.
Curmie isn’t afraid of detractors, but sometimes they’re just not worth
the trouble. Sometimes, Curmie responds
with a clarification or further argument.
Rarely (there’s that word, again), he’ll ban someone. (He hasn’t done that in several years.)
For all this, FIRE’s work, whether arguing against speech
codes, protecting research from government interference, or working to
eliminate loyalty oaths (including towards DEI advocacy), is unquestionably a
net positive, and the free speech rankings contribute towards this utility.
FIRE is, to be sure, enormously and not infrequently smugly
proud of their work, and Wednesday’s webinar to hype the new rankings showed
that off. Curmie does not begin to profess
to any expertise in survey, data collection and analysis, and the like, but he does
come by his soubriquet honestly, and there was more than one instance in which
his eyebrow raised in skepticism.
A couple examples, paraphrased to what Curmie was hearing
(perhaps not what the speaker thought he was saying). “Well, we have this totally subjective green/yellow/red
light analysis, and we’ll give you points if you’re green and take them away if
you’re not…. We don’t really pay any attention to the good things you’ve done
unless you pro-actively tell us about them before the rankings come out…. If you sign on to the Chicago principles, you
get points for that; actually following them is (apparently) of less importance….”
The whole process seems to be an attempt to make a
fundamentally subjective analysis seem objective. Curmie has been guilty of the same; he’s not
pretending otherwise, but he at least tries to let the audience in on the
extent to which the evidence is or is not trustworthy. And he’d definitely be interested in how self-selecting
respondents were. He knows how course
evaluations work, after all. As soon as
they became optional, they lost pretty much all credibility. If there are 20 students in a class—5 loved it,
3 hated it, and a dozen thought it was OK, you’ll get two positive responses,
three negative responses, and two “meh” responses. How FIRE’s methodology addresses this problem
would be worth knowing.
More problematic was the avoidance of the proverbial
elephant in the room. That’s a
particularly apt expression, since the elephant is the symbol of the Republican
Party, which, at least in states like Florida and Texas (there are others, no
doubt), is the greatest threat to free speech on university campuses.
As many readers of this blog know and others will have
surmised, Curmie is a retired professor at a state university in Texas. That makes him both a little more knowledgeable
and, admittedly, a little more biased in his interpretation of what is
transpiring. But he finds it difficult
to understand how a student’s willingness or unwillingness to discuss controversial
subjects in a purely social setting is more relevant to free speech concerns
than is a professor’s ability to determine what should and should not be taught
in a course in their area of expertise.
This summer, Greg Abbott and his simpering acolytes in the
Texas legislature passed SB27, which is as anti-intellectual, authoritarian,
and generally reprehensible a piece of legislation as Curmie can recall, anywhere,
ever. Curmie hopes to write a longer essay
on this, but let’s just say that articles like the ones linked here and here pretty well reflect Curmie’s thinking.
The bill strips faculty of the right to elect their own
representatives, de facto grants state government the right to overturn
any decision made at a state university, and gives whatever local authority
remains exclusively to the president. The
president is appointed, often unilaterally, by the regents, who are appointed
by the governor. In the over two decades
that Curmie has been affiliated with the university from which he is now
retired, not a single regent has not been a hard-core Republican. Indeed, their political affiliations have
often been trotted out as if they were credentials for the job.
But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, “Wait! That’s not all!” SB37 is, more than anything, an assault on
academic freedom and, by extension, of freedom of speech. Political hacks are scouring every syllabus,
looking for anything that might challenge right-wing ideology or even suggest that
different points of view might not only exist, but reasonably exist.
And now we circle back to that webinar, in which viewers were
encouraged to submit questions. So
Curmie did so. He can’t reproduce his
question verbatim, but it was something like this: “In an environment in which
state legislatures are exercising what amounts to absolute control over
curriculum, why are you surveying only students and not faculty about free
speech issues?” His question was ignored,
while the moderator cheerfully moved on a softball questions from someone she
identified as her friend. OK, there were
probably more questions than could have been accommodated in the time frame,
and the answer to my question, pretty much “it’s hard to do that,” was sort of
hinted at in response to a different question.
But it wasn’t the avoidance of Curmie’s question that really
stood out. Someone asked about the news
out of Texas A&M,
where a single narcissistic and reactionary student circulated a surreptitious video
of challenging a professor for including a discussion of verboten (by
Trump/Abbott) topics like gender identity and transgender people. A grandstanding pol got involved, and soon
the professor was fired, the dean and department chair demoted, and the
president at the very least under fire.
Edicts about what can and cannot be taught in a university
classroom are clear violations of academic freedom and evidence of authoritarianism.
Firing a professor without even the pretense of due process is illegal, or at
least would be in any state with a governor or state legislatures that weren’t so
proudly anti-intellectual. Curmie is loath
to use terms that exaggerate the gravity of a situation, but if this isn’t
fascism, the footwear sure does seem to be the correct size.
Anyway, whoever asked the question didn’t go into any details,
just that a professor at A&M had been fired. Someone from FIRE acknowledged the situation
in about a half a sentence, didn’t explain the context to listeners who might not
have heard about the incident, and then proclaimed in the Q&A link that the
question had been answered. NO, IT
FUCKING WASN’T!
FIRE still, as of this writing, hasn’t addressed the situation
at A&M, just as they never addressed the question of religious charters chools in Oklahoma,
but they did get out a brief statement about the shooting of Charlie Kirk,
leaping to the conclusion that it was politically motivated. (It might very well have been, but certainly
didn’t know that when the statement was released.)
PEN America, however, responded swiftly and surely. Here’s Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms Managing Director of U.S. Free Expression Programs:
We are witnessing the death of academic freedom in Texas, the remaking of universities as tools of authoritarianism that suppress free thought. The decision to remove these academic leaders to satisfy politicians’ demands is an excessive punishment for the alleged violation of transparency requirements. When university presidents have little choice but to dismiss faculty members’ expertise and enforce ideological edicts, the space for free speech and open inquiry on our campuses is undeniably being suffocated.
As he writes this, Curmie is a member of FIRE but not of PEN
America. Both those situations are
likely to change in the relatively near future.
Back when he was teaching, Curmie assigned texts by the
likes of Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Augusto Boal, and
Irish drag queen Panti Bliss (Curmie encourages you to look up any of these
folks who are new to you, Gentle Reader): not to get students to agree with
their ideologies, but because you can’t understand the entirety of the way
theatre and the larger culture interact without acknowledging the voices that
may be on the periphery in one way or another.
If he were still teaching, Curmie wouldn’t change his syllabus or his teaching style one iota to accommodate the dictates of petty tyrants like Abbott or Trump. It’s a good thing he’s retired, then. This way, they won’t have to fire him.
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