Meanwhile on the International front....

I agree with Suroweicki. ... except he knows, as well as I do, that most people happily allowed that barn door to be blown off its hinges a long time ago.

All of those schools receive Federal financial assistance of various sorts. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 says that they can't get that Federal funding if they are discriminatory, and the Department of Education has been given broad authority to go after them if it decides in its bureaucratic wisdom that they are being discriminatory (as they define it at any given time).

Federal agencies have their authority because Congress gives it to them. So a Congressional committee on education holds the purse strings and the ability to empower or disempower the Department of Education in doing that "work." As a result, that committee can certainly hold a hearing in overseeing it all. And at that hearing, the universities that are asked to come can talk about academic freedom. And grandstanding elected morons can do what they do.

I agree that government shouldn't be in this business. But if people want to point to the first amendment, they are then saying that a gazillion other instances of the Civil Rights Act being used to make people jump through hoops about what some administrator has decided is "inclusive" violates people's first amendment rights, too. In practice? People are very selective about their outrage when it comes to stuff like this, depending on who is the crosshairs and why.

My personal opinion. ... The academic freedom / free speech arguments those university presidents are now making rings hollow, because they have been very selective in their actions. They pick and choose when to speak out and take on causes and castigate members of their communities. ... and when they don't want to, they hide behind free speech and academic freedom. For years, there has been an atmosphere of "preferred speech" on campuses, not free speech, indicative of a brand of activism that has divided everyone along racial lines -- everyone vying for preference and acknowledgment of some kind of victimization -- and then a forced narrative that certain groups are oppressed and others are oppressors (with no nuance allowed, no allowance for anyone's individuality). ... That is exactly what is feeding what is going on right now.

Those administrations are petrified of the students -- almost an entire age group -- that has bought into the divisiveness and very simplistic narratives about "privilege" and "oppression" and how broad groups of people have been labeled by them. There are faculty members at these schools that have fed all kinds of destructive attitudes. Anyone challenging it reflexively gots shouted down and called a racist or a bigot, and at worst, cancel culture took root. The universities themselves, afraid of being branded something bad, coddled it. And now it is biting them in the ass like a realtime Lord of the Flies plot.

The biggest problem now for those university presidents is that jewish alumni at some schools, who had been contributing a boatload of money to their endowments, got very pissed off. So Congress can grandstand away, but if anything changes in what those administrations choose to speak out about and what not to speak out about, it's going to be the financial hit that is pretty serious. In particular, UPenn has some very wealthy jewish alums who are sending $1 checks right now (instead of the large donations they have made in previous years), and I don't think Liz Magill (and the trustees) can possibly survive how she has mishandled her job. I just think they are trying to hold off as long as possible before there are changes to make it seem like the changes didn't come under pressure.

 

Thx

 

HE'S BACK!

 

Thx Inky.