All of this might have been enough to convince the people who run Harvard that they needed to make some changes, and, in fairness, they have made a few small ones. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences did away with mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring but replaced them with a service statement that could easily be used to weed out candidates on the same grounds. And it partially adopted institutional neutrality, leaving out a key and currently essential part: that political divestment to get the university to take sides is off the table—National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood saw this coming.

But, despite these small steps, or even because of how small they were, it was reasonable to remain skeptical about whether Harvard had really understood the message. Professor and Dean of Social Science Lawrence D. Bobo has made it eminently clear that it did not get through to him.

Rather than admitting the need for soul-searching and real, substantive changes, he argues in a new editorial posted to The Harvard Crimson that faculty who criticize Harvard publicly should be sanctioned by the university. Yes, you read that correctly. Instead of recognizing that Harvard is under intense scrutiny and suffering a reputational crisis because it has proven itself to be morally and intellectually corrupt, Professor Bobo thinks the way to restore calm to campus is to weaken the academic freedom of Harvard’s faculty even further.

Consider the irony: this institution consistently ranks dead last and occupies its own “abysmal” category for free expression on campus. This is the same place that forced Carole Hooven out for stating there are two sexes. Tyler J. VanderWeele was canceled for his views on marriage. Bobo himself participated in the punishment of Professor Roland Fryer, whose academic work Bobo had previously criticized. After a sexual harassment investigation recommended sensitivity training for Professor Fryer, Professor Bobo and the then-dean of FAS Claudine Gay suspended him for two years and closed his lab.

It is not surprising but still stunning that Professor Bobo thinks the solution to Harvard’s ills is to clamp down on faculty speech. His desire to punish faculty members who “incite external actors—be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government—to intervene in Harvard’s affairs” is yet another revelation of how firmly entrenched the problems at the university are.

His perspective, which implies that Harvard’s issues are merely a public relations problem rather than a profound moral and intellectual crisis of its own making, reveals a level of arrogance and entitlement shared by too many faculty members—an attitude that urgently needs to be corrected.

Calling donors and alumni “external actors” and suggesting they should have no role in the institution’s governance is wrong and insulting.

Alumni do participate, for example, in selecting Harvard’s board members. Donors are obviously entitled to have a say in how their donations are used. Alumni and donors are undoubtedly members of the Harvard community, and any self-respecting person associated with Harvard should demand that Bobo retract this claim and apologize.

Harvard relies on the media to share news about its research and societal contributions. The idea that its faculty should protect it from negative scrutiny suggests a cultish commitment to face-saving that is at odds with Harvard’s commitment to truth and only deepens public suspicion of the institution. It is also deeply ironic given that Bobo published a public editorial criticizing Harvard and its policies but would happily take away his colleague’s speech and limit their ability to voice their concerns.

Beyond all of this, universities, including private ones like Harvard, need to recognize that their autonomy and academic freedom are granted as part of a social contract from which American society expects to benefit. They should be generally free to govern their own affairs and allowed a broad degree of latitude out of respect for academic freedom, but academics have done such incredible damage to their own sector that the most recent poll shows that public confidence in higher education has dropped to 28 percent. When will they recognize just how strained their relationship to American society is and accept that they are largely to blame for it?

The idea that Harvard should respond to scrutiny by closing in on itself and punishing faculty who make public criticisms of the university is both perfectly on brand and so stunningly obtuse that it beggars belief. Bobo accuses his colleagues of “conscious action that would seriously harm the University and its independence.” However, he and any like-minded colleagues should realize they are harming Harvard.

As Dean of Social Science at Harvard, Bobo is powerful. He controls funding and has huge influence over the careers of scores of faculty; his remarks are clearly intended to threaten his colleagues to follow particular norms and suggest an informal policy that punishes particular speech and expression, which is the antithesis of Harvard’s mission of pursuing “truth.”

Bobo and his colleagues should remember the following warning from the American Association of University Professors’ 1915 Declaration of Principles:

If this profession should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and the unworthy or to prevent the freedom that it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task will be performed by others.

Rather than asking how they can protect themselves from richly deserved and necessary criticism, Professor Bobo and his colleagues should ask themselves what they can do to earn back the trust and respect of alumni, donors, and the American people.

This post appeared on Minding The Campus on June 17, 2024.

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In an essay published by the New York Times the same day the report was released, Noah Feldman and Alison Simmons, co-chairs of the Institutional Voice Working Group, wrote that they “didn’t address . . . the hard problem of when the university should or shouldn’t divest its endowment funds from a given portfolio.” The University of Chicago, on the other hand, which has led the way on institutional neutrality since the publication of the Kalven Report in 1967, has made clear that divestment is incompatible with the values of a great university. It issued an unequivocal statement in 2016 saying that it will not entertain economic or academic boycotts against any nation, including Israel.

ACTA has also long stood against divestment, including in our 2017 report detailing the coordinated efforts of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine to advance the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement. We explained that BDS referenda passed at 12 colleges in the 2014–15 academic year and urged trustees to stand firmly against this pressure. When external agitators try to bend university governance toward a given agenda, a commitment to institutional neutrality quickly disposes of that.

Other academic leaders have shown a better way forward in recent months. Vanderbilt University’s chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, advocates for (and practices) “principled neutrality,” arguing that a university should be unyielding in the values it upholds and that those values “should be expressed as behavioral norms necessary for fulfilling its mission, not as an imposition of one opinion on the university community.” The same principle enlivens the classroom, too. University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos wrote in November 2023, “It is the imperative of individuals within the University to seek truth without being limited by authority. This institutional neutrality is essential to vesting freedom of speech in our faculty members and students.” He relied on principle this spring when he refused to consider divestment, as demanded by the protesters on his campus.

ACTA will be carefully monitoring actions taken by Harvard leadership in the coming months and whether the Kalven Report’s principles of institutional neutrality are correctly practiced. At present, ACTA cannot recognize Harvard University as a practitioner of principled institutional neutrality. ACTA President Michael B. Poliakoff stated, “It is good that Harvard will no longer issue official political statements, but we should never forget the circumstances that led to the adoption of this policy, and, in light of them, it is deeply troubling that Harvard could not bring itself to rule out divestment and adopt a full policy of institutional neutrality. In other words, Harvard needs a firm policy, not an evasive pretense.”

Steven McGuire, ACTA’s Paul & Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom, added, “While Harvard has taken an important first step toward adopting institutional neutrality, its new policy remains disappointingly incomplete, and Harvard has a lot of work to do before it will embody the commitments to free expression and diversity of thought that this policy seeks to support and protect. We continue to encourage Harvard to become an institution that truly embraces the values of academic freedom and viewpoint diversity that it appeals to in this report.”

The post ACTA Credits Harvard for New Policy on Official Statements, but Urges More Robust Commitment to Institutional Neutrality appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Northwestern president Michael Schill insisted that he spoke in his own voice, “Mike Schill, citizen, Jew and human being” in his condemnation of the October 7 massacre  and not for the institution. His respect for institutional neutrality was reasoned and defensible. But how ready he is to jettison it now, quaking in the face of student demands!

His self-congratulatory statement of April 30 is spineless capitulation, or, to use Churchill’s phrase, “boneless”: “This agreement was forged by the hard work of students and faculty working closely with members of the administration to help ensure that the violence and escalation we have seen elsewhere does not happen here at Northwestern” and that “the agreement includes support for our Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students.” Schill notably ignored Northwestern’s Anti-Defamation League Campus Antisemitism Report Card drop from “D” to “F,” and, in his Congressional testimony before House Committee on Education and the Workforce, he defended his encampment deal claiming, “By engaging students with dialogue instead of force, we modeled the behavior we want to apply going forward.”

Schill is now joined by the leadership of Brown, Evergreen, Minnesota, and the University of Washington. On the same day as Northwestern’s capitulation, Brown’s president Christina Paxson agreed, in return for the dismantling of the encampment (which, she specified, violated Brown’s policies) that there would be no suspensions or expulsions of those protesters, and discussion of divestment would proceed. Also on April 30, Evergreen State University added a particularly noisome twist to its capitulation on divestment: it will no longer approve study abroad in Israel, in other words, agreement to a discriminatory academic boycott. And one day later, Minnesota caved to five of the six demands, including divestment talks, balking only at banning targeted employers from its job fairs. It was a very bad week for rule of law and university governance. Tacitus once wrote, “They wreak devastation and call it peace.” It works for boneless wonders, too.

The appeasements continued. Williams College, whose president wrote on October 12 of her neutrality that precludes sending campus-wide messages no matter what the circumstances, quickly abandoned neutrality and agreed to allow the protesters to present their views on divestment to the board of trustees.

Harvard University, which earlier had set up a committee to consider institutional neutrality, offered a sit-down between protesters and a representative of the Harvard Corporation.

Divestment should, from the very beginning, be off the table. Wise institutions have steadily, especially since October 7, recognized, albeit late, the wisdom of the University of Chicago Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action.

Written amidst the desperate turmoil of the era of the Vietnam War, it reads, in part: “…there emerges, as we see it, a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day…”  The University of Chicago recently invoked it, in the face of demands from its own students for divestment from Israel:

Over more than a century, through a great deal of vigorous debate, the University has developed a consensus against taking social or political stances on issues outside its core mission. The University’s longstanding position is that doing this through investments or other means would only diminish the University’s distinctive contribution — providing a home for faculty and students to espouse and challenge the widest range of social practices and beliefs.

If the boneless wonders regain their vision and fortitude, they also have good models to follow at Vanderbilt and the University of Florida. Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier’s logic was crystalline:

…our three commitments are free speech, or we call it open form, institutional neutrality, which means that the university will not take policy positions unless they directly affect the operating of the university. So we don’t take a position on foreign policy, and a commitment to civil discourse. Now, calling for BDS, for a boycott of Israel, is inconsistent with institutional neutrality… we’re not going to go there.

President of the University of Florida Ben Sasse has properly steered the university through the storms. Sasse proclaimed that adult behavior at UF is mandatory: “This is not complicated: The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.”

This is the way forward from the campus disgrace we are witnessing. Our nation’s colleges have long been engines of equality and innovation and they must have leaders who can keep them focused on reaching those goals by being neutral and having rules and standards applied consistently and universally.

This post appeared on AEIdeas on May 28, 2024.

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Which makes you wonder: Who put this crew in charge? It does not seem to occur to the protest community that such decisions are supposed to be the result of stakeholders pushing for change and officialdom wanting to accommodate them.

Not extortion.

College protests have spread beyond Columbia and Harvard to campuses across the country. And if a poll of 719 Columbia students, faculty and workers conducted by New York Magazine and the Columbia Daily Spectator is to be believed, 68 percent of those at Morningside Heights hope pro-Palestinian demands are met.

Hamas should be happy with American academia.

Me? I stand with Israel. I also agree that all students and faculty have a free-speech right to express opposing views. But they do not have a right to trespass on campus quads, and they do not have a right to keep students who want to learn from college classrooms.

As Steven McGuire of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA, told me, “Most if not all of these encampments can and should be shut down on the basis of content-neutral policies.” He’s right.

So where do we go from here?

Fight hate speech with smart speech. Social media platforms have enabled critics to see just how twisted many of the woke pro-Hamas protesters are.

At George Washington University, a small group of students had a bullhorn dialogue about how great it would be to execute — actually behead — administrators. “To the guillotine,” they chanted, apparently undisturbed that they were aligning themselves with the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.

Columbia student Khymani James shared his negative views on Zionism on social media: “I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill,” James wrote. James, who has apologized, has been barred from Columbia’s campus.

Good luck finding a good job if any of you actually graduate.

Last year, hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman called on fellow big shots not to hire students who blamed Israel, not Hamas, for the Oct. 7 massacre that left more than 1,200 dead. It’s time the protest class realized that bad ideas and a general lack of judgment can have consequences.

Activists who broke laws — by damaging property or trespassing — should face serious consequences. They prevented students who wanted to to learn in a classroom from a chance to do so. They also cost their institutions a lot of money. Their privileged status as students should not exempt them.

Anyone who’s involved in organizing or leading campus occupations, McGuire offered, “should receive some pretty significant discipline.” That could be a suspension, and in extreme cases “even expulsion.”

(I’d add clean-up duty. Make tent dwellers clean up after themselves.)

But McGuire cautioned, “I’d be surprised if we see consistent, strong follow-through,” because for too many years, administrators caved to chaos.

Now it’s time to grow up.

This appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on May 7, 2024.

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Americans already knew higher education leaned to the left. What many did not know is how many faculty, staff, and students are so committed to corrosive, anti-civilizational ideologies that they could not even pause to acknowledge victims of terror or condemn their attackers.

As some unleashed their hatred of Israel, Jews, or both in the wake of October 7, large numbers of others applied the simplistic oppressor-oppressed, post-colonialist narrative they have imbibed during their time in our educational institutions and turned out to protest and disrupt their campuses.

Meanwhile, most college and university presidents were dumbfounded. Perhaps they, like many Americans, did not know what some of their employees and students really thought. More likely, they knew but did not expect so many of them to say the quiet part out loud.

Either way, they had to contend with a problem they had not faced when responding to past social and political events. They could denounce Hamas and stand with Israel but alienate a large contingent on their campuses, or they could appeal to principles of neutrality and freedom they had historically violated and incur the wrath of donors, alumni, politicians, and many others who would rightly smell the rank hypocrisy.

As they fumbled their responses, they allowed disorder to spread across their campuses, mostly without consequence, even as Jewish students filed lawsuits and Title VI complaints reporting alleged incidents of anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination.

Jews and others who believe laws have been broken should absolutely pursue legal action, but authorities can and should have readily dispersed many of the disruptions, including the current encampments, for violating content-neutral policies regarding time, place, and manner.

Some administrators have acted and should be applauded for doing so. When students rushed into Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr’s office building a few weeks ago, she gave them 10 minutes to leave and then suspended the students and had them arrested.

At Vanderbilt University, 27 protesters who forced their way into a building housing the chancellor’s office lasted less than 24 hours before the administration had them marched out by police, some in handcuffs. In the end, four students were arrested, three expelled, one suspended, and over 20 placed on probation. Chancellor Daniel Diermeier explained the school’s approach: “We clearly state the principles and rules that support our mission as a university. Then we enforce them.”

This is precisely what campus leaders must do. Allowing students to break the rules with impunity or applying rules inconsistently leads them to push the limits further while opening leadership up to charges of hypocrisy when they discipline some offenders but not others.

Even after the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania lost their jobs, too many others have failed to respond consistently and effectively to policy violations on their campuses.

This can partly be explained by administrators’ historic antipathy toward disciplining their students. Unlike what happened at Pomona, when Princeton University students occupied President Christopher Eisgruber’s office for 33 hours in 2015, he responded by agreeing to address their demands and punishing no one. Is it any surprise that the students planning the encampment there told recruits not to expect serious consequences even though they knew they were breaking the rules?

This cannot all be explained by an imprudent or soft commitment to leniency. Matters have clearly gotten out of hand. But these institutions are what they want to be. They screen for professors who are committed to the right causes using devices such as mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion statements, and they admit students who focus on activism instead of learning.

A few years ago, Stanford University admitted a student whose application essay simply repeated #BlackLivesMatter 100 times. At Vanderbilt, one of the ringleaders was a known activist who was admitted on a “merit scholarship for activists and organizers,” according to the Associated Press.

Now campus administrators across the country are faced with a monster of their own creation in the form of unruly encampments that violate university policies and create a hostile environment not only for Jews, but also for students who simply want to attend class and learn. Some university presidents have shown leadership, calling in the police when they could not disband the encampments on their own, but too many others have failed to stand up for the rights of others at their institutions.

At Columbia University, President Minouche Shafik called in the police, only to allow the students to set up camp again. Then she waffled and pleaded as the protesters held the university’s commencement hostage, and they repaid her by smashing windows and occupying Hamilton Hall.

Shafik has finally done the right thing, calling in the police again and this time asking them to stay through graduation. But she should have nipped the whole thing in the bud at the start. She was lucky that the NYPD cleared out the protesters so flawlessly. At UCLA, administrators were slow to stop their campus from descending into violent chaos.

Free expression includes the right to protest, but these encampments have gone beyond free speech and violated campus rules and the rights of others. It should have been an easy decision to shut them down and to make an example out of the disruptive students with suspension or expulsion. Instead, too many administrators have tolerated them and made things worse.

This article appeared on Blaze Media on May 2, 2024

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On April 11, 2024, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni hosted a webinar exploring antisemitism, how it manifests on campus, and how to prevent harassment of Jewish students while upholding free expression on campuses.

Panelists include: Lawrence H. Summers, President Emeritus at Harvard University and former U.S. Secretary of Treasury; Pamela Paresky, Senior Fellow at the Network Contagion Research Institute, Senior Advisor to the Open Therapy Institute, and Advisor to the Mindful Education Lab at New York University; Nadine Strossen, John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union; and Eli Noam, director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information and Garrett Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Business Responsibility at Columbia Business School.

This webinar is part of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s Institute for Effective Governance®

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While some of those involved in shouting down Ms. Coulter were reportedly disciplined, it is critical that the university demonstrate its unwillingness to allow such an egregious offense against its mission to stand. In the words of Provost Kotlikoff, “Cornell must be a place where the presentation of ideas is protected and inviolable. Shielding students or others in our community from viewpoints with which they disagree, or filtering campus speakers based on the content of their presentation, undermines the fundamental role of a university.”

While shouting Ms. Coulter down, one protester yelled, “Your words are violence!” But words are the opposite of violence, and the university is one of the great gifts of human civilization precisely because it is a place where we are free to persuade one another without the threat of force. The protesters did not resort to violence, but they demonstrated their disregard for this valuable gift when they forced Ms. Coulter from the podium. As she said in an exclusive statement to ACTA, “at the better schools . . . students have too much intellectual self-respect to scream and carry on. They want to beat you in Q&A.” But the protesters at Cornell chose to embarrass themselves and their school while violating the rights of Ms. Coulter and their fellow Cornell community members. The university is correct to right this wrong.

But now members of the Cornell community are accusing the administration of hypocrisy because it has cracked down on protesters who have disrupted campus spaces in violation of the university’s policies. These critics apparently fail to see the consistency in refusing to accept the disruption of campus events and spaces where students study and learn. Both are defenses of the fundamental purpose of the university.

Moreover, while Cornell faculty and staff—many of whom never said a word in defense of Ms. Coulter but have been greatly concerned about protecting a colleague who found a terrorist attack “exhilarating”—are protesting for academic freedom and free speech, one of them has begged Provost Kotlikoff in a letter to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun to disinvite Ms. Coulter. Are the students at Cornell really so fragile? Ms. Coulter is known for making statements that many find offensive, but if a professor who sympathizes with Hamas still has a job, then surely Cornellians can tolerate having a provocative conservative on campus for an hour or two.

Cornell must show both its campus community and the country that it can and will respect diversity of thought and freedom of speech. We agree wholeheartedly with Provost Kotlikoff: “there could be few more powerful demonstrations of Cornell’s commitment to free expression than to have Ms. Coulter return to campus and present her views.”

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We are not alone in monitoring this trend. The issues that HB 1213 seeks to remedy are a matter of bipartisan concern, and we enthusiastically support the proposed legislation because it provides a commonsense solution to this problem.

Few have articulated the imperative better than President John F. Kennedy:

“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country. Without such knowledge, he stands uncertain and defenseless before the world, knowing neither where he has come from nor where he is going. With such knowledge, he is no longer alone but draws a strength far greater than his own from the cumulative experience of the past and a cumulative vision of the future.”

Those words went unheeded. In a 1987 survey, about half of the American citizens polled thought that the phrase, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” came from the U.S. Constitution. Regardless of what one thinks of that sentiment, it would improve political discourse to identify it correctly as classic Karl Marx. Flash forward 34 years, a 2021 Newsweek poll revealed that 24% of college students had a positive view of capitalism while 32% favored socialism. Given these survey results, it is no wonder that 3% of the 1,100 schools ACTA surveys through our What Will They Learn?^® project require a foundational economics course and only 18% require a foundational course in American history.

To further illustrate the necessity of House Bill 1213, I would like to point out that Black Hills State University does not require a foundational course in U.S. government or history.

In March 2022, a Quinnipiac University poll asked adults across America if they would stay and fight if Russia invaded our borders. Only 45% of men between the ages of 18 and 34 said they would stand and fight, instead of leaving the country. President Kennedy was right: “defenseless before the world.” Let us be clear: ignorance and contempt for our freedoms and civic institutions go hand in hand. Those who do not understand the value of freedom, or the price paid to guard it will not have the will to foster and defend it. 

Derek Bok, who served as Harvard’s 25^th president, diagnosed the problem in a 2020 interview:

“It is widely agreed that an informed and engaged citizenry is important, many would say essential, in order for democracy to flourish or even survive. There is also abundant evidence from national assessments of civic knowledge and from studies of the attitudes and behavior of college-age adults that large numbers of students are neither very knowledgeable nor convinced that government and politics are worth much of their time and attention.”

We have not seen remedies coming from existing university departments. Thus, it falls to legislators and governors to bring new resources and new voices to campus. Not infrequently, new institutes and centers pride themselves on providing the intellectual diversity that is so often lacking on the contemporary campus. In 2021, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee called for an institute committed to “informed patriotism.” The website for the nascent center at University of Tennessee tells us: “Lawmakers from both parties spoke in favor of the Institute’s mission to strengthen civic education and participation while reviving thoughtfulness, civility and respect for opposing viewpoints in national discourse.” The University of Florida’s Hamilton Center, “will highlight the value of debate and disagreement based on a core commitment to the search for truth and will resist the current push to ‘deplatform,’ ‘cancel,’ or professionally destroy those with whom we may disagree.” Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership’s website reads: “The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership is dedicated to fostering a culture of intellectual diversity to facilitate the open and free contest of ideas that are a foundation to a healthy constitutional democracy.”

One unique, and in our view necessary, characteristic of newly established centers is the ability for the center to be overseen by an independent, intellectually diverse board of advisors chosen from the nation’s leading scholars of American history and government. ACTA recommends that statutory language, moreover, should specify that the new center will have independent hiring authority, to ensure that it not merely replicate the focus of departments already existing at Black Hills State University. This feature, as created by similar legislation in Ohio (2023) and Tennessee (2022), would strengthen HB 1213 by ensuring that the hiring of center leadership and faculty reflects the intellectual diversity that is increasingly disappearing at institutions of higher education across the country. 

I would like to leave you with a quote from former President George W. Bush:

“Our history is not a story of perfection. It’s a story of imperfect people working toward great ideals. This flawed nation is also a really good nation, and the principles we hold are the hope of all mankind. When children are given the real history of America, they will also learn to love America. Our Founders believed the study of history and citizenship should be at the core of every American’s education.”

Members of the committee, I need hardly rehearse the devastating reports of de-platformings and shout-downs from Yale to Stanford that have received national attention, just in the last 12 months. Nor do I need to repeat the disheartening statistics of civic illiteracy mentioned earlier in my testimony. We have before us a strong remedy. Representative Scott Odenbach has done a great service in crafting HB 1213, and ACTA enthusiastically supports this legislation.

The post ACTA Testimony to the South Dakota Senate Education Committee in support of House Bill 1213 appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Download a transcript of the podcast HERE.
Note: Please check any quotations against the audio recording. The views expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of ACTA.

The post Tony Banout and Tom Ginsburg: Why Institutional Neutrality Matters appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Key findings from the survey include:

• Thirty-nine percent of respondents said shouting down a speaker is always or sometimes acceptable.
• Nine percent of respondents said using violence to prevent someone from speaking is always or sometimes acceptable. This number rose to 27% among students who identify as Democrats, compared to only 6% among Republicans.
• Forty-eight percent of respondents said they self-censor at least occasionally. Forty percent of Republicans said they self-censor fairly or very often, compared to only 6% of Democrats.

“These survey results show that Furman University, like so many American colleges and universities, is failing to maintain a culture of free expression and openness to viewpoint diversity,” stated Steven McGuire, ACTA’s Paul & Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom. “Given the evident willingness of many Furman students to shut down views they do not like, it is not surprising that so many of their peers feel they cannot share their views on campus. The different experiences of Democratic and Republican students at Furman are especially notable. Republicans are much more likely to self-censor, which means that the whole student body is not regularly hearing the full range of views widely held by segments of the American people on various subjects.”

Furman’s leadership can take action to restore the free exchange of ideas on campus by adopting the measures outlined in ACTA’s Gold Standard for Freedom of Expression. “It is the solemn duty of governing boards to remove the barriers to free expression at their institutions, wherever those barriers are found,” remarked ACTA President Michael Poliakoff. “They must not accept evasive answers when core freedoms and values are at issue. Americans are properly impatient when they see the money they pay for college so misused that graduates emerge emotionally and intellectually unprepared for the discourse that is fundamental to civic life.”

The survey report can be found here.

MEDIA CONTACT: Gabrielle Anglin
EMAIL: ganglin@goacta.org

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