University Professors Are Now Worried About Free Speech

Professor David Yamane had a post recently about a "statement on free speech" made by "a group of scholars" who, I am shocked to discover, don't like Trump Administration policy vis-à-vis funding academic research projects. Speaking Out for Democracy and US Higher Education

What follows started as a comment to that post. I've edited it to expand on a few things. I could write at length about some of these topics.

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Not sure what the situation at Wake Forest is, reguading free speech, but here are some of my initial thoughts on the topic as seen at universities in general:

1. The democratic ideals of free thought, free speech, free association, freedom of assembly and the right to dissent are worth fighting for.

   How often, when a conservative is invited to speak on a college campus are they shouted down, had their visit canceled because of threats of violence, or experience other forms of The Heckler's Veto? How much "thou shalt use my preferred pronouns" compelled speech is there on college campuses? If Candace Owens, or Dave Rubin, or a similar speaker shows up on a college campus, how many will try to just disrupt the talk, so that there is no freedom of speech for conservative voices? How many conservative commentors could be invited without disruption at all?

   The letter linked by Professor Yamane mentions Columbia specifically. That was one university that had a tremendous problem with antisemitism after the October 7th attacks. How many others didn't receive so much press, since they aren't located in NYC?

2. Education is a fundamental pillar of a democratic society.

   What are the current stats on "reads and/or does math at grade level" in the Blue cities? There is a meme about "we used to teach Latin and Greek in high school and now we teach remedial English in college." At the higher education level, how much has turned into indoctrination? I know he is viewing the situation at high education facilities, but the whole is under scrutiny.

   Consider Whole Language. We know how to teach people to read. Whole Language isn't it, but somehow it became a fad in the '90s. It destroyed a large number of kids' ability to read and think. It was created from whole cloth out the education universities. (Or why did "Hooked on Phonics" become a cottage industry?) Also look up "the open concept." It was the fad from the early '70s. It too was a disaster. It too came out of academia.

   One thing I didn't say in the comments was about math. We also know how people learn math. You learn math by solving problems. In school, that involves homework, and worksheets. Parents don't like homework, and teachers don't like grading homework or worksheets. The result of abandoning those methods is that no one can do math at grade level.

3. Diversity is essential.

   How many conservatives, libertarians, Christians, or Orthodox Jews, are there as tenured faculty at universities? I don't have access (or easy access) to that data but here is some I do have: Democrat versus Republican ratios in academia from the National Association of Scholars.It seems that academica welcomes all kinds of people, as long as they think (and vote) exactly the way they are expected to. Outside of some disciplines like Anthropology or Sociology there is more balance, though not a lot.

4. Education, knowledge, and science are intrinsically worthwhile.

   I will merely refer you to the crisis in academic research, where lots of research can't be reproduced, even stuff from peer-reviewed publications. I didn't provide links in the comment, because I don't know what the SPAM filters are like, but I will provide one of my own from the archives here: “Einstein, We Have a Problem” – The problem with so much science today is it isn’t true

5. Academic freedom is necessary to the pursuit of knowledge.

   Academic freedom is not equivalent to a right to be subsidized by the taxpayer. My interest is mostly in high-energy physics, since I was initially on a track to get a PhD in that field. The current push for a new, higher-energy collider to replace the Large Hadron Collider in Europe is little more than a jobs program for physicists. See Sabine Hossenfelder's YouTube channel and her video on that Future Circular Collider, or her video on how particle physics is going wrong. If built, the FCC would cost $20 billion dollars plus yearly operating costs, and really has no hope (or not a lot) of reaching the next level of discoveries. It is only proposed to support the upcoming generation of post-docs.

6. No amount of accommodation or compliance will protect us.

   This is 100% correct. "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -Benjamin Franklin, 1759. The other quote that comes to mind is from Darth Vader and The Empire Strikes Back: "I have altered the deal; pray I don't alter it further." (See the statement about taxpayer funding above.)

I'm all about free speech. Free. Speech that offends others. Discussions of topics without trigger warnings. Discussions and evaluation of topics deemed "Not Politically Correct." That really doesn't describe the situation found on most college campuses in the past decade.