Administrators — not just DEI administrators — are the biggest threat to free speech on campus

There is no way out of the current academic freedom and free speech crisis on campus while universities remain as bureaucratized as they are

I appeared on “Rising” with Robby Soave and Briahna Joy Gray on Wednesday, and I have some thoughts I want to share with you all coming off of that discussion.

The subject of my segment was my and Rikki Schlott’s recent piece in Reason Magazine, which expands on a chapter from our book, “The Canceling of the American Mind.” In it, we show the ways that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements function as political litmus tests on campus, creating a very difficult barrier to entry for anyone not in lockstep with the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. We then describe what we call the Conformity Gauntlet: the seemingly endless series of obstacles — from college entrance essays and faculty and tenure processes that require that you prove your commitment to DEI to the ever-present threat of cancelation or being reported to your school’s “bias related incident team” — that pressure students and academics to drop out or bend the knee.

However, the big question that came up during our discussion was whether the presence of DEI administrators is a threat to free speech on campus — and, well … yes, it is. But it’s not only DEI administrators. If my more than two decades doing this work has taught me anything, it’s that administrators in general are threats to free speech on campus. Dig into my books, “Unlearning Liberty,” “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and, of course, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” for more on that.

Still, from a legislative or regulatory standpoint, the single biggest threat I have seen to free speech and academic freedom on campus has been the DEI requirements implemented by the California Community Colleges system. In an effort to combat these requirements, FIRE sued the California Community Colleges Chancellor and the members of its Board of Governors, as well as the State Center Community College District.

In the case, FIRE is representing six tenured professors, each of whom teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching and pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. This includes requiring professors to “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.” 

Under these regulations, faculty performance and tenure will also be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of these government-mandated viewpoints. As our client, Reedley College professor Bill Blanken, said, “I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction? What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?”

Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” (which we sued over too — and won. It’s currently on appeal.) was unconstitutional because it attempted to restrain what viewpoints a professor can espouse. The State Center Community College District’s rule, however, is about what viewpoints professors must espouse. It’s an attempt to compel someone to express a belief, which is never lawful. We don’t force people to salute the flag, or display the state motto, or print opinions they don’t like in their newspaper, and we certainly don’t demand they profess faith in any kind of political idea in the course of educating other people.

The only thing scarier than the idea that administrators would attempt to compel speech as a method for forcing people to further their ideology is the idea that any of them would think doing so is okay. And I don’t only mean legally okay. I mean morally okay. Forcing others to mouth your beliefs is never an acceptable way of promulgating an ideology — even if it’s your five-year-old child and all you want them to acknowledge is that Han shot first (which shouldn’t even be that controversial. Who are you going to believe, George Lucas or everything you know about space piracy?).

The California DEI case is certainly the most alarming, but it’s far from the first or only example of how DEI administrators have threatened academic freedom and free speech on campus. Here’s a very incomplete list of other instances that you should know about:

• After tenured University of Central Florida professor Charles Negy tweeted about racial issues, the school issued a statement signed by the president, provost, and chief equity, inclusion and diversity officer condemning the tweets and opening an investigation into Negy.

• Yale Law’s associate dean of student affairs and director of diversity, equity, and inclusion repeatedly summoned a law student to meetings and pressured him to apologize for sending a lighthearted party invitation that used the term “trap house” because it was considered “pejorative and racist.” 

• Loyola University New Orleans repeatedly subjected a professor to investigations and assigned him a DEI coach because of his protected in-class and extramural speech.

• After a University of California, Los Angeles music professor showed his class the 1965 film version of Othello (in which Laurence Olivier wears skin-darkening makeup), a dean reportedly sent a department-wide email saying the professor’s that the incident had been reported to the Office of Equity, Civil Rights, and Title IX.

• Also at UCLA, after a student complained about a professor reading MLK, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which includes racial slurs, UCLA referred the matter to its Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for review. 

• Syracuse University adopted new policies to hold bystanders responsible for “bias-related incidents” and “hate speech.” The chief of diversity and inclusion said that bystanders “can be held accountable,” and directed students to report incidents either to the school’s Office of Equal Opportunity, Inclusion and Resolution Services or anonymously through its bias reporting policy. Requiring bystanders to be speech police is truly worthy of the name Orwellian. 

• A University of California System “guidance document” written by its council of chief diversity officers appeared to instruct students and faculty about how they may talk about the coronavirus (e.g., “Do not use terms such as “Chinese Virus.”).

• In 2023, Stanford Law School (my alma mater) students shouted down 5th Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan when he attempted to speak at a student-sponsored event. This was after long meetings with DEI administrators and after a precisely ten minute shout down then-Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach got up and gave a truly cringeworthy seven minute speech wondering if the “juice” of free speech and of having a 5th circuit judge speak to law students was “worth the squeeze.” The Stanford Law School incident earned its own chapter in “Canceling” as demonstrating the full power of the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress.  

And then, of course, there’s Carole Hooven, who left a 20-year teaching position at Harvard after campus DEI bureaucrats targeted her for comments she made on “Fox and Friends” insisting that we be kind and compassionate to transgender people while recognizing that biological sex is real. I’ve written and spoken a lot about what happened to Carole (including in “Canceling”), but it’s best to simply read her new piece for The Free Press detailing her side of the story.

The bottom line: DEI administrators — and campus administrators in general — are and will continue to be a threat to free speech and academic freedom on campus. There is no way out of this crisis on campus without either eliminating those positions or repurposing them to ensure that admins defend campus free speech and academic freedom, encourage nonconformity, and value seeking out differing viewpoints in the face of too much campus consensus. Sadly, while I’ve proposed this and other ideas for reforming higher education, I think the likelihood of that actually happening is pretty dang low. 

If we care about less expensive, more equitable higher ed, we have to acknowledge we need cheaper, slimmed down, less ideological institutions than we currently have.

And about that closing speech from Briahna

So I’ve received both praise and some ribbing about how I responded to Briahna’s final soliloquy during my segment on “Rising,” which she concluded by saying, “I’ll give you a chance to respond.” My response was “it was just a statement,” because it was. There was no question for me to answer there. After that she abruptly ended the interview (if it could be called that), which had already gone on about twice as long as intended. But let me address some of the factual assertions she made:

Briahna claimed that colleges may graduate many people who think of themselves as “liberal” but are actually economically conservative. That doesn’t strike me as accurate.  According to a study by Nate Honeycutt (discussed here) about 40% of professors identified themselves as either Marxist, socialist, activist, or radical, and about 56% of graduate students self-described that way. If Briahna has noticed that fewer older people in the real world lean to the left economically, that is likely because many of us — even those like me who think of themselves as left of center — grew up when Marxist-Leninist countries were collapsing (like the Soviet Union) or had to at least partially embrace free markets (like China). My own experience was made even more vivid by living in Eastern Europe in the ‘90s and getting to talk directly to people who survived the Soviet system. If Briahna has noticed that many elite college grads are more economically “conservative,” which generally means more libertarian, that might be because there is evidence that higher IQ people tend lean more left libertarian/classically liberal.

Briahna also claimed that “most young people have a left-leaning political bent.” This also defies research, which shows that from 2005 to 2018, 19.8% of students identified as liberal and 18.1% identified as conservative, with little change over time. She may have had that impression because at Harvard (her alma mater) liberals outnumber conservatives by more than seven to one among students (according to the last three Harvard Crimson polls) — but obviously Harvard is not representative of the rest of the country (far from it). In reality, the overrepresentation of more left-leaning students at Harvard may have more to do with the fact that the application process asks for things like DEI statements, and employs other subjective measures that allow campuses to admit the kind of left-leaning activist students administrators like.

Ironically enough, these elite schools, which have been overflowing with DEI administrators, ostensibly dedicated to eliminating pernicious biases, seem to have produced a number of graduates with biased and inaccurate perceptions of the country. Yet another reason to favor significant reform.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Here’s a great video the FIRE team put together about the California DEI lawsuit. I encourage you to share it as far and wide as you can, because this really is probably the biggest threat to academic freedom in the country at this moment.