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Thanks, I really liked reading this and I agree with the points. Four particular thoughts of mine about universities and colleges:
First, the way I understood the founding principles of US democracy was that the state would adjucate disputes: you have an argument over whether someone's cow trampled your crops or someone said something ind…
Thanks, I really liked reading this and I agree with the points. Four particular thoughts of mine about universities and colleges:
First, the way I understood the founding principles of US democracy was that the state would adjucate disputes: you have an argument over whether someone's cow trampled your crops or someone said something indecent, you go to a judge and they decide. Access to the courts is of course harder in practice these days - and so, especially at private universities, a private organisation ends up fulfilling much of the role originally assigned to the state. You have campus rules on top of laws, that are enforced and breaches investigated by the college; even in cases such as accusations of rape, which is a felony if I understand the definition correctly, colleges are expected to do their own internal investigations and punish offenders accordingly. It's even considered, to say the least, very bad manners to involve the actual state, as in calling the cops on someone.
To the extent that a private organisation takes on executive and judiciary funcations that, in public space as opposed to on a campus, would be the state's business, I think it's especially valuable to say they should be following the spirit of the first amendment, just like there should be a presumption of innocence until proved otherwise when you're investigating an alleged theft or assault on your campus. You want to be your own courthouse, that comes with responsibilities as well as rights.
Otherwise, as you say, freedom of speech becomes meaningless - you essentially have a system where the real state can't go after you for your speech, but the "going after you" bit has been shifted to the private locally-state-like institution so you end up sanctioned after all. That's about as honest as a dictator promising the real military won't torture any subjects, and then setting up a separate mercenary-paramilitary force for that instead. The real question is whether you enjoy the outcomes that the authors of the first amendment were thinking of when they drafted it.
Second, it is generally held as you said that academic freedom is a particularly valuable principle so the threshold for cancelling a professor, as opposed to maybe an actor, should be reasonably high.
Third, I find it particularly dumb that the "left" is trying to cancel people for bad ideas. Back in the day, someone could have been dismissed for being gay, and there was a risk of everything from co-workers you had a beef with to organised campaigns from the "right" to get you outed and fired. You can't have a consistent argument that it's ok to cancel someone for saying the term "woman" is useful in medicine, but then throw a fit when someone tries to use the same tactic because you're pro-choice.
Finally, I think most of what's happening on campuses actually comes down to money. Colleges need fee-paying students and donors to do everything from keeping the lights on to growing their profit margins, and the academic job market has many applicants chasing every single place, so the managerial class has decided to get exploitative. My best source for this is https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-explained-or-what-on-earth-is-an-adjunct/ which is on the surface about adjuncts, but goes into the whole structure of universities. For example, in the Hamline case (https://verdict.justia.com/2023/01/18/the-not-renewed-excuse-at-hamline-and-elsewhere linked from the previous article) where the uni "cancelled" an adjunct for showing a depiction of the prophet Mohammed, in AN ART HISTORY CLASS for crying out loud, there was some debate over whether the university "fired" the person in question. Technically, they did not, because adjuncts are on rolling fixed-term contracts anyway, so the uni could just choose not to renew the contract. That both makes it much easier to get rid of faculty, and keeps the remaining ones more in line.
To sum up Brett's point on ACOUP: " University leadership have exploited the creation of an academic caste system to create a class of academic serf, allowing them to redirect funding (and spiraling tuition money), often towards their own pet projects." The driving force behind this is not DEI, but money. DEI is sometimes and excuse, sometimes a whip to beat the serfs with, and sometimes pandering to "the (paying) customer is always right". Having the threat of cancelling hanging over the serfs is just one more way to keep them in line, especially when there's always always another applicant you could hire instead.
The one thing that would really shake things up is if the student mob went after a donor, and other donors started to re-evaluate how much they'd send to their alma mater that year.