When free speech skips school

In 2006, I clipped a “Non Sequitur” cartoon that captured perfectly the mystique that surrounds our nation’s universities. The cartoon pictured a professor ensconced in a cubicle surrounded by an alligator-infested moat — drawbridge up — while one outsider, gazing across the moat, says to another: “We have no idea what he does, which, of course, is one of the great perks of tenure.”

A decade ago that cartoon was funny because it played to the notion that what went on in our universities was beyond the comprehension of mere mortals.

Ten years later there’s no mystery surrounding the games people play in academe because they make headlines every week. What follows is a roll call of university players who took up arms against a sea of injustice — but defeated free speech instead.

First came the “diversophiles,” who rose to power in the ’80s, then set the stage for the other players. Their original intent was commendable — to end the era of “white privilege” in our universities and make them reflect the multicultural nation we had become.

What began, though, as their mission to include all “marginalized voices” quickly became their aim to exclude — or marginalize — anyone who did not share their other pieties.

On May 8, 2016, New York Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristoff captured the diversophiles’ mission in one line: “We progressives want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.” Kristoff’s “Confession of Liberal Intolerance” was a stunner, but his call for “ideological diversity” in our universities comes about three decades too late.

What we have instead is ideological conformity, which has reshaped course content across disciplines. In the history department, for example, it wasn’t enough to charge contemporary conservatives with racism, sexism, homophobia — and their latest crime — xenophobia. So-called activist historians have made those charges retroactive, reaching back 10 centuries to include the perpetrators of European “colonialism,” whose sickness America caught, making our own heritage a source of contempt.

Their mission made news in 2014, when university professors who serve on the College Board reframed high school AP classes to suit their “internationalist” ambitions — as well as their ambition to remove the taint of American “exceptionalism” from the AP curriculum.

After their leftist agenda was exposed, the firestorm that followed forced the College Board to reinstate references to American victories and economic successes and, in 2015, to issue a statement saying that the new guidelines present “a clearer and more balanced approach” to American history.

But no such “groundswell of criticism” has threatened revisionist historians in the university. Today’s revisionists believe that if they expose us as a nation founded on “guns and greed,” as Howard Zinn once said, students will become lifelong acolytes for the hard left.

Blatant admissions of that agenda are rare, but in 2004, then President Stephen Trachtenberg told the graduating class at George Washington University to “move your tassels from right to left … which is what I hope happened to your politics in the last four years.” The research group Accuracy in Academia likened Dr. Trachtenberg’s speech to speeches “students can expect to hear if they tune in to this year’s Democratic convention.”

When revisionists began stressing our fault lines rather than our merits, they also dropped surveys of European and American history from lists of required courses, even for history majors. But students who must study our “shameful” past are more likely to remember Thomas Jefferson by his new tag “racist rapist” than by the document he wrote to secure their freedom.

Over in the English Department, it’s Western literature that has fallen from grace, as have professors who hold it sacred.

In their place is a syndicate of “Theorists” who blame literature for abetting a patriarchal system that oppresses women and minorities, that is, anyone not empowered by white male “heteronormitivity.” Armed with a new world view (anything Western bad), theorists use masterworks to denounce our heritage — and to give Hotspur wannabes a moving target for unspent rage.

For example, the June 3, 2016, edition of the Wall Street Journal included an excerpt from a recent petition submitted by Yale undergraduates who demanded that a required course in Major English Poets be abolished because a “year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students.”

To calm such students, many English departments offer alternative classes students may take to meet requirements. For example, UNC Chapel Hill’s English Department offers English 291: “History of Illustrations in Children’s Texts,” and English 664: “The Challenge of Queer Theory to Literary Studies.”

But no English department ploy is so daft as the toppling of Shakespeare. Last year, a survey of 52 top-rated schools found only four that require English majors to study Shakespeare. Even more distressing is the fact that required enrollees may remember the Bard not as the master of timeless insights and perfectly wrought poetry, but as the advocate for an “all-woman ghetto,” as feminist professor Ann Thompson once said, or as the opponent of “distributive justice,” as Marxist critic Michael Bristol has argued.

Students, then, become the first casualties in the English department’s war on racism, sexism, and the scourge that beget all others — capitalism. Of all the isms that inflame university professors, “savage capitalism” tops the list.

Long before Bernie Sanders bewitched students with promises of free stuff, Marxism redux had become a profitable enterprise in universities nationwide. From their safe perch in a system that guarantees income, benefits, and the prospect of a lifelong pension, in-house Marxists can sneer at capitalists — even donors whose beneficiaries aim to replace free enterprise with a new-improved brand of socialism. Only in academe can professionals prosper by exploiting the very system they claim to detest.

Which brings me to that breed of students whose antics have laid bare the blight on universities nationwide. Roger Kimball dubbed them “crybullies” because they combine a wailing touchiness with a resolve to expel from school anyone who makes them feel “unsafe.”

Their list of bogeymen includes everyone whose words can be twisted into a racist, sexist, or homophobic slur or who supports ideas they disagree with — most notably invited speakers Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom Brandeis disinvited in 2014, and Condoleezza Rice, whom Rutgers canceled that same spring. Before the summer of 2014, student radicals made news by banning or shouting down outsiders who did not know that “free speech” on campus means “free to speak like me.”

Then came the sideshow at the University of Missouri, which put insiders, including a college president, in the crybullies’ crosshairs. When students forced President Wolfe to resign, they inspired others to protest the “Ku Klux Kulture” they claim persists nationwide. Soon afterward, Yale’s president confessed that he had “failed” students who said they were spooked by the very thought of “insensitive” Halloween costumes.

But no one could have guessed that the hand puppets of leftist professors would take up arms against their handlers as well, as Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis discovered when she suggested that feminism had been “hijacked by melodrama.” In an article for the Chronicle Review, Kipnis admitted that even leftists “live in fear of some classroom incident spiraling into professional disaster.”

And professors are not alone in their fear of student-wrought disasters. Just this July, the Berkeley student newspaper the Daily Californian revealed that when students stormed Chancellor Nicholas Dirk’s office last spring, he installed a door that will double as an “escape hatch” in the event of subsequent protests.

With its recent stand against student protests, the University of Chicago would restore reason in the university — and, one hopes, restore John Stuart Mill’s approach to free speech. When Mill wrote in “On Liberty” that “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility,” he spoke directly to the type of professors and students that would claim infallibility a century and a half later.

Thus far the type has gone unchecked, and that is the single greatest failing of the modern university.

Nan Miller, part-time resident of Whitefish, is a retired English professor.