Steven Pinker, noted Harvard psychologist and linguist delivered an address to mark Boston's Ford Hall Forum's presentation of their Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Pinker's speech draws valuably upon two of Pinker's hats - as psychologist and FIRE adviser in offering a sharp analysis of the threat that rising notions of psychology pose to free speech. Pinker outlines the subconscious force of the "psychology of taboo", and the theoretically innocuous speculations, such as the price of betrayal or infidelity, that "in fact are corrosive because they require people to think exactly the kind of thoughts that they should not think if they are committed friends, allies, family members." Recognize that taboo? I'm sure. Individually, it's a taboo that's hardwired; the problem rises when institutions larger than the individual, such as academia "which is, at least nominally devoted to pursuing the truth no matter how uncomfortable it makes people emotionally" begins to buttress the taboo with institutional force, banning speech and inquiry of sorts that might cause discomfort, and squarely quashing first amendment rights in the process. This is the path that leads to the University of Northern Iowa seeking to ban "unwelcome electronic communications" and it's a frightening one for sure. Read the speech to find out more.

A depressing, if somehow unsurprising given the current state of higher education, read from the Boston Globe.

It seems that only 23 percent of spring 2010 courses at Harvard offer final exams. At least one reason is embarrassing---the university has cut back on funding exam proctors, meaning that professors or their teaching assistants now need to supervise the three-hour final exams. Here was History professor Charles Maier: "A lot of people said, 'I don't want to go through that.' They didn't say it openly. But it probably was a factor."

But Keith O'Brien's article is filled with rationalizations as to why many educators consider eliminating final exams a positive thing. The Globe piece---using language (bolded by me) all too familiar to the assault on quality in contemporary higher education---ponders how the development raises "serious pedagogical questions about 21st century education: How best do students learn? And what's the best way to assess that? Is the disappearance of high-stakes, high-pressure final exams a sign that universities are failing to challenge today's students, or is it just a long overdue acknowledgment that such tests aren't always the best indicator of actual knowledge?"

On Sept. 23 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on a visit to U.N. headquarters in New York, told the U.N.'s General Assembly that "some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack" that killed 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001. Within hours of Ahmadinejad's speech, which prompted walkouts by U.N diplomats from the United States, Britain, Sweden, Australia, Belgium, Uruguay, and Spain, as well as a condemnation by President Obama, who declared that Ahmadinejad's remarks were "offensive" and "inexcusable," the Iranian president was sitting down to a chit-chat at a New York hotel with---graduate students at Yale. The meeting---at which any discussion of 9/11 or what Ahmadinejad had said about it, was off-limits---had been arranged by their teacher, Hillary Mann Leverett, one of eight senior fellows at Yale's brand-new Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.

Indeed, the meeting with Ahmadinejad and several of his aides could be said to have been a kickoff event for the Jackson Institute, which had celebrated its official opening only four days before, on Sept. 19. Funded with a $50 million gift in 2009---one of the largest ever donated to Yale--from former pharmaceutical CEO John Jackson, Yale '67, and his wife, the poet Susan Jackson, the stated aim of the institute is "training tomorrow's global leaders," as a headline on the institute's website states. The Jackson Institute will oversee Yale's undergraduate major in international relations and several graduate programs. Yet there seems something odd about a global-leader training program that within less than a week of its inception featured a softball session with perhaps the most vitriolic of today's global leaders, one who, besides elaborating in his U.N. speech on various conspiracy theories about the events of the 9/11 massacre, is notorious for denying the Holocaust and declaring that there are no gays in Iran (not surprising, because the penalty for homosexuality there is death).

It also seems odd that two of the Jackson Center's eight senior fellows---a full fourth of the total---consist of Leverett and her husband, Flynt Leverett, director of the Iran Project at the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that generally advocates a reduced U.S. military presence in the Islamic world. Both Leveretts have careers stretching back several years of tireless article-writing that defends the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad's government and blames the United States and Israel, not Iran, for Iran's nuclear buildup and the generally frosty relations between Iran and the West.

Video of our Capitalism on Campus event last week is now available here on on the Manhattan Institute site. The first two videos feature panels on the state of instruction in capitalism and political economy, showcasing a diverse range of academics from Jeffrey A. Miron, professor of economics and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard, to Jerry Muller, professor of history at Catholic University. The third video features the luncheon speaker, Robert P. George of Princeton University. If you're at all interested in the topic you'd be well-served to take a look.

What does it mean to be safe on campus? The word is so often invoked---creating "safe zones" or maintaining a "safe environment"---that it has arguably become meaningless.

Perhaps more accurately, it has taken on a second meaning, specific to the university. Whereas the real-world definition refers essentially to one's physical well-being, in the campus context "safety" has become synonymous with feeling comfortable, or not hearing challenging words or ideas---threats, simply put, to one's emotional state and level of comfort.

This disparity transcends linguistics. It speaks to how the modern university prepares---or fails to prepare---students for the real world. There's nothing wrong, per se, with administrators caring for student comfort in all of its forms. But when that encroaches on basic campus liberties as well as to the academy's core educational mission, even those sympathetic to a given group's cause must take a step back. Events over the past two weeks at the University of Rhode Island provide a clear example.

In the October 3rd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is a broad comparison of diversity and sustainability "ideologies." In it, Peter Wood offers several general remarks about the terms (or notions, attitudes, commitments . . . what is the right word for these hazy but potent "-ities" that bear so many psycho-political undertones and moral imperatives?). I'm not concerned about colleges trying to push recycling and reduce energy usage---on this score, conservatives have made a tactical mistake in letting the Left seize the environmentalist mantle---but I am concerned about the way in which such measures have acquired a coercive pull and might displace attention from core educational aims.

First of all, Wood notes, one has displaced the other. Diversity is no longer the cutting-edge term it once was. As he says, "Freshmen now arrive on campus already having sucked on multicultural milkshakes from kindergarten to senior prom. Diversity for them is just the same ol' same ol'." Whether you revere diversity or not, the point is correct. Diversity is standard fare, and for universities to push it as if it were a higher breakthrough only strikes the students as puffery.

Second, he casts diversity and sustainability as "second-wave movements." Diversity came out of affirmative action, sustainability out of environmentalism. Wood rightly identifies one reason why diversity prospered, that is, that it revised the negatives of reverse discrimination into the positives of better educational outcomes. Likewise, sustainability turned from the pollutions of the past to the cleanliness and efficiencies of the future.

George Philip deserves a prominent place in any 2010 academic hall of shame. The SUNY Albany president recently terminated the university's French, Russian, Italian, Classics, and Theater departments, citing financial concerns. That Albany purports to be a quality university (and is, in fact, one of SUNY's better branches) makes Philip's move all the more unjustifiable.

At nytimes.com, Stanley Fish appropriately excoriates Philip's decision, and astutely analyzes many of the reasons for the situation in which humanities departments currently find themselves. Among them---the decline of core curricula, which Fish notes "has happened in part because progressive academics have argued that traditional disciplinary departments were relics from the past kept artificially alive by outmoded requirements."

Alas, Fish's proposed solution to the crisis in the humanities at public universities requires all but ignoring the conduct of the academy over the past generation. He writes, "The only thing that might fly --- and I'm hardly optimistic --- is politics, by which I mean the political efforts of senior academic administrators to explain and defend the core enterprise to those constituencies --- legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others --- that have either let bad educational things happen or have actively connived in them.

Charlotte Allen's September 23 post here, College for the Intellectually Disabled, has outraged some Down Syndrome activists, one of whom sent us the letter below. The gist of the letter is that the intellectually disabled deserve to be in college, though by definition, they will be unable to do the work. Kindness and a feel-good sense of inclusiveness are at work here, plus a fear of litigation and the feeling that college is becoming just another entitlement that cannot reasonably be withheld, even from those who cannot read or write.

That's why a few campuses are offering college-like "experiences" to the intellectually disabled, and may one day routinely offer college-like academic degrees, which they fully understand will not really be earned.

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To the Editor:

As Board President of The Down Syndrome Guild of Kansas City and the mother of a son with Down syndrome attending a large university, I am appalled at this vitriolic rant against persons with intellectual disabilities. This morning my staff will be directed to assemble the contact information for all of the national organizations representing persons with intellectual disabilities. Please note that I serve as Board Vice President of one of the national Down syndrome organizations.... (These) organizations alone represent 400,000 families organized into 200+ affiliate organizations across the United States. I am suggesting that you take down this article from your site. Once the link is posted on the national forums, there will be a call to action.

On paper, accreditation is an amazing system. Among other things, it simultaneously advises colleges on how to improve, enforces a minimum level of quality, provides needed information to policy makers, and protects colleges from government intrusion. It does all this with only a few hundred employees, and a few thousand volunteers. Indeed if accreditation actually accomplished all it claims to, it would be one of the best systems ever devised.

The only problem is that accreditation accomplishes almost none of what it is supposed to. The advice given to colleges is often inappropriate; accreditors refuse to define quality, let alone enforce a minimum level of it; the entire process is shrouded in secrecy, providing almost no information to outsiders; and while still relatively successful in shielding colleges from government intrusion, accreditors have too often used their quasi-governmental power to behave in just as dictatorial a manner. Accreditation needs to be reformed.

Read CCAP's full report, prepared by Daniel Bennett, Richard Vedder and myself, for a detailed analysis of these problems and our proposed solutions, which would move us toward an outcomes-based quality control certification system.

The news circulating among humanities professors across the country is the decision by SUNY-Albany to close programs in Classics, French, Italian, Russian, and Theatre. (Judaic Studies, too, has been virtually eliminated and journalism will be cut in half.) The general dismay is palpable, but faculty members should prepare for more of the same in the coming years. It's easy to attribute the decision to bean-counting administrators who don't respect the humanities, but we should keep in mind how much pressure the leadership at SUNY-Albany must have felt in order to take a drastic step that they knew would evoke indignant protest and piles of bad PR.

The email sent out by President George Philip (reproduced here) spells out the financial state of affairs:

This year's State Budget reduced the level of State assistance to our campus by nearly $12 million. In fact, over the past three years, the campus has cumulatively suffered more than $33.5 million in State tax support reductions - more than a 30% decline. Since 2008, we have addressed these reductions to our revenue base through the elimination of approximately 200 vacant lines resulting from resignations and retirements, a soft-hiring freeze, reductions in non-personal expenditures and temporary service, reductions in graduate student support, a moratorium on non-essential travel, energy savings, operational efficiencies and more.

A couple of weeks ago Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, wrote a serious, humorous, penetrating assessment of the rise of "sustainability" as the new ideology de riguer on college campuses. (The article is also available here, but read it on the Chronicle site if you can --- the comments there are worth the price of admission --- and it was cogently discussed here by Mark Bauerlein.) 

"Recently," Wood began,

I came across a photograph of students at an event gathered around a cake that bore the iced command, "Celebrate Sustainability!" Clearly the candle had been passed. For more than a generation, cakes at campus events have tutored students to "Celebrate Diversity!" Something has changed---besides the frosting.

The pursuit of diversity on campuses remains a highly visible priority, but it is being subtly demoted by enthusiasm for sustainability. As an ideology, diversity is running out of steam, while sustainability is on fire....

"Diversity" is still alive and well at the University of Virginia, but now it does seem to be playing second fiddle to sustainability. As an example of the new fervor, for example, on October 20, "in observance of today's national Campus Sustainability Day," the Community Outreach and Communications Subcommittee of the President's Committee on Sustainability (one of whose tasks is to educate the university on "sustainable thinking") made available on its sustainability website a new pledge that it invited all members of the university to sign. The text:

The Arizona Civil Rights Amendment, also known as Proposition 107 or HCR 2019, will be on the November, 2, 2010, ballot. Virtually identical to similar measures launched by Ward Connerly and passed by substantial margins in California, Washington, Michigan, and Nebraska, Prop. 107 would amend the Arizona constitution to prohibit the state from "discriminat[ing] against or grant[ing] preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting."

All these prohibitions against preferential or discriminatory treatment based on race, sex, or ethnicity are based on and embody the non-discrimination principle that inspired the civil rights movement and is at the core of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but nevertheless they have actually all been opposed by those who fancy themselves civil rights activists today. Although it is old hat by now, I remain shocked every time I see additional evidence that "civil rights" are now widely understood --- at least by liberals, Democrats, academics, mainstream journalists, etc. (but I repeat myself) --- to require racial preferences, that those of us who continue to believe that treating individuals without regard to race, creed, or color are seen to be closet, or out of the closet, racists.

One of the most common, discordant notes in the by now well-rehearsed chorus of opposition to non-discriminatory equal treatment comes from feminists. Early on defenders of preferential treatment realized that there are more women than blacks or Hispanics, and in each campaign they have devoted great wealth and effort into the effort to persuade women that they would become the main victims of non-discriminatory equality. Very early in the debate in Michigan, for example, the leaders of eleven women's organizations issued a statement opposing the requirement of equal treatment ... and supporting preferences for themselves. "Oftentimes," it stated,

affirmative action is viewed as a tool that solely benefits people of color. However, it is important to remember that affirmative action benefits women as well --- regardless of race or color," concluded Anita Bowden of the Michigan Council of the YWCA. "In fact, women are the most frequent beneficiaries of and will lose most if affirmative action is lost."

"We stand in opposition to Ward Connerly's deceptively titled "Michigan Civil Rights Initiative," said Diane Neth Covel, Director of Public Policy, Michigan AAUW.

Congratulations to FIRE for inducing the University of Virginia to drop four policies that restricted the speech of students and faculty. One policy had prohibited Internet messages that are "inappropriate" or "vilify" others. The campus women's center backed down from two unusually preposterous policies that listed "teasing," "jokes of a sexual nature" and "innuendo" as examples of sexual harassment and warned that simple flirting or causing a woman to feel disrespected could be harassment as well. The university also reformed "Just Report It!" a "bias reporting" system, promising that protected speech will not be subject to University disciplinary action or formal investigation. FIRE praised University president Teresa Sullivan for making these changes within three months of taking office.

I recently posted on the peculiar strategy employed by defenders of a Brooklyn College committee's selecting Moustafa Bayoumi's book, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America, as mandatory reading for all first-year and transfer students at the college. As I noted at the time, Bayoumi and his defenders present straw-men arguments, suggest that the only figures criticizing them are on the far-right fringe, or portray themselves (from their positions as tenured or tenure-track professors) as helpless victims. Bayoumi has taken the dodge-and-victimization strategy to a new level, in an essay just published in the Chronicle Review.

"On closer inspection," Bayoumi mused in his column, "it became clear to me that my detractors"---note that he didn't qualify his statement to suggest "some" of his detractors---"hadn't actually read the book." This interpretation, of course, allows Bayoumi to ignore the kind of devastating criticism offered by people like my Brooklyn colleague Robert Cherry. And while Prof. Bayoumi might not like what I have to say, even he presumably would concede that I have read his book.

"Next I realized how insulting those objections [of critics] were to our students, suggesting that they are unable to form independent judgments of what they read." By this rationale, no one could criticize a Biology Department that assigned a creationist textbook, since such criticism would be "insulting" to the students forced to read the inappropriately selected text. Of course, the main criticism in this matter was directed not against BC students' cognitive abilities, but the judgment of a faculty committee that would mandate all incoming BC students read one and only one book---a book whose sole section open to fact-checking (the afterword) contains numerous strained or outright erroneous interpretations.