By Cathy Young

A few months ago, a post with a shocking claim about misogyny in America began to circulate on Tumblr, the social media site popular with older teens and young adults.  It featured a scanned book page section stating that, according to "recent survey data," when junior high school students in the Midwest were asked what they would do if they woke up "transformed into the opposite sex," the girls showed mixed emotions but the boys' reaction was straightforward: "'Kill myself' was the most common answer when they contemplated the possibility of life as a girl."  The original poster--whose comment was, "Wow"--identified the source as her "Sex & Gender college textbook," The Gendered Society by Michael Kimmel.

The post quickly caught on with Tumblr's radical feminist contingent: in less than three months, it was reblogged or "liked" by over 33,000 users. Some appended their own comments, such as, "Yeah, tell me again how misogyny 'isn't real' and men and boys and actually 'like,' 'love' and 'respect the female sex'?  This is how deep misogynistic propaganda runs... As Germaine Greer said, 'Women have no idea how much men hate them.'"

Yet, as it turns out, the claim reveals less about men and misogyny than it does about gender studies and academic feminism.

I was sufficiently intrigued to check out Kimmel's reference: a 1984 book called The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective by psychologists Carol Tavris and Carole Wade.  The publication date was the first tipoff that the study's description in the excerpt was not entirely accurate: the "recent" data had to be about thirty years old.  Still, did American teenage boys in the early 1980s really hold such a dismal view of being female?

When I obtained a copy of The Longest War, I was shocked to discover that the claim was not even out of context: it seemed to have no basis at all, other than one comment among examples of negative reactions from younger boys (the survey included third- through twelfth-grade students, not just those in junior high). Published in 1983 by the Institute for Equality in Education, the study had some real fodder for feminist arguments: girls generally felt they would be better off as males while boys generally saw the switch as a disadvantage, envisioning more social restrictions and fewer career options (many responses seemed based on stereotypes--e.g., husband-hunting as a girl's main training for adulthood--than 1980s reality).  But that's not nearly as dramatic as "I'd rather kill myself than be a girl."

Hoping for clarification, I emailed Kimmel, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University in New York and a leading scholar in gender studies.  Kimmel replied that he had indeed relied on the Tavris and Wade book; he added that he "had intended to remove the reference" as dated and would definitely do it for the next edition.  (The Gendered Society has gone through five editions since 2000; the fourth, cited in the Tumblr post, appeared in 2011.)  When I asked about the mismatch between his account of the study and his source, Kimmel promised to look into it after returning from a lecture tour; two weeks later, he emailed to say that he did not have The Longest War at hand and could not explain the discrepancy.  He conceded that he might have "misquoted" Tavris and Wade, noting that he felt this did not affect his overall argument and hoping that I could "evaluate the larger value of the book without being distracted by a single error." 

What, then, about the larger value of The Gendered Society, described on its back cover as "one of the most balanced gender studies texts available"?  Unlike some conservative critics of feminism, I am sympathetic to Kimmel's professed goal of a society in which women and men are individuals first regardless of gender, and to his argument that the sexes have far more in common than Mars-Venus rhetoric suggests.  Unfortunately, these principles coexist with a steady drumbeat of female victimhood and male wrongdoing--often backed by tendentious or downright distorted evidence.

Thus, The Gendered Society's discussion of gender in the workplace briefly acknowledges that women's earnings are driven down by family-related work interruptions--but still treats gender gaps in pay and advancement almost entirely as the wages of discrimination, summarily dismissing the factor of sex differences in worker motivation. (Amusingly, Kimmel also asserts that mostly female jobs pay less due to sexism but doesn't notice that in his own tables of the most single-sex-dominated occupations, the two highest-paid jobs--dental hygienist and speech-language pathologist--are nearly all-female.)  The narrative is often contradictory.  Thus, after citing staggering statistics of how many women are sexually harassed at work, Kimmel claims that the motive for harassment is almost invariably hostile--"to put women back in their place." A paragraph later, he notes that the truth in sexual harassment cases is often elusive because the man may see "an innocent indication of sexual interest or harmless joking" where the woman sees sexual pressure. 

The chapter on "The Gendered Classroom" uncritically repeats tales of girls' woes--for instance, that girls' self-esteem "plummets" in junior high school--without mentioning that they have been strongly disputed, not just by critics of feminism but by mainstream psychologists.  The assertion that "girls' IQs fall by about thirteen points," compared to three for boys, is drawn from a 1935 book. (Ironically, Kimmel is then left scrambling to explain how "the systematic demolition of girls' self-esteem, the denigration of their abilities, and the demotion of their status" results in a situation in which girls outperform boys academically at every level.)

Predictably, The Gendered Society also depicts American culture as saturated with male violence toward women. After quoting feminist anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday's assertion that "the lower the status of women relative to men, the higher the rape rate," Kimmel invites readers to consider what this says about women in the United States, which "has the highest rate of reported rape in the industrial world--about eighteen times higher than England." 

Oh really (to borrow the title of Kimmel's sarcastic sidebars intended to rebut different views of gender relations)? According to United Nations statistics, in 2010 the reported rape rate in the U.S.--27.3 per 100,000 people--was slightly lower than in England and Wales, at 28.8 per 100,000; in the six years previous years, it was 5 to 30 percent higher.  (Belgium's reported rape rate in recent years has been similar to that of the U.S., and sometimes slightly higher; in Sweden, it stands at about 60 per 100,000, no doubt due to an unusually broad definition.)   Since Kimmel's footnotes did not indicate the source, I emailed again to ask him about it; the best citation he could offer was an essay by feminist psychologist Patricia Rozee, "Rape Resistance: Successes and Challenges" in The Handbook of Women, Psychology and the Law (2005), which offers the (unsourced) claim that the U.S. rape rate is "twelve times that of England." 

Kimmel also recycles the claim from feminist advocacy groups that "domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women in the nation"; in fact, Centers for Disease Control and Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that women suffer about five times many injuries from accidental falls and about twice as many from car accidents as they do from all violence (about a third of which is inflicted by partners or ex-partners). 

Meanwhile, research on women as perpetrators of domestic violence is dismissed as "a small chorus of voices shouting about 'husband abuse,'" with no mention of the fact that many of these voices belong to female scholars (except for one paragraph ridiculing sociologist Suzanne Steinmetz) or that there are by now over 200 studies indicating similar levels of male and female aggression in relationships.  Kimmel also charges that such studies conflate aggression and self-defense, an argument that has been convincingly refuted.  His use of anecdotal evidence is equally skewed: noting that talk of female violence is belied by the lack of battered men asking for protection, he adds in a sarcastic aside that "O.J. Simpson did call himself an 'abused husband.'"  But one could easily choose a different celebrity example--for instance, actor/comedian Phil Hartman, shot by his wife Brynn (who, friends' accounts suggested, had been violent before) in a murder-suicide.

No scholarly text is ever error-free. But in the case of Kimmel's book, there is a consistent pattern of using selective evidence and even pseudo-facts to stress women's victimization and paint males (particularly American males) in the worst light. The  fictitious claim that most boys would choose death over girlhood--which will undoubtedly live on the Internet after it's gone from future editions of the book--fits seamlessly into the big picture. 

Internet myths aside, The Gender Society is widely used in college courses.  And if it is indeed the most balanced gender studies textbook available--which may well be true--that says a lot about the rest.

According to a new report released by the American Association of University Professors, the gap between the salaries of faculty at private and public universities is widening.  The "Annual Report on the Status of the Profession" found that at the public institutions, full professors averaged $118,054 and assistant professors $69,777, while at the privates full professors' average salary was $157,282 and assistant professors' $86,189.

Even while the rest of the economy struggles, the last decade has been a flush time for private institutions, with endowments surging an average of 19.2 percent in 2011 and 11.9 percent in 2010, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Meanwhile things have gone steeply downhill for public colleges and universities as legislatures across the country have cut back on appropriations for higher education and, at the same time, have imposed ceilings on tuition increases.  The financial squeeze has taken a toll on the quality of instruction offered at some of our best public institutions.  Unfortunately, the situation is likely to get worse in the years ahead, given the condition of state and federal budgets.  

Holding Their Own with Harvard

There was a time not so long ago when elite public institutions, such as the University of California (Berkeley), the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin, more than held their own against competition from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite private institutions.  Berkeley's reputation for academic excellence in the 1950s and 60s was unsurpassed; indeed, in the 1960s many experts considered Berkeley to be the finest university in the world.  Flagship universities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Virginia earned rankings in the top ten or twenty universities in the country.   Admission to these institutions was widely sought after by out-of-state students willing to pay premium tuition for high-quality education.   With enrollments in excess of 30,000 students, these institutions dwarfed the privates in scale but delivered a great deal of educational "bang for the buck."   

Today the situation is vastly changed. There is not a single public institution listed among the top 20 schools in the 2012 ranking by U.S. News and World Report. Berkeley ranks 21, while Virginia comes in at 24 and Michigan at 29.   The Forbes ranking, which takes into account the both cost of the college and the quality of its educational program, does not list a single public institution in the top 30, and lists just seven in the top 50 - certainly an indictment of the quality of instruction offered at the less costly public institutions.  In that survey, Berkeley comes in at number 50, while flagship universities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota do not make the cut at all.   For the first time private institutions - and not just the Ivies -- dominate the roster of our top colleges and universities.

Too Slow to Tap Private Wealth

There are undoubtedly many causes that one might cite to account for this far- reaching development in higher education.   Public universities in the Midwest have been forced to cope with population changes and the decline of auto and steel industries in their states.  At the same time, private institutions have benefitted disproportionately from the stock-market boom of the last three decades that has provided them with the resources to recruit top faculty and students while expanding their research and educational programs.  Public universities, long in the habit of relying upon legislative appropriations, have only recently begun to tap into this expanding spigot of private wealth.    

Yet there is a more fundamental cause behind this reversal of fortunes in higher education.  Put simply, big government is killing - has killed - the elite public university.

In the heyday of the flagship universities in the 1950s and 1960s, state governments spent the bulk of their funds on just a few functions - primarily transportation, public safety, welfare, and higher education.   During this period, flagship universities had few competitors for state funds and, indeed, with their alumni well represented in the legislatures and the "baby boom" generation headed off to college, they were well positioned to lay claim to a rising share of state budgets.  Across the nation, between 15 and 20 percent of state budgets flowed into the public universities at a time when public-employee pensions, health insurance, and K-12 education were still minor items in state budgets.   For a brief time, the political environment favored generous investments in elite public education.

That is no longer the case.  The expansion of state governmental functions since the 1960s has created a most unfriendly political environment for the flagship universities. According to a report by The National Association of State Budget Officers, Medicaid and K-12 education together accounted for 44 percent of state government spending in 2012, while public pensions (which claimed less than one percent of state budgets in the 1960s) now account for 11 percent of state expenditures.   By contrast, higher education now lays claim to less than 10 percent of state expenditures, or roughly half the share allocated to this sector in the 1960s.   In the scramble for public dollars, the flagship universities must now contend with public-employee unions demanding funds to pay for salaries and pensions for their members, court orders and referenda directing ever more public funds to K-12 education, and the lure of federal matching funds for Medicaid, welfare, and other federally subsidized programs.   

The Sprawl of Many Campuses

On top of this, the flagship universities today must share public appropriations with an expanding complex of regional campuses and community colleges that barely existed in the 1950s and 1960s.  California created its elaborate and expensive three- tier system of research universities, regional universities, and community colleges in the early 1960s just as the University of California was reaching a pinnacle of influence and prestige.  Other states expanded in parallel ways.  Michigan now supports 45 distinct institutions of higher learning, all in financial competition with the state's two flagship institutions.  All of these second and third tier institutions have representatives in the legislatures demanding their share of state higher education dollars.  In addition, more and more teachers at the lower tier four year universities and community colleges are leveraging their power by joining unions that bargain and lobby in their behalf.  Professors at elite institutions have so far resisted the pressures to unionize out of professional loyalties and convictions about promotion through merit and competence.      

All of this has had the predictable result of forcing flagship universities to look for other sources of financing through federal grants, private philanthropic support, and tuition increases that increasingly are paid for by student debt.  None of these strategies is likely to succeed.  While federal spending on higher education has skyrocketed in recent years (largely by increasing appropriations for Pell Grants), these funds are divided many ways among the 3000-plus colleges and universities across the nation and the expanding for-profit sector of higher education.  Private philanthropy is now seen as a source of funds for institutions like the University of California, the University of Virginia, and the University of Michigan, but this sector is not large enough to fill in for declining public support for these institutions.  Private donors, moreover, have always been skeptical about funding state universities that, when all is said and done, are still largely controlled by state legislatures.  As for tuition increases and student loans - those two sources of revenue long ago passed beyond the threshold of affordability. 

Does any of this matter?  For all their flaws, flagship public institutions in the post-war era provided hundreds of thousands of working class and middle class Americans with a quality education and an affordable avenue of upward mobility.     

They have prepared generations of leaders at the state and national levels.  The great state universities are not going to disappear and many will maintain a standard of excellence, but in an age of lumbering and inefficient governments trying to do all things for all groups they will not have the resources to perform at their former level or to compete with high-performing private institutions.

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James Piereson is a senior fellow at The Manhattan Institute and President of the William E. Simon Foundation.

By Harvey Silverglate and Juliana DeVries

In a breathtakingly bold move, the civil rights offices of both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have mandated the effective abolition of free speech on college campuses, as well as the almost certain conviction of large numbers of students, many of whom will be innocent, of "harassment." Neither justice nor education will be well served.

The ED/DOJ's disturbing and unconstitutional May 9^th letter, mandating changes in sexual assault and harassment procedures and standards, arose out of a joint ED/DOJ investigation and evaluation at the University of Montana, Missoula. The ED and DOJ addressed their letter to the university president, but more broadly described it as "a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country to protect students from sexual harassment and assault." In other words, any college or university receiving federal funding (which includes nearly all of them) risks losing that funding, if it does not comply with the standards laid out in the letter. 

Everyone Guilty Three Times a Day

The inevitable result of this seemingly innocuous, or at least hyper-technical, rule is that all students would arguably be guilty of harassment several times a day. According to ED/DOJ standards, even playing uncensored rap music at a college party, posting something controversial on Facebook, or defending former U.S. Representative Todd Akin in class could now constitute "harassment." (And engaging in satire or parody is just inviting expulsion!) It is now up to "victims" - presumably the more oversensitive or even neurotic members of the student community - to decide when unwelcome words constitute actionable harassment. In other words, in a hypothetical 500-person lecture on gender disparities in the workplace, the one person who takes offense to slide five has the power to silence the professor, and to keep the 499 other students from hearing the speech in question. The Supreme Court some time ago referred to this tactic as "burning the house to roast the pig," and has consistently ruled it unconstitutional.

Indeed, the ED/DOJ mandate would not stand a chance of surviving a constitutional challenge if one were brought by either a dissatisfied university or a student punished by his or her college for uttering protected speech or engaging in innocuous personal conduct. (The letter even misquotes the Supreme Court decision in the seminal case of Davis v. Monroe County.) But by the time a challenge makes its way up to the Supreme Court - a process that typically takes half a decade or more, assuming that discretionary high court review is in fact granted - the bureaucrats will have already succeeded in establishing a permanent cultural change such that students won't even be tempted to say something of a sexual or even, very likely, a gender-related nature, nor engage in dating activity, that might possibly disturb an overly sensitive fellow student.

Campus free thought and academic freedom have already been on virtual life-support for some 25 years and counting. In a 2013 study of 409 American colleges and universities, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) found that three-fifths maintain policies that infringe upon the free speech rights of students. FIRE President Greg Lukianoff lists numerous examples of students being punished for seemingly innocuous conduct and speech in his October 2012 book Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. Lukianoff writes, for example, of a student punished for making a collage critical of a parking garage, another for publicly reading a book about the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan in a street fight, and of a professor labeled a dangerous threat to campus safety for posting a pop-culture quote on his doorway. This latest ED/DOJ letter is the culmination of a decades-long trend of censorship on campuses - a trend that is discouraging debate and homogenizing the minds of our future leaders.

Can Things Get Worse?

As one long-time close observer of the college campus scene with years of experience teaching at Harvard wrote to Silverglate: "Just when you thought things could not get worse, the government...instructs universities to criminalize bad jokes, clumsy flirtation, and unpopular social science. Amazing! And appalling!" And so it is.

The picture looks bleak, unless the bureaucrats have gone so far this time that those who value preserving our nation's universities and a free society's values will finally be galvanized to do something. Without major push-back, dissimulation and cynicism will surely replace frankness and honest discussion on our campuses. As the wily French diplomat and functionary Talleyrand is reported to have said, in explaining how it was that he survived all of the turbulent twists and turns before, during and after the French Revolution, keeping his power perch and his head attached to his neck throughout: "Language was given to man to disguise his thoughts." And so it will be on college campuses everywhere. So much for what the Supreme Court has called "the market place of ideas."

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Harvey Silverglate, a Boston criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer and writer, is the co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org). He co-authored The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses). Juliana DeVries, who graduated from Columbia University in 2011, is a Program Associate at FIRE.

(Photo: Eric Holder. Credit: Fox.)

By KC Johnson

Students at Stanford are the latest to fall victim to the assault on due process mandated by the "Dear Colleague" letter. Last week, the university's faculty senate approved the "Alternative Review Process," an across-the-board diminution of due process rights for Stanford students accused of sexual assault.

The Office of Civil Rights' "Dear Colleague" letter, to review, mandates that colleges lower due process in two respects: weakening the burden of proof from the clear and convincing standard to the preponderance of evidence standard; and introducing a form of double jeopardy by allowing accusers to appeal when an accused student is found not guilty in a college disciplinary process. In addition, the letter strongly encourages a third change--prohibiting an accused student from cross-examining his accuser--that, when coupled with the usual requirement that accused students not be represented by counsel in disciplinary proceedings, effectively ensures that no cross-examination of the accuser will occur.

Stanford's ARP implements each of these OCR proposals. But, like most schools that have eagerly adopted the Dear Colleague approach, Stanford goes beyond even what OCR has demanded in weakening due process for accused students. For instance, through the ARP, students are judged by a five-person panel of "reviewers," but can be found guilty by a vote of 4-to-1. (Even the "Dear Colleague" letter doesn't require non-unanimous verdicts.) So if 80 percent of the review panel believes, with a 50.01 percent level of certainty, in an accused student's guilt, Stanford can brand him a rapist.

Who exactly are these "reviewers"? I testified (via Skype) against the ARP. A pro-ARP witness assured the student government that it need not worry about weakening due process protections, because in his experience, no student accused of sexual assault at Stanford was innocent anyway. Moreover, he noted, the university specially trained the disciplinary panels on sexual assault cases to ensure that the panels would be able to discern the truth.

A couple of years ago, FIRE was able to obtain the "training" material used in the 2010-2011 academic year; among other things, Stanford encourages ARP jurors to view an accused student presenting his case in a "persuasive and logical" fashion as an indication of guilt. Even the "Dear Colleague" letter doesn't claim that acting logically is a sign of guilt.

In an Orwellian fashion, law professor Michele Dauber, who co-chairs the university's Board of Judicial Affairs, celebrated the changes, arguing that as the local prosecutor's office does "not tend to bring charges in college acquaintance rape cases," Stanford needed to act on its own. She rejoiced that since the ARP had been adopted on a trial basis, Stanford had "more than triple the number of [findings of responsibility] in just the last three years compared with the last 13 years combined."

You don't need to be a law professor to understand that lowering the burden of proof, ending unanimity to find guilt, preventing an accused student from cross-examining his accusers, and introducing double jeopardy will increase the chances of a guilty finding. Such changes will also increase, dramatically, the chances of an innocent student being deemed a rapist. But neither Professor Dauber nor her Stanford colleagues appear to worry about that. 

By Peter Sacks

The higher-education story of the week is about cost: colleges and universities are cutting prices. At least that's the impression one gets from media coverage of the annual report from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). "Colleges Cut Prices by Providing More Financial Aid," states the Wall Street Journal. "Private U.S. colleges, worried they could be pricing themselves out of the market after years of relentless tuition increases, are offering record financial assistance to keep classrooms full."

Many colleges are "lowering" prices, but not because they're messing with their hefty sticker prices. In fact, American colleges and universities engage in a massive system of price discrimination, offering students varying discounts from the sticker price depending on family income and assets, number of children in college, and other family financial factors. While the amount of the discount largely depends on a family's ability to pay for college, many colleges also offer price breaks to students based on "merit," as measured by SAT scores and high school GPA. 

Here Come the 'Enrollment Managers'

Indeed, higher education is a curious and strange business - and it's not generosity that's driving colleges and universities to provide more financial aid. Instead of just slashing sticker prices to stay competitive, colleges offer "tuition discounts" in the form of scholarships and grants of various amounts.  The bottom line is what's called the net price, which is the total cost of attendance - sticker price plus expenses - less institutional grants and scholarships.  By making some students and parents pay full fare, or close to it, while offering discounts to less wealthy students, colleges attempt to maximize net tuition revenue.  Indeed, after many years of engaging in the "high sticker price, high discount" business model, colleges have acquired armies of "enrollment management" consultants who advise colleges on the best strategies for maximizing tuition revenue.  

After years of relative stability, between the years 2000 and 2006, when average tuition discounts for freshmen ranged between 37 and 38 percent, discounts began to climb more rapidly.  In those relatively flush economic times of the mid 2000's, many colleges were engaged in a sort of arms race for certain high-achieving students whose enrollment and matriculation would boost average SAT scores and boost the institution's ranking on college guides such as U.S. News & World Report.  Colleges attempted to attract such students with hefty discounts. 

Smaller Colleges Suffered More

But the Great Recession arrived, and students and families took big hits on income and wealth. According to the US Federal Reserve's Study of Consumer Finances released in 2012, the median value of inflation-adjusted pre-tax income fell 7.7 percent from 2007 and 2010 and median net worth of families fell 38.8 percent. In order to maintain enrollments during the recession, colleges steadily ratcheted up discounts.

Tough times were especially punitive to smaller colleges. Many of these colleges struggled to maintain enrollments and used discounts to stem enrollment losses.  But often the discounts simply gobbled up revenues because student demand for many of the weaker institutions wasn't sufficient to offset the price cuts. Indeed, the discount rate at small colleges rose to 46.2 percent in 2012 compared to 41 percent and large research institutions and just 40 percent at comprehensive doctoral universities.

The Great Recession may have changed the higher-education industry for good, serving as a wake-up call for wholesale reforms in pricing.  Poor economic conditions exposed profound weaknesses in Americans' ability to pay for college. Financial need will remain high, but poorly endowed private schools will continue to struggle to stay competitive and stave off enrollment declines. Also, public universities are seeing state tuition subsidies erode, and they face pressure to raise tuitions to uncompetitive levels.

Apart from the most desirable, highly branded colleges and universities, the rest of the industry has reached an unsustainable state.  Long-term demographic projections suggest enrollment growth will continue to hold steady or even decline.  Too many financially strapped institutions suggest that the industry may be overcapitalized and due for a shakeup - with too many relatively weak institutions chasing a limited number of desirable students. Making matters even more complicated is that financial need continues to grow and the condition of family finances remains tenuous.

"It gets harder every year," one chief business officer reported in the NACUBO's survey. "There are many indicators the business model that higher education has relied on for many years may have to change."

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By KC Johnson

The End of Sex is a frustrating book. Author Donna Freitas, a self-described feminist, has written a thoughtful and richly-researched study of how the sexual culture on contemporary campuses shortchanges many college students. She draws from a rich data base, namely, a multi-year survey of students at different colleges supplemented by the author's own experience in residential or student life. Yet Freitas' recommendations--based around a call for faculty and administrators to guide students more in such matters--would almost certainly make things worse, given the professoriate's ideological alignment.

Freitas detects three basic characteristics to hookup culture: some form of sexual intimacy; which is brief, lasting no more than a few hours over a single night; and which is intended to be purely physical, not anything approaching emotional attachments. "If a person brackets all emotions and feelings of attachment," she argues, "a hookup becomes an efficient form of sexual interaction. Today's students tend to be overcommitted and extremely busy, and they don't have the time (or at least are socialized to believe they don't have the time) to get serious about any one person," leading to a practice that "creates a drastic divide between physical intimacy and emotional intimacy."

Drawing from anonymous surveys and follow-up interviews with a smaller group of surveyed students, Freitas concludes that while students seem to accept hookup culture, actually most are deeply troubled by it. They long for more meaningful commitments, rather than simply casual sex. Media, friends, and parents, she discovers, reinforce a troubling norm that long-term relationships in college aren't possible.

Lisa Mogilasnki is precisely the type of student about which Freitas writes. The Harvard sophomore recently penned an op-ed for USA Today expressing her discomfort with the alcohol-heavy hook-up culture, noting that it can pressure female students in particular into behaving in ways they otherwise would not. "Hookup culture," Mogilanski wrote, "seems like a perversion of what human relationships ought to be. Its distinguishing feature is its lack of discretion, except on the dimensions of physical attractiveness and proximity. Its participants seek out anonymity, creating taboos like 'dormcest.' They implicitly acknowledge that their actions are never really emotionless, at least probably not for both people." In the end, she contended, the culture leaves both genders feeling "equally impoverished."

The most interesting chapter of Freitas' book traces the fate of the Anscombe Society, a student group formed at Princeton in 2005 "dedicated to affirming the importance of the family, marriage, and a proper understanding of sex and sexuality." The group urged creation of a Princeton Abstinence Center, and members told administrators that they felt stigmatized for their views on campus. Despite skeptical, and at times almost hilariously hostile, coverage in the local and national media, Anscombe enjoyed a considerable level of support from Princeton students, since they appeared to be about the only entity on campus challenging the assumptions of the hookup culture. Similar groups sprang up at other Ivy League schools. To Freitas, this development shouldn't have surprised anyone: an audience exists for such groups, not merely among socially conservative students "but also among students who are uncomfortable with hookup culture for a variety of personal reasons."

At the same time, however, their basic principles limited the appeal of socially conservative, religious groups like Anscombe. On most campuses today, relatively few students, even Catholics or mainline Protestants, consider it reasonable to adhere to their religious denomination's view of appropriate sexual activity. According to Freitas, while "God isn't much of a factor in the average college student's decisions about sex, their peers are a factor--indeed, a major factor."

Moreover, by linking their opposition to the hookup culture to an opposition to same-sex marriage (the group's mission statement celebrated sex only in "its proper context: that of marriage between man and woman"), Anscombe and like-minded organizations alienated the "larger, silent majority of students on most university campuses who are not happy with hookup culture but would never align themselves with such politics." (A recent Washington Post poll showed more than 80% of voters under 30 support same-sex marriage.) On this matter, Freitas argues that Anscombe reflects the more general perspective of influential abstinence theorists, such as Mark Regnerus, who also are well-known for their anti-gay activism. Anscombe's anti-gay-sex agenda also provided an excuse for Princeton president Shirley Tilghman, a paragon of political correctness, to dismiss the group's broader concerns altogether.

To avoid the type of difficulties that Anscombe faced, Freitas proposes encouraging faculty and administrators to help students use "tools" for assessing problems with the hookup culture and its symptoms, even to aid students in finding "meaningful alternatives" to the hookup culture. But as recent examples show, this idea is extremely problematic.

Take, for instance, an ambitious, highly public, attempt by Duke faculty and administrators to give students the "tools" to improve campus culture. After his cancellation of the 2006 men's lacrosse season, Duke president Richard Brodhead created a "Campus Culture Initiative," designed "to evaluate and suggest improvements in the ways Duke educates students in the values of personal responsibility." The move garnered widespread support from "activist" faculty members; History professor and former Duke provost William Chafe argued that "the events that we know took place reflect underlying realities of student culture, at Duke and at American colleges and universities generally, that cry out for attention." Among the events that Chafe purported to "know" at the time he penned his op-ed: that something "happened" to false accuser Crystal Mangum. The Campus Culture Initiative final recommendations were almost a caricature of political correctness, coupling a demand to de-emphasize athletics with a call for a new required course taught mostly by the infamous Group of 88.

It might be, of course, that the pedagogical and ideological alignment among Duke's administrators and "activist" faculty is unusually pernicious. It might be that at most campuses, faculty and administrators wouldn't exploit the cause to advance a form of far-left Puritanism. But I very much doubt it. The experience of Delaware's Residential Advisor program, so ably exposed by FIRE, mirrored that of Duke's Campus Culture Initiative.

KC Johnson is a history professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, and co-author, with Stuart Taylor, Jr.,  of  "Until Proven Innocent," a detailed account of the Duke lacrosse non-rape case.

By Richard Vedder

In the highly competitive free market economy that propelled the United States into our planet's richest nation, business enterprises making mistakes pay huge and sometimes fatal consequences. Indeed it is what Joseph Schumpeter aptly called "creative destruction" that forces firms to be productive, efficient, innovative, and willing to take risks. Contrast this to higher education.  Schools that make mistakes suffer minor but not grievous consequences. The top three schools in 1900 (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) are usually regarded as the top three today.

I looked at the Fortune 500 list for 1993. Of the top 20 companies, more than one third have undergone radical change. Three have gone bankrupt, although they still survive: General Motors, Chrysler, and Eastman Kodak. The Kodak stockholders have been almost completely wiped out and Chrysler has been sold. Three oil companies ceased to exist, being merged into larger companies (Mobil, Texaco, and Amoco). Philip Morris has undergone a fundamental transformation and has divided itself into several entities. Others have had their standing radically change for the better (Berkshire Hathaway went from 158 to 7, Apple from 67 to 17), or worse (Boeing went from 14 to 39, United Technologies from 18 to 48).]]> By contrast, there has been little change in the top 20 universities as measured by US News & World Report.  17 schools in the top 20 in 1993 are still there; no school in the top 20 in 1993 ranks below 23^rd today. There is no "creative destruction" going on, at best a wee bit of what Clayton Christensen calls "disruptive innovation." However,  three forces at work suggest bigger changes are coming, and that we will see more fatalities and well as big success stories in American higher education in the next generation.

1.  Erosion of Third Party Support

The single biggest reason universities have little creative destruction is that third parties -persons other than the consumer or the producer -have highly subsidized them from the consequences of mistakes. There are five big sources of subsidy income: state government institutional subsidies; federal government grants, especially for research; governmental (mostly federal) student financial assistance; gifts by private individuals to universities; and endowment incomes. There are good reasons to believe the growth in all five of these will be limited over time.

Americans have not yet realized that as we move from a market-based competitive free enterprise society towards a more socialist welfare state on the European model, economic growth is falling, probably permanently. That means we simply cannot afford to do thing we normally would think were within our capacity. The ability of the federal government to expand its spending is constrained by a slowdown in expansion of tax revenues, excessive debt burdens, and heightened competition for subsidy dollars, especially from health care - arising from expanding benefits and an aging population. This will crowd out both research grant spending and subsidies of students via grants and loans. Similarly, the population aging is increasingly crowding out state spending on colleges, a trend that shows no long-term signs of abetting, despite some modest recent increases in appropriations. A more stagnant welfare state means reduced income and wealth growth among the rich, aggravated recently by a soak-the-rich tax policy.  This means philanthropic giving will not show robust growth. Similarly, lower economic growth will impede investment returns of endowment funds.

The irony of it is that American higher education is left-centric; it overwhelmingly likes President Obama and other liberals. Yet the policy prescriptions of American welfare state liberalism are what will wound if not kill the growth of American higher education in the years to come.

2.  The Erosion of the Labor Market for College Graduates

The view that college graduation provides a near-guaranteed ticket to a prosperous middle-class life style conflicts with the reality of today's labor markets. The number of college graduates vastly exceeds the number of relatively highly-paid skilled jobs traditionally filled by degree holders. More and more recent college graduates are working as hotel desk clerks, bartenders, taxi drivers and janitors. Meanwhile, a construction industry employment consultant tells me that he is desperately looking for welders for clients - welders earn great incomes but have little postsecondary education. We are turning out more college graduates than skilled-job growth requires even in the best of times, increasing the risks and job security problems of earning a degree. This all translates into reduce demand for university services.

3. Rising Competition

When something gets expensive, consumers look for lower-cost alternatives. For years, for-profit providers have developed increasingly attractive options to traditional education, increasingly at low costs (e.g., StraighterLine). Coursera, EdX, Udacity and the Saylor Foundation are just four new providers of almost zero-cost online courses, often of high quality. Soon innovators will package these into low-cost degrees despite efforts of some traditional providers (with the assistance of the accrediting agencies they control) to stop them. Career colleges have grown enormously, offering certificated training for future chefs, truck drivers, hair stylists, medical technicians, etc. Developing job competency by examination may grow -we have a CPA examination and a bar examination for lawyers, why can't we have a College General Education Equivalency Test, where those doing well show a probability of occupational success equal to that offered by holders of bachelor degrees? If a diploma costs $100,000 to $200,000, surely there are feasible and cheaper ways of telling employers who is likely to prove competent.

Richard Vedder directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, teaches economics at Ohio University and is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

By Peter Sacks

In my 1996 book Generation X Goes to College, I predicted that virtually anyone with a computer and a modem would have access to the storehouse of human knowledge. As a result, higher education as we know would become an anachronism, if not obsolete. The university's status would diminish because it would lose its competitive advantage in disseminating information. 

The recent emergence of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), however, raises obvious questions.  Are these new teaching methods as effective, in terms of student performance, as real-life classrooms? Can these new technologies bring down higher education costs? Former Princeton president William G. Bowen takes on these questions and others in his new book Higher-Ed in the Digital Age. Once a skeptic, Bowen now concludes that online learning programs will reduce the cost of higher education without harming student learning outcomes.  

His conversion is inspired by the findings of ITHACA, a non-profit organization that conducted "the most rigorous assessment to date" on the economics of online learning technology.  That study demonstrated that student learning outcomes, as measured by standardized tests, are no worse in online courses than in traditional classes. Not better, just not worse.  Though these results might sound unimpressive, Bowen asserts that they are "very important" because they disprove the common prediction that online education will harm students.  

Moreover, he argues, the long-run cost savings of labor-saving technologies could be profound. One reason is that online courses can help institutions fill the gap between the large demand for critical courses and the limited ability of cash-strapped public institutions to satisfy it. Improvements here could reduce the average time it takes to complete a degree, making colleges more productive, affordable and efficient.  Bowen acknowledges that the ITHACA study could not answer cost-savings questions because most savings occur over time. Still, Bowen notes that early evidence from various simulations suggest that the long-term instructional savings could be significant. Compared to a traditional course with multiple sections, savings in teaching labor costs alone ranged from 36 percent to 57 percent in the simulations.

Despite this promising data, it is unclear whether most university administrators will embrace this technology. According to the most recent (January 2013) report of the Babson Survey Research Group, 46 percent of whom say that teaching online courses requires more time and effort from the faculty than traditional courses. That percentage was 44 percent the year before.  Regardless, the number of students who had taken at least one online course rose by 570,000 in one year, for a new total of nearly 7 million students. That's a growth rate "far in excess of those of overall higher education," the report says. Some 32 percent of all college students had taken at least one online course, the highest percentage on record.

Online learning therefore seems an inevitable part of the future higher education landscape. But like so many technical advancements, we often fail to consider the technology's far-reaching implications. Bowen, who focuses exclusively on online technology's potential to reduce costs, is no exception.

The Cost of Standardization 

My major concern is the increasing standardization of the college experience. In order to make online learning worth the cost of development, institutions must achieve economies of scale so as to spread its costs over a large number of students.  But achieving these economies of scale means losing certain intangible aspects of the classroom environment; indeed, online education makes no room for the interpersonal interactions that are an essential part of an authentic education. MOOCs in particular lack a human element. For example, the leading MOOC provider EdX (founded by Harvard and MIT) is poised to deploy artificial intelligence software for grading student essays. As someone who has taught college writing, I am most skeptical that a computer program is capable of differentiating an average essay -- though containing all the textbook components of an essay -- from a brilliant one.  Machines will reward mediocrity because mediocrity is what machines can be taught to understand.

Rest assured that I am not a Luddite. Indeed, I concede that educators ought to rethink the role of the university. However, they must identify the university's comparative advantage, and given the advent of online technologies, the dissemination of information is not sufficient. Instead, academic leaders should recognize that colleges are uniquely suited to nurture imagination and creativity. No other institution is capable of creating centers of innovation that persist for generations.

To that end, we should let fast and cheap educational programs provide students with basic skills and have the universities provide the real education. Faculty will then take on a new role: Instead of lecturing large classes, they will become expert consultants who guide learners in the application of information for solving, creating and inventing. David Brooks recently cited one professor's prediction that universities will eventually tell students to take certain college courses online, "and then, when you're done, you will come to campus and that's when our job will begin."

Growing Stratification? 

My second concern is that cost-saving technologies will have different consequences for rich and poor institutions and for rich and poor students. Public institutions have faced decreased taxpayer subsidies for years and feel acute pressure to reduce costs through standardization. In contrast, wealthy private universities have little incentive to standardize and cheapen their learning environments. 

The evidence suggests that online learning programs primarily cater to students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. To address this question, I used two U.S. Department of Education longitudinal databases to assess the backgrounds of students who were enrolled exclusively in online education programs in 2007-2008, the most recent data available for analysis. Overall, an average of 82 percent of students was enrolled in traditional programs, while some 18 percent were enrolled exclusively in online programs. My findings:

• Test scores. Among the highest-scoring students on admissions tests, virtually all (95 percent) were enrolled in traditional education programs. Low-scoring students were more than twice as likely as high-scoring students to enroll in online programs. 
• Selectivity. Just 8 percent of students at colleges with very selective admissions criteria were enrolled in an online program. By contrast, 13 percent of students at moderately selective institutions, 16 percent of those at minimally selective colleges, and 23 percent of students at open admissions colleges, were enrolled in online programs.
• Economic background. Students who enrolled in online programs were more likely to be first generation college students from lower income families than students enrolled in traditional settings.  Some 20 percent of students considered low-income and first-generation college-goers were enrolled in online college programs. By comparison, just 14 percent of students considered not low-income and not first- generation college-goers were enrolled in such programs.
• Parental education. Students whose parents were relatively uneducated were more likely than students with highly educated parents to enroll in online college programs. About 21 percent of students whose fathers completed no more than a high school diploma were enrolled in online programs. That compares to just 9 percent and 12 percent of students whose fathers had attained a professional degree or a doctorate, respectively, going to college online.

Thus, it seems likely that lower-income and budget-strapped students will make the most use of online learning technologies.  This is all well and good to the extent that more students will have access to higher education.  Still, online college programs could further stratify our higher education system, dividing those educated at an "authentic" full-fare university and those who received their degrees from online programs.

We can therefore anticipate the formation of three distinct groups of students. Well-off students will attend the few colleges and universities that are wealthy enough to eschew standardization and automation. They alone will have real relationships with great faculty. A second, less wealthy group of students will use online courses for their general education and attend "authentic" institutions for a short while. For poorer students, online learning could well become the main course. They will attend institutions that, strictly speaking, grant post-high school credentials to the coach class.

By Robert Weissberg

Charles and David Koch are reportedly interested in buying the Tribune Company's eight newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun. According to The New York Times, this is less about making a profit than acquiring a platform to extol the brothers' laissez-faire ideas. Current estimates put the price tag at about $623 million (privately owned Koch Industries have annual revenues of about $115 billion).

Leaving aside the obvious arguments about buying dinosaurs and whether the brothers could ideologically re-shape these papers, let me suggest a better investment--establish an undergraduate college heavy on the humanities and social sciences (including economics) that recruits only top students. (David Koch took a step in this academic direction in 2007 when he gave $100 million to MIT for the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research). In a nutshell, it's better to create an elite alternative to today's left-leaning academy than to exercise the owner's droit de seigneur to write weekly op-eds on the evils of Washington's regulation. The Koch boys surely must appreciate how innovation can destroy the old economic order and higher education is no exception. Moreover, creating a college via a 501(c)(3) foundation would provide huge tax savings, perhaps even making the enterprise "free." 

I am not advocating "Libertarian U." America hardly needs another politicized, indoctrination-minded university. Rather, and perfectly consistent with libertarian values, today's higher education could benefit from a top-notch undergraduate-oriented college unfettered by political orthodoxies, a true marketplace of ideas where, at least in principle, the  brothers' cherished laissez-faire could get clobbered. Surely Charles and David will agree--no ideological litmus tests, and may the best ideas win.

From Harvard and Stanford to Koch

Many of today's great universities owe their existence to a single Great Benefactor. John Harvard's deathbed bequest created Harvard University. There's Peter Cooper and Cooper Union; Duke's Washington Duke; Cornell's Ezra Cornell; Johns Hopkins of Johns Hopkins; Leland Stanford of Stanford and Cornelius Vanderbilt of Vanderbilt among many others. And let's not forget John D. Rockefeller who in 1890 with the American Baptist Education Society founded the University of Chicago (Marshall Field of department store fame donated the land). 

If the Koch brothers feel a bit shy, they can just transform an existing school, for example, make Hillsdale College into Hillsdale University. Humble origins can be overcome--today's research-driven Carnegie Mellon University began as Carnegie Technical Schools, offering only vocational training for Pittsburgh's poor.

Starting fresh totally solves innumerable problems. No more futile calls for universities to hire a few token conservatives or trying to slim down over-stuffed bureaucracies that add nothing of intellectual value. Nor will conservative donors fret about administrators misallocating their gifts (recall the Robertson Foundation suit at Princeton and Yale returning the Bass family's $20 million gift). In an instant, intellectual life would be cured of obsessing over race, class and gender. The Kochs would also have the opportunity to re-think tenure and instructional options. To prevent ideological nonsense from creeping back in, all syllabi and reading lists will be posted online, a boon for parents, future enrollees, trustees and donors.

Buying an Abandoned Campus

The financial start-up costs would be relatively low, especially with a focus on the humanities, the social sciences and economics/business. Nor is there anything mysterious about building a university from scratch, and there are also abandoned campuses that can be bought cheap. Begin by hiring a few top administrators competent to recruit department chairs. In an instant, all the PC corruption, everything from the mindless group-identity and feel-good majors to expensive remediation centers would be gone. Assuming ample salaries and perks plus genuine academic freedom, our new university -- let's just call it Koch University or KU -- would be flooded with resumes. For many leading academics, the prospect of intellectual freedom and escape from PC orthodoxy would be irresistible. Free at last!   

The Koch brothers might especially welcome job applications from distinguished researchers currently at CATO, Heritage or Reason who abandoned the university's version of life-of-the-mind when they realized that their political views made them academically unhirable. KU would also be remarkably cheap. Traditional European universities would be the model: a bare-bones administration with no athletic programs, no student services, no housing and dining, and no counseling. Craig's List will replace overpaid Deans of Student Services. Moreover, look to 158-year-old Berea College: KU would hire students to mow the lawn, pick up trash, or better yet, students would start small business (Berea does not charge tuition). Money would also be saved by eschewing uneconomic professional schools like music and architecture. Further, permit students to fulfill some requirements by enrolling in free online courses at top schools elsewhere. Reading assignments could be accessed on tablets or iPhones or printed off on high-speech cheap printers (no more college bookstores).

We Need a Good Education School

But, if there is one cost-effective way of altering today's political culture, it would be to establish a pre-eminent School of Education. It is in K-12 that the real long-term harm occurs, so that by the time a student arrives on campus, the intellectual damage may be irreversible. Even if their brains have yet to be corrupted, many lack the basic skills (and work ethic) necessary for higher education. So many classes are in fact remedial. I strongly suspect that graduate of the KU School of Education would immediately find work in school districts desperate for smart, demanding, knowledgeable teachers. To paraphrase Cato (Cato the Elder, 234-149 BC, not today's Koch-funded CATO), Columbia Teachers College must be destroyed.   

Equally important, education professors at KU can develop new PC-free curricula, write no-nonsense K-12 textbooks and conduct honest research on how to reach youngsters who seem impervious to education. Out goes multiculturalism, in goes intellectual rigor and hard work. If there is one part of today's dreary educational landscape that desperately needs change, it is in schools of education and changes here cost but a pittance compared to subsidizing The Chicago Tribune.   

KU is an easily copied template and it is conceivable that some of today's elite lefty schools will follow KU's lead to hold market share. This is especially true when KU students pay a tiny fraction of what it costs to attend Swarthmore or Oberlin and receive a superior education, to boot. Philanthropists like Bill Gates could probably set up half a dozen and, rest assured, unlike most of the schemes advanced by today's education-minded foundations, they would succeed (the Gates Foundation once spent $2.1 billion in a failed effort to boost academic achievement by converting big high schools into multiple smaller ones).This business model also avoids all the pitfalls of for-profit schools while students will graduate largely debt-free and highly employable.

Thousands of smart youngsters will receive an intellectually first-rate education from intellectually accomplished professors who put truth above ideology, and at a fraction of the tuition charged by ideologically soaked small liberal arts college. As this model spreads it is easy to envision tens of thousands, perhaps more, of these well-informed, clear-thinking young men and women moving up to positions of power. This would truly be revolutionary, and good business, too.     

(Photo: Charles and David Koch. Credit: Forbes.)

PETER WOOD: Samuel Goldman seeks to distinguish the small and marginal subset "conservative defenders of liberal education" from other kinds of conservatives. He places these poor folks "in a blind alley." They are, he says, at odds both with "potential allies outside the conservative movement" and with the conservative movement itself, which finds its center of gravity in something other than the preservation of civilization. He then offers friendly advice as to how we conservative defenders of liberal education can find an exit from that alley. Make friends, he says, with people who are not political conservatives but who "take pride in their status as conservators of a cultural inheritance."

I take it by "conservative defenders of liberal education" he means folks like the members of the National Association of Scholars. Good advice, but as it happens, we are already there and have been for the last 25 years. A sizable portion of the NAS membership is made up of people who are registered Democrats. Some of our board members, some of our prominent donors, and some of the scholars who write for our journal Academic Questions emphatically identify themselves as "liberal," and by that they do not mean libertarian. And NAS tirelessly explains to those in the media who insist we are a "conservative" organization that, no, we are an organization that focuses squarely on improving American higher education by advocating for the continuing relevance of reasoned inquiry, the pursuit of truth, and the centrality of Western civilization. We never defined those as "conservative" principles. And in fact they are not. They appeal to some conservatives, which is great. But they also appeal to some liberals, which is also great.  

It is hard to believe that anyone who has delved into the report has discerned there a "jeremiad."  The original Jeremiah said that "The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron"--and that was on one of his sunnier days. The voice of the NAS report is typified by this: "At the level of course offerings in the 2011-2012 academic year, the Bowdoin curriculum looks very much like a standard liberal arts college curriculum." We don't call out Bowdoin's "sins" and what we write is with a pen of erasable ink and a readiness to correct any errors that readers may spot. 

Far from being the same old, same old conservative diatribe, What Does Bowdoin Teach? is something new under the sun: a deeply contextual, dispassionate, and reasonably comprehensive examination of the whole of one college's effort to educate its students, in the classroom, in the dorms, and in every other campus context. 

The upshot of this is that we have attracted quite a few readers from outside the precincts of self-proclaimed conservatives. I just returned from a speaking invitation at Williams College, where the report hit a resonant chord. I've also heard (positively) from readers at other colleges that number among Bowdoin's peer institutions, including Amherst, Middlebury, and Mt. Holyoke. One of the senior professors at Bowdoin published a letter in the Bowdoin student newspaper in which she says much of the report is "spot on." 

Mr. Goldman, on the other hand, seems to be making a sub-specialization of taking issue with the report.  This is his third go, and on each occasion he has cast the report as a "conservative" critique, though the report itself isn't presented as that. It addresses Bowdoin's lack of conservative faculty members and poor representation of conservative views, but there is a difference in writing about a point of view and espousing that view. None of Mr. Goldman's forget-me-nots, incidentally, provides any evidence that he has actually read the report. Maybe he is saving that for part four.

Mr. Goldman appears not to be very good in spotting those who are, more or less, already on his side.  But let me hasten to add, it is a complicated side to be on.  The NAS promotes the study of enduring works of philosophy, literature, science, and history; but not because we fetishize the "Great Books" or think that time-tested works all say the same thing. Rather, we favor the hard work of understanding how and why major thinkers disagreed and how from their disagreements emerged a tough-minded tradition of critical inquiry. Liberal education, taken seriously, has a lot of work to do, especially with 18- to 22-year-olds who in many cases arrive at college with a poorer command of the essentials than was typical of students in years past. 

Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars.

JONATHAN B. IMBER: Samuel Goldman and Peter Lawler each take up the question of how academic conservatives (who are admittedly few and far between) can better work with their predominantly liberal colleagues. I think Goldman is correct, as far as it goes, that those of us who profess some measure of difference in our opinions about many things with our colleagues, can and should find ways to work together to achieve the common purpose of educating our students. This used to be called collegiality, and although I think it has come to be vastly overrated, the insistence on civility as a basic foundation of our academic precincts should never be too much to ask of ourselves.

Goldman thinks that the internal stakes are important to cultivate, and I, for one, have lived by that advice for a very long time. However, staying in one place for any period of time is out of fashion these days. Civility and collegiality have been undermined for quite some time by the ways in which the academic perch has allowed for multiple forms of participation beyond one's home-base. I have observed over a nearly forty-year career how loyalty and devotion to institutions of all kinds (from family to school to employer) have been attenuated by both the ease of movement and the restlessness about doing "one's thing."  One of my colleagues told me that the first question he was asked by a distinguished colleague at an elite university was, "Are you going to move?"

Indeed, the entrepreneur on the move is in fashion. To be sure, there is absolutely nothing wrong with entrepreneurship. It has always existed, and those institutions, like my own, are beholden to the genius of capitalist entrepreneurs whose creative destruction continues to produce enormous dividends for all concerned. With that acknowledged, the implications for higher learning are suddenly daunting. 

_____________________________________________________________________

Jonathan B. Imber is Jean Glasscock Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College.

By Samuel Goldman

What's conservative about liberal education? On any serious consideration, the answer is: a lot. Students do pick up marketable skills when they take classes in literature, history, or philosophy. But the real purpose of studying languages, books, and arguments is to initiate them as members of a community of free men and women, the present and future of which are heavily influenced by its dual origins in Athens and Jerusalem. In a recent essay for Minding the Campus, Peter Augustine Lawler described this task as "cultural transmission"--a term than could almost be derived from postmodern theory. It would be more conservative to use the still intelligible Latinate term tradition, which literally means "handing over."

Liberal education, then, has a distinctly conservative function. But that does not give it any necessary connection to conservative views on other matters, let alone approval for the Republican Party. Rather than confusing a cultural function with a partisan program, defenders of liberal education should pursue alliances with educational "conservatives" of the center and left. 

Conservatives and Liberal Education

Because liberal education involves the handing over an inheritance from the past, political conservatives have been among its most outspoken advocates in modern America. Beginning in the 1950s, conservatives like William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, and Robert Nisbet mounted a defense of tradition against the political activism and intellectual fads that were already gaining influence on campus. They justified this defense partly on the grounds that Americans who were ignorant of their heritage would be unable to resist socialism. Through this argument, academic disputes acquired a distinctly political significance.

The association between liberal education and political conservatism was strengthened during the culture wars of 1980s and 1990s. While many liberals and progressives embraced the expansion of the canon to include more minorities and women, conservatives took their stand with the Dead White Men. The argument was not just about reading assignments. For academic conservatives like Harvey Mansfield, the defense of tradition in the classroom went along with opposition to affirmative action in admissions.

More recently, conservative critics of higher education have focused on the paucity of Republicans on college faculties. With partisan loyalties so unbalanced, they ask whether liberal education has been transformed into a form of indoctrination. In his new book, Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?, the sociologist Neil Gross finds little evidence of explicit bias against Republicans in graduate school admissions or faculty hiring. But he argues that the perception that faculty is liberal--particularly in the liberal arts--may deter young conservatives from pursuing academic careers.

From Defense to Dismissal

The result of these developments in conservatives' relationship to liberal arts education is a kind of paradox:

On the one hand, conservatives see themselves, with some justification, as the historical guardians of liberal education. Often, this means study of dead languages, old books, and traditional scholarly specialties such as military history. On the other hand, conservatives are deeply alienated from the actual practice of liberal education. Even in the 1950s, they understood themselves as an endangered remnant on campus. Now, they seem to be shut out almost entirely.

The oscillation between ownership and alienation generates the shrill tone that characterizes conservative discussions of liberal education. The recent report on Bowdoin College by the National Association of Scholars is a good example. The report's intention is laudable: to show how far Bowdoin has drifted from its traditional goals. But it reads like a jeremiad against every change in higher education since the 1960s and does not give adequate credit to the professors and students there who devote themselves to teaching and learning many of the same subjects and sources as their predecessors. 

At times, conservatives' criticisms of liberal education as actually practiced are so bitter that they make it sound as if the whole enterprise is beyond redemption. This dismissive implication encourages populists and libertarians who regard liberal education as a waste of time and money. Consider Rush Limbaugh's dismissal of a hypothetical classics major as "Miss Brain-dead" without hopes of gainful employment. Nor have Republican politicians shown any affection for liberal education. Among the candidates in the GOP primaries last year, both Rick Perry and Mitt Romney proposed policies that would hasten the transformation of public universities into vocational schools.

Conservative defenders of liberal education, then, seem to be caught in a blind alley. Their political affiliations distance them from potential allies outside the conservative movement. But their putative allies within the movement have little interest in their goals. 

Making Friends and Influencing People 

Any defense of liberal education that condemns current practice in light of a decades-old ideal is doomed to fail. The homogeneity that once characterized the American academy cannot, and in many respects should not, be restored. Affirmative action may be on the way out, at least in public universities. But ethnic diversity and cultural pluralism are here to stay.   

Liberal education also won't get much support from the conservative movement or Republican Party. This is partly because the association was contingent in the first place: the invocation of Aristotle as a bulwark against socialism was never especially convincing. More importantly, however, the populist and libertarians strands of contemporary conservatism are usually indifferent, and in some cases actually hostile to liberal education's traditional functions. The enthusiasts for MOOCs and vocational training are not friends to liberal education.

What should conservative defenders of liberal education do? In my view, they ought to look for fellow "conservatives" outside their usual circles. There are more educational conservatives on the faculty than studies of political affiliation suggest. 

Although they usually vote for Democrats and hold liberal views on many issues, a surprising number of professors take great pride in their status as conservators of a cultural inheritance. What they dislike is the suggestion that asking students to read Dante means they oppose, say, universal healthcare. Since there is no connection between these things, prudent conservatives would do well to avoid suggesting one.

Another strategy for broadening the base of support for liberal education is to point out the deeply ambiguous character of the classics (broadly conceived). It's not just that writers like Tolstoy evade contemporary political categories. They also pose questions that challenge any moral, political, or aesthetic commitments. In this respect, liberal education can be subversive of prejudice as well as conservative of a cultural heritage. If you doubt that, try teaching Plato's Symposium.

Finally, defenders of liberal education should be prepared to defend the study of Western traditions as a basis for understanding other cultures rather than an alternative to it. We cannot learn everything at once or equally well. It is wise, therefore, to begin with what is familiar and near before progressing to what is strange and distant. At the same time, students from non-Western backgrounds have much to contribute to discussions of the European past. Modern American students can struggle with 19^th century novels partly because they can't imagine how class and family could exercise such a powerful influence over individuals' behavior. But students from India, for example, may understand from personal experience. 

Opponents of such efforts may identify them as a Trojan horse for conservative politics. The best rebuttal to such accusations is to describe them, in perfect sincerity, as false. Liberal education is not a cover for any agenda, nor is it the property of any party or sect. It is, to borrow from Matthew Arnold, an introduction to the best that has been thought and said in a particular place and span of time.

The miraculous thing is that these treasures belong to us all, no matter who we vote for.

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Samuel Goldman is a Senior Contributor to The American Conservative and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. 

By KC Johnson

At some point the demands for federal investigations into our colleges' supposed indifference to accusers in sexual assault cases will reach the point of parody. In fact, that point might already have been reached with two recent developments. First, celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, an attorney who never met a TV camera she didn't like, has agreed to represent several Occidental College students in their complaints about the school's sexual assault policies. Second, a Title IX complaint has been filed against Swarthmore College, an institution widely considered a paragon of political correctness. To get a sense of the campus climate: Swarthmore was last in the news after student protesters successfully pressured Robert Zoellick, a former head of the World Bank and an early supporter of the Iraq War, into declining an offer to serve as commencement speaker.

Richard Perez-Pena--coordinator of the New York Times' anti-campus due process beat--brought news of both developments in a co-authored article. As is his customary pattern, Perez-Pena didn't actually describe the policies against which the students were complaining. (No mention, that is, of Occidental's bizarre standard under which a male student can be deemed culpable for sexual assault even if his partner says "yes" to intercourse.) Referencing the Orwellian criteria that campuses currently use would not, it seems, comport to the ideological framework through which the Times is viewing these stories.

Instead, Perez-Pena quotes two Occidental students, Kenda Woolfson and Carly Mee, who say they were forced to encounter the person who raped them on campus and even at graduation. Yet neither woman appears to have even filed a criminal complaint, much less gone to trial. Perez-Pena appears uninterested both in why the two women pursued this course of action or in the journalistic ethics of describing someone (albeit anonymously) who hasn't even been charged as a "rapist." The Los Angeles Times, by contrast, noted that Mee never went to the police with her accusations.

In what might have been a rare instance of good editorial judgment--or perhaps simply the result of a lack of space--Perez-Pena didn't include another vignette from the Allred press conference that Gawker mentioned. Summarizing a claim from Allred's filing, Gawker showed that Occidental once punished a student found culpable for rape by making him write a five-page report. Neither Gawker nor Allred substantiated the claim. Instead, readers are asked to believe that a college so politically correct that its policy holds that "yes" might mean "no" in a case of sexual assault is also utterly indifferent once it finds students guilty of assault. Only those gullible enough to see Allred as a high-minded idealist would uncritically accept such a claim.

The Times Visits Swarthmore 

What about Swarthmore? Unlike Occidental, the college defines sexual assault in a standard fashion, but its definition of sexual harassment raises eyebrows. After maintaining that the college follows relevant federal precedent that "an intimidating, hostile, or demeaning environment is defined as one that is so severe, pervasive, or objectively offensive that it interferes with a person's ability to learn. . . or have access and opportunity to participate in all and any aspect of campus life," its guidelines then note that "there is a wide range of behaviors that falls within the general definition of sexual harassment and many differing notions of what behaviors are and are not acceptable." That list includes a "lewd comment," or "unwelcome verbal" advances; therefore, it has a much lower threshold for harassment than the Supreme Court.

The procedures the Swarthmore activists have deemed insufficiently protective of the accusers' standing are, sadly, as due process-unfriendly as the typical college disciplinary process. Accusers have no obligation to report any sexual assault to the police or to consent to a medical rape exam. They can, nonetheless, simply file a complaint through the college, prompting the college to conduct an investigation, which can be overseen by Title IX coordinator Sharmaine Bradham LaMar--hardly a neutral party. LaMar then can investigate "in the manner appropriate"; she isn't required to interview witnesses or even the accused student. She must issue a report, usually within 20 days of the complaint and always within 60 days. The accuser and accused students can then file a written reply.

At that point, charges can be dropped--but even then, the Dean's Office has "the discretion to require the accused to participate in remedial measures that ensure sufficient education and counseling of the College's policies." In other words, an uncharged student can be compelled to perform "remedial measures" solely on the basis of LaMar's judgment.

If charges are pursued, the matter gets turned over to the College Judiciary Committee. The accused student is sworn to secrecy--any public discussion of the charges against him, even if they're wholly unfounded, constitutes "a violation of College policy and is an adjudicable offense." Mentioning the allegations to an outside counsel, therefore, violates the Swarthmore judicial code.

The college goes to great lengths to prevent accused students from thoroughly examining the evidence that LaMar or her investigators compile. College guidelines suggest that accused students will obtain access to the material relevant to the hearing against them only 48 hours before the hearing. Then, in a most unusual twist even at due process-unfriendly Swarthmore, the evidence can be viewed only in the college dean's office and cannot be removed or photocopied.

Once the hearing begins, the accused student can bring one "supporter" into the hearing room, but the college limits acceptable "supporters" solely to current members of the Swarthmore community. Since Swarthmore doesn't have a law school, this requirement effectively prohibits attorneys without explicitly saying so. The "supporter" cannot speak in the hearing.

The accused student lacks the right to cross-examine his accuser, although he can question other witnesses called by the colleges. (Swarthmore provides no explanation why the accuser can't question the most important witness against him.) Witnesses testifying on behalf of the accused student must be pre-cleared by the college "observer," a judge-like figure, who can reject any proposed witness in advance. At the hearing itself, another college figure, the "convener," can also reject witnesses--even those, it seems, approved by the "observer." The convener also can exclude any and all questions he or she deems prejudicial, privileged, confidential, or that "otherwise would interfere with the fair adjudication of the hearing." Guilt is established, reflecting OCR guidelines, according to a preponderance of the evidence, or 50.01% percent.

To summarize: at Swarthmore an accused student can be punished even if no charges were filed against him. Once charged, he can't consult with a lawyer, since doing so would breach confidentiality rules and result in additional punishment. He can only examine the evidence against him two days before the hearing, and only then in the college dean's office, without an ability to photocopy material. He can't cross-examine his accuser, his witnesses or questions can be excluded for arbitrary reasons, and he can be found guilty by a 50.01% threshold.

And yet not only have a group of Swarthmore students filed an OCR complaint deeming these policies insufficiently protective of the accuser's rights, but Swarthmore's president, as summarized by the Times, "said that Swarthmore has acknowledged flaws in its record and has been trying to address them" to meet the accusers' concerns. What procedures could possibly be acceptable to such figures?

That's not a question the Times wants to answer.

The Importance of Process 

Regarding campus sexual assault, understanding the process provides critical context, which makes the Times' consistent exclusion of process all the more indefensible. A typical reader of Perez-Pena's oeuvre could be excused for believing that the complaining students faced something akin to the criminal justice system. Perhaps they encountered an indifferent police officer nearing retirement, or were assigned to an overworked prosecutor, or went before an indifferent jury, or were brow-beaten by a brutal defense attorney, all while having to obtain guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Yet, of course, the campus judicial system is entirely different. The personnel encountered by the accuser--figures such as LaMar at Swarthmore--have every bureaucratic incentive to respect, not alienate, female accusers, since such figures owe their jobs to accommodating all diversity-related concerns on campus. And the disciplinary system is tilted, often wildly so, in favor of the accuser. By declining to mention this necessary context to the paper's readers, the Times presents a (willfully?) inaccurate picture to readers.

As to why the guilt-presuming procedural apparatus matters so much to defenders of the academic status quo, consider two remarkable, and perhaps unintentional, assertions by Brown University vice president Margaret Klawunn. Defending her university's prohibiting students accused of sexual assault the right to counsel in campus disciplinary proceedings, Klawunn fumed, "We don't want attorneys to start running the University process." Fairness, it seems, takes a back seat to preserving administrative control. And the Brown Daily Herald summarized Klawunn's celebrating the OCR-mandated preponderance-of-evidence threshold: "Sexual assault complaints often lack sufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." Imagine the (appropriate) outrage from the Times editorial board if a member of Congress demanded minimizing procedural protections in virtually any other criminal case on the grounds that such "complaints often lack sufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."

By Peter Augustine Lawler

A big divide is showing up between conservative and libertarian criticisms of higher education. Conservatives--and I am among them--argue that higher-ed has become too vocational and libertarians say it is not vocational enough.

Professor Michael Hepner of the University of Dubuque, part of an influential and cutting-edge effort to think through the causes of the withering away of "general education" programs, drew recent attention by arguing that conservatives are obviously right.  "It is no secret," he wrote, "that American higher education is becoming more and more technical."  Colleges are reducing the quantity and quality of general ed requirements so that students can get to their technical majors more quickly and easily.

I would add the observation that technical majors expand as general ed programs contract.  Complicated techno-lite vocational majors like music marketing and sports broadcasting often require huge numbers of courses.  The student, after all, has to master both music and marketing!  And then there are the alleged imperatives of the various specialized accrediting programs for education, business, chemistry, nursing, and so forth.  How could anyone possibly expect to get a job without a professionally accredited major?  English, literature, history, and philosophy and other "liberal arts" majors remain modest in size.  Those majors, of course, don't really claim to prepare technically competent students for some specialized job.  They don't have any vocational or professional reason to gloat.

One reason general education as liberal education is fading fast is that professors in the social sciences and humanities do a pathetic job defending its indispensable perennial relevance.  The Association of American Colleges and Universities is a case in point.  Their first claim is that liberal education gives students "a sense of social responsibility."  Libertarians respond, not without reason, that such a pro-social attitude is what you might pick up from your parents or at church or by being involved in your local community.  They add, of course, that being socially responsible ought to be up to the individual.  It's based on a feeling--empathy--that might be more screwed up than helped by the narcissistic environment of today's self-indulgent humanities professors. The libertarians are perfectly right that it's not worth giving up lots of time and treasure (and especially "borrowing treasure") to acquire a sense--an attitude-- that might not be anything more than buying into the trendiest form of professorial political correctness.

The real claim of liberal education, I think, is that its social or civic function is what is sometimes called "cultural transmission."  A student learns what it means to be part of a political community in a particular place and at a particular time. The student learns what it means to inherit a tradition of thought, love, and action. You have to understand yourself as more than an "abstract individual" before you can really know what your responsibilities as a relational being are. 

From this view, liberal education isn't a mere feeling or sense. It's to be filled with human content. Or better, it's to be filled with the content that allows a human being to be all he or she is meant to be.  There's no way someone could be socially or politically responsible without, for example, knowing the purposes and limits of our government as found in our history and in our best political writing. There's no way someone could be socially or politically responsible without the prudence and moderation that comes through reflection on the enduring lessons of our political experience.

The Seductive Charm of Technical Competence

From this view, gen education can't help but mean an education all American students should share in common.  It includes, of course, more than knowledge of our country in particular, given that our country is part of a larger tradition and a larger world.  From a technical view, it's pretty much always the case that our ingenious inventions have freed us from having to depend on the limitations of the less enlightened past.  But that "progressive" insight doesn't really apply as readily--or sometimes at all--to our moral, political, and religious lives.

One point of "liberal education" is to chasten the vanity that is one seductive charm of technical competence. Today it, among other things, should be an antidote to the "autonomous" pretensions of the creeping and sometimes creepy libertarianism of the morally challenged "displacement" of our self-important "cognitive elite."

The other part of the AACU's lame defense of general education as liberal education is that it can be the source of skills that are "transferable" to our techno-world of work, such as critical thinking, analytical reading, effective communication, and problem solving.  That, of course, is not really an argument for the study of history in particular. Surely those skills could be picked up without all that annoying historical "content." 

Not only that, it's not an argument for "general education," because any history course or any philosophy course could be the source of the "competency."  Students don't have to know any content in common, because what's important is the "how" or technique and not the "what," "who," and "why" that liberal education, in particular, claims to address.

The AACU, by subordinating liberal education to the production of technical skills and prosocial attitudes, has no standpoint by which to resist the trivialization of gen ed. There's no reason that the skills and attitudes can't be picked up in a very user-friendly form. So history and literature can be delivered in courses dealing with pop culture, burning (and typically ephemeral) contemporary issues, or sexuality.

Trivial Gen-Ed Courses Fail

There's a place for such courses, no doubt, but not as general education. They're not about essential "cultural transmission," about discovering who you are and what you're supposed to do. Students can't be fooled into thinking that they're a serious--much less indispensable--part of their higher education. They contribute to their perception that all real education is technical education. And so it's no wonder that studies show that trivial gen-ed courses even fail in inculcating students with the relevant marketable skills and responsible attitudes. When their "learning outcomes" don't have to do with "cultural transmission," they don't achieve any learning outcomes at all.

Relativism, as many have said, is one cause of "the suicide of the humanities." But another is the understandable but futile effort by their proponents to justify their contribution to general education on technical terms in an increasingly technical/vocational environment. It's a pretty open secret that the phrase "critical thinking" is pretty fuzzy. If it's not critical, after all, it's not really thinking! The least our defenders of general education liberal education should begin to do is to explain that thinking is not only about the "how"--as technicians (or sophists) believe--but about the "what" and the "who" and the "why." 

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Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor in the Department of Government and International Studies at Berry College. 

By Greg Lukianoff and Robert Shibley                          

It's no longer a matter of much debate that America's college campuses are not the beacons of free and open discussion  they were intended to be. In its 14 years of existence, our organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has documented hundreds of cases of gross abuses of students' and faculty members' fundamental rights. More than sixty percent of America's largest and most prestigious colleges have speech codes that are either unconstitutional (at public universities) or directly contradict promises of free speech (at private universities).

The two authors of this piece come from different political and personal perspectives. One is a liberal and an atheist (Lukianoff), the other a conservative evangelical Christian (Shibley). Our combined decades of work as president and senior vice president  of FIRE have convinced us that the groupthink and the pressure to conform, be silent, or talk solely to those with whom you already agree  that is fostered by the culture and rules of the modern campus is destructive to students, our educational system, and our society as a whole.

So what can people who recognize the importance of free speech on campus do about it? There are a number of possible measures that might be taken. FIRE is already doing some of them; others would require new large-scale and ambitious initiatives. Some are cultural. Some are political or legal. None are the silver bullet that a lot of us might like, and some have tradeoffs that might make them less desirable. Let's take a look at a few of them.

1. Tie Speech Protections to Federal Funding.

Margaret Hagen, a professor at Boston University, recently proposed that Congress  use the power of the purse to force campuses to respect free speech. This would be a statutory effort that would tie the receipt of government funding to enacting policies and practices that respect free speech, much as colleges that receive government funding must provide access to military recruiters. Given our college funding system, this would apply to nearly every college in America, public or private, since "federal funding" includes not just direct subsidies (received mostly by state schools) but also research grants as well as student funds like Pell grants and Stafford loans. Virtually every college in the U.S. gets federal funding from at least one of these sources--indeed, FIRE only knows of three that don't, out of the thousands of American colleges: Hillsdale College, Grove City College, and the College of the Ozarks. (There are probably more, but not many.)

The advantage of this plan is that with the stroke of a pen, Congress and the President could make every college in America sit up and take notice about free speech issues. Lawyers would be hired to ensure compliance and rewrite speech-restrictive policies that suddenly look a lot more expensive.. Vague genuflections towards free speech would suddenly have real meaning. But there are philosophical problems with this approach. First, it would undoubtedly mean more government intervention in college administration.

Second, this type of legislation could lead to unjustified complacency about rights on college campuses. After all, public colleges are already required to follow the Constitution and yet most don't. Putting federal funding at risk would certainly give them greater incentive to do so, and give private colleges actual incentive to do so, but enforcement would rely on federal bureaucrats being willing to actually cut funding to schools that fail to comply. This might be politically impossible at big schools like Ohio State or prestigious schools like Harvard. Colleges are likely to know this and may be willing to take that gamble. Colleges are in a similar situation with regard to compliance with the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA (a deeply flawed law, but that is for another column). Noncompliance is unlawful and can be punished through the loss of federal funds, but this has never happened in the 39 years since its enactment, despite many abuses.

Third, religious schools or explicitly ideological schools would lose the ability they now have to regulate expression in keeping with their missions. FIRE recognizes the right of private schools to put other values above free speech as long as they are transparent about the rules before students enroll. Few actually do--out of the more than 400 schools FIRE rates, only nine explicitly place other values above free speech, and two of them are military academies. But a free, pluralistic society should allow the ability to establish and join private organizations that have their own set of values that may not agree with the mainstream. Imposing First Amendment standards on all institutions via legislation may be the quickest of all fixes, but it comes with some significant drawbacks.

2. Legally End the Slippery Debate about What "Harassment" Really Means.

Since the 1980s, the most common form of campus speech codes has been wildly overbroad or vague  harassment codes. Poorly written or purposely broad harassment policies can chill or silence huge swaths of protected speech. For example, Auburn University at Montgomery bans "jokes" about protected characteristics, as well as "making judgments," thus managing to ban with a single policy both Chris Rock and Sandra Day O'Connor.

The Supreme Court has actually provided the solution to this problem, if only schools would listen. It comes from Justice O'Connor's majority decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), in which the Supreme Court set out a standard for peer-on-peer harassment in the educational setting that protects free speech while preventing real discriminatory harassment. Under the Davis standard, behavior becomes punishable when it is (1) unwelcome, (2) discriminatory, (3) on the basis of gender or another protected class, such as race, (4) directed at an individual, and (5) "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims' educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution's resources and opportunities."

The Davis standard is a definition that is serious and that correctly confines harassment to seriously discriminatory patterns of behavior. Such a specific definition is nothing like the countless campus codes that prohibit "inappropriate," "demeaning," or merely "offensive" speech. Adopting Davis would send a strong message that "harassment" can no longer be treated as code for a student's or administrator's supposed "right not to be offended."

Colleges could adopt the Davis standard on their own, or the standard could be written into federal or state legislation. Since all schools receiving federal funding are already bound by Titles VI and IX to have rules against racial and sexual harassment, adding this standard to law would not result in further federal entanglement. Indeed, it would add much needed clarity to federal requirements that confuse nearly everyone involved. It is crucial, however, that the law state that the definition of harassment should be understood as "no more and no less than" the Davis standard, and that the Davis standard definition be the only acceptable definition of harassment in the educational context. Without such language, campuses would simply go back to their current practice of having an arguably constitutional definition of harassment in one part of their code coupled with comically unconstitutional definitions of harassment elsewhere.

3. Litigate Aggressively.

Public colleges and universities that maintain unconstitutional speech codes are, of course, breaking the law. Yet at least 61.6% of the public colleges rated by FIRE have speech codes that we deem to be blatantly unconstitutional. FIRE's Speech Code Litigation Project helps students file lawsuits against such unconstitutional speech codes, usually at the rate of about one per year. The project has a 100% success rate, aided by the "target-rich" environment and our expertise in constitutional law. FIRE has also repeatedly provided college administrators with "actual notice" about their unlawful codes through massive certified mailings, making liability for those codes easier to establish.

Our efforts to highlight speech codes with our annual Spotlight reports and targeted litigation have helped. Five years ago, 75% of schools had speech codes that violate First Amendment principles. This year, it was down to 62%. We've spent 14 years working to roll back speech codes while avoiding truly widespread litigation. Yet with more resources targeted towards litigation, there's no doubt that this number could be driven lower as schools realize the risks of maintaining speech codes that are frankly indefensible in a court of law.

Campus speech codes and unclear federal policies currently give campus administrators an excuse to overreact to speech. Indeed, university attorneys have some basis for believing that it may be safer, from a liability standpoint, to overreact. This kind of legal ambiguity--which can leave administrators wondering if they can be sued for not violating the Constitution--sends the problem of politically correct administrators into overdrive. Litigation on a large scale may be the only way to rebalance this perverse incentive structure by creating a real and substantial risk to colleges that currently find it safer and easier to censor first and ask questions later.

4.  Make Colleges Certify Free Speech Protection.  

Knowledge is power, which makes disclosure rules a popular form of providing transparency in many sectors of our economy. Lawyers, stockbrokers, accountants, and many others are used to disclosing pertinent information in the course of business. But there's no rule that says universities must disclose whether they protect students' fundamental rights, despite the fact that they are treated like autonomous city-states with little oversight or accountability in this area. Congress could add a provision to federal law that would require public colleges to annually certify that they have reviewed their policies and that they comply with the First Amendment. The legislation would also require private institutions to declare whether they offer their students free speech rights equivalent to those enjoyed by students on public campuses. These submissions would be posted in a searchable online database, so the information would be publicly available. Private universities that aren't bound by the Constitution would likely find it difficult to tell students and faculty don't have anything like full First Amendment rights.

While the law would not have to involve penalizing universities for not protecting speech (although public universities would court disastrous lawsuits if they admitted they didn't follow the First Amendment), they would have to carefully consider their answers.

5. Not Just Sticks: Provide Carrots to Colleges that Behave.

FIRE has ensured that administrators who refuse to address speech problems on their campuses face possible legal action, expenses, the loss of qualified immunity, and negative publicity. However, simple negative reinforcement is not enough. Colleges must also have "carrots"--positive incentives for reform--to go along with the metaphorical sticks. FIRE works hard to provide positive publicity for those schools that do cooperate and reform their policies. Schools that earn a "green light" rating from FIRE, such as recent examples Eastern Kentucky University, Ole Miss, and Mississippi State, receive public praise, a reward that encourages other schools to follow suit. FIRE has also begun publishing an annual list of the best schools for freedom of speech in The Huffington Post.

Perhaps most valuable, though, is FIRE's willingness to work with universities to avoid the circumstances that lead to bad publicity. FIRE attends multiple college administrator conferences every year to let them know what the law says about free speech and to make sure they know that FIRE is ready to collaborate with colleges in crafting policies that meet their needs without compromising essential freedoms. Rather than pay tens of thousands of dollars to "risk management" consultants who are more concerned with avoiding liability than they are with the Constitution, colleges can work with FIRE--for free, of course--to devise policies that have the greatest protection possible: a basis in reason and principle.

6. The Broader Job: Let's Work to Change the Culture.

FIRE has been successful in winning its  battles one after another. But progress is slow and resistance is high. So it's essential to talk about ways to try to spark a meaningful cultural transformation that will push back against the tide of illiberal behavior on campus.  We must act on more than a case-by-case basis. We must seek systematic solutions.

Since K-12 civics education fails to provide the foundation in the First Amendment and the overall principles of a free society, students arriving in college need to understand their rights. While students know that America protects freedom of speech, and they care about that, most can't articulate the underlying principles or explain why freedom of speech, dissent, thought experimentation, and devil's advocacy are important. And colleges are hardly helping students learn these valuable lessons. FIRE is increasingly aiming at reaching high school students before they arrive on campus. For instance, FIRE's "Freedom in Academia" high school essay contest has elicited over 13,000 submissions since it first began and continues to grow. This year, we're also partnering with the Bill of Rights Institute to develop a curriculum package for high school seniors with a FIRE video and a step-by-step lesson plan.

Another small-scale idea that could have a big impact on campus would be a "boot camp" program for American high schoolers. Beginning in large cities such as New York and Philadelphia, advocates could host sessions focusing on the challenges on campus and how students can fight back against censorship and attempts to clamp down on independent thought. Armed with the tools necessary not only to advocate for the First Amendment, but to understand the importance of meaty, meaningful debate, these students will arrive on campus ready to defend their rights and the rights of their fellow students.  Not every student must be fully educated on the First Amendment. In our experience, even a single student with knowledge of free speech and the power of dissent has the potential to make a difference. Alumni also offer a powerful but difficult-to-mobilize constituency. Over the last decade, we've seen that legal pressure and public attention can have a huge impact on campus. That pressure is all the more difficult to resist when it comes from alumni. After all, few colleges or universities will risk losing millions in alumni support that they could retain by reforming their policies or reversing rights violations. Money talks, and if we can educate alumni on just how serious censorship is at their alma mater, their voices will be heard loud and clear by administrators.

Finally, and most broadly, we must seek ways to overcome the "echo chamber" effect that is prevalent in academia and increasingly in our society at large. This is not something that Congress or lawyers can fix: the change must necessarily be cultural. But if a way can be found to promote the idea that truly educated people seek out discussions with smart people with whom they disagree, it could go a long way to overcoming groupthink both on and off campus.

Too often, people succumb to the temptation to dismiss their political and cultural opponents as ignorant or stupid. And there are many ignorant and/or stupid people out there in all walks of life. If you're looking for one to take on in order to make yourself feel better about your beliefs, you'll find one. But nearly every idea in American discourse that is not utterly fringe has hundreds or thousands of advocates who are perfectly capable of making solid cases for their beliefs. The fact is, if you can't find a person who is capable of making rational arguments on behalf of the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street, you didn't really try, especially in the age of the Internet.

But you might not get this impression on a college campus. As Penn professor Diana C. Mutz discussed in her 2006 book Hearing the Other Side, the more education you have, the less likely you are to have exposure to people with different points of view. This is asking for (and delivering) massive problems of "confirmation bias" that spill over into society at large. One might hope that colleges would be aware of this problem and would be working overtime to correct it; it is, after all, their job to ensure their students are being trained to use the tools of reason and critical thinking. But there's little indication that this is the case on the scale necessary to make a difference.

That's why promoting a cultural norm that advocates seeking out those people and testing one's beliefs would advance dialogue more than we can now imagine is possible. Debate series like Intelligence Squared, websites like Bloggingheads.tv, and others are doing great work towards this goal off campus, and similar programs exist on campus as well. But this shouldn't be just an optional program on campuses--it should be a core goal of the university. Failing that, teaching students that debate is actually fun as opposed to fraught with the risk of offense, that seeking out opposing viewpoints is what smart people do, that too much agreement may not mean that you are right but that you are caught in a self-affirming clique, and that thought experimentation leads to better ideas could do a lot to help students poke their heads out of the echo chambers campus censorship helps create.

Greg Lukianoff is an attorney, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.

Robert Shibley is an attorney and Senior Vice President of FIRE.

(Photo 1: UMass Student Protest. Credit: Matt Cadwallader via Masslive.com.)

(Photo 2: Sam Houston State University student protest. Credit: The Hunstville Item via FIRE.)    

By Judah Bellin

Originally run as a Manhattan Institute Policy Brief.

The growth of student-loan debt has raised a vexing question: Is a college degree still a good investment? No segment of American higher education has faced greater scrutiny than for-profit colleges and universities.

For-profits differ from traditional institutions in important respects. They are accountable chiefly to shareholders, who expect a return on their investment; their stocks are usually traded publicly; and they face no restrictions in setting executive pay. In addition, their admissions standards generally are much lower than those of comparable nonprofit schools. While for-profits only accept students with a high school diploma or equivalent, they are otherwise nonselective. The average acceptance rate for for-profits in 2007-08 was slightly above 74 percent, the highest of any sector and roughly 5 percentage points higher than public universities. Most important, for-profits' academic goals are distinct: they explicitly seek to equip students with vocational skills. To that end, they emphasize technical training over the liberal arts. 

The Promise of For-Profits

The most promising aspect of for-profits is their ability to accommodate those students who, for whatever reason, cannot thrive in a traditional institution. The student-body makeup at for-profits, report Harvard scholars David Deming, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence Katz, underscores their success in attracting underrepresented demographics: "Although African Americans account for 13 percent of all students in higher education, they are 22 percent of those in the for-profit sector. Hispanics are 15 percent of those in the for-profit sector yet 11.5 percent of all students. Women are 65 percent of those in the for-profit sector. For-profit students are older, about 65 percent are 25 years and older, whereas just 31 percent of those at four-year public colleges are and 40 percent of those at two-year colleges are."

For-profits also attract students from socioeconomic groups typically not found in great numbers at traditional colleges and universities. Some 75 percent of students attending for-profits are financially independent of their parents, meaning that they are 24 or older, married, responsible for dependents, veterans, or "wards of the court." In contrast, only 36 percent of students at public two-year colleges in 2007-08 were dependent. The figures are lower for other types of institutions.

The dependent students at for-profits are generally poorer than those attending any other type of institutions: whereas in 2007-08, some 54 percent of dependent students at for-profits had incomes below $40,000, only 35 percent of students enrolled in public nonprofit two-year programs did. The same figures for students enrolled in public four-year programs and private nonprofit programs were 25 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

For-profit colleges attract nontraditional students because those colleges can accommodate the students' unique needs. Many students cite the no-frills nature of for-profits in explaining their decision to attend. Given that for-profit students are often both poorer and more financially independent than their peers at traditional universities, they often must work and care for their families while pursuing their degrees. For-profits serve these students well because students can enroll in as many courses as their other commitments will allow. For-profits' academic offerings also appeal to these students: they do not offer liberal-arts programs but rather teach technical skills for specific fields--and thus can quickly train students whose time is more limited because of work and family commitments.

The technical training that for-profits offer underscores the industry's greatest strength. For-profits can easily change their program offerings based on market signals; accordingly, they provide training in fields in which employer demand for skills is increasing. Indeed, for-profits recognized burgeoning opportunities in "phlebotomy, x-ray and ultrasound technicians, practical nursing and even registered nursing" and increased their offerings of associate's degrees and certificates in these fields much more than other institutions did.

For-profits are more successful than community colleges at retaining students who enroll in shorter programs: one estimation model shows that for-profit students are 9 percent more likely to obtain certificates and 4 percent more likely to obtain associate's degrees than students who begin these programs at community colleges. Furthermore, they are more likely to stay in such programs and less likely to take makeup classes after their first year. This suggests that though four-year for-profit programs do not offer substantial dividends to their graduates, students who attend for-profit colleges for shorter periods without interruption are relatively successful.

Recent Problems and Sanctions

Still, controversy persists. Many argue that for-profit colleges care less about student outcomes than they do about the funds available through federally backed student loans--and these concerns are not wholly without merit.

Some reports show that many for-profit colleges misrepresent alumni employment figures to potential students while providing low-quality academic offerings. Criticism of the industry is growing. New York Times editorials have depicted for-profits as mere "profit centers" and "generally a bad deal for taxpayers and for the underprivileged students they often recruit through deceptive means." Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, lambasted the industry as rife with fraud and "manipulation."

Like those at nonprofit institutions, students at for-profit colleges are typically eligible for aid--generally loans--through Title IV of the federal Higher Education Act (HEA). That aid, in turn, is a principal source of income for virtually all postsecondary schools. However, students at for-profit colleges default on those loans at a much higher rate than students in either public or private nonprofit institutions.

In 2008, 25 percent of students at for-profit colleges defaulted on their loans within three years, compared with a rate of 7.6 percent for private institutions and 10.8 percent for public institutions. These default rates increased from 2006 to 2011. Moreover, students at for-profit colleges default at rates disproportionate to their numbers: though they constitute just 12 percent of all those in the higher-education industry, they make up half of those who cannot pay back their loans.

For-profits' graduation rates are also worse than those of their nonprofit peers'. Completion of bachelor's degrees is significantly lower at for-profits than at other institutions: though in 2002, 57 percent of all bachelor's students obtained their degrees within six years, only 22 percent of students at for-profits did, compared with 65 percent at nonprofit private schools and 55 percent at nonprofit public schools. Moreover, the disparity between white and minority students' completion rates is larger in the for-profit sector than in any other. Finally, for-profit students have a greater likelihood of being unemployed than their peers.

In response to these troubling figures, the U.S. Department of Education in 2011 promised to hold for-profits to the letter of the so-called gainful employment language in the HEA. Henceforth, federal aid to students attending a particular institution would be contingent upon its student-loan-repayment rates. In the department's view, for-profit programs led to "gainful employment" if at least 35 percent of students were paying back their loans and if the annual sum repaid was not above 30 percent of students' discretionary income, or 12 percent of total earnings.30 If institutions did not meet these standards for three years within a four-year period, they would no longer receive federal funding. Moreover, those institutions that the department believed were providing inferior opportunities would then need to request permission from the department to create new "educational programs." Though the D.C. District Court invalidated the loan-repayment measure on the grounds that the desired percentage of students repaying their loans was "arbitrary," the Department of Education pledged to find more acceptable figures. At that time (June 2012), however, only 5 percent of programs at for-profits would not have met the "gainful employment" standards.

Going Forward

How should policymakers approach for-profit colleges? Any proposal should seek to encourage the positive aspects of for-profit colleges--dynamism and the appeal to nontraditional students--while forthrightly addressing their more problematic elements.

Certainly, the federal government should stop subsidizing substandard institutions. As noted above, for-profit colleges rely on federal funding for their continued existence. Strip that away from institutions that fail to produce measurable positive results, and the lower-quality colleges would be hard-pressed to stay in business.

Still, many students who depend on federal aid to support their education would no longer have an opportunity to earn postsecondary degrees. A more gradual approach, with the Department of Education reducing the amount of Title IV loans that it grants by 10 percent each year, might be better. This approach would give families enough time to carefully reconsider their educational options. Alternatively, the Department of Education could cap the amount in Title IV loans that it provides to for-profit colleges each year, thus forcing administrators to reduce unnecessary spending. Doing so would signal that federal support is not unlimited and might encourage for-profits to cut back on nonessential spending.

However, even this gradual approach would put for-profits at a competitive disadvantage: it would push students toward nonprofit institutions, where they can expect more abundant aid. This raises an important point. Thus far, the federal government has targeted for-profits specifically. However, if the Department of Education is concerned about loan repayment, completion rates, and employment statistics, it should also scrutinize traditional institutions with regard to these outcomes. It should not matter whether a student is delinquent in paying back loans from a for-profit, nonprofit, or public college. The government subsidizes students at all three types of institutions and has an interest in ensuring that its investments are used well everywhere.

The federal government can make its commitment to worthwhile higher education clear by ensuring that any regulation of for-profits, or alteration to the student-loan system, is applied to nonprofit colleges and universities as well. This would avoid raising suspicions that new federal measures aimed solely at for-profits are motivated by politics rather than concern for student success. The goal should be an approach that treats for-profit and nonprofit colleges identically, so as to make all consumers in the higher-education market more cautious about their investments. That would make it easier for students to choose the programs that best suit their circumstances and that provide the skills that they need to prosper.