☆ Keeping anti-free speech faculty out of local colleges—simpler than it sounds? (4/5)
Charles Joseph Hullmandel, CC BY 4, via Wikimedia Commons
If the cancel culture phenomenon is a snowball effect (starting with recruiting one coercive professor), how can we stop the snow in the first place? According to free speech advocates David Puelz and Elizabeth Weiss, it’ll take hiring centered on quality scholarship; high academic standards for students; and perhaps a smaller, tighter university. An Opp Now exclusive.
Opportunity Now: Earlier, David made a comment about that critical percentage of coercive faculty members—when you reach the point of no return. But what can local universities do to avoid getting to that point, do y’all think?
David Puelz: I can speak to how UATX has thought through this question. First of all, as a general principle, we are opposed to all forms of illiberalism. Our goal as an institution is to build a culture free of this intolerance. Thus, university leadership must unequivocally agree to uphold these principles. If they endorse and desire to propagate illiberalism institutionally, then they should go to another university. There are many options for them. Our operating principles actually matter, and we attract faculty and leadership that believe in them.
ON: How might you determine a faculty applicant is illiberal and disqualify them?
DP: If they endorse any kind of coercive ideology. In fact, to sum up my earlier points, endorsement of coercion is usually correlated with poor scholarship.
Go Deeper:
- Suspended volleyball coach: SJSU's trying to “silence people that are speaking up for their First Amendment rights”
- The quiet (passive) center: How local university extremism capitalizes on reticence
- Irony alert: SJSU prof--considered star teacher and scholar by university--bizarrely persecuted for defending himself at protest
As a general rule, if you stick to the quality of scholarship, you will select the right faculty. The quality of scholarship is directly proportional to the strength of the evidence used in that scholarship. So if you’re evaluating a Marxist ideologue who is a Marxist scholar, history’s provided little to no evidence that Marxist systems lead to flourishing societies. Then, a “top Marxist scholar” should almost not exist by definition. The only reason they exist within current institutions is because of fear, coercion, and suppression of honest debate.
This doesn’t mean Marxism should not be studied or taught at universities. Universities are curation engines that must carefully decide what students should learn in a finite time. If evidence is one guide for the pursuit of truth, disciplines lacking empirical verification should be downweighted relative to others.
With that said, sometimes there aren’t statistical tests or direct evidence for these things. In these cases, you have to make a call of, “This is a set of ideologies that we can't have leading and running our institution.” For instance, DEI—or orthodoxies that believe it’s okay to limit speech. And we have to have a strong leadership structure to support that.
Elizabeth Weiss: Additionally, to your original question, I think one of the solutions is reducing the university's size to prioritize high-quality scholarship. I wonder what might happen if we took out a bunch of redundant or non-rigorous majors, and even programs like dancing that might work better at focused conservatories. What if we didn’t admit students based on athletic ability, but how good of students they are?
DP: We have a similar view at UATX. From the start, we made the decision to more narrowly focus on fewer majors rather than spread ourselves too thin. Even within STEM, our institution emphasizes only three areas of study: data science, computer science, and mathematics.
EW: Along with this, I believe it’s helpful for state colleges to use a lax acceptance policy under the “big tent approach”—but once they’re in, it should be sink or swim. If a student can’t conform to the academic standards, they have to leave. “No hard feelings, we wish you well on your next adventure, but our university isn’t a good fit for you right now.”
Instead, what we often see now is a lowering of standards to try to retain students. For instance, I’ve faced pressure throughout my career to give better grades to sports students, when they hadn’t necessarily earned them. Coaches would write me letters urging me not to fail X student.
And once, as an assistant professor, I had a student in my graduate statistics class who was earning a D. She identified as Native American. I was told by my department chair—you know, the person with the power to give me a good or bad rating—that I ought to change her grade.
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