As college campuses consistently play host to a nearly warlike struggle for America’s culture, the colleges suddenly seem to be on the defensive. Thank goodness. If this is a culture war the campus Left is waging, it’s a war they deserve not only to lose, but to be demolished.
I wrote earlier this week about a symbolic bit of blessedly patriotic counter-leftism essayed by a Stanford fraternity in 2017. Advised by an administrator that its popularity on campus would rise if it stopped displaying the American flag, the frat instead bought and displayed a bigger flag.
Alas, the frat is out of business for other reasons now, also not really its fault – but that story of the bigger flag, reported this week, captures the spirit of resistance to authoritarian political correctness that now is putting university lefties on their heels.
The biggest news, well reported here at the Washington Examiner, was about a massive win for reason in the settlement of a lawsuit by the conservative Young Americas Foundation against the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley has been famously hostile to conservative speakers, putting major burdens and restrictions on student groups sponsoring such speakers that it does not put on liberal ones. Encouragingly, Berkeley got taken to the woodshed. The university not only agreed to pay the foundation $70,000, but also reversed a whole series of policies that discriminated against conservative viewpoints. This is a tremendous win for free speech and the unfettered exchange of ideas that universities are supposed to foster.
Elsewhere, Harvard is playing defense on two fronts, both of which show the school at its leftist worst. First and most prominently, all sides await a verdict from a federal judge in the high-profile lawsuit heard in October in which Asian students charge Harvard with years of unlawful discrimination against them. Many observers thought the Asians pressed their case well enough to prevail. Second, just this week, a group of fraternities and sororities sued Harvard to block its rule forbidding members of single-sex organizations from leading campus groups or athletic teams.
Harvard is on shaky legal ground in these cases, and even shakier moral ground. And if even Harvard, a private university, loses these fights, then public universities pushing crazy political correctness are on ground even less solid.
“Of course [Harvard] is not a public university, so it’s not bound by First Amendment or open records or any normal kinds of accountability,” said Robert Shibley, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, to U.S. News and World Report. “So you have a powerful and rich university with less accountability than many other private institutions have by virtue of the way they are governed.”
Meanwhile, universities that go too far are being punished by the free marketplace as well. As one Brett Kittredge noted in an excellent essay here on Wednesday, the University of Missouri has suffered grievous losses in enrollment ever since it countenanced a false bout of race-based paranoia. Likewise, Evergreen State University, one of the looniest-left places in all of academia, has suffered ever-more severe drops in enrollment the more and more it kowtows to the totalitarian-minded students. The college also was forced to pay half a million dollars for mistreatment of a professor whose sin was objecting to an exercise in racial segregation.
Plenty more examples could be given, but the trend is clear: University administrators and students no longer can count on getting away with their cultural jihad against Middle America. The empire of unreason is in retreat. Here’s hoping its retreat hastens, into a full-blown rout.
