See Thru Edu is a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation
Thomas K. Lindsay, Ph.D., Editor in Chief and Director, Center for Higher Education, Texas Public Policy Foundation
The untenured faculty member can’t count on anyone reading student comments with the appropriate discernment and rightly fears being unpopular or even controversial for any reason. So he or she operates with the cynicism that accompanies the observation that virtue is not rewarded.
It isn’t just at Harvard, of course. I’m told by law professors I know that even at schools that aren’t known as being hotbeds of leftism, many of the faculty have succeeded in turning their PC enthusiasms into courses.
Recently I attended what was called the Western Civilization Summit in Austin, jointly sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the host of SeeThruEdu, and the Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University.
Relativism was supposed to make all tolerant of all opinions. Instead, it has provided intolerance a license to bully.
No one, whatever his/her identity, has a monopoly on truth. This idea is central to the Enlightenment and to American democracy, and it is profoundly threatened by a leftist ideology that elevates identity over ideas. The end of free speech on campus may just be the beginning.
Let’s push to have universities adopt the Chicago/Princeton policy nationwide. Ask schools to reiterate in no uncertain terms a dedication to the principle that universities and colleges are marketplaces for ideas, and that attempts to suppress expression of free speech are not to be tolerated.
Can a university be in compliance with the law when “an Asian-American student must earn an SAT scores 140 points higher than a white student, 270 points higher than a Hispanic and 450 points higher than an African-American” to have an equal chance at admission? Zhao and quite a few legal scholars think not.
Asian-Americans have the lowest acceptance rate for each SAT test score bracket, having to score 140 points higher than a white student, 270 points higher than a Hispanic student, and 450 points higher than a black student to be on equal footing with these ethnic groups. If this isn’t a flagrant double standard, how would we define one?
“The very term ‘Western civilization’” notes the great American social critic Christopher Lasch in a Harper’s essay from November 1994, “now calls to mind an organized system of domination designed . . . to keep the victims of patriarchal oppression – women, children, homosexuals, people of color – in a permanent state of subjugation.”
A formal education in American history serves young people best by equipping them for a life of deep and consequential membership in their own society. The College Board’s 2014 framework sadly neglects this essential civic purpose of education in history. We can, and must, do better.
