E-Pluribus | April 26, 2024

The adults in the room at universities need to stand up; civil wrongs; and DEI's broken promises.

Apr 26, 2024

A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

David May and Antonette Bowman: How Universities Can Take Back the Quad

Universities are about education, or at least they’re supposed to be. But as happens periodically, a movement sweeps across the country and many campuses turn into hubs of social or political protest. Writing at The Dispatch, David May and Antonette Bowman says there’s already a mechanism in place for college administrations to rein things in without infringing on free expression: codes of conduct.

The protests at Columbia are a product of the explosion of antisemitism on college campuses around the country since October 7 but have also inspired further demonstrations: Students have been arrested at New York University, Yale, and the University of Minnesota among others, and tent encampments are popping up on campuses across the country. Colleges and universities have a tool at hand to deal with this problem, if only they’ll use it: enforcing codes of conduct by clarifying expectations and holding perpetrators accountable.
[. . .]
Thankfully, some outside of academia are trying to help. The House Education and Workforce Committee, which also called the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT to testify on their handling of campus antisemitism late last year, has initiated numerous inquiries. For its part, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has opened dozens of investigations of American colleges and universities for alleged violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin for programs that receive federal funds.” A 2019 executive order clarified that antisemitic discrimination can fall under this rubric.
Yet too many administrators have failed to adequately clarify and enforce their own codes of conduct during the six months since the Israel-Hamas war began with Hamas’ invasion of Israel.
[. . .]
Some administrators are imposing more serious consequences. On April 5, Vanderbilt University announced the expulsion of three students, the suspension of another, and disciplinary probations for 22 other students who had protested Vanderbilt’s refusal to divest from Israel by conducting an overnight sit-in that began with a broken window and an assault on a security officer.
Also on April 5, at Pomona College in California, police arrested 20 anti-Israel protesters who stormed the college president’s office and refused to identify themselves.
A university’s code of conduct serves a foundational role in cultivating an ethical campus community and healthy learning environment. Such codes function as a collegiate “rule of law,” governing a democratic microcosm and transitional training ground for adult citizenship in a diverse democracy.
Unfortunately, too many students are either unaware of their university’s code of conduct, or they don’t mind violating it. Administrators can nip this problem in the bud by including questions about freedom of speech, peaceful protest, and respect for the dignity of others in the application process. And when students accept an offer of admission, leaders should then systematically teach students what the university expects of them during the orientation process, requiring admitted students to certify that they have read the code of conduct and commit to abide by it.

Read it all here.

KC Johnson: Biden’s Civil Rights Rollback

The irony of Title IX turning into a strike against civil rights isn’t lost on KC Johnson at The Free Press. Johnson says the Biden administration (with perhaps an eye to the election in 6 months) is resurrecting policies in place during the Obama-Biden administration that stack the deck against the accused in campus sexual misconduct cases.

Last Friday, the Biden administration followed through on a promise: to roll back civil rights for college students accused of sexual misconduct. The new regulations come under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. Set to go into effect in August, they will restore some of the worst excesses introduced when Biden was vice president under Obama.
[. . .]
In reaction to the news, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) stated: “Justice is only possible when hearings are fair for everyone. Today’s regulations mean one thing: America’s college students are less likely to receive justice if they find themselves in a Title IX proceeding.”
Back when Obama was president, his administration made the elimination of campus sexual assault a priority—an effort led by then–Vice President Biden. It was a worthy goal.
But, as The Free Press previously reported, it quickly went wrong:
[. . .]
During the Obama years, the definition of sexual misconduct expanded to include even trivial interactions, and procedures were put into place that stripped the accused of the most basic of rights. Young men—the accused were almost always young men, of course—were sometimes expelled from campus without ever seeing the charge against them in writing, or hearing testimony against them.
As a result, a new legal phenomenon was born: young men suing their colleges for mishandling cases that accused them of sexual misconduct. More than 500 such suits have been filed in federal courts alone. Many have been successful, establishing basic procedural protections for the accused through the courts.
Then, in 2020, under Trump, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos prioritized Title IX reform. Uncharacteristically for the Trump administration, her effort was thorough and comprehensive, with regulations that carefully balanced the rights of both accuser and accused. The public liked what DeVos did. Even now, healthy majorities support the procedural protections she established.
The Biden administration this month did keep a few of the DeVos reforms. One is that the accuser and accused can come to an “informal resolution” to help avoid a lengthy Title IX investigation. Another is that the accused is presumed to be “not responsible” for the alleged conduct until a conclusion is reached. (A basic principle that shouldn’t need reinstating.)
But overall, “The new regulations are a self-promoting piece of political theater that diminish the rights of all parties,” says Samantha Harris, an attorney who represents both accusers and accused. They “allow universities,” she adds, “to violate students’ rights to due process and fundamental fairness in ways that have already been held impermissible by courts around the country.”

Read the whole thing.

Raquel Rosario Sánchez: DEI Was Supposed to Help People Like Me. It Didn’t

As an intended beneficiary of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies, self-proclaimed lifelong leftist Raquel Rosario Sánchez knows whereof she speaks. Rather than help, Sánchez says rather that DEI is used as a cudgel to silence non-orthodox points of view and maintain conformity.

Thomas Harris [UK Free Speech Union]: “Genuine diversity of thought is required for any business to thrive, but much EDIC [Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Climate] training is having the opposite effect and embedding a new form of groupthink.”
Being a young UK-based woman of colour from the Dominican Republic, this rings true to me. I’ve been invited to DEI meetings and trainings that were supposed to be about assisting and empowering people like me. Yet none have been positive experiences. My role at these forums, I learned, was to look a certain way, not to candidly express my actual viewpoints.
[. . .]
My worst experience was at a service that employed me to work with women recovering from cocaine and heroin addiction, including prisoners set to be released into the community. When I received the invitation to join the organization’s DEI group, I had a bad feeling about what was to come, but decided to attend anyway.
The proceedings began with a group of women—remember that these are women who work at a women’s service that helps women in need, speaking to other women—informing us that we had to define what a “woman” is. The definition they got to was “anyone who identified with femininity,” and things went downhill from there.
It became apparent that, rather than engage in an effort to promote inclusivity and a welcoming environment, the meeting’s true purpose was to announce—and enforce—a certain ideologically prescribed dogma, and to browbeat dissenting voices into either agreement or silence.
The organisation’s leaders wanted to force employees to elicit pronoun declarations from its service-users, and to publish a “trans-inclusive” statement of the fashionable sort that other progressive organizations were putting on social media. This would inform the world that, notwithstanding our mandate as a women’s service, we were open to anyone who merely identified as such.
As much as I would have preferred to stay out of these issues, they were germane to my work, as I’d been hired to host a women-only peer-support group. The women I supported, being more familiar with the real-life challenge of daily survival than the esoteric gender theories of Judith Butler, told me unequivocally that they wanted a female-only space. There were aspects of their experiences, principally involving violence and sexual exploitation at the hands of men, that (not surprisingly) they felt far more comfortable discussing with (actual) women, not men who “identified” as women.
When I challenged these new proposals at work, I was informed that the issue was very much non-negotiable, as the leaders were clearly enthused about their organization’s shiny new intersectional identity, and didn’t care much what our service-users thought about it. I was free to privately believe the heresy that human biology is a real and material presence in our lives, but I was not to traffic in such forbidden ideas at work.
[. . .]
As a lifelong leftist, I still find it jarring to think of how all this was allowed to happen within the short time frame of my own professional life. My only solace comes from the rising tide of evidence, in Canada, the UK, and elsewhere, indicating that more and more people realize that DEI posturing and rituals do not lead to true respect for diversity and inclusion. In my case, as in many others, they lead in the opposite direction.

Read it all.