Internet Scofflaw

The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point has put out a list of banned ideas similar to the University of California’s list. In fact, the list and its formatting is almost the same, which tells me that there is someone out there pushing this stuff.

Another troubling aspect of the Obama administration is its politicization of the government’s statistical agencies, which are supposed to be free of politics. In the latest instance, the FBI commissioned a bogus report on mass shootings, which it has now been forced to retract:

Last September the Obama administration produced an FBI report that said mass shooting attacks and deaths were up sharply—by an average annual rate of about 16% between 2000 and 2013. Moreover, the problem was worsening. “The findings establish an increasing frequency of incidents,” said the authors. “During the first 7 years included in the study, an average of 6.4 incidents occurred annually. In the last 7 years of the study, that average increased to 16.4 incidents annually.” . . .

But late last week, J. Pete Blair and M. Hunter Martaindale, two academics at Texas State University who co-authored the FBI report, acknowledged that “our data is imperfect.” They said that the news media “got it wrong” last year when they “mistakenly reported mass shootings were on the rise.”

Alas, but surprisingly, the retraction was issued with much, much less fanfare than the original bogus report.

It’s worth noting that criminologist John Lott debunked the study almost immediately, while the report’s authors dithered for the better part of a year before admitting he was right.

It’s very helpful for the University of California to put out a list of ideas you’re not allowed to hold. Thanks guys!

For example, one of those banned ideas is “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” That, like the other 50-odd prohibited sentiments, are “microaggressions,” a new term that is taking the politically correct world by storm. It provides a invaluable tool for proclaiming any sentiment a progressive disagrees with to be racist, even though it isn’t. (If it were actually racist, you wouldn’t be bothering to call it a microaggression.)

It is a sign of the times that the University of California, having been exposed for this, doesn’t even have the decency to backpedal in shame:

The university stood by the use of the guides.

“Given the diverse backgrounds of our students, faculty and staff, UC offered these seminars to make people aware of how their words or actions may be interpreted when used in certain contexts. Deans and department heads were invited, but not required, to attend the seminars,” University of California Office of the President spokeswoman Shelly Meron told FoxNews.com.

She added that the university had not banned the words when it labeled them as examples of micro-aggressions and insisted that the university system is “committed to upholding, encouraging and preserving academic freedom and the free flow of ideas.”

Meron said that they have one more seminar scheduled that makes use of the training guides.

Terrific! We are committed to the free flow of ideas; we just want you to know that expressing certain ideas (like merit-based hiring) will brand you a racist. I’m sure that untenured faculty will take great comfort from that reassurance and will feel perfectly free to speak their minds.

Ironically, the University of California was the birthplace of the so-called “free-speech movement“, but it’s quite clear now that the movement was never about free-speech per se, but their speech. They were all for free-speech when they were in the minority, but now that they control the campus, everyone must toe the line.

POSTSCRIPT: Eugene Volokh takes a look at the University of California’s unconvincing explanation.

Ken White notes that Berkeley’s chancellor is giving lip service to the “free speech movement” it spawned, while simultaneously neutering it by drawing a distinction between free speech and “political advocacy”. Of course, anyone with any knowledge of the Constitution knows that political speech (“advocacy”) was the entire point of the Freedom of Speech.

As White put it:

Political advocacy is not distinct from free speech. Political advocacy is the apotheosis of free speech.

Berkeley’s chancellor is hardly alone. The very same people who used to celebrate free speech on campus hate it now. It’s not hard to see why.

The “free speech movement” arose when leftist ideology was a minority opinion. Free speech was important to leftists so they could be heard. Today, leftist ideology is a majority opinion, at least on college campuses, if not yet nationally. What use is free speech to them now? Free speech now means their opponents can be heard.

I wasn’t there at the time, but the left’s behavior today proves that (broadly speaking) they didn’t care about free speech per se, they cared about leftism.

(Via Instapundit.)

The California State University is following Vanderbilt and Michigan, banning Christian groups from campus. As in previous cases, the pretext is that they do not admit “all comers” if they require leaders to be Christian.

Of course, all campus groups choose leaders who ascribe to the group’s beliefs. (Just try to get elected president of the College Republicans/Democrats if you’re a Democrat/Republican.) Christian groups are being penalized for being forthright about it.

Oh, this isn’t sinister at all:

The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online.

The “Truthy” database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution.”

“Social pollution.” What a lovely term that is.

(Via Instapundit.)

California cracks down on unregulated lessons. Because California thinks it’s better for people to remain ignorant than to be taught by the wrong people.

(Via Instapundit.)

A pernicious notion has entered our universities that reflects a deep and very strange misunderstanding of free speech. The notion is that if you don’t approve of what someone is saying, you can stop them from saying it, and that doing so is actually an exercise of free speech.

Thus, if you don’t like a speaker, you can go to the talk and shout him down, and you’re simply exercising your free speech. Or if you don’t like a display, you vandalize it, and that vandalism is an act of free speech.

It should be self-evident that this is wrong. Stopping other people’s expression is not free speech, it’s the opposite of free speech. But people seem profoundly confused by this, and it’s not just our students, but the administrations:

On January 22, 2013, the DePaul chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), having attained the required permits, erected a pro-life display. . . That afternoon, numerous DePaul students vandalized the display. . .

With the investigation completed, DePaul Assistant Dean of Students Domonic Rollins provided Del Campo with a report from the Department of Public Safety, containing the names of 13 DePaul students who had admitted to vandalizing YAF’s display. On February 5, the national YAF organization posted this document on its website. . .

DePaul found Del Campo responsible for the charge of “Disorderly, Violent, Intimidating or Dangerous Behavior,” as well as a charge related to “Judicial Process Compliance.” Del Campo has been placed on disciplinary probation and is prohibited from all contact with the students named in the public safety report. DePaul has also required that Del Campo complete an “Educational Project” in the form of a reflection letter.

As yet, the vandals have apparently not been punished, but the university is punishing the victim for publicly naming them. This is insanity.

I think the slogan Censorship is Peace would go very well with War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.

(Via Evan Coyne Maloney.)

Vanderbilt University announces that Christian student organizations are no longer welcome on campus. Anti-religious activists have been trying to accomplish this sort of thing at various schools for years (they tried and failed at CMU in 1994), but this is their first high-profile success.

. . . from 7% to 8.8% in just one year.

Remember that the federal government just nationalized the student loan industry, as part of the Democrats’ scheme to pretend that Obamacare wouldn’t balloon the deficit:

Thanks to only-in-Washington accounting, making the Department of Education the principal banker to America’s college students created a “savings” of $68 billion over 11 years, certified by the Congressional Budget Office. Even CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf admitted that this estimate was bogus because CBO was forced to use federal rules that ignored the true cost of defaults. But Mr. Miller had earlier laid the groundwork for this fraud by killing amendments in the House that would have required honest accounting and an audit.

Armed in 2010 with their CBO-certified “savings,” Democrats decided they could finance a portion of ObamaCare, as well as an expansion of Pell grants. But as Bernie Madoff could have told them, frauds break down when enough people show up asking for their money. That’s happening already, judging by recent action in the Senate Appropriations Committee, where lawmakers apparently realize that the federal takeover isn’t going to deliver the promised riches.

Nationalizing an industry isn’t a windfall for taxpayers? You could knock me over with a feather.

Apparently this isn’t a joke:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.

In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.

Ilya Somin and Jonathan Adler offer carefully reasoned arguments against the “precautionary principle”, but do we really need them? When someone questions the safety of an activity, the burden of proof is on the other side? That’s insane.

I say — and I’m not being facetious — that conferences on the precautionary principle endanger human health and the environment. Prove me wrong.

Rafael Medoff, a Holocaust scholar, has uncovered US government documents that shed new light on Franklin Roosevelt’s policy toward Jews. The SS St. Louis incident — in which nearly a thousand Jews fleeing Europe were denied asylum in the United States and sent back to Europe, where many of them were murdered — was no aberration. FDR was an anti-Semite.

The documents, which were publicized last week by former New York mayor Ed Koch, are the record of a meeting in Casablanca between Roosevelt and the notorious French general Auguste Noguès. In the wake of the Allied landings in North Africa, the Vichy government had released most of the Jews from their concentration camps, and Noguès wanted to know how much of the Jews’ civil liberties must be restored. The record (page 608) relates Roosevelt’s response:

It was also stated that the Jews, especially those in Algeria, had raised the point that they wish restored to them at once the right of suffrage. The President stated that the answer to that was very simple, namely, that there weren’t going to be any elections, so the Jews need not worry about the privilege of voting.

Mr. Murphy remarked that the Jews in North Africa were very much disappointed that “the war for liberation” had not immediately resulted in their being given their complete freedom. The President stated that he felt the whole Jewish problem should be studied very carefully and that progress should be definitely planned.

In other words, the number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc.) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population. Such a plan would therefore permit the Jews to engage in the professions, and would present an unanswerable argument that they were being given their full rights.

To the foregoing, General Noguès agreed generally, stating at the same time that it would be a sad thing for the French to win the war merely to open the way for the Jews to control the professions and the business world of North Africa.

The President stated that his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints that the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany, were Jews.

(Paragraph breaks and emphasis added.)

In regard to the “over fifty percent” statistic, Medoff adds “It is not clear how FDR came up with that wildly exaggerated statistic.”

Such statements from a US president are astonishing and horrifying, and indeed are all the more horrifying because they were not merely anti-Semitic remarks, but a policy to be imposed on North Africa by the Allies.

There is no question as to the veracity of the account, as Koch observes:

Hard to believe a president would say such a thing? Maybe, but the source is unimpeachable: the transcript appears in Foreign Relations of the United States, a multivolume series of historical documents published by the U.S. government itself. The Casablanca volume was published in 1968, but did not attract much notice at the time. Dr. Medoff has done a public service by bringing it to our attention again.

(Via PJ Tatler.)

All of that talk about excluding ROTC from campus because of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is revealed as just a pretext:

Wounded Iraq vet jeered at Columbia

Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.

“Racist!” some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.

(Via Instapundit.)

They are anti-military, plain and simple. We need to start enforcing the Solomon Amendment on these jackasses. (Of course, that will never happen during this administration.)

I have to add that Columbia University really, really sucks. In addition to their hostility to our military, they play host to a genocidal madman, and they steal their neighbors’ property.

CMU historian Kiron Skinner points out that the WikiLeaks affair is likely to discourage the generation of contemporary documentation that historians rely on.

Last February, Muslim students at UC Irvine successfully used sustained, concerted heckling to prevent Israeli ambassador Michael Oren from giving a talk at their university. Proving that they know nothing at all about America, they had the chutzpah to argue that their actions, preventing Oren from speaking, were an exercise of free speech.

It was obvious at the time that the disruptions were organized, but it seemed impossible to pin the organization on any particular group, even though the perpetrators were all members of UC Irvine’s Muslim Student Union. The group repeatedly denied any involvement. But it turns out they organized the effort by email and the emails leaked.

The group has now been suspended, which seems like the minimum penalty for organizing to block a speech and lying about it. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Something is rotten at UC Irvine, and there’s little evidence that the university has the will, or even the desire, to do anything about it.

Gateway Pundit has the story.

A story in the Economist teaches me something I didn’t know about higher education in England. Tuition at English universities is capped at £3,290 per year, which is well below the cost of the education. The government subsidizes the difference. Consequently, to limit the size of the subsidy, the government imposes a cap on the number of students. No school can grow its class without obtaining permission from the government, which is routinely denied.

The price cap does not apply to foreign students (from outside Britain and the EU), so the number of such students is not capped. Consequently, the number of international students at English schools is soaring. For example, at the London School of Economics, half of the undergraduates and 80% of the graduate students are foreign.

This is an appallingly perverse policy. The government is requiring its universities (some of the best in the world) to serve foreign students instead of its own citizens. No doubt the policy was justified as making higher education more affordable when, in fact, it actually makes it unavailable to most prospective students. Fixing the system would presumably result in an outcry from the minority who benefit from the arrangement.

In short, it’s an excellent example of the perversity of progressive policies.

The LA Times reports:

Scientists expected Obama administration to be friendlier

When he ran for president, Barack Obama attacked the George W. Bush administration for putting political concerns ahead of science on such issues as climate change and public health. And during his first weeks in the White House, President Obama ordered his advisors to develop rules to “guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch.”

Many government scientists hailed the president’s pronouncement. But a year and a half later, no such rules have been issued. Now scientists charge that the Obama administration is not doing enough to reverse a culture that they contend allowed officials to interfere with their work and limit their ability to speak out.

“We are getting complaints from government scientists now at the same rate we were during the Bush administration,” said Jeffrey Ruch, an activist lawyer who heads an organization representing scientific whistle-blowers.

Jonathan Adler adds:

This should not surprise. The “GOP War on Science” argument was always overstated and sought a partisan explanation for a phenomenon generated by broader institutional pressures and incentives. There were also early signs that the Obama Administration would replace science politicization of the Right with that of the Left.

I’ve noticed that academics often put inexplicable faith in Democratic politicians. Even those who have a healthy cynicism in other areas often seem to make an exception when it comes to Democratic politicians. They are genuinely dismayed when, inevitably, those Democratic politicians behave like weasels (even from the progressive perspective). And yet they repeat the same mistake all over again for the next guy.

The provost of the University of Ottawa has written to Ann Coulter in advance of her upcoming visit to the Ottawa Campus Conservatives, threatening her with prosecution if she says anything that violates Canadian censorship laws.

It’s disgusting enough that Canada has those laws in the first place, but it might be even worse to see the a university provost using those laws to intimidate a campus speaker.

Well, I guess as Dean Steacy (Canadian “human rights” investigator) put it, freedom of speech is an American concept, without value in Canada.

(Via Instapundit.)

Apparently, “top climate researchers” think that climate science is insufficiently political:

Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics.

In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of “being treated like political pawns” and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times.

Climate science’s problems are self-inflicted, the result of extensive academic misconduct. Somehow, I don’t think “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” is what the doctor ordered to restore confidence in the field.

But, maybe we should take this with a grain of salt. The only scientist cited by name as supporting this approach is renowned nutcase Paul Erlich (famous for advocating forced abortions, universal sterilization, and a “Planetary Regime” the world’s resources, as well as impressively inaccurate predictions of global famine), so this might not actually be a serious endeavor. I hope not: I’d like to see climate science get its act together, not worsen its problems.

Yet another mistake in the IPCC report:

The Dutch environment minister, Jaqueline Cramer, on Wednesday demanded a thorough investigation into the 2007 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change after a Dutch magazine uncovered it incorrectly states 55 percent of the country lies below sea level. . . Only 26 percent of the Netherlands is really below sea level.

(Via the Corner.)

The London Times reports:

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

Another alarming prediction in the IPCC report on climate change has been shown to be bogus. A finding that much of the Amazon rainforest is endangered actually referred to logging, not climate change:

In the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), issued in 2007 by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists wrote that 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest in South America was endangered by global warming.

But that assertion was discredited this week when it emerged that the findings were based on numbers from a study by the World Wildlife Federation that had nothing to do with the issue of global warming — and that was written by a freelance journalist and green activist. . .

It has now been revealed that the claim was based on a WWF study titled “Global Review of Forest Fires,” a paper barely related to the Amazon rainforest that was written “to secure essential policy reform at national and international level to provide a legislative and economic base for controlling harmful anthropogenic forest fires.”

EUReferendum, a blog skeptical of global warming, uncovered the WWF association. It noted that the original “40 percent” figure came from a letter published in the journal Nature that discussed harmful logging activities — and again had nothing to do with global warming.

If you’re counting, that’s three errors in the IPCC now (that we know of), all resulting from faulty scholarship.

It all depends on whose ox is getting gored. Ordinarily, the editorial board of the Tartan — CMU’s student newspaper — will reliably support the entire liberal agenda, including higher taxes. Ah, but a tuition tax, that would be a tax on them! The Tartan is against a tuition tax. Taxes, you see, are for other people.

I am against the tuition tax, and I hope to see it defeated. But I am delighted to see the Tartan getting mugged by reality.

UPDATE (12/19): Tom Blumer has a similar take. (Via Instapundit.)

A troubling incident at UNC-Chapel Hill: A student group is unpopular in certain circles. Those people threaten the group’s faculty advisor. The faculty advisor remarks that he is able to defend himself. Chancellor Holden Thorp calls the remark “highly inappropriate” and induces him to resign as the group’s faculty advisor. The student group will soon be forced to close if they cannot find a new advisor.

UNC ought to be sticking up for free speech on campus, rather than collaborating with the mob to shut down a student organization. UNC ought to be disciplining threats against its faculty, not the faculty who are being threatened. Very, very badly done.

At Berkeley, the birthplace of the “free speech movement,” protesters are calling for the firing of John Yoo, a tenured law professor, for producing a work of legal scholarship (the so-called “torture memos”) that has become unpopular. Academic freedom is appropriate only when it advances progressive causes, I guess.

(Via the Corner.) (Related post.)

UPDATE: Once again, the dean of the Berkeley Law School issues a statement in support of academic freedom. It’s good that he’s done it; bad that it’s necessary. (Via Volokh.)

Is anything honest in the State of Illinois? The University of Illinois admits that it bows to political pressure in admissions. (Via The New Editor, via Instapundit.)

A few weeks ago, the Economist had a story on universities that tried to employ the “Yale model” for investing their endowments without actually knowing what they were doing:

The model may also have been adopted by endowments that were too small for it. “You need to be very big and very diversified, and to be sophisticated enough to understand the risk management of complex investments,” says Anthony Knerr, who advises universities on funding strategies. Some of the hardest hit may be smaller endowments that adopted a “Yale-lite” strategy that they did not really understand. They may also have been unable to invest in the best hedge funds and private-equity firms, which have (until now) been able to pick and choose between investors.

But this is 2009; no one should have to suffer the consequences of one’s own bad judgement any more.  So the latest institution to look for a Federal bailout is the University of Virginia.

(Via Instapundit.)

FIRE has a retrospective on the University of Delaware’s 2007 re-education program.  Unfortunately, it’s not entirely clear that it was actually dissolved.

(Via Instapundit.)

Stanley Kurtz has been trying to look at documents in collection of the University of Illinois – Chicago. The documents pertain to Obama’s tenure on the board of (former terrorist) Bill Ayers’s organization, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Despite early assurances from UIC librarians, they keep finding reasons not to let him see the documents.

UPDATE (8/19): UIC has issued a statement.