The most astounding thing about American higher education isn’t the fact that we have intolerant “progressives” demanding that those who disagree with them be silenced, but that those censorious academics find so many allies among our college leaders. At one institution after another, once the “woke” indicate their displeasure at someone, the administration can’t move fast enough to comply with their demands.
In today’s Martin Center article, Portland State political science professor Bruce Gilley writes about this disturbing phenomenon.
Gilley focuses mainly on events at his university, where a new report published by the Oregon Association of Scholars shows how serious the censorship problem has become. He writes, “What should concern Americans about New Censorship, the report argues, is its explicit attempt to redistribute basic freedoms of speech and publication on the basis of ‘anti-racist’ credentials. (And it extends well beyond higher education.) Portland State President Dr. Stephen Percy refers to this policy shift approvingly as a ‘new status quo’ in which fundamental liberties and one’s status before the law are determined by one’s professed zeal for anti-racist activism.”
As Orwell put it, “some animals are more equal than others.”
The faculty senate at Portland State has passed a resolution banning criticism of faculty, departments, and programs. Moreover, it declares that academic freedom is merely “a smokescreen for settler-genocidal institutions of oppression.”
It’s very troubling that purported scholars at a university would go along with such utter nonsense. But American higher education has been a magnet for such people for decades.
Gilley concludes, “While ordinary Americans get on with their productive lives raising their families, working hard to support themselves, and contributing to their communities, this New Censorship is taking shape in a way that will soon become a fait accompli. The reading of Plato and Dr. Seuss, as well as discussions of voter fraud and uncertainties about climate change, are now being proscribed in the name of wokeness in a mass movement that is finding its foundations in higher education and then moving outward.”