A Wrong Against the Right

[mikesilvia]

Once again, graduation time is upon us, and a new study by the Los Angeles Times says plenty about the state of higher education in America. The paper looked at the invited commencement speakers for 150 colleges and...

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[Wickabee]

So he's complaining he doesn't get enough speaking engagements because the majority of people in one group don't like him.

Isn't that how a free market is supposed to work? Why does he want to tear down capitalism in favour of the government regulating who can and cannot speak at graduations?

[dadandsoncards]

He's not complaining at all, just showing how colleges only bring one point of view to their campus. When any right winger tries to do anything the left has a conniption fit and demands to have their way or they will pout.

[Wickabee]

He's not complaining at all, just showing how colleges only bring one point of view to their campus. When any right winger tries to do anything the left has a conniption fit and demands to have their way or they will pout.

Then why is he calling for people to demand equal time for conservatives at these schools?

[tpeichel]

Liberals are hypocrites. They claim they value diversity, but it really is only a certain kind of diversity.

[Wickabee]

And Republicans preach the Free Market but want people forced to hire them so seems pretty equal to me.

[MadMan1978]

Liberals are hypocrites. They claim they value diversity, but it really is only a certain kind of diversity.

Now back up you false statement

[MadMan1978]

Did anyone catch Paul Ryans little speech?
I did catch parts and well it was a complete joke.

Note: I was part of the graduation committee when I graduated. The Committee was made up most students and WE invited the speaker. NOt the College. I am not sure how other colleges invite their speakers.

[tpeichel]

Here's one example:
Swarthmore made national news in April when one of the school’s most illustrious alumni, Robert Zoellick, a deputy secretary of state in George W. Bush’s administration, a Bush-nominated World Bank president and U.S. trade representative, and a veteran of private-sector work at Goldman Sachs and Fannie Mae, declined to accept an honorary degree and deliver a commencement speech.
Leftist students had dredged up one bogus reason after another to disinvite him, shifting claims as each successive attack was refuted by Zoellick’s defenders. The real goal, of course, was to deny conservatives legitimacy at Swarthmore. Zoellick’s most prominent critic, Will Lawrence, was the Mountain Justice organizer who’d led that bank-takeover a couple years before.
When rumors that Zoellick’s graduation speech would be hit by protests began to fly, he withdrew, saying he didn’t want to disrupt the ceremony. President Chopp said nothing in defense of Zoellick until after he’d withdrawn. To their credit, Swarthmore’s liberals were mortified by the manifest intolerance of the anti-Zoellick campaign. Mountain Justice and its radical allies, of course, were delighted with their victory, and with so clear an indication that the administration would do nothing to stand in their way. As for conservatives, it was yet another sign that they were unwelcome at Swarthmore.
That message came through again a bit later in April when Bob Weinberg, acting chairman of Swarthmore’s Department of History, writing on behalf of his entire department, endorsed Mountain Justice’s divestment campaign in the Swarthmore Daily Gazette. Weinberg stopped just short of declaring that leftist social activism, as exemplified by fossil-fuel divestment, was the only legitimate outcome of a Swarthmore history education. Yet it’s tough for a reader to draw any other conclusion from the piece, especially since Weinberg made no effort to reassure moderates, libertarians, or conservatives that their views would be respected by the department. A Swarthmore freshman, Nicholas Zahorodny, wrote me that the decision of the history faculty to endorse divestment as a department, rather than as individuals, contributed “to a lock-down of discussion on campus,” intimidating and alienating prospective history majors who may not have supported divestment.
Like many campuses, Swarthmore has institutionalized the pursuit of “sustainability,” a vague term that smuggles a leftist political agenda into the official mission of colleges under the guise of fighting global warming. In the current issue of the Swarthmore College Bulletin, President Chopp offers an openly political interpretation of sustainability, which she argues needs to be incorporated into everyone’s “political practices.” The school’s “Sustainability Action Plan,” “The Greening of Swarthmore,” insists that “radical changes” must come “in all sectors of society” if sustainability is to be properly realized. What happens to free debate when a college lends its official imprimatur to a political program of the Left?
If you’re a stellar student, don’t mind ad hominem attacks, and know how to avoid courses taught by intolerant professors, you just might get along at Swarthmore as a conservative. But even then, you’ll find not a single conservative professors to study with. James Kurth, a social conservative who’s taught foreign and defense policy and has served as a mentor to Swarthmore’s conservatives for decades is now emeritus (although still supervising independent-study courses). Maybe that’s why there are conservative students at Swarthmore who stay “closeted to keep from getting picked on.” So writes openly conservative freshman Savannah Saunders, who adds, “I find it so sad hearing conservatives hide their views out of fear.” Kate Aronoff, of Mountain Justice, notes in the course of her attack on Swarthmore’s tradition of tolerance that conservatives at the school are “ostracized.”
So the ejection of conservatives and the inaction of President Chopp at the board takeover were simply the culmination of a longer history. And in the days since the board takeover, conditions at Swarthmore have deteriorated.
In response to the Board takeover, the administration planned to hold open-ended “community discussions” led by students with contrasting viewpoints, so as not to “exclude or marginalize” any group. That program was quickly dismantled when radicals showed up at a planning meeting, many of them uninvited, to insist on holding “teach-ins” where their demands for transforming Swarthmore would be discussed. Student attendance must be mandatory, said the radicals. Administrators knuckled under without resistance, again leaving conservatives “excluded and marginalized.”
The radicals are demanding a massive expansion of Swarthmore’s politicized “studies” programs, with a new Latino Studies major specifically dedicated to Latinos in the United States, and mandatory classes for all Swarthmore students in ethnic studies and gender and sexuality studies. To further this process of naked political indoctrination, many radicals are calling on Swarthmore to pare back its international-relations courses, which are charged with “reinforcing Western hegemony.” The radicals also want all claims of sexual assault to be made public, thereby naming the accused before a trial even begins.
Think of these proposals as a real-time example of the story laid out by the recent report on Bowdoin College published by the National Association of Scholars. That report describes a massive expansion of Bowdoin’s politicized “studies” programs at the expense of more traditional courses, which have been turned into isolated islands at the school. At Swarthmore, the remaining traditionalist and non-politicized islands may soon be swallowed up.
At its official website, Swarthmore’s administration played these “teach-ins” as earnest good-faith conversations, rather than what they were: mandatory re-education sessions held at the insistence of the radicals in defiance of the administration’s plans, not to mention the wishes of conservative students. The radicals themselves were furious at the dissembling. They wanted credit for having forced their demands on the school. Swarthmore quickly blocked all comments on the online article describing post-takeover events at the school, an effective way of preventing parents from finding out what was actually happening on campus.
Last week I e-mailed President Chopp a series of questions about the board takeover and subsequent events. (I’ll provide full text of my questions and her replies in a follow-up post.) I asked Chopp why she’d done nothing to restore order during or since the board takeover, and wondered if she was concerned about the effects of her inaction on students who do not share the views of the protesters.
In reply, Chopp invoked Swarthmore’s Quaker tradition of tolerance and insisted that she’s simply been allowing all students to have their say. While she acknowledged that sometimes this approach fails, Chopp expressed faith that tolerant dialogue would eventually be restored at Swarthmore. “We are going to listen and talk to one another, even if it takes many times and many meetings to learn from one another and to decide the way forward,” she said.
This seems to me to be thoroughly wrongheaded. In effect, Chopp’s reply gives Swarthmore’s radicals a green light for further disruptions. She offers no indication of behavioral lines that cannot be crossed, nor any recognition that we are dealing with intimidation by radical students, not dialogue. Chopp seems unable or unwilling to recognize that Swarthmore’s radicals have consistently answered her displays of fecklessness masquerading as tolerance with various iterations of “F*** your constructive dialogue.” She claims to be listening to all voices, when in fact she has collaborated in the forceful silencing of conservative students. She confuses Quaker tolerance and nonviolence with inaction and the surrender of core liberal principle. She has abandoned her students and her school to the tender mercies of an Alinskyite mob. Swarthmore is spinning out of control, and it is Rebecca Chopp’s responsibility to put a stop to it.

[Wickabee]

Hey, they're just giving the people what they want. And in the end, he declined, didn't he?