Authored by Jonathan Turley,
It appears that being unrelentingly woke means that you need fewer dormitories. The University of Oregon is facing a major budget crisis and will cut $65 million from its budget and close dorms due to low enrollment. That growing crisis, however, did not stop Oregon from burning almost a million dollars fighting against free speech. It also did not induce its faculty to offer greater intellectual diversity and tolerance to prospective students. Oregon is a cautionary tale for a generation of academic social warriors, but also an opportunity for those who want to restore balance in higher education.
Oregon has long been an example of academic orthodoxy. While most state schools begrudgingly yield to First Amendment demands and offer better free speech alternatives to private universities, Oregon is known as a hardened silo for the far left in teaching.
We previously discussed how Portland State University Professor Bruce Gilley, who was blocked from the Twitter account of the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion after tweeting “All men are created equal.” Oregon spent almost a million dollars fighting to bar such speech.
Such controversies have plagued the university for years, with no sign of self-examination by administrators or academics. The university was criticized for its monitoring of social media to punish errant thoughts or microaggressions. The law school’s law review was accused of anti-Israel discrimination.
The school previously gave special recognition to University of California (Santa Barbara) Professor Mireille Miller-Young, who criminally assaulted pro-life advocates on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara. At the University of Oregon, she was honored as a featured speaker at the University of Oregon’s Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Part of its “black feminist speaker series,” Miller-Young’s work was highlighted by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of English to show “the radical potential of black feminism in the work that we do on campus and in our everyday lives.”
Now, the school is facing declining revenues and enrollments.
President Karl Scholz recently announced that this was due to lower out-of-state first-year enrollment, which means lower tuition revenue, increased costs, and a loss of grant funding.
Strangely, while closing dorms, the school is still building two new dorms.
Putting aside the school’s past budget judgment and discipline, the university’s reputation for intellectual orthodoxy deters many who do not want to pay tuition for their children to be indoctrinated or silenced. Even with plunging trust in higher education, administrators and faculty cannot resist the temptation to exclude opposing voices.
Oregon is not the only school facing such shortfalls. Some woke institutions have closed entirely. The irony is that faculty would seem to prefer to see their institutions die than restore balance to their departments. However, this may offer a real opportunity for legislators and donors to force real changes in the culture of these schools.
As I have previously written, parents and students who value free speech must increasingly look to public universities where faculty are subject to constitutional guarantees. Public universities may be the final line of defense for free-speech advocates.
We now largely have two systems of higher education for those seeking education with a diversity of opinions and viewpoints. Except for outliers like the University of Chicago and other private universities holding the line on free speech, the orthodoxy found at private universities remains a barrier to many conservative and independent thinkers.
If we are to protect these bastions of free speech, legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members continue to take the view that citizens are a captive audience expected to continue funding their departments, while excluding conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.
If faculty members want to continue maintaining echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should have to seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy.
Legislatures can demand evidence that schools are maintaining intellectually diverse faculties in determining the level of continued support from citizens.
When some of us have argued for such campaigns, academics hypocritically claim that we are calling for political litmus tests or hiring based on political parties. It is an absurd argument that I have previously addressed, including in my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
The call is for donors and legislators to withhold funding until they see real reforms, including greater diversity on faculties. They are not directing the hiring but looking at the results. The faculty members objecting to such calls have watched passively (or actively supported) the purging of conservative or libertarian faculty from universities and colleges.
When confronted by their own obvious ideological litmus tests, they shrug. Some acknowledge that their departments are overwhelmingly liberal, but insist that they just cannot find “competent” or “intellectually promising” conservatives. A few will admit that they do not believe that conservative views have a place in their departments.
It is impossible to deny the purging of faculties to create an academic echo chamber. If a large corporation effectively eliminated women or minorities while claiming no conscious discrimination, they would be trounced in court.
For years, I have raised concerns about the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculty members replicate their own views and values. There is no evidence that any faculty members (including those acknowledging the loss of virtually all faculty from the right of center) are honestly willing to reform their schools.
That ideological echo chamber is hardly an enticement for many facing rising tuition costs and relatively little hope of being taught by faculty with opposing views.
A Georgetown study recently found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools — almost identical to the percentage of Trump voters found in the new poll.
There is little evidence that faculty members are interested in changing this culture or creating greater diversity at schools. In places like North Carolina State University a study found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans 20 to 1.
As college and university presidents face these shortfalls, it is time for legislators and donors to demand real proof of diversity in hiring and a change in the culture of these institutions. Otherwise, schools like Oregon will continue to close dorms as they push wokeness over wisdom.
