Free Speech is Mostly Restricted in American Colleges and Universities

FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has just produced its newest evaluation of the speech codes and policies of American Colleges and Universities.  FIRE has a list of the ten worst colleges and universities for free speech.  They are:

Mount St. Mary’s University  
Northwestern University, where a high school friend is an Economics Professor and Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education  
Louisiana State University  
University of California, San Diego  
Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota 
University of Oklahoma, from which a sister earned a BBA degree  
Marquette University  
Colorado College  
University of Tulsa, from which the same sister earned a Master of Taxation degree  
Wesleyan University

Because I have many family members and old high school friends who live in Oklahoma, the fact that the University of Oklahoma and the University of Tulsa are on this list is particularly distressing.  I would occasionally deal with the boredom of high school by playing hooky so I could spend 10 hours reading in the library of the University of Tulsa.  The Oklahoma State University also lowered its freedom of speech rating from a Yellow Light rating to a Red Light rating.  Apparently Oklahoma's academic professionals are playing catch-up with those of the longer established commitments to socialist elitist indoctrination, political correctness, and the belief that some groups are incapable of rational thought and forever governed by irrational emotions.

But, FIRE has been successful in creating a trend in the direction of more free speech in our colleges and universities.  The improvements have been slow and have required many a hard fight to bring about.  There are now 23 colleges and universities that have earned a good Green Light evaluation by FIRE of their speech codes, namely codes that guarantee free speech on the college campus.  This is up from 18 colleges and universities out of 440 which are evaluated.  Twenty-two are listed here, and the University of Maryland - College Park has just been added to those with a Green Light freedom of speech evaluation.  The good, free colleges are:

Arizona State University
Black Hills State University
Carnegie Mellon University
Cleveland State University, where my wife took some courses to prepare for a change of major for graduate studies
Eastern Kentucky University
George Mason University, with a great Economics Dept., but many scientists who want to suppress the free speech of scientists who reject the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis
Mississippi State University
Oregon State University
Plymouth State University
Purdue University
Purdue University Calumet
Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania
The College of William and Mary
University of Florida
University of Maryland
University of Mississippi
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
University of North Florida
University of Pennsylvania, the only Ivy League School with a free speech policy!
University of Tennessee – Knoxville
University of Utah
University of Virginia
Western State Colorado University

Unfortunately, the really awful Red Light evaluations still apply to 49.3% of the colleges and universities evaluated for the 2014-2015 academic year.  But this is a considerable improvement compared to the 75% of Red Light universities in the 2007-2008 academic year.  So, which American Universities that I have attended, my family members have attended, or my friends have attended are so inclined toward totalitarian free speech restrictions that they have landed on the FIRE Red Light list?

Brown University, where I earned my Sc.B. degree in Physics
Case Western Reserve University, where I earned my Ph.D. in Physics
Columbia University, where one of my daughter's earned her MBA
Franklin & Marshall College, where a colleague earned his B.S. in Chemistry
Georgia Institute of Technology, where a son-in-law earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a niece is pursuing an engineering degree
Johns Hopkins University, where two colleagues earned their Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry or Materials Science and Engineering
Lehigh University, where a colleague from the past earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry
Ohio University, where a fellow graduate student is now a Physics Professor
Oklahoma State University, which two sisters and my brother attended, as well as many high school friends
Pennsylvania State University, where an old colleague teaches
Princeton University, where a friend from Brown University earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where a graduate student friend earned his B.S. in Physics
Ohio State University, where many of my wife's family earned their degrees
University of Cincinnati, for whose faculty and graduate students I have provided many analyses
Dartmouth College, where two high school friends earned undergraduate degrees
University of North Carolina - Greensboro, where a sister lives
University of Texas at Austin, from which a daughter earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering
University of Tulsa, from which a sister earned a Master of Taxation degree

When Brown University and Case Western Reserve University ask me for donations to their "educational" endeavors, it does not endear them to me that I know that they are not primarily interested in helping their students to learn thinking skills and to develop independent minds.  They are largely in the business of producing socialist elitists in a carefully controlled environment with very limited freedom of speech.  Neither does it give me a warm and fuzzy feeling to think of the fortune my wife and I spent to send a daughter to one of these schools.  She compounded the indoctrination problem by earning an MBA at another of these strictly controlled indoctrination schools.

At least the generally dismal condition of our American colleges and universities is slowly improving on the whole.  Instead of giving donations to Brown University and Case Western Reserve University, I will give the money I might have given to them to institutions interested in studies and educational efforts that benefit individuals who value liberty and rational thought.  FIRE is one such organization.

School Choice Programs Produce Better Education Results than More Dollars

Vicki E. Alger of the Independent Institute has a very interesting, article on the lack of correlation of spending with educational results and the scramble to seek more tax money for education.  She points out that school choice programs seem to be a more important factor in improving the education of children in the school lunch program.  Because the most interesting results in her article are buried deep into it, I will quote them here:

Based on public-school results from the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the average nationwide reading and math performance among low-income eighth grade students was pitiful, with a 48% proficiency rate in both subjects.

The big spenders paid more for worse results. In Nebraska, which spent nearly $8,000 per student, a mere 39% of disadvantaged eighth-graders scored proficient or better in reading and math. For the approximately $7,000 a year Illinois spent on instruction, its low-income eighth-graders did no better than the national averages in reading and math.

States that spent less per pupil tended to have better educational outcomes. More than 45% of low-income students in Idaho—with its relatively puny $4,100 per pupil spending—tested proficient in reading and math. Low-income students in stingy Arizona, which spent $4,200 per pupil on instruction, had 51% proficiency rates in both subjects. And students in penny-pinching Oklahoma, which spent around $4,300 per pupil, achieved a 53% proficiency rate in reading and 52% in math.

 One of the most striking differences between these two sets of states is the availability of parental-choice programs. Unlike Nebraska or Illinois, both higher-scoring Arizona and Oklahoma have parental-choice scholarship programs that enable parents of disadvantaged students to choose the schools they think are best, including private schools. Schools have to compete for students, which forces them to improve their performance.

Congratulations are due to my home state of Oklahoma!  To be sure, it is one of many of my home states, but it is the one where I graduated from high school in a two-year period between moving there and leaving the state for college.  Nonetheless, I have considerable family there.

Nonetheless, I am sure that the educational bar for proficiency is much too low and that in general it is likely to be too generously assessed.  Even so, the results are clearly terrible.  Government-run schools are a disgrace for the most part.  Even when they are good at the basics, they tend to be awful Big Government indoctrination centers.

Our Mind-Closing Universities and Conformity

A short post by William Murchison entitled When Higher Ed Shuts the Door on Taxpayer's Right to Know discusses the increasing trend to secrecy on the part of university boards and presidential selection committees.  Murchison says:

The Columbia Journalism Review scores the “increasingly closed-door culture” of university boards, such as Kent State University’s, which not only conducted a secret presidential search recently but “admitted to shredding documents to cover their tracks.”  How about the boards of Wayne State University and the University of Michigan, which not only kept their searches secret but suppressed the names of the finalists until both were hired. Then they told the world!

One can see that given the state of commitment to Progressive Elitism and to political correctness on college campuses that it must be very nearly impossible to conduct the managerial affairs of a public college in the open.  If the board and selection committees maintain political correctness and promote Progressive Elitism as they are expected to by student activists and most faculty members, many taxpayers will be appalled to see what is going on.  If the board and other college controlling committees do not do as expected by student activists and faculty, they are also in very hot water.  Nay, boiling water surrounded by drooling cannibals on most campuses.  Given the culture of the college campus today, such public institutions of Progressive Elitist indoctrination are in a dilemma in all but the most socialistic of states.

Private universities generally only need to satisfy their alumni, students, and faculty, despite raking in huge sums of research grants from the taxpayers.  This is a less tough nut to crack, especially in the Ivy League and equivalent schools, where the alumni have long been very successfully indoctrinated in the Progressive Elitist viewpoint.  These Ivy League schools are very assured that virtually all of their graduates are fully committed to Progressive Elitism, partly because they select for that in their admissions and partly because the on-campus commitment to this indoctrination has long been so thorough.

So how did I escape becoming a Progressive Elitist at Brown University?  By never tiring of pitched debates with up to a dozen Progressive Elitists at a time.  By never being intimated, because I was able to shake the very foundations of their belief, at least for a few hours.  After which they would return as though the discussion never occurred, but with no better ideas than those ideas that had failed so miserably but hours earlier.  Progressive Elitism is definitely a religion for almost all such persons and they refuse to allow that religion to be evaluated and assessed by reason.  But being fully committed to reason, I at least was not susceptible to their religious conformity.

Just as most people in many communities become captured by their desire to belong to a particular dominant religion, whether Christian, Hindi, Islam, or Buddhism, so too do most people in a community dominated by the Progressive Elitist religion just have to be Progressive Elitists so they will belong.  So while people are complex and highly differentiated individuals, most still have a great desire to conform so they will be accepted into a community of people.  If this means denying reality, including their own natures, well then reality will generally be denied.  The human suffering that results knows few bounds, which is why our culture has become more and more cheerless and more and more nihilistic.

Only a community committed to reality, reason, productivity, and individuality can achieve man's greatest needs of security, freely given and valued friendships, real cooperation in mutual endeavors and relationships, the freedom to pursue our highly differentiated values generally according to our individual natures, and hence the freedom to pursue our own happiness.  Such a community is rich in its choices and possibilities.

Unfortunately, those people with already low self-esteem are fearful of that very richness of choices and possibilities.  The less free a society becomes, the larger the number of people with such low self-esteem and the more fearful the society becomes of individuality, choices, and possibilities.  Universities, far from opening young people's eyes to the joy of pursuing life in such a rich, reality-driven society, have long been indoctrinating them to choose a conforming, low-choice, hierarchically managed society that denies them their very individuality.

Rally of the Indoctrinated and Obedient Youth

I watched the rally on the Mall on C-Span today going by the name of Restore the Sanity and/or Fear, while cooking and eating a meal.  I tell you that because I would not have spent my time doing that otherwise.  What I observed was a large crowd composed almost entirely of young white people under the age of 30.  The ratio of women to men was close to 2 to 1.

Now Stephen Colbert made a point of declaring the rally a demographic representation of America.  It was not.  It was even less a demographic representation of the Democrat Party with respect to race.  Unlike Tea Party rallies, families were not common in the crowd.  Unlike Tea Parties, there were few individual created signs.  They were brought to the Washington DC Mall with this injunction:

Think of our event as Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement; the Million Man March, only a lot smaller, and a bit less of a sausage fest; or the Gathering of the Juggalos, but instead of throwing our feces at Tila Tequila, we’ll be actively *not* throwing our feces at Tila Tequila.

There was really no political agenda put forth.  There was the usual Comedy Central caricature of conservative American viewpoints and the presumption was that if you were unhappy with their people, who were not clearly identified, then you were simply a fear-monger or an irrationally fearful person.  There was certainly no discussion of why unemployment is so high and has been so long.  There was no discussion of tax policy.  There was no discussion of the debt and deficits or of Social Security or Medicare problems.  There was no mention of ObamaCare.  There was no campaign to impugn business or to advocate a plethora of new regulations and mandates.  It was all light, at least if you were not someone being characterized as afraid of all Muslims or someone who finds Fox News to be a useful source of news.  It was not clear what the purpose was other than that Colbert stated that it was to show that they could draw a large crowd, which they did.

The crowd appeared to be mostly college students and relatively recent graduates of college, fresh from their many years of indoctrination in government-run schools and government controlled colleges.  When the MythBusters warmed them up prior to Stephen Colbert appearing, they literally jumped when told to.  They did waves for quite an extended time.  They cried on command and popped fingers from the inside of their mouths when told to do so.  The crowd proved they were the well-indoctrinated and authority pliable subjects ideal for socialist regimes.  Many of them had traveled long distances simply to be together with their kind.  Of course, many of the young women were single and looking for suitable socialist men, of whom there is a paucity, at least relative to the women.

Yes, men were in short supply.  First, when in the government-run schools, it becomes clear to many boys that they are set up and treated like the bogeymen of our society.  White males are the oppressor class in the socialist lexicon of group identities.  Many males become turned-off by education for this reason, either simply because they do not like being treated as though their race and sex make them evil or because they conclude that the educators have nothing useful to teach them.  So, women go on to college now in much larger numbers than men, where they wind up desperately looking for men with whom they can have real relationships.  There the women are further indoctrinated in socialism and in the idea that terrible social injustices characterize America and the only solution is to have ever-bigger government. 

Meanwhile, the men who did not go on to college are not their type and many fewer of them are socialists.  Overall, according to a Gallup poll of almost 150,000 interviews performed from January to May of 2009, 41% of women are Democrats, while only 32% of men are.  In the under 30 years of age group, about 34% of men are Democrats and 44% of women are.  We can get a better handle on the situation for Democrat women under 30 who dominated the "Restore the Sanity" rally.  College educated men are in the ratio of 43/57 = 0.75 and Democrat men to Democrat women are in the ratio of 34/44 = 0.77.  The product of these ratios is 0.58.  One can see why so many women might travel far to find a man of their kind at the Restore the Sanity rally, which really failed to develop any other purpose.  Comedy Central, with its parodies of non-Democrats as stupid, brutal, and fearful, can easily be watched at home.  The rally was really an effort of desperate women to restore their sanity with relationships with men they think, in their highly indoctrinated and elitist minds, are compatible.

Of course they could be Republicans or Independents and enjoy the fact that there are more men than women in both of those groups.  But, that would not be politically correct.  They would have to be more independent-minded to deny the school indoctrinators.

Are Democrats Illiterate?

I propose to answer this question scientifically.

All good science begins with careful observation of reality.  So, let us examine the easily observed facts of Democrat behavior with special attention to the ability to read and reading comprehension.

Let us take note that in the last few months, many instances have been documented of Democrat Congressmen indicating that they have no to little idea of the content of the rather short and easily read fundamental documents of the United States of America.  They have failed to attribute our acknowledgment of our equal and sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the Declaration of Independence, often mis-attributing that to the Constitution.  They have commonly referred to a General Welfare Clause in very confused ways and wrongly attributed powers to it, which are very, very far from its intent and context in the Constitution.  They have repeatedly made it clear that they do not understand the essays of the Federalist Papers which worked so hard to explain the purpose of the provisions of the Constitution.

They embrace socialism despite its failures among the Jamestown settlers and the early Pilgrims, in New Harmony, Indiana following 1825 when Robert Owen purchased it for his communitarian society, the failure of the socialist experiments in Italy, Germany, the USSR, Cambodia, China, North Korea, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.  The Swedes and the British had to back away from their more extreme adoption of socialism.  Yet, our Democrats are unaware of these problems.  Even in Canada, the more conservative recent management of the economy has allowed Canada a relatively quicker improvement in the recession than we have had in the U.S.  None of these facts are known or understood by the leadership of the Democrat Party, who so much want the U.S. government to duplicate those failed experiments.

The Democrats continue to claim that man is facing a global warming crisis, despite widely available accounts describing the huge failure of the science that was supposed to support that hypothesis.  They continue to believe that ethanol use mandates will help us achieve energy independence and give us cleaner air, though many easily read accounts inform us that this is not so.  They tell us that alternative energy will make America energy-independent and produce jobs, even as they destroy the coal industry and would provide unreliable electric power.  Again, many easily available accounts make it clear that alternative energy is not yet and will not probably be soon ready for prime time use.  They express ignorance of the many warming periods and cooling periods of the Earth's past, despite such records being easily available to the reader.

The Democrats still claim that minimum wage laws are good for those poor victims of discrimination that they, the Democrats champion, the young black male.  They have failed to read the accounts of how this minimum wage law proclivity has caused skyrocketing unemployment among inner city young black males.  They care not about those living in low cost-of-living rural flyover areas who are also badly affected by these thoughtless and cruel laws.

The Democrats have failed to note that the history books and economics have clearly shown that the life of the average man and the poor has been hugely benefited by the free markets of Capitalism.  Yet, they rail against it and the profit motive at every opportunity.  How many times have we heard Obama sneer at the profit motive and at those who have too much income, in his poor opinion.  Yet, the pursuit of wealth by the able has always created more jobs and more life security for the less able.  How has a college graduate and Harvard Law School graduate managed to be so completely ignorant of the literature of history and of economics?

Let us consider the Democrat Congressman in his home lair.  Bills are presented to him for his vote and he votes for them without reading them.  I suppose this could be an irresponsible act of laziness, but it may be that they are not able to read or if they do, they cannot understand what they have read.  In fact, a couple of Democrat Congressmen have actually said that they did not read the bills, such as the health care bill we call ObamaCare, because they would not understand it if they read it!  Given that one Congressman representing an Atlanta, GA district believes that islands float and that putting too many people on an island may make it tip over, the idea that there is a huge lack of reading comprehension takes on an elevated probability.  Obama himself has made many claims about the ObamaCare bill before it was passed and since he signed it into law, which are obviously wrong.  Now, we know he can read, because of his use of teleprompters.  But, this says nothing about his reading comprehension.  Either that is very poor, or he is lying to us almost constantly.

Another recent example of reading disabilities among Democrats is the short Arizona bill which carefully instructs the police to check for lawful presence in the United States when they are checking out another infraction of the law.  The bill clearly states that racial profiling must not be applied, and yet Obama says the law is bad because it will cause racial profiling.  Eric Holder, the Attorney General, says he is considering taking the state of Arizona to court over the illegal discrimination in the Arizona bill.  Yet, he has not read this short bill, so he is either hugely irresponsible or he has a very high threshold of dread for reading.  An Assistant Secretary of the State Department has apologized to the Chinese over and over about how the Arizona bill puts us on the same human rights plane the Chinese are on.  Apparently, he has read the Arizona bill and concluded that illegal aliens will be returned to countries where they will be shot as in Chinese returns of escaped North Koreans or that we will treat illegal aliens as the Chinese treat the Tibetans.  One wonders how he has read such actions into the bill.  Many, many thousands of other Democrats have made very negative assessments of the Arizona bill, implying that they either cannot comprehend what they read or they so dread trying to read and comprehend that they prefer to declare the law un-American to actually reading it.

Having come to the end of my observations on Democrats and reading, I must allow that in the total light of my understanding of human beings, those most complex and mysterious of all entities, I cannot be sure that Democrats cannot comprehend what they read.  The problem is that I know of counter-examples.  Being a scientist, I have worked with many a Democrat.  Some of them can read science and comprehend it, unless, at least in some cases, the science is said to have political and economic implications.  When these scientists read about topics infused with social and political implications, they suddenly have a selective loss of reading comprehension.  All things inconsistent with their allegiance to their dogma fall into their blind spot.  They simply cannot see them.  They cannot comprehend them.

So, I do believe there is a reading comprehension problem and even a thinking comprehension problem.  The Democrat problem is so deep an indoctrination into an ideology heavily laced with emotive feelings of envy, hate, cruelty, tribalism, group identity, self-loathing, self-victimization, guilt, uncertainty, dread, and other joyless feelings, that they cannot comprehend anything that does not fit into that negative worldview.  Where I see harmony, the satisfaction of individual needs and desires, a richness of choices, trades with mutual benefits, and equal opportunity in the free markets, they are only able to see exploitation, deprivation in not having something someone else has, having to make painful decisions about what they want, and any trade must have a winner and a loser.  This different worldview is so basic, I wonder if it is almost always embedded in most people while they are still children.  Thereafter, the Democrat simply cannot comprehend the world as it is so clear to me.