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College May Punish Students Who Disrupted Conservative’s Speech

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Claremont McKenna College officials have announced possible repercussions for students who protested a conservative speaker’s speech last week.

Protesters successfully blocked students and professors from entering an on-campus building to hear Heather Mac Donald’s pro-police speech, as reported by The Daily Signal last Friday. Mac Donald is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

In response, Hiram Chodosh, the president of Claremont McKenna College, or CMC, released a statement Friday, saying, “Blocking access to buildings violates College policy. CMC students who are found to have violated policies will be held accountable.”

Joann Young, director of media relations for CMC, elaborated on Chodosh’s statement, telling The College Fix in an email that students could face a variety of repercussions, including “temporary or permanent separation from the college.”

Steven Glick, a senior at Pomona College, one of the five undergraduate institutions that make up the Claremont Colleges alongside CMC, covered the protests as editor-in-chief of The Claremont Independent, an “independent journal of campus affairs and political thought” that is dedicated to “upholding truth and excellence at the Claremont Colleges,” according to its website. The publication receives no school funding.

“I wasn’t able to speak with many of the protesters and about what they were doing,” Glick said. “Several protesters prevented me from conducting interviews by pushing me, putting their hands and clothing in front of the camera, and shouting over anyone who did try to talk to me. Another correspondent from The [Claremont] Independent was threatened with physical violence while he attempted to interview protesters.”

Glick’s interactions with protesters were shared on The Claremont Independent’s Facebook page through Facebook Live.

Glick said it was evident many protesters “had no clue what was going on.”

“They chanted about Palestine for quite a while, which had nothing to do with Heather Mac Donald’s planned lecture,” Glick said. “It seems that protesters simply viewed Ms. Mac Donald as an opponent of progressivism, and felt it apt to chant about any progressive cause they could think of.”

Since CMC is one of eight institutions that make up the Claremont Colleges, many of the protesters were not students of CMC, and some, according to Glick, were not students at all. “Some of the protesters were middle-aged people who were clearly just there to help organize the protest,” Glick said.

When asked how students have responded to the protest, Glick said, “I get the sense that most students were disappointed that the protests led to the cancellation of the event, whether they agreed with Heather Mac Donald or not.”

As The Daily Signal previously reported, Peter Uvin, vice president of academic affairs for Claremont McKenna College, said in an email to students after the incident that he understands that “words hurt” and “people have strong opinions and different—often painful—experiences with the issues Heather Mac Donald discusses.”

Uvin went on to add that he “could not accept” students’ attempts “to make it impossible for her to speak, for you to listen, and for all of us to debate.”

In reaction to the administration’s response, Glick said:

The CMC administration should have had a bigger presence at the protest and told the students what consequences, if any, they would face for their actions. By remaining largely absent from the scene, they effectively gave the protesters a free pass.

(For more from the author of “College May Punish Students Who Disrupted Conservative’s Speech” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

With Colleges Turning Into Indoctrination Camps, What Can Christian Parents Do?

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As we saw in Part One and Part Two of this series, free speech and liberal arts education are dying or dead at most American colleges, while expressions of Christian faith are increasingly penalized. What is a student or parent to do? The options are narrowing, year by year.

Ideally, we’d want to see those strong believers who can make the grade walking the storied lawns of Harvard, Yale, and other elite institutions, honing their arguments with top-notch secular thinkers, gaining five-star credentials, making connections, and witnessing to their faith. But few of those things are possible anymore at most such universities, where matters grow worse year by year. Such schools are clutched tight in the whitened knuckles of tenured radicals, with ever-expanding “speech codes” that repress free expression of thought, and curricula driven not by reason or love of culture, but ideological fervor.

The Ivies Don’t Want You

When schools like Middlebury College can let violent mobs assault professors and silence free speech, while Yale lets angry snowflakes drive celebrated faculty members to give up tenure and quit, we can no longer pretend that these schools are really elite. They might have famous professors, massive endowments, and kids with high SATs, but they are becoming little more than leftist seminaries, which preach a new and puritanical creed that’s not just neutral but hostile to Christianity and Western civilization. Each year, they churn far too many lazy, sloppy thinkers who react to ideas that offend them by starting riots, throwing tantrums, having meltdowns, or claiming that they are victims. Sooner or later, employers will catch on and figure out that it’s time to stop hiring Yalies — except those with the courage (which these days borders on recklessness) to swim against the tide and speak their minds.

Middlebrow Schools Won’t Protect You

You might think that an ordinary state university, or long-standing Catholic college, would be a friendlier venue for conservative, Christian students. But that’s no longer broadly true, as the teachers and administrators at schools eager to polish their reputations ape what is taught and practiced at elite campuses. It wasn’t at Harvard that a journalism professor called on “muscle” to grab the camera of a student journalist who was documenting a leftist riot. It was at the University of Missouri. It wasn’t at Oberlin that a Christian student was silenced by her professor for questioning same-sex marriage — and another professor who spoke out on her behalf was fired. It was at putatively Catholic Marquette University.

Faithful Schools Under Fire

Even colleges with a traditional evangelical Christian orientation are under heavy pressure from theological progressives to compromise biblical teaching and practice on crucial moral issues. It doesn’t help when the regional accrediting authorities threaten to yank the school’s right to grant certified degrees or dispense federal student loans, as happened to Gordon College in Massachusetts. Even when such schools (for now) dodge Big Brother’s bullet, such controversies give ammo to progressives on campus and in the faculty to push such colleges in an ever more secular direction.

Intentionally Christian Colleges

There are a few smaller, more recently founded colleges that we might call “intentionally Christian,” which push back against the overwhelming pressure of trends within academia, to teach traditional liberal arts and sound theology. For highly motivated, intellectually talented students with an interest in academic pursuits, journalism, or the arts, choices such as The King’s College in New York City or Hillsdale College in Michigan make sense. This is where many of the believers who once might have braved the Ivy League will now end up instead, so there’s some hope that they will produce the new cultural leaders which the church desperately needs.

What About the Rest of Us?

But there aren’t anywhere near enough spots at such colleges to educate millions of Christians who simply want a basic college education so they can get started with their lives. Nor is a traditional liberal arts education meant for everyone. Millions of young people want to get training in business, marketing, nursing or math and science, as a preparation for useful, productive careers as citizens and parents. It used to be that universities would require such students to complete a liberal arts “core curriculum,” enriching them with the fundamentals of English literature, Western civilization, American history, and civics — on top of what used to be solid high school education in those subjects.

None of this is true anymore. Apart from a few small, niche colleges that are worth seeking out for select students, there are few schools which you can count on to provide your children with a decent basic education. Many do a good job preparing people for jobs, if they can keep their heads down and not be swayed into secular radicalism by peer pressure and propaganda. But that’s the best you can hope for.

Instead, parents must be proactive. They must see that raising children of faith in today’s environment is a solemn and difficult duty, conducted in mission territory where “soft” persecution is already underway. We cannot count on institutions to form our children; too many have been infiltrated, either openly or quietly, and betray their founding missions.

What’s a Parent to Do?

As editor for ten years of the Christian-friendly, conservative guide to education Choosing the Right College, I was often contacted by parents who sought advice about where their children should study. Obviously, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Some students — cussed non-joiners and misanthropes like me — would still do well at some Ivy League schools. (Recent graduate Aurora Griffin’s How I Stayed Catholic at Harvard recounts how one student kept her faith.) Other students really belong in the intense subculture of an intentionally Christian college. Many students (many more than you’d think) should skip college altogether and learn useful trades that pay better than most white-collar jobs.

But looking at the middle of the bell curve, I suspect that the wisest option for the average son or daughter of a conservative Christian family would run as follows:

1. If you’re lucky enough to have a serious, academically and doctrinally sound Christian high school close by you, and you can afford the tuition, by all means use it. If not….

2. Consider either home-schooling, or supplementing your children’s education — which might be much more meager or politicized than you could possibly imagine — with materials from a “classical Christian” home school (there are dozens to choose from) that focuses on the liberal arts. Such programs can provide much of what used to be offered in high schools and colleges in key areas of learning, from religion and philosophical reasoning to literature, art, history, and civics.

3. Once you’ve done your best at home to fill in the vast, yawning moral, cultural, and cognitive gaps that exist in the average curriculum, seriously consider state universities with low in-state tuition as the wisest option. There is really no reason to saddle your child with anything like the Class of 2017 average of $37,113 in student debt for what will likely be a disappointing experience. Look closely at smaller or satellite campuses, and community colleges that allow students to fulfill requirements at lower cost.

4. Look for single sex and substance-free dorms, if any exist. If not, consider the benefits of a student living at home and commuting to school. The “traditional college experience” was always overblown, and is in many places now toxic.

5. Investigate chaplaincies, religious student organizations, and churches where your child can continue to live out and deepen his life of faith. Don’t be surprised if the chaplain who serves your denomination at a public university is far more doctrinally shaky than your pastor back at home. If so, steer your child to a more faithful local congregation instead, and make sure you keep in regular communication with him about his faith and the challenges which he faces.

6. And above all, pray for your children. They will need it.

(For more from the author of “With Colleges Turning Into Indoctrination Camps, What Can Christian Parents Do?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Most College Humanities and Social Science Programs Have Become Enemies of Freedom and Reason

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In the wake of the riots that have silenced free speech on one campus after another, it is clear that few colleges or universities still offer a real liberal arts education. Nor have most even lapsed into simple careerism, aiming solely at getting students ready to support themselves and their families. That would be bad enough, a grim decline from the reason that the Church created the first universities back in the Middle Ages: forming the “whole person,” as West Point still aims to do.

No, things are much worse than that. The reason that most students go to college is grimly careerist — it’s like getting a green card that permits you to work at most jobs in America. But the schools have kept the infrastructure of old-fashioned Western liberal arts institutions, adding on the apparatus of 19th-century quasi-sciences like sociology and history. However, the ideas about human nature, politics, economics, morality and culture that have captured most humanities and social science departments are aggressively hostile to the culture of the West, especially Christianity, limited government, and economic freedom. Even the unique value of human life is no longer taken for granted, thanks to the explosion of ecological fundamentalism in the name of “sustainability.”

So we have the worst of both worlds: schools that keep up the pretense of forming young people in humanistic disciplines, while the teachers who’ve grabbed control of the relevant departments are doing exactly the opposite. So students pass statues of Homer, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare and Washington, en route to classes whose teachers and texts sneer at every value any of those men would have treasured.

Your average humanities department is thus like a seminary whose theology department has been captured by tenured atheists. Even in schools that still retain a Western core curriculum, there are influential teachers like the late Edward Said of Columbia, who boasted that he taught the “canon” of Western literature as a means of exposing our culture as the oppressor of most of the world.

Rejecting Reason, Freedom and Objectivity

Even worse than that, whole disciplines have turned against ideals of reason, free discourse and objectivity, and rest their conclusions instead on untestable, aggressively political dogmas whose premises are unquestioned. In fact, if a student or teacher attempts to question them, he will simply be punished, academically or professionally. Thus they operate less as intellectual fields of inquiry than intolerant, man-made religions — or ideologies. That word means more than just “worldview.” It’s a term for a set of intellectual rationalizations for positions you chose for non-rational reasons, such as the craving for money, power, privilege, or revenge. An ideology is a half-baked idea with a fully loaded pistol.

The great critic of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism, Eric Voegelin, explained how to distinguish a legitimate, grounded worldview from an ersatz religion, or ideology. In The New Science of Politics, he noted that ideologues defend their systems not by anticipating objections and answering them, but instead by forbidding the questions.

Marx allowed no room in his system of materialistic determinism for the possibility of God. When students asked him about that, he told them that in a future socialist paradise, the question of God would never come up. (Indeed, future Marxist governments would send the secret police to make sure of that.) Of course that is not an answer but an evasion. It’s the response not of a philosopher but of an ideologue.

Whole Disciplines Without Dissenters

Women’s studies professors, almost to a person, take for granted the right to abortion. How many “queer theory” teachers are willing to entertain the natural law objections to same-sex marriage? Will they let students defend that position in papers in their classes, without subjecting them to classroom shaming and punitive grading? Would students who end up in one of these classes have the nerve to make the experiment? I don’t advise it. I advise not taking those classes, and if they are required I advise transferring colleges.

Can we really take seriously the claim that these are legitimate academic fields, when the answers to complex questions that are widely and justly debated — not just across America, but around the world and throughout the centuries — are so blithely taken for granted that there are simply no dissenters? Worse still, these disciplines poison other departments, as history professors adopt the “consensus” of women’s studies “scholars” on one issue, and philosophers, theologians, even chaplains accept the queer theorists’ party line.

It’s not just that classes infused by such corrupted, politicized disciplines indoctrinate students with pat, false conclusions, and encourage them to wield them self-righteously as cudgels. Nor even that students are being robbed of the chance to appreciate thinkers, artists, and statesmen of the past with any sympathy or pleasure. All that is bad enough.

Lazy Thinking Makes Snowflakes

Even worse, in the long run, are the intellectual laziness and emotional fragility that such an education produces. Can you imagine college Democrats in 1952 reacting to the election of immigration hawk Dwight Eisenhower as today’s “snowflakes” responded to Donald Trump’s win? Even the self-righteous and often violent radicals who took over campuses in the 60s didn’t have melt-downs, public crying fits, and apparent nervous breakdowns when Nixon beat McGovern. Whatever crackpot ideologies they might have adopted, they had been through the training in rigorous, critical thinking that Western education has prided itself on since the ancient Greeks. Our current generation wouldn’t know rigor from rigor mortis.

All these are excellent, and to my mind decisive, reasons to shutter most humanities and social science departments, and reduce English faculty to teaching remedial reading, correct grammar, and the basics of business writing. Let universities and colleges shrink down to their icy, pragmatic core: preparing future taxpayers, without poisoning their minds with toxic ideologies founded on crass intellectual sloth. First do no harm.

But who will pass on the really important traditions of humanistic learning, which our current crop of “humanists” has poisoned like a virus yet clings to like a tapeworm? Tomorrow I’ll grope toward an answer at how to replace the wrecked infrastructure of liberal education in our current tough conditions. (For more from the author of “Most College Humanities and Social Science Programs Have Become Enemies of Freedom and Reason” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

How Close-Minded Liberals Have Ruined Higher Education

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While college administrators and professors accept disgraceful behavior, we as taxpayers, donors, and parents should not foot the bill.

Let’s look at some of that behavior.

A University of Washington Tacoma Writing Center press release told students that expecting Americans to use proper grammar perpetuates racism. The University of Nebraska Omaha will host a workshop for “anti-racist allies” to develop “action plans” that confront America’s “foundation of systemic oppression” in the context of “the current political climate.”

The workshop was inspired by professor Tammie Kennedy’s recent book, titled “Rhetorics of Whiteness.” She will lead a discussion on “taking action against white supremacy.”

Black students at the University of Michigan demand campus officials provide them with “a permanent designated space on central campus for black students and students of color to organize and do social justice work.”

Bob Lange is an associate professor emeritus of physics and an adjunct associate professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. He says, “It is not terrorism to kill representatives of a government that you are opposed to.”

His remarks were reported by Canary Mission, a group of students who document people and groups who are promoting hatred of the USA, Israel, and the Jewish people, particularly on American college campuses.

It reports that Lange maintained that the 2012 terrorist attacks on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya—which killed four people and injured 10 others—were “not terrorism.”

Orange Coast College suspended Caleb O’Neil for violating an obscure school policy against recording classroom lectures. It’s what he recorded that was disturbing to the college administration.

He recorded a human sexuality professor, Olga Perez Stable Cox, spending class time telling her students that President Donald Trump’s election was an “act of terrorism” because he is a “white supremacist” and Vice President Mike Pence “is one of the most anti-gay humans in this country.”

Additionally, the professor asked all of the Trump supporters in the classroom to stand up and be accounted for.

In a relatively rare incidence of the education establishment’s doing the right thing, the Coast Community College District’s board of trustees overrode the college president and rescinded O’Neil’s suspension and other sanctions. What the board did not do was to sanction Cox for being a thug and bullying her students.

Commentator Dennis Prager recently wrote a column titled “Why Professors Object to Being Recorded.” Prager says:

Our colleges and universities (and an increasing number of high schools and elementary schools) have been transformed from educational institutions into indoctrination institutions. With the left-wing takeover of universities, their primary aim has become graduating as many leftists as possible.

He adds:

Most professors objecting to being recorded know on some level that they are persuasive only when their audience is composed largely of very young people just out of high school. They know that if their ideas are exposed to adults, they may be revealed as intellectual lightweights.

These professors know that they are persuasive only when their audience is composed of very young people with minds full of mush. If their ideas are exposed to more mature adults, they will be seen as quacks, hustlers, and charlatans.

By the way, I’ve taught graduate and undergraduate economic theory for 36 years at George Mason University. At the beginning of each semester, I invite students to record my lectures.

I have no idea who has listened to the lectures or where the recordings wind up. But I challenge anyone to find a lecture in which I proselytized students to my political or personal values.

While professorial proselytization is accepted at most universities, I believe that to use one’s classroom to push one’s personal beliefs, particularly on immature students, is both immoral and academic dishonesty.

What’s going on at the nation’s colleges represents a threat to both liberty and academic excellence. It is a gross dereliction of duty for legislators, donors, and decent Americans to allow it to continue. (For more from the author of “How Close-Minded Liberals Have Ruined Higher Education” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Will College Campuses Give Rioters a License to Firebomb?

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“I have been punched. I have been spit on. I have had my personal information posted online,” Naweed Tahmas, a Berkeley College Republican who helped invite Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus, told the media. He says that since the riots another student yelled in his face, accusing him of exercising “white privilege.”

Tahmas is actually a Persian-American, not a European-American, but that hardly matters for the purposes of racist shaming of conservatives.

Tahmas said that the Oakland police have received a death threat against the president of Berkeley College Republicans, warning “You can protect Milo, but you can’t protect [name of College Republican].”

Milo Yiannopoulis, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is a performance artist and a provocateur who’s become a folk hero to campus conservatives with his fearless (and incredibly vulgar) “Dangerous F****t” tour. What Milo says is sometimes repulsive, but it is protected by the Constitution. If only the authorities would enforce it.

In two of Milo’s recent appearances at taxpayer-supported public universities, violence broke out. The story in Seattle at the University of Washington has been weirdly underreported in national media. At a rally against Milo, a protester was shot. The student (or former student: it’s still not clear) who shot him turned himself into the police, yet has not been charged, strongly suggesting police have evidence that he was defending himself from physical attack by an anti-Milo, anti-Trump protester.

At Berkeley, home of the Free Speech movement in America, Milo’s appearance was cancelled when a riot broke out among the protesters. This was not just a case of feelings getting out of hand though: It was yet another appearance of “Black Bloc” protesting, a new technique encouraged by the socialist Left.

Masked, Hooded Democrats with a Racialist Agenda

As Inside Higher Education reported, amid 1000 or so peaceful demonstrators some 150

did come to start fires, break windows and hurl rocks at police officers. … They wore black and concealed their faces with masks. They brought — and used — bats, metal rods, fireworks and Molotov cocktails to get their message across. In the process they undermined “the First Amendment rights of the speaker as well as those who came to lawfully assemble and protest his presence,” said a spokesperson for Berkeley.

Yet afterwards the college newspaper published at least five commentaries from Berkeley students and alums condoning the violence on the grounds that letting Milo speak is an act of violence. “Violence helped ensure safety of students,” an essay by one Berkeley student was headlined.

Yvette Felarca, a public middle school teacher, defended the Berkeley violence both to the LA Times and on Fox News:

“It wasn’t just people dressed in black who were acting militantly and everyone else is peace-loving Berkeley hippies,” said Yvette Felarca, a political organizer of By Any Means Necessary, an immigration and affirmative action coalition that seeks to build a mass militant movement,” reports the LA Times. “Everyone cheered when those barricades were dismantled. … Everyone was there with us in political agreement of the necessity of shutting it down, whatever it was going to take. It shows we have the power.”

Jake Shields, a World Series of Fighting welterweight, was not so enthusiastic. Emerging from a nearby restaurant where he says he watched a group of black masked men chasing a lone citizen while police stood by and did nothing. “That’s when I had to intervene, because no one is helping the guy, including the police,” Shields said. “Dude, you guys have your faces covered, you’re attacking people, you’re being f***ing fascists,” Shields told one of the masked assailants.

Violent men in masks with a racialist agenda, who are defended by the powerful, while police stand by and refuse to defend the innocent … America has been down this ugly road before. I’ll go ahead and say it: The “Black Bloc” seems to have learned from the horrifying success of the Ku Klux Klan, which for decades silenced dissent in a dozen American states.

Fascism in Canada

Things are even worse in Canada. Law enforcement there is close to declaring open season on intellectual and political dissent. Conservative students organized a panel at the University of Toronto to discuss threats to free speech on a wide range of issues, ranging from politics to climate change. The event was disrupted by thuggish protestors with profane chants, threats and false fire alarms. As the campus newspaper reports:

According to the event organizer, what [protestors] tried to do was called “no-platforming”, which is “an anti-high-fascist tactic, aimed at, if someone is trying to spread hate speech or fascism or violent rhetoric, […] you deny them the platform to actually express those views,” said the protest organizer, who further explained that the protesters joined outside the conference room when Levant started his speech.

The chants included “F*** white supremacy,” “F*** Climate Change Denial,” as well as chants against Trump and a “fascist USA.”

One of the invited speakers silenced by the protestors was publisher Ezra Levant. He responded:

“None of those words apply to me — I’m not American, and I’m not a fascist,” wrote Levant… in reference to the chants. “But the people dressed in black, wearing handkerchiefs over their mouths, carrying sticks, flipping over tables, and threatening a peaceful meeting on campus — those are actually fascists by definition.”

Levant says the Stormtroopers called his reporter Jay Fayza (who is black) a “white supremacist.” The Canadian Broadcast Company then ran a whole segment calling his media company, The Rebel, hateful and racist. Nora Loreto, a journalism union boss (yes they have journalism unions in Canada) tweeted out, “I’m getting closer and closer to publicly advocating camera smashing when people see The Rebel goons out and about.”

Levant, who left the mainstream media to found his own company, says he must now hire bodyguards for his reporters: “I know, it’s insane. This is Canada, not Russia or Venezuela. But that’s what life is like under Justine Trudeau and Rachel Notley and Kathleen Wynne,” he said. He called the protestors “anti-Semitic cowards don’t want to go on the record as Jew-bashing, gay-bashing racists. They’re ashamed of themselves. Same reason they wear masks at their riots.”

The Nation Praises Thuggish Attacks While Cops Cower

Meanwhile back the U.S., the mainstreaming of violence by the Left continues apace. On January 22, The Nation published a piece praising Black Bloc violence: “The transcendental experience of watching Roger Federer play tennis, David Foster Wallace wrote, was one of ‘kinetic beauty’… what Foster Wallace saw in a Federer Moment, I see in a video of a neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the face.”

Here is for me the most disturbing news from Berkeley: With a violent masked mob of 100 to 150 people creating as much as $600,000 in property damage, just one person was arrested. This was no accident. This was a deliberate police policy: “At Berkeley, the police officers felt that trying to get in the middle of the crowd would’ve sparked more violence and resulted in more severe injuries. They chose not to try to arrest the black bloc protesters, because they felt it would have compromised the safety of their students,” Inside Higher Education reported.

Other college law enforcement officials praised that approach: “It always could be worse,” University of Maryland College Park Police chief Mitchell said. “The property damage was disappointing and absolutely unlawful, but that certainly could’ve been worse as well. I applaud the way they handled the incident.”

I, on the other hand, applaud the way the NYPD handled Black Bloc protesters who tried to violently disrupt an NYU speech by libertarian Gavin McInnes the day after the Berkeley riots. Cops immediately moved in and arrested 11 people.

The Berkeley violence is clearly not a one-off — they are part of an increasingly organized and highly privileged Left’s plan to silence conservative dissent where it is most vulnerable: on college campuses.

Organized mobs are throwing firebombs to disrupt speech, destroy property, and endanger bystanders. When the authorities refuse to stop them they endanger us all. (For more from the author of “Will College Campuses Give Rioters a License to Firebomb?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Why Professors Object to Being Recorded

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After the election of Donald Trump as president, a professor at Orange Coast College in California, Olga Perez Stable Cox, went into an extended hate rant against the president-elect. Among other things, she described Trump’s election as an “act of terrorism,” labeled him a white supremacist and called Vice President-elect Mike Pence “one of the most anti-gay humans in this country.”

And this wasn’t even a political science class in which one might expect political talk, no matter how irresponsible. Cox is a professor of human sexuality.

When a student who recorded the diatribe posted the recording on social media, the professor’s union, the Coast Federation of Educators, AFT local chapter 1911, said on Facebook: “This is an illegal recording without the permission of the instructor. The student will be identified and may be facing legal action.”

According to the union, the recording “violated the professor’s course syllabus, the Coast Community College District Code of Student Conduct, and the California Educational Code (sic), section 78907, which (exists) to provide a robust, learning environment for all students irrespective of their opinions.”

The aforementioned California Education Code section states, “The use by any person, including a student, of any electronic listening or recording device in any classroom without the prior consent of the instructor is prohibited.”

The American Association of University Professors has long opposed unauthorized recording and public posting of what professors say in classrooms.

As it happens, I taught for two years at Brooklyn College. I recall students asking me whether they could record my lectures. And I remember thinking, “Why on Earth would I say no?”

I wanted whatever I said in a classroom to be heard by more than 50 people. “Who wouldn’t?” I wondered.

Here, then, is my theory as to why most professors who object to their class lectures being recorded do so: They fear having what they say exposed to the general public.

Our colleges and universities (and an increasing number of high schools and elementary schools) have been transformed from educational institutions into indoctrination institutions. With the left-wing takeover of universities, their primary aim has become graduating as many leftists as possible.

The vast majority of our colleges have become left-wing seminaries. Just as Christian seminaries exist to produce committed Christians, Western universities exist to produce committed leftists. Aside from the Christian-leftism difference, universities differ in only one respect from Christian seminaries: Christian seminaries admit their goal, whereas the universities deceive the public about theirs.

Thus, in the “social sciences” — disciplines outside the natural sciences and math — a large number of college teachers inject their politics into their classrooms. And if they are recorded, the general public will become aware of just how politicized their classroom lectures are.

But there is another reason.

Most professors objecting to being recorded know on some level that they are persuasive only when their audience is composed largely of very young people just out of high school. They know that if their ideas are exposed to adults, they may be revealed as intellectual lightweights.

Students therefore need to understand that when professors object to being recorded, it is a statement of contempt for them. The professors are, in effect, saying to their students: “Listen. I can get away with this intellectually shallow, emotion-based propaganda when you are the only people who actually hear it. You aren’t wise enough to perceive it as such. But if people over 21 years of age hear it, I’m toast.”

All rules governing the recording of conversations without permission should apply to a professor meeting privately with a student.

But when professors stand in front of a class, they are in the public domain. Moreover, the public pays at least part of these professors’ salary at virtually every university. We therefore have a right, and even a duty, to know what professors say publicly in classrooms.

In fact, I would encourage every student who cares about truth and intellectual honesty to record what their professors say in class. I would also encourage every parent to find out for what they are paying. And I would encourage professors to record themselves in order to protect themselves against doctored material.

Any professor who is not ashamed of what he or she is saying in class should welcome being recorded.

And any student taking a class with a professor who objects to being recorded should know that this objection is almost always equivalent to the professor saying: “I want you to hear what I say in class because I’m quite confident that you can’t differentiate between instruction and indoctrination. But if what I say goes public, people who do know the difference will expose me as a propagandist.” (For more from the author of “Why Professors Object to Being Recorded” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

There Really Is Climate of Violence on Campuses

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Time for our News Quiz! How many were arrested and punished in Berkeley among those who rioted, vandalized and violently beat a man with shovels, almost killing him, when the right-wing comedian Milo was to visit that campus?

Hint: The total was the same as the number of student militants menacingly brandishing automatic weapons who violently occupied Cornell’s Willard Straight Hall in 1969 in protest of Cornell’s “racist attitudes” and “irrelevant curriculum.”

Still not sure? Then here, at the risk of being too generous, is another hint. The number of violent actors arrested at Berkeley is the same as the number punished for their violent storming of the stage at the University of Wisconsin, Madison to prevent mild-mannered Ben Shapiro from speaking on the subject of decency, an event at which “Campus police watched but did nothing to stop the interruptions.” Violent students also blocked Shapiro from UCLA.

If you still don’t have it, the number you’re looking for is the usual count of those arrested, expelled or otherwise punished for their use of violence to further political causes at colleges and universities all across this fair country. It is a number fewer than the fingers on your right hand to the left of your thumb.

No more clues. Unless you find the answer too distasteful to admit, you have at least an inkling of this circular figure.

The Violent in Charge

Now that we have finished the first question, it is time for our … Political Science Quiz! Ready?

What do we call those people in a society who are licensed or allowed to use violence?

No hints this time. We call these the people in charge.

Since the violent are in charge, and since folks regularly use violence on college campuses as a means of politics — violence that just as regularly goes unpunished or is countenanced — we can therefore say that there is an officially approved climate of violence many campuses in the United States.

It really is this simple. Violent students (and professors) are in charge, have been in charge, and will continue to be in charge as long as they are allowed to use violence.

Violence in and around universities is so commonplace that its presence is thought natural and necessary. Pepper sprayings, calls for muscle, assaults of speakers calling for free speech (another Berkeley incident), a brawl and students rushing the stage, students occupying by force various campus offices.

These violent actions are not only in protest of freedom and traditional morality. Sometimes plain old-fashioned greed is the excuse. As when students violently burst into and occupied various buildings at University of California at Davis to whine that tuition should not increase.

There isn’t any point in continuing the examples. The reports of violent behavior and temper tantrums of campus denizens appear in the news as often as storm reports, ever since the 1960s. Everybody knows this to be true. Everybody expects it. And except for noting these incidents, as I am doing now, few do anything about them.

Don’t Call Them Snowflakes

The mistake is to label violent, fit-throwing students as they crowd into “safe spaces,” fill their diapers and demand to be changed, with being “snowflakes.” Those who do so, says Anthony Esolen in his new book Out of the Ashes, “are wrong in their diagnosis and inaccurate in their criticism.”

It is also something of a mistake to point at the students and laugh at them for being weaklings. The students hold the hammer, and they know it … in our world of inversions, power is granted to people who claim that they have no power and who resent the greatness of their own forebears. They do not seek “safety.” They seek to destroy. The strong man is bound and gagged, and the pistol is pointed at his head — the seat of reason itself.

On paper, at least, university presidents, deans and trustees are in charge. Almost none of these people, duly accepting their office and possessing the right to administer punishment and keep order, fulfill their duties to maintain order and keep the peace. Sometime these officials share the political goals of the violent on campus, and so excuse the violence.

But often those purportedly in charge do not want the grief associated with doing the right thing. If a president expelled a violent student, the national media would be against him, a large part of his faculty would be against him, the student body would be against him, even the trustees buckling under the weight of publicity would be against him. It is easier to look the other way or issue a non-binding We-Love-Tolerance-And-Repudiate-Violence missive. (For more from the author of “There Really Is Climate of Violence on Campuses” please click HERE)

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Instead of Coddling, Universities Should Let Students Grow Up

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One wonders just how far spineless college administrators will go when it comes to caving in to the demands of campus snowflakes.

For those unfamiliar with the term “snowflakes,” it is increasingly being used to characterize college students easily traumatized by criticism and politically incorrect phrases. They demand safe spaces and trigger warnings so as not to be upset by views that challenge their own.

Snowflakes feel as though they must be protected against words, events, and deeds that do not fully conform to their extremely limited, narrow-minded beliefs built on sheer delusion. This might explain their behavior in the wake of Donald Trump’s trouncing of Hillary Clinton.

Generosity demands that we forgive these precious snowflakes and hope that they grow up. The real problem is with people assumed to be grown-ups—college professors and administrators who tolerate and give aid and comfort to our aberrant youth.

Let’s look at tiny samples of it.

To help avoid microaggressions, the University of North Carolina administration posted a notice urging staff and faculty members to avoid phrases such as “husband/boyfriend,” which they claim is heteronormative, and “Christmas vacation,” which “minimizes non-Christian spiritual rituals.”

This winter, the Oregon State University administration will treat its students to a new class that promises to teach them about how blacks have historically resisted white supremacists.

Professor Dwaine Plaza, one of three instructors for the course, said the idea was inspired by Trump’s election, which he fears will take the country back to the 1960s.

The University of Maryland is hosting a series of postelection lectures on how a “commitment to white supremacy” gave Trump momentum and blaming “white America’s spiritual depravity” for his rise to power.

One of the topics will be “Make America White Again? The Racial Reasoning of American Nationalism.”

At Pomona College, posters giving instructions on “how to be a (better) white ally” and stating that all white people are racist were put in the dorm rooms of new students.

Ned Staebler, Wayne State University’s vice president for economic development, i.e., fundraising, declared that Trump is a Nazi and his supporters are comfortable with bigotry.

He said, “I’ll say flatly that many of the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump did so because of his bigotry.”

In response to a claim by Ben Carson—Trump’s pick to be secretary of housing and urban development—that people have the right to display Confederate flags on private property, University of Pennsylvania professor Anthea Butler tweeted, “If only there was a ‘coon of the year’ award.”

Previously, Butler informed us that God is a “white racist” and Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, was a “blood sacrifice.”

Wake Forest University faculty and administration seek to make the university a sanctuary campus. Campus security will refuse to follow federal laws and will stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from pursuing criminals if they come onto Wake Forest property.

This is nothing less than nullification of federal law. While liberals support nullification of federal immigration law, I wonder how they would respond to cities nullifying laws enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Snowflake indulgence has been fostered by the education establishment and, more recently, by federal law.

One of the most popular features of Obamacare is its provision that children can remain on their parents’ health care plan until they are 26 years old. That promotes prolonged adolescence, sparing the necessity for youngsters to get out on their own.

Some have criticized my lack of sympathy for snowflakes in the wake of their emotional trauma resulting from Trump’s defeat of Clinton.

Here’s my question to you: How much sympathy would you have for those 18- to 24-year-olds who are in the military if they conducted themselves—on aircraft carriers, in nuclear submarines, and in special forces—just as college snowflakes did in the wake of the Trump victory? (For more from the author of “Instead of Coddling, Universities Should Let Students Grow Up” please click HERE)

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Here’s Why If You Have a College Degree You’re More Likely to Live in an Elite Bubble

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Political scientist Charles Murray recently surveyed 130,919 Americans between the ages of 20-99 to determine how big or small of a “bubble” they live in. Participants took the “Bubble Quiz,” and answered questions like, “Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American neighborhood in which the majority of your 50 nearest neighbors did not have college degrees?” and “During the last year, have you ever purchased domestic mass-market beer to stock your own fridge?”

The lower the score a participant received, the bigger the bubble and more “insulated” they are from “mainstream American culture,” meaning that they don’t watch the same TV shows, drink the same beer, drive the same cars, and work in the same fields as people who received higher scores.

The most-bubbly zip codes in the United States are (unsurprisingly) in New York City, Boston, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, Washington, D.C., and San Diego also have bubble areas too, but not on the same scale as New York City or Boston. As Murray notes, the zip codes with the biggest bubbles are “overwhelmingly Democratic strongholds.”

So what’s the root difference between Americans who live in a “bubble”? And why is there a difference? According to Charles Murray, the greatest divide is a cultural one. Murray argues that “mainstream American culture” is “conspicuously different from the culture of the new upper class” located in large-city bubbles. As a result of this cultural divide, there’s an “asymmetry of power” between those who live in big cities and those who don’t. Further, the quiz found that elite zip codes in America are predominately white and urban.

So, white urbanites who don’t drink mass-market beer, have never owned a pickup truck, and don’t eat at Ruby Tuesday, “run the nation’s culture, economy, and politics,” according to Murray.

And what makes someone “elite”? In short, a college degree makes a big difference.

Murray found that when he “controlled for the age of the respondent and the urbanization of the zip code, it turned out that virtually all the effect on the bubble-score is driven by the percentage of adults with a college degree in the zip code where the respondent lived.” The survey also discovered that the median family income of the zip code had “almost no independent effect” on the size of a bubble, which is significant.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that only 33 percent of American adults hold a bachelor’s or higher degree. For some, a four-year degree is too expensive to obtain, and for others who are drawn to technical or labor-intensive jobs, a bachelor’s degree may not be necessary or desirable. But in an increasingly divided country, American adults who don’t have a college degree feel powerless in comparison to those who have formed elite bubbles.

When people feel powerless, they feel like they have nothing to lose. Donald Trump made the powerless feel like they mattered once again, and that’s why he won the election.

So what should “elite” Democrats do if they want to connect with the rest of America? “Get out more,” says Murray. (For more from the author of “Here’s Why If You Have a College Degree You’re More Likely to Live in an Elite Bubble” please click HERE)

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New York Proposed Free College, but Not Everyone’s Buying It

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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced an “aggressive” new plan to provide free college tuition to families earning up to $125,000 a year. Under the proposal, nearly a million families would qualify.

“We’re making college tuition-free for middle-class families,” Cuomo, a Democrat, said. “This is the most aggressive plan ever proposed.”

To participate, students are required to enroll full time at a state university of New York (SUNY) or city university of New York (CUNY) two- or four-year college.

Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and a professor of economics at Ohio University, called the proposal “extortionately inappropriate.”

“You’re taking money from the general taxpaying public—including some low- and middle-income people—and redistributing that to a group that will probably include a very significant part of a somewhat more affluent population,” Vedder told The Daily Signal. “It’s certainly not a redistribution to the poor; it’s a redistribution to the middle class—and a fairly affluent middle class.”

Cuomo is billing the proposal as “the first of its kind in the nation.” But while the plan appears to be the most far-reaching, it’s not the first time states have leveraged tax dollars to pay for at least some of their students’ college tuition. Oregon, Tennessee, Georgia, Michigan, and Louisiana have all done so in various forms, but not all of those programs have proven sustainable.

Louisiana, said Norbert Michel, an expert in financial regulations at The Heritage Foundation, provides a case study for why free tuition is “bad public policy.”

“It simply is not true that ‘everyone’ must have a college education,” Michel told The Daily Signal. “Pretending otherwise devalues the college degree, and it isn’t really free. Someone always ends up paying more for a college education when we pretend it’s free because we transfer tax dollars over to universities.”

Under the Louisiana college scholarship program, called the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students (TOPS), any student earning a 2.5 GPA or above who scores at or above the state average on the ACT or SAT is eligible for money to cover the full tuition of any public university in the state, despite how much or little their family earns. Scholarships can also be applied to private schools, although they won’t cover the full cost.

Last March, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said due to a historic budget shortfall, the state no longer had adequate money to fund the program. According to CNN, more than half of Louisiana State University’s 26,000 undergraduates receive state-funded scholarships, totaling “about $58 million.”

From 2000 to 2010, Louisiana saw a 20 percent spike in the number of high school students who headed to college in one year. But in the wake of the budget shortfall, thousands of students received notifications last year that the scholarship program would only cover 42 percent of tuition costs for the spring 2017 semester.

To address the costs of college affordability, Vedder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity said he’d “do nothing.”

“I think we’re over-invested in higher education,” he said. “But if you’re going to do something—and maybe there’s a political case for doing something—I would reduce subsidies to the state universities that are already being given, and convert that money to vouchers and give it to the low-income students.”

Cuomo’s Excelsior Scholarship program aims to provide free tuition to students from middle-class families making up to $125,000 per year, which according to the governor, accounts for 80 percent of New York households. He estimates the plan will cost approximately $163 million per year.

In creating the plan, Cuomo took a page from Sen. Bernie Sanders’ playbook. Sanders, an independent from Vermont, appeared alongside the governor on Tuesday at LaGuardia Community College to announce the new proposal.

“If the United States is to succeed in a highly competitive global economy, we need the best-educated workforce in the world,” said Sanders, who campaigned on the issue of free tuition while running for president. “We must make public colleges and universities tuition-free for the middle-class and working families of our country.”

The program, called the Excelsior Scholarship, will be paid for “by leveraging New York State’s generous aid programs,” Cuomo’s press release reads. It adds:

Currently, the Tuition Assistance Program, or TAP, provides nearly $1 billion in grants to college students statewide and New York is one of only two states in the nation that offers this type of entitlement. Under the program, eligible students would still receive TAP and any applicable federal grants. Additional state funds would cover the remaining tuition costs for incoming or existing eligible students.

Average tuition costs for a bachelor’s degree fall between $6,000 and $7,000 at SUNY and CUNY.

Cuomo’s proposal still needs approval from the state Legislature. He and Sanders are hopeful if the measure passes, other states will follow.

“Mark my words,” Sanders said. “If New York state does it this year, state after state will follow.” (For more from the author of “New York Proposed Free College, but Not Everyone’s Buying It” please click HERE)

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