Colleges and universities have historically been beacons of innovation and scholarship, shaped by intellectual diversity and a passion for knowledge and debate. Freedom of speech has always been a vibrant part of campus culture.
But that enduring image of universities is now under attack.
A new dogma is pervading campuses across America, with students and academics seeking to silence all opinions that dissent from the progressive orthodoxy. Nothing highlights this dogma better than UnKoch My Campus.
Earlier this month the student-focused organization hosted a national “day of action,” encouraging students to protest what they perceive as the Koch Brothers’ untenable influence over American colleges and universities.
According to their website, the group is concerned by the donations that the Kochs have made to hundreds of colleges and universities, since 2005. They believe there is “mounting evidence” that the money is given with strings attached.
UnKoch My Campus claims that their efforts are about increasing “accountability, transparency, and academic freedom.” But as the group’s name alludes, they only target specific libertarian and conservative donors.
Their true purpose is clear. From UnKoch My Campus’ website: “With the 2016 elections just a year away, we have a chance to clog Koch’s political pipeline,” So let’s call this what it is: a progressive organization vilifying and attacking a voice on campus because it advocates ideas contrary to the progressive orthodoxy. And they’re doing so in the name of academic freedom.
The irony is palpable, if not chilling. Especially when you look at the kinds of campus specific donations that UnKoch My Campus claims to be concerned about—the majority of the money is coming from the left.
Stanford University received $40 million from billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer in 2009 to build the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy. Steyer’s organization NextGen Climate also spent $74 million in 2014 and plans to spend more in 2016 when they roll out a campus mobilization program with paid field staff on campuses in key battleground states.
The donation Stanford received is modest compared to the whopping $100 million Cornell University received from former Democratic Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s charity for construction on it’s new Cornell Tech campus. And the donation Cornell received pales in comparison to some of Bloomberg’s more generous endowments to John Hopkins, which has received more than $1 billion from Bloomberg in his lifetime.
George Soros’ foundation Open Society Institute gave $26.4 million worth of grants and project funding to universities in 2013 alone, $675,000 of which went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Civic Media.
All of this dwarfs the $68 million that the Koch brothers have given, from 2005 to 2013, for libertarian and free-market university programs.
And here’s the thing, the Kochs are for open immigration, marijuana legalization, and criminal justice reform, Their largest political expenditure was given to the ACLU to fight the Patriot Act. On many fronts the Koch’s agree with the left’s agenda.
So why are they so frequently under fire from progressives?
It seems that while progressives preach diversity as a fundamental value, they can’t accept any dissent from their rigid ideology. Their new agenda is to shame all dissenting thoughts and opinions out of the dialogue.
UnKoch My Campus is a small organization, but it illustrates this dangerous dogma, which is now permeating campus culture—the idea that it is ok to censor ideas and shut down speech, simply because you don’t like it.
It’s this same viewpoint that leads students and university faculty to protest for the removal of speakers and public programs on campuses around the country, simply for dissenting from the majority opinion.
Brandeis University made the decision to rescind an honorary degree to women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali after students and Islamic advocacy groups protested the decision. After student protests, Williams College in Massachusetts uninvited conservative feminist author Suzanne Venker to speak on why modern feminism has failed. Even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was uninvited to be the commencement speaker at Rutgers University after the faculty came together to protest her appearance. There are over 40 stories like this listed on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s Disinvitation List from 2013-2014 alone.
This behavior is symptomatic of an intolerant impulse among the Left to suppress all opinions they deem disruptive to the social norm. In an academic world where the majority of professors and administrators are more than a little left-of-center, this trend is disconcerting for the 35 percent of millennials that identify with the GOP. And it fundamentally harms intellectual debate.
There’s nothing wrong with students or campus faculty protesting against a speaker, campus event, or donor that is not in line with their personal beliefs – that’s part of the beauty of free speech. But the objective has become to silence dissenting speech entirely in an effort to control the conversation on campus – to quash any thought that deviates from the progressive ideology that dominates most universities.
This is counter-intuitive to what institutions of higher learning have always stood for: freedom of thought and the diversity of ideas.
If dissenting opinions continue to be silenced in the name of academic freedom,American universities will cease to be trailblazers in intellectual thought. Instead, they will stifle it.
I just hope we aren’t there yet.
