Higher education has been hijacked by leftist, ideological interests. Portland State University professor spells out five ways to fix it | American Enterprise Institute - AEI
In an article in First Things titled “Taking Power in the Academy” Bruce Gilley, professor of political science at Portland State University, outlines “five powerful ways to fix higher education” (as summarized by The College Fix, slightly revised version below): 1. Enforce existing laws that protect free speech, academic freedom, and due process A university that allows students or other groups to prevent speakers from coming to campus, whether through force or through administrative tricks, should be denied government benefits. So, too, with efforts to regulate speech on campus or to deny recognition to student groups outside the dominant ideologies. Regulation of speech includes speech codes, such as those that compel people to use gender pronouns not consistent with a person’s gender at birth or to use euphemisms like “undocumented migrant” instead of “illegal immigrant.” 2. Abolish university offices of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ … which have grown like great blobs from a narrow legal mandate into ideological shock units, tuition-funded activist agencies that push all sorts of left-wing agendas. By radically reducing the size of these bureaucracies, we can rein in both administrative bloat and the administrative imposition of left-wing viewpoints on the student body. Diversity offices have become not only legislative actors (making new rules to guide campus behavior) but also executive actors (promoting and implementing those rules) and judicial ones (setting up mechanisms that allow students to trigger Star Chamber–like inquiries and impose punishments). These offices should be abolished. Universities that preserve them should be excluded from federal student loan programs. 3. Stop letting professors be the only ones in charge of hiring The solution may be for hiring and promotion to cease to be the exclusive prerogative of the faculty: Alumni, boards of trustees, community partners, and grant agencies could have a role as well. In religious universities that have succumbed to political correctness, clerical control should be reasserted. Hiring and promotion committees should be forbidden to ask applicants about their commitments to diversity, social justice, sustainability, equality and inclusion, or other political or ideological issues. An employment ombudsman might guard against what is, in effect, the political blackballing of candidates. 4. Abolish grievance, indignation, and bitterness studies The abolition of departments with an explicit left-wing agenda would be another useful step. All of the grievance studies departments and programs should be ended and their fields of inquiry returned to the relevant disciplines. If you want to study black literature, it should be in a department of language and literature or English; if you want to study Native American history, it should be in a department of history; if you want to study women and politics, it should be in a department of political science. This reform would be a double winner, since we know from earnings data that grievance studies graduates are the lowest-earning of all those with university degrees. 5. Conservative and classical liberal faculty need to organize The corruption of the universities has come about through the use of political power, above all in university hiring committees and diversity offices. The deliverance of the universities will be achieved in the same way. Far from constituting a violation of academic freedom, the use of power is the only way to restore the conditions under which academic freedom is possible.
Comments
|
AuthorMaddog Categories
All
|