Now guess what kind of speakers were the ones primarily shut down. Hey, take a shot: you’ve got at least a 50-50 chance of being right! \Wow! You guessed it! In fact, the variety of censored speakers and their censors were more ideologically diverse than I expected.
FIRE maintains a “campus de-platforming database.” The free speech advocacy group explains,
“A deplatforming attempt is a form of intolerance motivated by more than just mere disagreement with, or even protest of, some form of expression. It is an attempt to prevent some form of expression from occurring. Deplatforming attempts include efforts to disinvite speakers from campus speeches or commencement ceremonies, to cancel performances of concerts, plays, or the screenings of movies, or to have controversial artwork removed from public display. An attempt to disrupt a speech or performance that is in progress is also considered a deplatforming attempt, whether it succeeds or fails.”
In 2024, its records indicate, there were 164 attempts at this kind of censorship on American campuses; FIRE has the receipts here. It was a record.
Kyle Rittenhouse appears to have been the most censored speaker of the year, but the list of speakers shut down are surprisingly diverse, including Hillary Clinton, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Michael Smerconish and Billie Jean King? The vast, vast majority of the blocked speaker attempts came from pro-Hamas/Palestinians/terrorism/anti-Semitism protesters, as you might guess.
This problem should not be a problem at all. The mistake college administrator make is having anything less than a no-disruption policy. Students disrupting an invited campus speaker in any substantive way should trigger a merciless response: suspension, then expulsion. It should not matter if the speaker is Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, Bozo the Clown, a white supremacist or a communist, a sexist or a terrorist. Mean signs and banners are fine (threatening ones are not). Education involves assessing good ideas and bad ones, experiencing heroes and villains. The toxic notions that words are violence and that stopping speech is a First Amendment right on a college campus need to be rejected, emphatically and forever. I will always remember when the Harvard Lampoon brought John Wayne to Harvard in 1974 specifically to skewer the conservative actor in a hostile question and answer session aimed at ridiculing him. Nobody tried to stop Wayne from speaking because the students all assumed they could make him look foolish. And the Duke, no slouch when off script, well-read and known for his sense of humor, debated them and matched their jibes with wit and self-deprecation. He left the stage to genuine applause and having won some young fans. The students learned something that day. That’s as it should be. Today’s Harvard students wouldn’t give John Wayne the opportunity to be a good sport.
Oh, about Billie Jean King: USC cancelled Asna Tabassum’s (the graduating class’ valedictorian) speech at commencement because of “substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement.” Weenies. They should have beefed up security and told any seniors planning protests that they would forfeit their degrees. Student and faculty objected to Tabassum’s speech being cancelled, so the university canceled all commencement speakers, including the iconic tennis champions and feminist.
Morons. I don’t know what can be done to save higher education here, short of leveling all the campuses, firing all the faculty and administrators, and starting from scratch. Yes, I know that’s unrealistic.
Ethics Alarms 
”Unrealistic”? Maybe not so. End federal student aid and you will solve two problems..
Because there is no national interest in an educated population, and only rich kids deserve to go to college, right, Chris?
False, before No Degree Left behind you could go to College and pay for it with a part time job. Now you can’t repay your degree ever.
yet another “problem” created by Federal government getting into an area and making things worse.
“Because there is no national interest in an educated population, and only rich kids deserve to go to college, right, Chris?”
You are better than this. To suggest that the only way to have an educated population is to lend ever increasing amounts of money to students who have no guarantee of a job that can make the investment pay off is not only myopic it is antithetical to critical thinking. How do Asian countries prepare their kids for academic success. Do European students graduate with huge loans to pay back? Are their other methods that might yield better outcomes at lower costs than our way of doing things. Probably. If the outcomes in terms of student ability are declining why should tuition rise? We should be paying for the final product should we not? If I get $10 worth of value from something I will not pay $20 simply because you spent that amount to create it.
I spent 20 years working in a community college and watched as kids had to absorb ever increasing tuition and fees because of ever increasing administrative overhead. Faculty and staff got used to 4% or more raises each year but they never gave a thought to how this largesse was impacting demand for their services because of the easy money they convinced students they needed to borrow to become successful. Student retention was the buzz word. Any suggestion that a student might be better suited for a non-academic training program that best matched the students cognitive capabilities or even talents was met with scorn by faculty whose positions were guaranteed by virtue of the fact that they taught required Gen-Ed subjects that theoretically give the student a broad understanding of the world.
I taught Economics and was required to change to a new edition every three years despite the fact that the early philosophers like Marx, Hegel, the classical theorists, Keynes and others nor much of any thing else had changed. I also doubt seriously if we need updated anthologies to teach literature or new math books every so often. Did Samuel Clemens update his works or did Descarte come up with something new posthumously? Textbooks are unnecessary. There are plenty of ways to learn without having to spend over $500 per semester on textbooks.
The point is that there is no check on prices if money can be easily had. Schools have no liability for encouraging someone to indenture themselves for thirty or more years to pay off the so called “investment in education”. The very schools whose graduates are clamoring for Biden’s loan forgiveness because they cannot make a salary large enough to live and pay back the loans taken are the very same that condemned Trump university for swindling those who used their own money to obtain a goal that was sketchy at best. All the education or training in the world will not help those unwilling or incapable of executing a winning strategy. Perhaps we should make student loans full recourse loans which means that if the seller of product uses financing in which a bank puts up the money but if the buyer defaults the seller must pay the loan back. The other option is to make going to the university something that is earned through hard work in primary and secondary grades. In this plan the faculty and employees of the university are paid by the government a fixed sum and the costs of educating those who have demonstrated talent will be shared by the entire society. As it is the entire society will be financing many who should not be in college and who who also force teachers to teach to the lowest common denominator in the class
There is no difference in federal student aid and the Fannie Mae – Freddie Mac policies that led to the 2008 housing bubble in which the goal of home ownership among those who could not afford home ownership took precedence over sound lending policies.
In all honesty, I would have been better off getting trained to be an auto mechanic, plumber, or something else that allowed me to use my creative talents that would permit me to make something that I could look back on and say “I created that” instead of getting my MBA and Econ degrees that trained me only to critique others. I was misled many years ago by academics who did not have my interests in mind.
I should point out that I never got financial aid and paid my own way through college by working.
There are plenty of reasons a university education is less affordable now. To name but a few: increased demand for services unrelated to the education per se (counseling, wifi in every building, etc.); a huge increase in non-teaching staff, especially in “Student Services”; drastic cuts in state funding for public universities; the fact that minimum wage hasn’t come close to keeping up with inflation; an even greater emphasis on sports programs at the expense of academics (NIL has made a horribly bad situation even worse)… Oh, and the increasing influence of trustees/regents/whatever: these people are mostly from the business world, so making a profit is what they care about.
In other words, there’s a lot of blame to go around: the universities themselves, politicians of both parties (in different ways), and the ability of employers to demand a college degree for jobs that don’t really require one. Yes, you could argue that federal aid has played a part, but I don’t think it’s high on the list. Moreover, the fact that you had to change textbooks isn’t because of anything other than the greed of a multinational publisher. The actual authors of those books get little of the profits. My dissertation advisor was co-author of a textbook that, as a conservative estimate, brought in gross receipts of $100,000 a year. He showed me his semi-annual royalty check once: it was less than $2.00.
Finally, I don’t think the benefit of a university education is exclusively, or even primarily, financial. What I attempted to teach wasn’t how to make more money, but how to construct or critique an argument, how to problem-solve, in short how to be a better citizen. I suspect that you did the same in that regard. There was a day when such an applicant was someone employers sought; now they want drones who’ll do what they’re told. That is beginning to be the case at universities now, too, alas. My colleague (the one whose sabbatical is what put me back in the classroom this fall) tells her outstanding students not to pursue a graduate degree to become a professor because the contemporary university is a hellscape for everyone but upper-level administrators and their sycophants. I won’t go that far, but it’s becoming harder to disagree overmuch.
I could certainly have made more money, perhaps a lot more, doing something else. But I was lucky–to come from a middle-class family, and to have grown up when I did. That allowed me to enter the workforce debt-free and therefore to do something that interested me (and at which I was pretty good, if I do say so myself) instead of struggling for subsistence. If my circumstances were those of some of my students today, I seriously doubt that I’d have anything resembling a retirement nest egg or own a house or be able to go out to eat on occasion.
We have failed the younger generation. The federal government bears some of the blame, but financial aid for needy students is unquestionably a net positive… or at least it would be if the politicians cared more about the future than about keeping their donors happy, and if corporations were a little less greedy. That’ll be the day…
I could have ticked off all those items as you did but those items exist because of federal intervention which uses grants to push political agendas within schools. I have witnessed the social engineering at work. As for students, their aid does not even get threatened unless you do virtually nothing for more than 3 semesters. I would have no problem using public funds to invest in every kid who have displayed an unquenchable thirst for learning but unfortunately college for so many is merely a right of passage in which the student is given a long leash to behave without parental supervision. This experience is paid for in large measure with long term loans and Pell grants. Let those who cannot cut it fail out early so they are not burdened with mountains of debt because they were supported through for an extended period by unnecessary federally funded support and counseling services .
The ability to pay drives the demand curve for admissions to colleges which results in higher prices as schools compete to attract larger numbers of students. Retention is a metric used by the government to validate a schools efficacy in education and its ability to be eligible to provide federal aid.
There are other ways to invest in developing talent instead of giving money to anyone who meets a financial need. We need a new financing model. That may mean that we create apprenticeships for all types of degrees whereby the future employer offsets some of the costs of tuition and fees.&
We need to incentivize academics long before the decision to go to college arises. Our schools are failing at all levels. Remedial education in freshman and sophomore years should not be paid for with federal dollars and grad programs should require a CBK of all students enrolling so that if a nurse wants a graduate management degree then he or she needs to get the prerequisite business courses instead of making those with the skills to sit through what are nothing more than junior and senior year coursework.
I was at the airport a few days ago and happened to look up at the control tower, which reminded me that Reagan had fired all the air traffic controllers once upon a time. That seemed insane at the time, but the sky didn’t fall, and neither did any of the planes in it. So maybe not so unrealistic to start the universities over from scratch after all.
I wish it were easier to tease out the “attempts” (i.e., the university didn’t bow to the pressure) from the successful suppressions, and link the latter to ideological perspectives. I suppose I could spend hours doing that on my own, but I really do have better things to do with my time.
Jeez, I hope so!