Increased endowments lead to more political correctness at institutions of higher education

The largesse of donors in the recent past has led to the entrenchment of Libthink political/social/economic agenda items and talking points at colleges and universities, mostly at the expense of actual academic work, which is likely to suffer further when cutbacks imposed by decreased giving in these times of economic downturn.

Noteworthy:

"This observer, relying more on observation and hunch than outright cynicism, is willing to bet that the teaching side of the academy will suffer more than the in loco parentis administrative side. Assistant vice-deans of student life specializing in sensitivity training will likely outlast the professor of European history or the instructor in Chinese, Arabic, or other critical languages."

...and:

"Consider some of the administrative offices created in recent years at various educational institutions around the country that seek to micro-manage every aspect of student life and to cater to one or another gender, race, sexual identity, or other such interest group into which intrusive administrators divide up their students. A "Guideline for Classroom Discussion," which required students to "acknowlege that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist," was mandated for one course, in 2004, at the University of South Carolina. The University of Delaware, in 2007, instituted a mandatory "residence life education program" that attempted to push onto students a number of university-approved views on topics from race to sexuality. (It was eliminated after The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and FIRE-induced media reports exposed the fundamental violations embodied by the "treatment" program.)

After recent allegations of racist slurs on a North Carolina State University 'Free Expression Tunnel,' the school's Chancellor appointed a Campus Climate Task Force. In other words, if there's a problem of censorship on a campus of higher education, the administrative solution is to create a body to study the problem, rather than to simply remove the obstacle to academic freedom.

No serious person can really argue that a student body needs such bureaucracy to participate in the civilized life of the university, much less in order to become an educated person. We are not talking, after all, about some war zone replete with carnage, rape and pillage, and genocide.

We are talking instead about communities of higher learning where students have lived, worked, and studied together for centuries, long before the advent of the modern armies of administrators seeking to keep the peace and enable different groups of students to survive the often-bruising ego-assaults that are a normal part not only of growing up, but of exposure to the world of sometimes disturbing ideas.

As Alan Charles Kors and I noted in our 1998 book, The Shadow University, 'most students respect disagreement and difference, and they do not bring charges of harassment against those whose opinions or expressions "offend"' them. Yet today, we observe, 'the universities themselves... encourage such charges to be brought.' Surely massive administrative bureaucracies of student life must be maintained if universities are going to enforce the increasingly ubiquitous - in academia - 'right' not to be offended."