The NAS reports that the University of Delaware faculty has refused to approve the ideologically challenged residential life staff's botched attempt to effectively reinstate a version of the doctrinaire program that was nixed after it drew national criticism last fall:

The NAS is encouraged by the vigorous opposition mounted by the University of Delaware's faculty against the attempt to subvert its legitimate academic function. Yesterday, the UD Faculty Senate met; the last item on the agenda was the new residence life program proposal. Put forth by the Student Life Committee, this program would replace the old residence life program which was shut down on November 1, 2007. But the proposal never made it to a vote.

Both faculty members and students spoke eloquently against the program, explaining that it promoted a political ideology, just like the old program. They told how the residence life agenda focused on sustainability, a term that, contrary to appearances, isn't limited to environmental issues but is being used by UD's Residence Life officials to promote political dogmas.

Professor Matt Robinson, chairman of the Faculty Senate Student Life Committee, who presented the new Res Life proposal offered the bold claim that, "The concept of sustainability, that's only speaking in terms of environmental." His attempt to package the new program as only conservation and environmental preservation, however, didn't persuade skeptical faculty members who had taken the trouble to read the details. They replied that the term sustainability is being used to sneak in “a curriculum of indoctrination” similar to the one President Harker suspended in November.

Yesterday's debate in the University's Faculty Senate also showed that many UD professors recognize the impropriety of turning instructional responsibilities over to ill-trained residence life activists. The presence of student voices among the opposition was particularly heartening. NAS hales our Delaware affiliate, particularly Jan Blits and Linda Gottfriedson, for their unflagging efforts to prevent the indoctrination program from being reinstated. We also salute Adam Kissel, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, for his work on the UD res life situation, and for the letter he gave to faculty members urging them to reject the proposal.

We at NAS are pleased that yesterday's debate focused on substance. According to NAS executive director Peter Wood, "The UD faculty criticisms of the proposed new residence life program arise from genuine concern about the integrity of UD's undergraduate programs, not from any spirit of political partisanship."

Debate will continue on Monday, May 12.

While Aliza Shvarts was dominating shock art news a couple of weeks ago, University of Maine at Farmington art student also made waves when she fulfilled an assignment by placing American flags on the floor of a campus building.

Plenty of people were outraged by the installation--local vets turned up to protest, and the College Republicans even made a YouTube video showing the flags, the protesters, the police, and the administrators standing by to keep the peace and explain that the student had procured all necessary permissions to place the flags in a highly trafficked hallway.

Check out the video above. Most of what you see is students instinctively walking around the flags on their way to and from class--but toward the end, one enterprising individual decides to stand on one of the flags to make a point. In doing so, he seems to have blurred a line that until that point passers by were automatically observing. You begin to see others step on the flag rather than walk around it, cutting mental corners as well as physical ones.

This might strike you as standard campus fare--someone tries to shock and awe everybody by publicly violating deep-seated norms of propriety. It may strike you as the unpatriotic analogue of Shvarts' inhumane handling of her body and the embryos it may or may not have held within it. But consider this: the student artist was forty-year-old education major Susan Crane, daughter of a twenty-five year military veteran, and a self-proclaimed conservative.

"I really had a hard time putting the flags on the floor. I'm a conservative Republican, and I come from a military family," she said. "I do believe in the flag as a symbol of freedom and what our country stands for. I first thought I could put paper under the flags but it was a safety hazard. I still really have not come to terms that the flags are on the floor. So that bothered me. I understand veterans fought in the war, and they died for our freedom. Other people have the choice to feel how they would interpret it."

And choose they did. Some called for censorship because the display offended them. But it sounds like more people thought better of that line of argument:

For the third day in a row, a student art project centered around the American flag sparked emotions in this college community, drawing town and university residents into another day of peaceful but intense contention.

About 100 people attended a rally called by Vietnam veteran Charles Bennett of Farmington, an American Legion commander. On Tuesday, he had challenged the University of Maine at Farmington administration's decision to allow an art project that used flags made of duct tape and plastic to be placed on the corridor of the student center.

Ultimately, the project generated debate about the flag and what it means.

"I think there is a renewed sense of patriotism on campus and appreciation of the flag," said student Austin Cookson, 20, of Kittery, who was holding up a large American flag with two friends.

"We're not saying the administration is un-American, but they are saying it is just a piece of cloth. It is a lot more than that. It represents freedom," he said.

A professor at Farmington writes to tell me that "The CRs and a few faculty members (from outside arts and humanities) now charge that the students' forced participation in the project, by having to make the choice to step on the flags or walk around, makes them human subjects. This group is arguing that in future all public art projects with the potential to offend to be submitted to the Human Subjects Research Board for review."

I argued that Shvarts should have had to go through Yale's IRB because she was undertaking a project that involved putting herself at risk. But to suggest that Crane's flag installation ought to have been reviewed--and implicitly nixed--by the IRB sounds like an absurd stretch, one that quite transparently seeks to hijack such review boards in the service of suppressing offensive views.

The College Republicans and the faculty backing them ought to know better--and they ought to be able to recognize when they are regurgitating in the most uncritical manner the nasty and unconstitutional logic that creates campus speech codes. If you want free speech for yourself, you have to defend it for others--especially when their expression shocks, appalls, or offends.

University of Pennsylvania history professor and FIRE founder Alan Charles Kors reflects on how the university has changed since the 1960s:

For students from "the Sixties" who moved into the world apart from the academy, there were adjustments to the reality principles and values of a free, dynamic, and decent society. The activists of the 1960s who stayed on campus, however--in original bodies or in spirit imparted to new bodies--expected students to take them always as political and moral gurus. Students did not do so. They had the gall first to like disco, and then to like Reagan. Such students had to be saved from the false consciousness that America somehow had given them. Thus, under the heirs of the academic Sixties, we moved on campus after campus from their Free Speech Movement to their politically correct speech codes; from their abolition of mandatory chapel to their imposition of Orwellian mandatory sensitivity and multicultural training; from their freedom to smoke pot unmolested to their war today against the kegs and spirits--literal and metaphorical--of today's students; from their acquisition of young adult status to their infantilization of "kids" who lack their insight; from their self-proclaimed dreams of racial and sexual integration to their ever more balkanized campuses organized on principles of group characteristics and group responsibility; from their right to define themselves as individuals--a foundational right--to their official, imposed, and politically orthodox notions of identity. American college students became the victims of a generational swindle of truly epic proportions. If that part of the faculty not complicit in this did not know that it was happening, it was by choice or willful blindness.

In the academic university--the curriculum and classroom, and the hiring that underlies them--it all varies by where one looks. To understand why and to understand one of the few vulnerabilities of universities to actual accountability and reform, one must understand the hierarchy that predicts academic institutional behavior: sexuality (in their language, "sexual preference") trumps neutrality; race properly conceived easily trumps sexuality; sex properly conceived (or, in their language, "gender") easily trumps race; and careerism categorically trumps everything. From that perspective, the careerists who run our campuses have made a Faustian bargain (though they differ on which is the devil's portion). Being careful, on the whole, to keep the natural and physical sciences, mathematics, and a variegated Column A of departments (sometimes psychology, sometimes philosophy, sometimes linguistics), and the professional schools that relate symbiotically to practical America relatively free of political agendas--though even in these cases, the barriers to crude politicization may break down--the careerist administrators have kept largely intact those disciplines where added value might be measured. From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences, and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics. In the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case--the professoriate and the curriculum--it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias, and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification. Most of the professors I meet are kind, indeed sweet, and certainly mean no harm. It is profoundly sad to see what they have become.

There also has been, compounding academic problems, a dumbing down of the professoriate that quite numbs the mind--best seen not in the monographs that earn people their degrees, but in the egregious nonsense, crude meta-theorizing, self-indulgence, and tendentious special pleading that are not merely tolerated without criticism, but rewarded at the highest levels. Those who want to understand critically the degradations that have occurred should look at, for starters, the stunning works of Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, editors, Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent; John Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities; and Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. Academia also has become a place where professors can achieve the highest rewards, except in the protected fields, for acting out their pathologies. In higher education, to paraphrase the Woody Allen stand-up line, we increasingly send our students to schools for learning-disabled and emotionally disturbed teachers. One cannot wholly escape these sides of universities even by majoring in the hard sciences; at least a few humanities and social science courses in oppression studies and demystification are generally required for graduation. Even if students escape these phenomena in their choice of study, though, they will meet them in freshmen orientations, residential programming, and the very rules and regulations of their campuses.

Those often kindly teachers, however, do have a sense of urgent mission. Even if we put them on truth-serum, the academics who dominate the humanities and social sciences on our campuses today would state that K-12 education essentially has been one long celebration of America and the West, as if our students were intimately familiar with the Federalist Papers and had never heard of slavery or empire. Having convinced themselves that the students whom they inherit have been immersed in American and Western traditions without critical perspective--they do believe that--contemporary academics see themselves as having merely four brief years in which to demystify students, and somehow to get them to look up from their Madison and Hamilton long enough to gaze upon the darker side of American and Western life. In their view, our K-12 students know all about Aristotle, John Milton, and Adam Smith, have studied for twelve years how America created bounty and integrated score after score of millions of immigrants, but have never heard of the Great Depression or segregation.

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity, and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individualism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist, and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten "minorities," including women (the majority of students), about the "internalization" of their oppression (today's equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum, and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them?

The power of universities comes from their monopoly of credentials. As Richard Vedder so deeply understands in his Going Broke by Degree, they are the only institutions allowed to separate young individuals by IQ and by the ability to complete complex tasks. They do not add value to that, except in technical fields. Recruiters do not pay premiums because of what the Ivy League or the flagship state universities teach in English, history, political science, or sociology. They hire there despite, not because of that. Recruiters do not pay premiums because our children have been sent to multicultural centers for sensitivity training. Recruiters pay premiums for the value already there, which universities merely identify. So long as recruiters pay premiums, however, it is rational for parents who wish to gain the most options for their children to send them to the university with the most prestigious degree. That will not change in the current scheme.

We now have closed-shop, massively subsidized, intolerant political fiefdoms, and they are the gatekeepers of society's rewards. Without incentives for different models of higher education, we shall have this same system of colleges and universities as far as the mind can foresee. The tax-free mega-endowments will grow. The legislators and the public will not end the subsidy. The alumni will continue their bequests. The trustees will proudly attend the administrative dog-and-pony shows, the most efficient act on any campus. Well-intentioned donors will support ghettoized "centers" (without faculty lines, cross-listed courses, graduate fellowships, or degrees) that marginalize inquiries that should be central to the academy. These provide protective coloration for administrators, help with fundraising in certain quarters, and permit a transfer of funds to the accelerating thirst for ever new forms of regnant campus orthodoxies. Until civil society makes administrators pay a price for the politicized hiring, curriculum, and student life offices they administer, nothing truly will be reformed.

One of the remarkable things about FIRE is how studiously and elegantly centered it is on precise legal analysis of individual rights. FIRE matches college and university policy up against the First Amendment, and, in the case of private schools not bound by the First Amendment, it compares what schools claim (or advertise) to do in the way of respecting free expression with what they do in practice. This is one of those formulae so simple as to exude genius. It has made FIRE remarkably successful during the short years of its existence. But it has also necessarily left a lot unsaid--about what the culture of academe is, how it got that way, and whether it can ever be reformed. Kors tackles some of those questions in his essay--and so lends a sobering perspective to the local victories of academic watchdogs.

Retired Wellesley classics professor Mary Lefkowitz--who famously challenged Afrocentric history in her book Not Out of Africa--speaks here about the consequences of her methodological critique of that politically correct but factually challenged school of thought. Lefkowitz elaborates on the fallout provoked by her book in her latest, History Lesson: A Race Odyssey. Among other things, the interview and the book touch on what happens to free inquiry and to academic careers when scholars play the race card as a means of avoiding and hijacking debate.

A Dartmouth alum looks at the Priya Venkatesan Affair through studiously pragmatic eyes:

Such conduct is hardly representative of the professoriate at Dartmouth, my alma mater. Faculty members tend to be professional. They also tend to be sane.

That said, even at--or especially at--putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan's. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about "interrogating heteronormativity," or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.

I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I "deconstructed" the MTV program "Pimp My Ride." A typical passage: "Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined." It received an A.

Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade. Why not? It's effortless, and there are better ways to spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism.

The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor's best efforts, there's life in American colleges yet.