Academic humanists arguably have an obligation to reach out to a public beyond academe. Setting aside ethical/professional questions, it's certainly in the best interests of humanists to connect with general audiences--involution, in-fighting, and navel-gazing are some of the worst features of overly specialized disciplines, and these things do damage not only to the humanities, but also to the professional viability of those who seek to study them professionally.

But that's easier said than done, for some hard-wired reasons elegantly laid out by University of Colorado history professor Patricia Nelson Limerick. Limerick has found her way as a public intellectual, and is immensely gratified by the work. But she recognizes, too, that academe strenuously selects against the very kinds of intellectual outreach that it needs. The result is an almost impossible situation for both aspiring scholars and for entire disciplines:

So why ... do I hold back on wholeheartedly recruiting young colleagues into this wildly gratifying, intellectually invigorating territory?

--To conventional academics in the humanities, contact with the public, as well as the entrepreneurial pursuit of financing, registers as contamination and impurity.

--Effectiveness as a public scholar requires practices far more strenuous than the comfortable custom of reminding audiences of fellow academics of the virtue and validity of left-wing principles.

--The clarity of language necessary for reaching the public will, in the judgment of conventional academics, convict its users of a lack of sophistication and a questionable level of expertise.

--The criteria used by humanities departments for hiring and promotion are half-a-century out of date and yet persistent and powerful. By those standards, the work of a public scholar can only register as "service," a not-very-glorified act of volunteerism that will be counted as immeasurably inferior when compared to real research.

--While colleagues who feel recognized and validated for their own achievements will be the best of allies, professional jealousy and rivalry will radiate from the insecure. Those stricken with envy will circle around a successful public scholar like sharks around a lively, aquatic protein source. But there is good news: Tenure, once you have it, will keep those sharks from doing much damage.

Here is the upshot: To become university-based public scholars, young people may well have to put their ambition into cold storage for a decade and a half. Go to graduate school, write a conventional dissertation, get a tenure-track job, publish in academic journals and in university presses, give papers at professional conferences to small groups of fellow specialists, and comply with all the requirements of deference, conformity, and hoop-jumping that narrow the road to tenure while also narrowing the travelers on that road. Then, once tenured, you can take up the applied work that appealed to you in the first place.

On another note, I love the bit about how, if you are addressing a non-academic audience, you can't just sit back and assert the superiority of your politics. Academia is quite a political monoculture, and this has a lot to do with how isolated, inaccessible, and, in some corners, irrelevant it is becoming. Academics who care about politics only damage their causes when they lock themselves into intellectual echo chambers of their own making. Everybody benefits from debate, and all ideas worth having are strengthened by challenge. That's a founding principle of academic freedom, and also a governing premise of the broader marketplace of ideas. Academics' difficulty honoring this has a lot to do with both their internal problems and their ongoing public relations disaster.

At Minding the Campus, John K. Wilson defends Delaware's doctrinaire residential life program with a lot of illogic and a good dose of name-calling:

The Faculty Senate at the University of Delaware is meeting later today to discuss approving the controversial Residence Life (ResLife) proposal for educational programming in the residence halls. The faculty should approve the proposal, partly because it's a good idea, but primarily because academic freedom is endangered whenever voluntary educational programs are banned. Conservative critics of the program are demanding censorship of ideas they dislike, and the Faculty Senate at a free university must not participate in such repression.

The only relevant question is whether the ResLife program violates the rights of students by compelling them to participate or censoring their views. There is not even a shred of evidence that this is the case, and the program explicitly says otherwise. There is no compulsion to participate or agree, there is no grading, there is no threat at all to a student's academic progress or to a student's ability to remain in a residence hall. In terms of compulsion, there is no there there, and no amount of hyperbolic fantasizing about what might happen can change this fact. The fact that in the past there were some minor issues about intrusive questions being asked of students by RAs is irrelevant to the consideration of this current program.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) claims, "Saying that the programming will be optional is hard to swallow. After all, how can a freshman, first day on campus, opt out at a time of great social pressure to do the activities everyone else is doing, and without full knowledge of what the program really entails?" Easy: stay in your room, hang out with other people, and ignore what the ResLife staff does.

FIRE is infantilizing college students, treating them like dumb puppies who will follow administrators mindlessly if any programming is allowed in residence hall. This is demeaning and insulting to all students, since it presumes that students would be better off with nothing to do rather than running the "risk" of being pressured to attend an event.

It is the liberal content of the program that FIRE and other conservative critics object to. FIRE argues that ResLife's proposal is "soaked in a highly politicized social and political agenda." I agree. It is a politicized agenda. Virtually all intellectual activity has a politicized agenda, because important ideas are political. ResLife promotes social justice and civic engagement, and these are political values (albeit not very radical ones). I think these are good political values, and conservatives disagree, but that doesn't matter. If ResLife was proposing to promote abstinence and other conservative values, I might disagree with them, but I would never seek to ban any of their activities. Instead, I would express my views and organize activities that reflect my values. So why won't these conservative groups try counterspeech instead of suppression?

It's true that some faculty (and students) might have good ideas for residence hall programs, and it appears they have already had input into the proposal. They're also free to organize their own programs if they are dissatisfied with what ResLife has created. But no one should have veto power to ban educational programs.

Another objection is made by FIRE: "The program still tries to change students' 'thoughts, values, beliefs, and actions.'" Trying to change what students think is a primary goal of all education. Adam Kissel of FIRE writes, "Try cutting half of the proposal out, and getting rid of the educational goals and intended learning outcomes, and the program might have a chance of being morally and legally sound." Exactly when did having educational goals become a thoughtcrime? I object to the relativist approach promoted by FIRE, which seems to presume that all ideas are equal and that staff at a university should never dare to teach anyone that some ideas are better than others. Adam Kissel imagines students being "bombarded with ResLife's sustainability agenda." But all of us are bombarded with ideas we may not like. No one at a university has a "right" not to hear ideas they don't like.

The attacks on ResLife's program are also anti-intellectual. FIRE seems to want ResLife to hold pizza parties and mindless social events, and never organize any controversial activities. Why can't a residence hall aspire to have more? Why can't a residence hall have intellectual activities and engage students in serious ideas?

Kissel claims that these are "re-education programs" that "violate the Constitution and the canons of academic freedom." To the contrary, if the Delaware faculty (or anyone else) tries to ban the ResLife program because they dislike some of the political views that might be expressed, they will be violating the Constitution and the canons of academic freedom. To call it a voluntary residence hall program "re-education" is insulting and demeaning to students who adults fully capable of expressing their own ideas and engaging with ideas different from their own.

If you do not like an educational program, then you are free to criticize it. You are free to propose and organize your own educational programs. But you are not free to ban the program from existing. And that is what critics such as FIRE are demanding.

The quality of the ResLife program is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether it should be banned. Academic freedom demands that even stupid ideas must be protected from censorship. Dorm activities at colleges across the country are almost universally vapid, and I am not especially fond of the ResLife proposal. I wish idiotic things like the "Discovery Wheel" could be consigned to whatever circle of self-esteem hell they came from. But overall, the University of Delaware proposal is a step above the average because it makes some halting effort at engaging students in serious issues. So my only objection to the ResLife proposal is that it doesn't try to educate students enough.

What confuses me is why Wilson--who purports to defend free expression on campus--wants to grind this particular axe. Surely he can see the difference between voluntary, student-motivated political efforts and institutionalized, politicized bureaucracies funded with taxpayer dollars? "It is disgraceful to see FIRE betraying the principles of academic freedom and seeking to ban a program from a university because it finds the content too liberal for its conservative taste," Wilson concludes. But the real disgrace here can be found in the way Wilson both misuses the concept of academic freedom and abuses FIRE's reputation in order to carry his own highly problematic point.

Setting the specifics of the Delaware program aside, it's worth examining the assumption that college dorms just aren't doing their job unless they are working hard to "educate" students in their off hours. If you have ever lived in dorms with students, you will know a little bit about how that assumption plays with them. And if you respect college students even just a little bit, you will be able to respect their instinctive distaste for condescending bureaucratic efforts to turn their school-year homes into scenes of endless tutelage--and you will also be able to see how knowing students are about such attempts, how they consciously tolerate and even, at times, quietly indulge those efforts as a path of least resistance. It's a short distance from that tolerance to a damaging cynicism no university should ever want to cultivate. But that's what a place like Delaware is doing.

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.