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“STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLE: Free Expression at Risk at Yale and Elsewhere”
“The Manhattan Statement on Higher Education”

No place should be more welcoming to academic freedom and freedom of speech than our colleges and universities, and yet these institutions have spent the better part of two decades censoring both. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is no stranger to higher ed’s one-party fantasy. In recent days we’ve seen one old case in defense of academic freedom come to a welcome conclusion and another begin. 
 

Institutions like NAS occasionally have time to also peek out our heads from the weeds, climb a tree, and ponder the greater strategic implications of the fights we have on the ground. Two friends of NAS have clamoured to great heights to offer their thoughts on the state of higher education; we have happily added our name to these statements. These two statements, one from the Manhattan Institute (MI) and the other from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), seek to redress higher ed’s reform resistance. 
 

In its statement, FIRE postulates that free speech is being threatened by a spreading fear of violence—citing examples over the last twenty-five years that lend to this theory. More recently, Yale University removed all images of Mohammed from Jytte Klausen’s book, The Cartoons that Shook the World, which FIRE says is a response to the mere possibility of violent threat. (As an anecdote, Bruce Gilley, a former NAS board member, received death threats for his defense of colonialism, which led to the article’s withdrawal from Third World Quarterly.) Such hedging against potential threats is being used to justify the further censorship of words and images, eroding commitment to the free exchange of ideas.
 

Higher education must stand up for the preservation of free expression against those who attack and undermine it. FIRE calls upon colleges and universities to make a stand for basic principles, explaining,
 

The free exchange of ideas is essential to liberal democracy; that each person is entitled to hold and express his or her own views without fear of bodily harm; and that the suppression of ideas is a form of repression used by authoritarian regimes around the world to control and dehumanize their citizens and squelch opposition. 

While FIRE addresses the disappearance of free speech in higher education, the MI statement on higher education takes a broader approach. It digs into academia’s racialism, ideology, and the chaos plaguing colleges and universities—a problem that has ultimately led to a breakdown of the social contract between higher education and the American people. 
 

The downward spiral of higher education over the last fifty years can be clearly seen in the academy’s bait and switch: come as a student, leave as an activist. Instead of focusing on the pursuit of truth, our colleges have taken unwavering political positions, using “diversity, equity, and inclusion” to discriminate on the basis of race in admissions and hiring practices; degrading the liberal arts from enriching culture to nihilistic “reductive ideologies” which seek to destroy Western civilization; the promotion of anti-Semitism, and so much more. 
 

MI points out that the American people shell out more than $150 billion per year to colleges and universities, with little to no return on their investment. Colleges and universities are bound by compact with the state—a historical fact dating back to the American founding—or as the MI explains “schools of higher education were established by government charter and written into the law, which stipulated that, in exchange for public support, they had a duty to advance the public good, and, if they were to stray from that mission, the people retained the right to intervene.” 
 

Now is the time to intervene. 
 

For too long, colleges and universities have been allowed to disseminate divisive ideology from classroom to culture; discriminate via hiring and admissions practices; give malign foreign influences the freedom to remain largely unchecked on campuses; ratchet up tuition prices while bolstering unnecessary administrative positions; and grant leadership a scapegoat for insufficient responses to difficult issues that require prompt action.
 

To solve higher education’s problems, MI proposes a series of changes to be written into “every grant, payment, loan, eligibility, and accreditation, and punishable by revocation of all public benefit” between the government and colleges and universities. This new contract would be a good start but will not resolve the crisis of higher education overnight.
 

As public outrage mounts at the state of higher education, hopefully our plans and pleas for change will not fall on deaf ears for much longer. There is much to be gained from an undergraduate education when it prioritizes the pursuit of virtuous citizenship, instills a love of learning, and prioritizes merit and excellence in and out of the classroom. 
 

Until next week.

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