NEW
YORK—Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, was founded by a minister in
order to train other ministers.
Just like
Harvard and Princeton.
The
difference is that Harvard and Princeton are both listed on all the “best
universities in the world” rankings, and Liberty always has an asterisk next to
its name.
And I
understand the reason why. As the definition of “university” expanded over the
past four centuries, we decided that it should be all about academic freedom,
inclusion, open-mindedness, and a willingness to look out into the world and
study everything—not just the limited concerns of the founders.
And so Liberty has this one big
problem: It’s segregated. It’s not segregated by race, but it is segregated
by religious belief. If you’re not an evangelical Christian, you probably
shouldn’t go there. It’s got everything universities are supposed to have—17
colleges, a medical school, a law school, a business school, an engineering
school—and it does basic research and offers master’s degrees and doctorates.
The Liberty Flames play Division I NCAA sports. But they also have a course in
“young Earth creationism” as well as a “code of conduct” similar to the ones at
military schools, so we can assume that atheists won’t fit in and Darwinists
won’t fit in and…well, a lot of people won’t fit in.
And so I get
why the guys who compile the “best universities” lists tend to downplay its
importance or place it in subcategories like “regional” or “specialized.”
What I don’t
get is why they don’t do the same thing to, say, Clark University in Worcester,
Massachusetts. Clark is a liberal arts school where incoming students are
indoctrinated to detect and understand their unconscious “microaggressions”
(implying that they’re all racist or sexist in one way or another) and given
trigger warnings and safe spaces and all the other protections of Generation
Snowflake. In other words, they’re required to “attend chapel”—it’s just a
different kind of chapel.
“If we want to get really fancy, we
can even add a Hypocrisy Algorithm.”
To quote The New York Times, which
chronicled the standard instructions at the Clark orientation program:
Don’t ask an Asian student
you don’t know for help on your math homework or randomly ask a black student
if he plays basketball. Both questions make assumptions based on stereotypes.
And don’t say “you guys.” It could be interpreted as leaving out women, said
[the chief diversity officer], who realized it was offensive only when someone
confronted her for saying it during a presentation.
Of course, as soon as she was confronted during a
presentation, the chief diversity officer asked to be absolved of her original
sin (not being able to speak precisely enough to avoid all offense at all
times) and so altered herself to make sure she was Clark material. She’s giving
her conversion testimony.
So Clark,
like Liberty, is segregated. It’s not segregated by race, or religion, it’s
segregated by a belief in the fallenness of all mankind—excuse me, humankind—in
the form of ingrained bias and prejudice. If you don’t believe this—if you’re a
member of the Young Republicans and don’t see color or gender as legitimate
ways of separating people—then you don’t belong at Clark. Clark should have an
asterisk by its name because it’s exclusive, not inclusive. It has a doctrine
that rules out certain people and, undoubtedly, certain campus speakers.
So I’m going
to make a proposal for a simple and effective way to upend the various
anti-free-speech movements currently afoot on university campi:
Incorporate
“doctrinal exclusion” into the algorithm for rating universities.
For example,
the Times Higher Education World University Rankings are based on thirteen
“performance indicators,” but 50% of those are derived from surveys (what
professors at other schools think), and 30% of them are simply search-engine
analysis (how many articles are published, how many are cited by other
articles, etc.). So you would simply add a fourteenth indicator based on two
factors:
(1) A survey
of what tenured faculty believe about the school’s openness to controversial
points of view. (Is censorship going on? Are they tolerant of unpopular schools
of thought? Does the administration react in a knee-jerk way when students
protest?)
(2) A
search-engine analysis of how many times the university responds to free speech
with disciplinary action, forces a student or faculty member to resign or
leave, or blackballs a speaker.
To wit:
*Albright
College suspending a student for wearing blackface in a YouTube video that had
nothing to do with her performance at the school.
*Dartmouth
outlawing the use of the term “illegal alien.”
*Princeton
banning the use of “man” and “woman” in school documents.
*Rutgers
rescinding an invitation to Condoleezza Rice.
*Brandeis
taking back the honorary degree of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
*Smith
College forcing Christine Lagarde to withdraw from an appearance (because,
among other things, she is “patriarchal”!).
*Yale
forcing a teacher to resign because she said the wrong thing about Halloween
costumes.
*Wesleyan
University threatening the funding of the student newspaper because a columnist
criticizes Black Lives Matter.
*Bowdoin
disciplining students for wearing sombreros to a party.
*Brown
University allowing Raymond Kelly, the New York City Police Commissioner, to be
shouted down.
*LSU firing
a tenured professor for saying that the longer two people are in a
relationship, the worse the sex gets.
*Hampshire
College removing the American flag because it’s a symbol of hatred.
All we would
have to do is apply the standard already applied to schools like Liberty
University. If Evergreen State wants to have a day on which whites aren’t
allowed to come to campus, then that’s fine, we’ll just track that through
search-engine optimization, put it into the “exclusion” algorithm, and the
ranking of the school will be affected accordingly. Eventually schools like
this will end up in “specialized” or “regional” or some other subcategory yet
to be invented.
If we want
to get really fancy, we can even add a Hypocrisy Algorithm. This would be used
for schools like Harvard that claim to be color-blind and inclusive but end up
getting sued by Asian-American students who are on the verge of proving that
Harvard discriminates against both white majorities and ethnic minorities
according to some “holistic” admissions process that they don’t want to reveal
to the courts. Once these cases get to the Supreme Court, we’ll have all the
data through discovery.
In the
process we’ll also discover how most of these companies that rank colleges are
full of BS to begin with. For example, the QS World University Rankings factor
in “international student ratio” as a way of rewarding universities that
attract students from other countries. I’m sure the University of Liechtenstein
loves that category, as would Bishop College, the scandal-plagued Dallas
institution that finally went out of business after several years of surviving
as a foreign-student diploma mill. Some of the big Asian universities are
already so fed up with the rankings that they’re talking about not releasing
any data in the future, and the Latin American universities, led by the highly
regarded Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, have already dropped out.
And why
wouldn’t the National University of Singapore and the University of Hong Kong
and Nanyang Technological University and Tsinghua University and Shanghai Jiao
Tong University all feel offended by the process?
After all,
they’re not segregated.
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