Posted on 12/22/2022 8:23:19 AM PST by george76
Majority of students opposed to bringing conservative speakers on campus, report found..
College students at America’s largest 203 colleges continue to censor themselves inside and outside of the classroom, a national survey of 45,000 students concluded.
Students play a significant role in censoring free speech on campus, but colleges can enforce policies that protect it, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s third annual College Free Speech Rankings, released in September, for the 2022-23 school year.
Adam Goldstein, FIRE’s vice president of research, told The College Fix in an email on December 16 that the wider culture has contributed to an atmosphere of thought and speech suppression on campus,
...
“To the extent there are clues in the existing data, cultural forces in the general public seem to create more discomfort than just on-campus interactions.” Goldstein stated. “For example, 41% of students were uncomfortable disagreeing with a professor in a written assignment, but 59% were uncomfortable disagreeing publicly.”
“Similarly, 48% of students were uncomfortable expressing their views on a controversial political topic on campus, while 60% were uncomfortable expressing unpopular opinions to fellow students on social media,” Goldstein stated.
However, Goldstein told the Fix that when it comes to students engaging in at least some forms of censorship, schools can play a big role in protecting free speech by enforcing policies against violent or disruptive tactics.
“Lots of campus censorship isn’t expressive, such as theft of newspapers, ongoing heckler’s vetoes that prevent speakers from speaking entirely, or trashing flyers from ideologically opposed campus groups,” he wrote. “To the extent campus policy or existing law prohibit those actions, enforcement is important. A policy is only ever as good as the will to enforce it.”
Columbia University ranked lowest, receiving a score of ‘Abysmal’..
FIRE’s lowest-ranked school for free speech “by far” was Columbia University, with a score of “Abysmal,” according to the report summary. University of Chicago ranked highest for the second time in two years. Other lowest-ranking schools included Skidmore College, Georgetown and the University of Pennsylvania.
FIRE calculated free speech scores for each school based on seven components, according to its rankings page. These included student openness to discussing challenging topics, tolerance for controversial speakers, students’ admission of whether they have withheld ideas out of fear and evaluation of written free speech policies.
The analysis includes the “largest survey on student free expression ever conducted” and “adds 45,000 student voices to the national conversation about free speech on college campuses,” according to a news release.
The report was completed in partnership with College Pulse, a marketing and research firm.
The Fix asked Goldstein whether the censorship it measured originated with student demands or administrative or faculty control.
“It’s tough to say, really, because it’s a chicken-and-egg problem” Goldstein stated. “Some students demand censorship, and schools occasionally justify their policies by saying the students demanded it.”
“Opposition to allowing controversial conservative speakers on campus ranged from 59% to 73% of the students surveyed, depending on the speaker,” according to the report. “In contrast, opposition to controversial liberal speakers ranged from 24% to 41%, depending on the speaker.”
Additionally, “more than three-in-five students (62%) said that students shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus was acceptable to some degree, down from 66% in 2021, and one-in-five (20%) said this about using violence to stop a campus speech, down from 23% in 2021,” the report stated.
Nonetheless, “large numbers of students demanding censorship is a relatively young phenomenon—not more than a decade old, really—whereas schools have been censoring student speech as long as they’ve existed.” Goldstein stated. “So I’m somewhat skeptical of the schools who say they had to censor something because students complained.”
Report indicates high rates of self-censorship..
Additionally, high numbers of students are censoring themselves, according to the report. Forty-two percent conservative students felt that they could not express their opinions freely, versus 13 percent of of liberal students who said the same. Sixty-three percent of respondents worried about damaging their reputation because someone misunderstood something they said or did.
Abortion, racial inequality, and COVID-19 vaccine mandates were rated as the three most difficult topics to discuss on campus, the report stated. Additionally 40 percent of students said they are are uncomfortable disagreeing with a professor.
“That so many students are self-silencing and silencing each other is an indictment of campus culture,” FIRE Senior Research Fellow Sean Stevens stated in the report news release. “How can students develop their distinct voices and ideas in college if they’re too afraid to engage with each other?”
A liberal arts college degree is nearly worthless / waste of time and money.
Excellent point. Far too many professors have spent their entire careers being professors with no real world experience from my personal experience, the adjunct faculty, who have actually done for a career outside and academic setting what they are teaching were far better at teaching the subject to make it, understandable and relevant.
I disagreed with many of my university professors and I let them know.
But I was a Vietnam era Vet, NRA member, with a full time job, paying a mortgage, and married raising a family.
I was at a private University and would not hesitate to make an appointment with the university president if needs be.
I’m paying for an education, not indoctrination.
It made a big difference in how I was treated.
Graduated with a STEM degree class of 90.
“A liberal arts college degree is nearly worthless / waste of time and money.”
Often true, though I have a degree in Sociology which I thought was useless. But I learned about statistics and how to use them, how to communicate, sound intelligent and a LOT of things I learned applied to real estate sales and development very well.
It’s not the degree, it’s how we use it.
Though I should also note that tuition was $200 a semester when I was in college. Books for a semester were often more expensive than tuition.
The Majority of College Degrees are Worthless Today..
https://internproof.com/news/the-majority-of-college-degrees-are-worthless-today.html
Now I tried it on a nun in the elite all girls high school I went to (on scholarship). Whew...what a b****. The Lord wouldn't have blown me off with such arrogance.
A liberal professor in the business department at the University of Utah taught me the price of dissent back in the seventies. Professors there and where I went to law school openly advanced their agenda, which also included using their position to have sex with their students. They had the morals of pimps.
I just retired from teaching economics in college. I had an open forum for EVERYONE to express their beliefs, but reserved the right to debate them.
“Scratch a liberal, find a fascist”.
Leftists are masters of projection, they are everything they accuse they accuse conservatives of being.
I have tutored way too many of my friends kids who were struggling in different subjects from math and science. Whatever the subject of the week was, I would first ask them to explain to me what their teacher told them. In some subjects, especially algebra, it was always excruciatingly painfully obvious that the teacher had absolutely zero basic mathematical background whatsoever. Their explanations were so convoluted and nonsensical as to defy logic. It was no wonder at all the kids struggled so much. I think they were a gender studies education major who lost the pool of who had to do math class that year.
The hardest yet most rewarding part was breaking their “math is hard” mental blocks. They would come in so utterly confused that they were incapable of grasping any explanation. You would very patiently have to work at it, say things just right until you make a tiny crack in the scales on their eyes when you can see the growing skepticism gradually fill them with the “hmmm, there is no possible way it can be that simple”. Then you have them apply it on a couple simple cases gradually building to more complex problem that just so happen to solve perfectly with the exact same simple logic, then with a thunderclap you can see the light spark in their eyes with the intensity of a thousand supernovas. Next you have them teach that to three of their freinds, and suddenly they are acing tests.
I have seen this work over and over and even brought a stereotypical sorority cheerleader girl to getting As. It always starts the same. Incompetent teachers confusing kids so much that they literally build walls of titanium around their skulls. I wonder sometimes if it is by design
To the extent that Ward Churchill was hired and promoted - University professor - because he claimed to be a Native American, he would be guilty of academic fraud. But the situation is worse than this.
Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar University, has written a paper that outlines a more conventional form of academic fraud on Churchill’s part. According to Brown, Churchill fabricated a story about the U.S. Army intentionally creating a smallpox epidemic among the Mandan tribe in 1837, by simply inventing almost all of the story’s most crucial facts, and then attributing these “facts” to sources that say nothing of the kind.
“One has only to read the sources that Churchill cites to realize the magnitude of his fraudulent claims for them,” Brown writes. “We are not dealing with a few minor errors here. We are dealing with a story that Churchill has fabricated almost entirely from scratch. The lack of rationality on Churchill’s part is mind-boggling.”
Similar charges have been leveled against Churchill by University of New Mexico law professor John Lavelle, a Native American scholar who has documented equally fraudulent claims on Churchill’s part regarding the General Allotment Act, one of the most important federal laws dealing with Indian lands. (Lavelle also accuses Churchill of plagiarism).
Of course some people believe they’re Napoleon. But that’s not a good reason for giving them professorships in French history.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1338679/posts
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.