If Academia Gets a Bailout, It Should Come With These Conditions

The coronavirus pandemic threatens America’s colleges and universities with a catastrophe. The higher education establishment wants the federal government to save them—but they want the money so they can continue to waste money on useless administrators, train students to hate America, and facilitate the extension of Chinese soft power into our country.

America’s students have suffered long enough from our predatory colleges and gone into debt to pay for hollow credentials. Hard-working students shouldn’t be made to suffer further because of the coronavirus pandemic. Besides, there’s enough good left in our colleges that they’re worth saving. But we shouldn’t support students or colleges with a blank check.

We should target our help to the neediest students—and our schools have to reform themselves.

The National Association of Scholars has just published Critical Care, which lists a series of reforms that America’s universities should undertake as a condition of receiving coronavirus bailout funds from the federal government. Our senators and representatives can use Critical Care as a guideline to marry generosity and high expectations toward our colleges and students.

Above all, regular bailout recipients must cut administrative overhead by 50%. Small colleges, with fewer than 1,000 students, must cut administrative overhead by 10%. The higher education establishment will fire professors wholesale and cut student aid to the bone before they voluntarily fire one administrator. Congress must insist that colleges slash administrative spending.

Bailout recipients also need to support the generation of students who have gone into debt-serfdom for the hollow credential of a B.A. Colleges taking taxpayer relief must establish student loan buyback programs and extend students’ new loans at low, capped interest rates. These colleges will also have to accept partial responsibility for student loan defaults. They must also cease to give college credit for remedial courses, which give students debt and no prospect of a good job.

Congress should tie bailout funds to real priorities, so colleges don’t divert them to hiring another Diversity Dean. Congress should reserve bailout money to provide payroll support for faculty and graduate students in practical disciplines critical to national security, such as emergency medicine, pulmonary disease, and virology. It should also reserve bailout money for apprenticeships and faculty payroll support in vocational education for vital careers such as medical assistant, laboratory technician, and police officer. Congress should also direct relief funds to community colleges, which provide the democratic backbone for America’s higher education.

America’s colleges and universities have drifted scandalously from the pluralistic search for truth toward narrow-minded “progressive” illiberalism, they hire their administrators and faculty from a tiny band of “social justice” zealots, and they wink their eyes at mob violence to enforce campus orthodoxy. Schools that receive bailout funds will need to guarantee student and faculty liberty. Congress should require all bailed-out colleges to protect intellectual freedom and due process. Congress should further require public universities to guarantee students’ and faculty’s First Amendment rights, as well as intellectual diversity and institutional neutrality. There’s no point giving money to colleges that have turned themselves into finishing schools for trust-fund antifa.

American universities have also drifted scandalously away from one of their core missions—to educate young Americans and to serve the American national interest. They must refocus on educating American students by limiting both the number of foreign students they accept and the amount of tuition they receive from foreign sources. They must cut off all connections with China, America’s great and hostile rival, above all by ending any connection with Confucius Institutes or the Thousand Talents Program. They must prohibit “sanctuary campus” policies, cooperate with federal immigration enforcement agencies, and cease to hire or admit illegal aliens. Colleges that receive bailout money must rededicate themselves to their civic mission.

America’s richest universities must pay their own way. The 100 wealthiest private colleges and universities, each of which has an endowment of more than $600 million, should not receive any bailout money from the federal government.

The National Association of Scholars offers Critical Care as a first word. We expect the vigorous free debates of the American public and American policymakers will improve it. But we strongly believe that any bailout of American higher education ought to possess conditions at least this rigorous.

The American people are generous to their schools. But they should only be generous to colleges and universities that are prudent stewards of their money, defenders of American national interests, and guarantors of liberty.

Critical Care outlines what our colleges and universities should do to deserve the taxpayer’s dime.

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Alaska’s snowflake school board

Its banning of The Great Gatsby reminds us that censorious college kids didn’t spring from nowhere

Some snowflakes in the US have decided that classic works by F Scott Fitzgerland, Maya Angelou, Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison and others are unsuitable to be read by students and must be immediately removed from the curriculum. Only this time we’re not talking about pimpled college kids, saying that words on a page are acts of violence against them and that their mental safety is threatened by having to read great literature.

This is censorship of a more quaint vintage – news that an Alaskan school board has pulled from its classrooms Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Heller’s Catch-22 and Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings over their supposedly inappropriate content. In particular, they’re upset about ‘sexual references’ (Gatsby); ‘bad language’ (Invisible Man); ‘racial slurs’ and ‘violence’ (Catch-22); and ‘“anti-white” messaging’ (Caged Bird).

The school board of Mat-Su Borough in Alaska voted by five to two this week to pull the titles from the curriculum. ‘The question is why this is acceptable in one environment and not another’, school board vice-president Jim Hart said at the meeting. He added that it would not be seen as acceptable ‘if I were to read these in a corporate environment’. Well, maybe. But that would probably have less to do with the content of the books and more to do with him insisting on reading on the job.

Much like his kindred spirits on campus, Hart presented these books as a threat to the mental health of students in the district, arguing that it would be unfair to expect teachers to guide students through the potential mental anguish of reading them. ‘These are teachers, not counsellors’, he said. And much like every other act of petty censorship, the move has spectacularly backfired. Local bookstores reportedly sold out of the titles within hours of the announcement, and the local teachers’ union has said it will fight the decision.

School boards, libraries and parents’ groups taking offence at literature and agitating for it to be banned is, of course, nothing new. The justifications for such censorship have just changed a bit over time. In the 1880s, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was banned by Concord Public Library in Massachusetts over its ‘coarse’ vernacular language. By the 1980s, it was being removed from school curricula due to its use of ‘racial language’ (namely, its frequent use of the n-word).

The range of books raged against over the years serves as a reminder that you can be offended by anything if you just put your mind to it. In 2001, some fundamentalist Christians tried to stage an actual book-burning of that ‘Satanic’ Harry Potter series. And in 2012, the Hunger Games trilogy came top of the American Library Association’s list of books people tried hardest to ban that year, in this case due to its allegedly ‘anti-family’ messages and violence.

But despite the more old-school, pearl-clutching feel to the Alaska story, the justifications for the bans were remarkably similar to those now made for more ‘woke’ forms of censorship. Once would-be censors presented certain books or films as morally damaging – as encouraging bad ideas, bad language and sexual impropriety. Now, they present them as mentally damaging, so much so you apparently need a counsellor to help you through them. In a similar vein, college students have in recent years called for the likes Gatsby and Huck Finn to be slapped with ‘trigger warnings’ to protect the ‘emotional safety’ of vulnerable students.

Woke censors might like to see themselves as more edgy than the uptight ‘think of the children’ types of past (and present), but they are actually pretty similar. Indeed, both share a remarkably low view of human beings and a remarkably philistine view of literature. In turn, while many tend to think that pious intolerance is a largely new twentysomething, leftish phenomenon, college kids clearly haven’t plucked their censorious ideas out of thin air. Snowflakes, we’d do well to remember, come in all shapes and sizes.

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Australia: Pro-China University bullies student critic

The University of Queensland is going to extraordinary lengths to silence its most effective critic, a 20-year-old philosophy student who has campaigned against the university’s tight links with the Chinese Communist Party.

Drew Pavlou came to public attention in July last year when, while leading a protest in support of Hong Kong democracy activists, he was assaulted by men who gave every impression of being heavies working for the Chinese state.

He then was targeted by a torrent of online hate and death threats from patriotic Chinese students. China’s consul-general in Brisbane, Xu Jie, praised the violence, drawing a rebuke from Foreign Minister Marise Payne. Pavlou decided to seek a protection order against the consul-general through the courts.

Pavlou’s safety was threatened further when China’s state media vilified him, in effect giving official blessing to patriotic thuggery. He was no longer safe on campus.

How has the university responded to these events, surely one of the most worrying assaults on free speech?

None of the pro-Beijing students or the thugs who assaulted Pavlou has been disciplined. Xu, whom UQ had appointed an adjunct professor, appears to be as welcome as ever at the university.

Instead, irritated by Pavlou’s robust criticism, pranks and sarcasm, UQ seems to have decided to intimidate him into silence.

In February, Pavlou posted a mock Facebook announcement of a forthcoming “UQ Confucius Institute Panel: Why Uyghurs Must Be Exterminated”. A bit of undergraduate humour? Not for the mandarins at UQ.

University lawyers Clayton Utz wrote a letter to Pavlou that itself reads like a prank. It accused him of “making false statements” because, in fact, the Confucius Institute has no involvement with “the alleged event”. There follows a page and a half listing the rules and by-laws it claims he has viol­ated, and ends menacingly: if he fails to remove the post and will not agree to refrain from making “false and misleading” statements, then the university “reserves the right to commence proceedings”.

Pavlou complied with the first demand. But then UQ sought the nuclear option. On April 9, the disciplinary board delivered a 186-page document detailing 11 charges. Pavlou has been summoned to a secret meeting at which, if he cannot explain himself, he can expect to be expelled.

Most of the allegations are trivial to the point of risible. UQ somehow manages to construe jokes, obvious hoaxes and social media badinage as forms of harassment and bullying or acts that prejudice its reputation. It’s true Pavlou’s activism is often provocative and his criticisms sharp, at times over the top, but whatever case the disciplinary board might have had is vitiated by the series of frivolous allegations against him, the effect of which is to indicate the board itself is engaged in harassment and bullying.

The first allegation is that he used a rude word on Facebook (closely monitored by the university) to describe students enrolled in the bachelor of advanced finance and economics. The university claims this constitutes “discriminatory, harassing or bullying behaviour … towards these students”.

It is laughable. Can they produce one student among several hundred aspiring corporate executives who read Pavlou’s Facebook page and felt discriminated against, harassed or bullied? If they could, would anyone take them seriously?

Pavlou deleted his mock “Why Uyghurs Must Be Exterminated” announcement but the university won’t let it go. It claims “a member of the public” (either a fool or a satirist) complained the planned event was “absolutely disgustingly racist and fascist” and they’d be there to protest, and claims Pavlou’s post harmed the university’s reputation by “indicating to the public that UQ supports an ‘extermination’ of the Uyghur people”.

Seriously. One begins to suspect that Pavlou has a secret sympathiser on the board conspiring to make the “allegation notice” so outlandish as to be laughed out of court.

But the next allegation takes a more sinister turn. It’s alleged that Pavlou was guilty of behaviour that “unreasonably disrupted staff or students” when at 12.30pm “on or about 26 February 2020” he took a pen from a shelf at the university stationery shop, wrote something with it, put the pen back and left the shop paying only for three sheets of card.

This kind of surveillance and reporting to authorities has more in common with Beijing’s Orwellian social credit system than what we’d expect on an Australian campus. It’s clear that someone high up at UQ decided, through exasperation or vindictiveness, to “throw the book at Pavlou”.

If UQ wants to counter criticism of its China links it has vast resources with which to do so openly, both within the university and more broadly. Instead, it has set up a kangaroo court hoping to browbeat an undergraduate into submission or to expel him.

In the context of UQ’s documented discomfort with Pavlou’s political activism — especially his highlighting of links between the university, its vice-chancellor and various agencies of the Chinese Communist Party — the threat of expulsion can be read only as an attempt to silence legitimate political activism on the campus.

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