Representative Katherine Clark takes on Betsy DeVos over ‘racist’ policy change

The usual false cry of racism from a Leftist -- even though it is racial discrimination she is defending. She wants "protections" for badly behaved black students.  A vocal dumbcluck

The decision out of Washington last week to end a policy that protected black and brown students from unfair and often racist disciplinary practices could have easily passed with little notice.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — whose legacy will be that she has repeatedly trampled protections for students — did it again last week, relying on discredited research that blames over-punished students themselves for blatantly unfair rates of suspensions and expulsions.

But DeVos didn’t see Katherine Clark coming.

The Melrose congresswoman was all over DeVos, blasting her in TV interviews and even calling for her resignation. Clark didn’t mince words, not at all, in decrying both the policy change and the entire Trump administration as racist.

In a phone interview, Clark told me she thought it was important that DeVos’s decision not get lost in the torrent of startling news pouring out of Washington.

“Her fundamental job as secretary of education is to look out for every student and make sure they have a fair opportunity for a quality education,” Clark said. Clearly, she doesn’t think DeVos is doing that.

“This is an administration that is marked by racist policies,” she continued. “It’s one of its hallmarks. So while not surprising, we cannot let it go unanswered. And when she does something so fundamentally wrong as rescinding protections and cherry-picking racist research, we have to respond.”

The “research” Clark refers to is a study of disparities in school suspensions by a group of conservative researchers. In a 2014 paper, they reached the conclusion that, in their words “early and prolonged problem behavior accounts for the racial gap in suspensions.” In other words, black and brown students who were getting suspended at far higher rates than their white peers were simply getting what they deserved.

That is ridiculous, as well as racist. And it’s a huge problem in our schools. My colleague James Vaznis recently reported on the state’s insistence that Roxbury Preparatory Charter School address its ridiculously high suspension rates for students of color. It’s a practice that stigmatizes students and seriously derails their learning.

Not surprisingly, DeVos did not take Clark’s suggestion that she step down. Initially, a spokesman for her department suggested that Clark was simply being opportunistic in criticizing the secretary; after a couple of days, the department stopped commenting altogether. Meanwhile, Clark said Congress is looking for ways to protect the students who stand to be affected by the change in policy.

“They should be ashamed,” Clark said. “The American public isn’t behind this. This is taking fringe research that when you look at the body of work of the writer it is an outrageous position — that these kids are just temperamentally different and the school-to-prison pipeline is inevitable, because that’s just what happens to black children.”

Criticized from the day she was first nominated for her post, DeVos has rolled back protections for one group of students after another: victims of sexual assault, students of color, students of for-profit colleges, even students with loans (that one was overturned in court). From the outset, she has displayed a blithe disregard for the notion that she should use her authority to ensure fairness.

But even by that standard, this decision — and the reasoning behind it — stands out.

“This is disqualifying for any public official, let alone the secretary of education,” Clark said.

As Clark and I spoke last week, we knew that the this incident would soon fade in public consciousness, overtaken by the inevitable next outrage. Clark wasn’t just fighting against a policy. She was also arguing, it seemed, against the numbness that can make the unacceptable appear routine.

“We cannot just let these moments pass with a shrug of the shoulders,” Clark told me. “These are fundamental values to who we are as Americans. If we can’t stand up against this, what will we stand up against?”

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Campuses are broken because of what we teach

President Trump’s executive order on free speech is the latest government response to what appears to be an atmosphere of increasing hostility to nonconforming ideas in institutions of higher education.

The order was no doubt issued with good intentions and in a civic spirit. Its impact, however, will only be on the margins as it doesn’t address the most profound problems affecting our universities today. And government is not the best instrument to implement the change our universities most need.

Concerned observers have good reason to fixate on the problem of free speech on campus. Instances of speakers being shouted down or disinvited, the emergence of speech codes, and other efforts to curtail speech are well-documented. And who can forget the protests a few years back around a Yale resident head’s suggestion that adult students at an elite university could use their own judgment in picking Halloween costumes?

Justifiably concerned about these efforts to promote “correct thinking,” many have been calling on universities to uphold the foundational American principle of the First Amendment. Trump explained his order in this light during the signing ceremony: “Taxpayer dollars should not subsidize anti-First Amendment institutions.”

The trouble is that the First Amendment is not the appropriate framework for understanding speech in an academic setting. For one thing, the First Amendment does not protect individuals from censorship by private institutions. Moreover, academic freedom is not a matter of individual liberty and creative expression, as the First Amendment has come to be understood.

John Stuart Mill explained that the pursuit of knowledge occurs through reasonable discourse — by making arguments and answering your opponent’s arguments. An atmosphere of free and open inquiry facilitates this dialectic. This is what is meant by academic freedom: disciplined conversation and the imperative to question assumed truths in the service of building and refining human knowledge.

Invoking the First Amendment or fixating on protests of individual speakers reflects confusion about the purpose of speech in education. While individual speaking events have educational value, they are not nearly as influential on students’ understanding as are the courses and curricula that account for the bulk of their education. And it is on this that concerned observers should focus: the education students are receiving.

At its best, a liberal arts education sharpens students’ thinking so that they are more critical and capable individuals and citizens. When this education is conducted by way of great texts of history, literature, and philosophy, students develop a deeper understanding of the human condition — of the human heart and its yearnings, of how our particular time fits into the larger scope of human history, and of the plight of others.

The most profound problem with our universities today is that so many disciplines have abandoned the pursuit of wisdom — of trying to understand the insights on the human condition of thinkers from the past. These disciplines take their bearings instead from the unquestioned premises that everything from art and literature to politics and society must be understood in terms of power and oppression, and that their own role is to correct the resulting injustice. It is from these premises that the obsession with identity politics arises. The predominance of this flat portrayal robs students of a deep education while simultaneously encouraging them to engage in unreflective activism.

The conversation about today’s universities would be improved if focus shifted away from concern with individual liberties and turned instead to the quality of education being offered. Universities have a crucial role to play in educating citizens for participation and leadership in a modern republic. Unfortunately, they are failing in this task today more than they are succeeding.

Civil society has the potential to play a leading role in improving higher education. Students and their families ought to choose their schools carefully. Alumni and philanthropists ought to be discerning about where and how they choose to invest their money. Aiding private citizens in these tasks are a growing number of nonprofit organizations, ranging from citizen watchdogs to donor-advisers, who can guide families and donors about the state of academia today and how those interested can best support a good education. The availability of a proper liberal arts education is crucial for the future of our republic.

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MEF vs Columbia Univ.: Opposite Responses to Erdoğan's Bullying

Policy and controversy – Left: NATO parliamentarians gather at the start of the Forum-sponsored policy conference. Right: The Turkish delegation loudly interrupts the proceedings before storming out as Emre Çelik, a Turkish dissident, took the podium.

PHILADELPHIA – April 8, 2019 – When Turkey's government demanded that Columbia University cancel a panel on the rule of law in Turkey because of the inclusion of a panelist associated with the Gülen movement, guess what that august institution did? It caved, canceling the event three days before it was scheduled.

In contrast, when the Middle East Forum received a similar Turkish diktat in September 2017, it handled the situation with a bit more courage and cunning. We invite Columbia President Lee Bollinger (a legal specialist on freedom of speech, incidentally) to take notes:

Hosting a conference for NATO's Parliamentary Assembly (NATO-PA), MEF also invited a member of the Gülen movement. Less than a week before the event, NATO-PA informed us that no less than the presidential office in Ankara demanded we remove the Gülen associate, Emre Çelik. If we did not, NATO-PA would pull out.

Wishing neither to capitulate to Turkey's President Erdoğan, nor to have a major investment go up in smoke, we decided to have our cake and eat it too. We removed Çelik from the program, so the event went off as planned.

But we arranged for Çelik to enter the conference through a back-door and invited him on-stage at the final session. When Çelik rose to speak, the Turkish delegation loudly interrupted the proceedings, then led the entire NATO-PA delegation in storming out (video here).

As MEF President Daniel Pipes explained to the exiting delegates: "NATO exists 'to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization' of member states. But the Republic of Turkey has betrayed those principles. President Erdoğan's attempt to stifle free speech at a Middle East Forum event today was despicable. We did not accept it."

"As Middle East studies departments increasingly censor themselves to align with Middle East dictators, the Forum happily fills the intellectual void," notes MEF's director of academic affairs, Winfield Myers. "We examine all angles and provide platforms for a wide-array of voices – unafraid, with no apologies, and not bending before despots."

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