Kors on FIRE

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Oppression studies have colonized the new campus, spreading academic orthodoxies throughout the Humanities, argued Alan Charles Kors at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

The University of Pennsylvania professor said to just “look at the course offerings—ethnic or regional studies, in so-called ‘women’s studies,’ in American oral history, in literature and sociology, in cultural anthropology, and increasingly in more and more departments colonized by the new campus orthodoxies.”

“They are courses on oppression studies and the oppressors are always groups and the victims are always groups unless you are studying the history of communism, where one learns of the mistakes, not actual oppression in the form of the murder of a hundred million men, women and children,” said Kors, the co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

It is this preference for group rights over individual rights which threatens free speech, he argues, because universities don’t appreciate the one diversity that remains in short supply on campus: “intellectual diversity.”

Professor Kors asserted that this “diversity, intellectual diversity, is in fact the great enemy and target of the left.”

“Only tyrannies pursue free men and women into the privacy of their conscience and self-definition and our campuses are tyrannical indeed,” he said.

Kors traced academics’ desire to undermine free speech back to the Reagan era. “In 1984, a majority of American college students voted for Ronald Reagan and you may date the onset of ferocious political correctness from that moment,” he said.

Kors was introduced by Malcolm A. Kline, executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

“Now, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten calls from students who say ‘my professors downgraded me and are threatening me with expulsion, but they say if you just meet me in my office we can work it out between the two of us,’” said Kline. “Or administrators who say, ‘you know, you’re in danger of expulsion because you have this speaker, but just meet me in my office, we’ll work it out together.’”

“The students call me and they say, ‘should I go?’ I say don’t go alone. Get a lawyer. Call FIRE.” FIRE has a network of attorneys working pro bono on free speech cases.

FIRE keeps a “Red Alert” list of those institutions which have “displayed a severe and ongoing disregard for the fundamental rights of their students or faculty members.” As of this writing, Michigan State University, Colorado College, Brandeis University, Tufts University and Johns Hopkins University are all on FIRE’s “worst of the worst” free speech offenders watch.

“Speech codes are inherently illiberal but they become insufferable by virtue of their intended double standards in practice, without which they could not last for one second,” argued Professor Kors at CPAC.

He recounted a series of repressive and vague speech codes confronted by FIRE over the last year, including

• Southern Illinois University’s decision to forbid “objectionable epithets and demeaning depictions,”

• The decision by Lonestar College at Tomball (Texas) to restrict “vulgar speech,”

• the University of the Pacific, which “has a policy that outlaws any expression, intentional or unintentional that has the effect of demeaning, ridiculing, etc. or that supports or parodies the oppression of others,” such as “insults, jokes, and derogatory comments,”

• Tufts University’s attempt to “close its conservative newspaper…after it published two satirical articles mocking 1) affirmative action and 2) Islamic fundamentalism,” and

• the University of Louisville’s restrictions on “unwelcome comments.”

“We need to send a different message out, that no one who tells you that you are too weak to live with individual rights and individual responsibility is your friend,” argued Professor Kors.

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.