Why I’ve Moved On from FIRE

I’ve been a donor to FIRE since 2007, but I’m no longer convinced by its diagnosis or treatment plan for the dire illness afflicting U.S. higher education.

The diagnosis attributes the malady to (1) overprotective parenting and (2) teenage addiction to smartphones and social media, which have produced a generation of anxious, depressed, and fragile students. “Safetyism,” the ruling doctrine of American parenting and education, comprises a destructive positive feedback loop: by protecting young people from emotional distress, it makes them less capable of managing their reactions to challenges—including ideas they find distasteful—leading to demands for even more “coddling,” and etc. Safety and empathy, according to this hypothesis, have become the primary values on campus, always trumping free speech and free inquiry when they clash.

Safetyism is real enough.

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I experienced a dramatic outburst of it during the waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2022, when about 60 students in my large introductory course demanded a remote exam option and accused me of endangering their health by refusing to provide one. However, events on most elite U.S. college campuses during the past year have proven that Heather MacDonald was correct that Safetyism is not the cause of the suppression of heterodox views in American higher education.

Students and faculty belonging to disfavored groups—e.g. white men; conservative Christians—are not coddled by administrators; they are mocked and reviled. Since Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent mushrooming of campus pro-Hamas disruptions and intimidation against Jewish students and faculty, only a few college administrations have even enforced their own pre-existing rules, let alone taken additional steps, to protect their Jewish students and faculty. Their pleas for safety and empathy have been met with empty verbiage at best and by silence or ridicule at worst.

Thus, on U.S. college campuses, calls for safety and empathy do not reflect primary values; rather, they are selectively deployed tools to serve an ideology.

This ideology, Critical Theory or wokism, is what motivates the suppression of dissent. The problem is political, not psychological. Cognitive behavior therapy won’t solve it. Furthermore, attempts to persuade the woke to tolerate disagreement—viewpoint diversity as a complement to racial and gender diversity—are futile because, for critical theorists, discourse has magical power; it generates reality. To allow so-called“oppressive” discourse is the moral equivalent of allowing physical violence by oppressors and their apologists. The constituency driving the imposition of campus orthodoxies is not the tantrum-throwing students; it’s the humanities and social science faculty, who, in Prof. John Ellis’s metaphor, resemble their mid-20^th century predecessors in much the same way that the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers resembled the humans they had replaced.

They’re an entirely different kind of person, motivated not by a scholar’s curiosity and humility but by a fundamentalist missionary’s fanaticism and zeal. This is the root cause of the decline of the academy. The headline-grabbing speech codes and cancellations of dissident professors are among its inevitable effects.

This change in the character of the faculty is the key to understanding why FIRE is wrong not just in its diagnosis but also in its prescription, which is for institutions to respect the same speech rights of faculty that the First Amendment guarantees. (I wonder how serious they are about this, e.g., whether FIRE would defend a professor threatened with termination for uncritically promoting astrology in the classroom).

The authors of the original (1915) AAUP Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure understood that academic freedom is not the same as the Constitutional guarantee of free speech. Only the former “is conditioned on [conclusions] being … gained by a scholar’s method and held in a scholar’s spirit … [as] the fruits of competent and patient and sincere inquiry, and … set forth with dignity, courtesy, and temperateness of language” (p. 298).

[RELATED: FIRE Makes the OCR Back Down]

The academy’s only unique contribution to society, which justifies its financial and other support, is this: the scholar’s method and spirit. But these differ from the spirit of the First Amendment. Elon Musk’s X does an invaluable public service by being maximally permissive of speech. But do we really want university classrooms and scholarly journals in which the ratios of nonsense to knowledge, of cruelty to civility, and of profanity to eloquence are the same as on X? Why would such institutions deserve society’s support and deference?

Unfortunately, a large chunk of the humanities and social sciences has sunk to astrological levels of unseriousness, as the “Grievance Studies” hoax demonstrated. The Grievance Department faculty now boast that their job description includes disruptive agitprop—e.g. academic units hosting “activists-in-residence.” Since Oct. 7, 2023, they have openly expanded this ambit to include political street violence —about as far as possible from “dignity, courtesy, and temperateness of language.” If they were still with us, the authors of the 1915 AAUP Declaration would conclude that their worst fears have been realized—that “our profession may prove unworthy of its high calling, and unfit to exercise the responsibilities that belong to it (p. 300)” and that the professoriate has reneged on its contract with society that granted academic freedom in exchange for behavior befitting a scholar.

The disease afflicting U.S. higher education isn’t Safetyism. It’s the takeover of the humanities, the social sciences, and administration by woke pseudo-scholars. And the cure isn’t to reward professors for saying and writing whatever they wish so long as the First Amendment protects it. Rather, it is to incentivize, through reforms to existing institutions and building new ones, a return to the intellectual and moral principles and customs that guided the academy before the rise of Critical Theory. For starters, the Grievance Studies pseudo-disciplines should be completely defunded. The new administration’s apparent seriousness about educational reform offers hope that this is now a realistic goal.

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