Mainstream higher education is under attack from an overbearing government that uses authoritarian tactics to erode academic freedom and enact an ideological vendetta. This is the recent takeaway from an address given at Hamilton College by former president Barack Obama. In addressing recent investigations and defunding of America’s elite universities, Obama urged academia to stand for “academic freedom.” For some reason, Hamilton and Obama missed the years of higher education’s decay before Trump’s re-election.
In addressing the Hamilton crowd, Obama’s rhetoric framed academia’s current travails with the Trump administration and public distrust as a struggle of values. Obama stated:
We say we’re for equality, are we willing to fight for it? Are we going to risk something for it? We say that we’re for rule of law, are we going to stick to that when it’s tough not when it’s easy? We believe in freedom of speech; do we stand up for freedom of speech when the other person talking is saying stuff that infuriates us and is wrong and hurtful? Do we still believe in it?
For university students and for your generation I think that’s important because part of how we got confused around some of these issues is that those who claimed to be fighting on behalf of social justice and freedom of speech and equality, sometimes we didn’t observe it ourselves.
It is as if Obama neglected the rising anti-Semitism, the cancel mobs, and silencing of conservative professors, the endorsement of racism in the form of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” (DEI) and the mass indoctrination and indebting of students that all culminated in making American higher education reminiscent of Dante’s seventh circle of Hell. For both Hamilton College and President Obama, some questions need to be addressed.
- Where were you in 2017 when students at Claremont-McKenna forcibly shut down an event featuring Heather MacDonald? Student protestors shouted “From Oakland to Greece, f**k the police.” Students smeared MacDonald as a “fascist” using “free speech” as a ploy.
- Where were you in 2015 when students at Yale University berated Nicholas Christakis over failing to create a “safe space” and demanded his resignation over hysteria about Halloween costumes and allegations of “cultural appropriation?”
- Where were you in 2023 when Stanford Law students heckled and canceled a speech by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan from the U.S. Fifth Circuit of Appeals because students felt he “proudly threatened healthcare and basic rights for marginalized communities”? Where were you when Stanford’s own DEI administrator took the side of the hecklers?
- Where were you in 2020 when the Chabad Center at the University of Delaware campus in Newark was burned down in an act of arson?
- Where were you in 2022 when Roland G. Fryer, a black professor at Harvard University, was forcibly canceled because his research empirically flew in the face of the woke orthodox thinking that predominates on campus today?
- Where were you in 2023 when the then-president of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, refused to answer before Congress the basic question of whether or not the calling for the genocide of Jews constituted a violation of “Penn’s rules or code of conduct?” Magill stated that such things were “context-dependent.”
- Where were you in 2015 when University of Missouri communications professor Melissa Click tried to forcibly prevent a journalist from filming protests on campus? Where were you this year when the head of the English department at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, flipped over a table on camps that was hosted by the College Republicans?
- Where were you for years as China established Confucius Institutes throughout American colleges and universities and Confucius Classrooms across the country’s K-12 system to promote the Chinese Communist Party?
- Where has your concern been over the explosion of anti-Semitism across college campuses since the October 7th attack?
- Where were you when Columbia University students forcibly detained and attacked Mario Torres, a college custodian, when they took over Hamilton Hall while calling for the destruction of Israel? Where were you when Columbia blocked one of its own Jewish professors, Shai Davidai, from entering campus?
Good professors ask good questions, and this is just a sample.
Obama is onto something when on the matter of free speech he stated, “sometimes we didn’t observe it ourselves.” No kidding, Mr. President. The only question that still lingers is why anyone who seeks wisdom or job training would want to attend American colleges or universities at all. Obama’s speech at Hamilton College exemplifies the hypocritical ideological self-aggrandizement that predominates in higher education today.
Cover designed by Jared Gould using image of Hamilton College by Bill Badzo on Flickr & image of President Obama by Kelly Kline on Flickr
From https://www.newsweek.com/obama-be-tolerant-listen-let-your-opponents-speak-457966 (Commencement speech of May 7, 2016 at Howard):
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So don’t try to shut folks out. Don’t try to shut them down, no matter how much you might disagree with them. There’s been a trend around the country of trying to get colleges to disinvite speakers with a different point of view or disrupt a politician’s rally. Don’t do that—no matter how ridiculous or offensive you might find the things that come out of their mouths.
Because, as my grandmother used to tell me, every time a fool speaks, they are just advertising their own ignorance. Let them talk. Let them talk. If you don’t, you just make them a victim, and then they can avoid accountability.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t challenge them. Have the confidence to challenge them, the confidence in the rightness of your position.
There will be times when you shouldn’t compromise your core values, your integrity, and you will have the responsibility to speak up in the face of injustice. But listen.
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The point is Obama spoke out (in his usual, understated manner) on this issue in May of 2016 while he was still president. This is "where he was". A better criticism of Obama, rather than a specious claim that he does not support free speech on campus, is the "Dear Colleague" letter, which adumbrated many of Trump's actions on withholding funds from colleges for not complying with federal dictates. "Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself."
Most of the items in this indictment are disturbing. I was disturved by most of them as they were happening. But
“Mainstream higher education is under attack from an overbearing government that uses authoritarian tactics to erode academic freedom and enact an ideological vendetta”
holds at present.
I know that literally thousands of faculty members and graduate students are deathly afraid to say anything favorable, or anything at all, about DEI, because they are terrified of losing their livelihoods.
After all, Christopher Rufo himself is on record as wanting to instill “existential terror” in higher education. Well, he’s getting what he wants, I hate to say.
But for what is happening, I want nothing to do with the “conservative” Trumpster movement that is destroying our country.
Yes, American Universities, at least the so called liberal arts programs, are mostly ideological swamps. But perhaps the most relevant follow on is- What will replace them?