Download a transcript of the podcast HERE.
Note: Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

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The December 5 testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce centered on the rise of vitriolic and explicit antisemitic behavior among both students and faculty on American campuses in the wake of the attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7. The testimony featured presentations by three college presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and M. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), in which the witnesses spent four hours obfuscating, deflecting, robotically mimicking one another with legally engineered answers, and generally struggling to address basic questions on how they have responded on their respective campuses to an explosion of antisemitic speech and conduct in keeping with stated principles of freedom of speech.

The rampant double standards were clearly evident to anyone paying attention to prevailing campus culture at American colleges and universities. When pressed, higher education leaders wrapped themselves in their reverence for free speech—but without the slightest acknowledgment that their own institutions have systemically driven out heterodox voices (either through private harassment and isolation and/or via public shaming), disinvited and shouted down speakers, and spent tens of millions policing language and thought on their campuses. The intellectual and ethical muddle displayed at the hearing has continued in the days since, as several of the witnesses try to “clarify” their deficient statements and only deepen the holes they dug for themselves.

None of them seemed aware that they presided over echo chambers where claims of “settler colonialism,” “intersectionality,” “implicit bias,” and other manifestations of an obsessive focus on race and gender have replaced objective study of the human condition. They themselves oversee campus cultures where students are now more likely to endorse reflexively the primitive, destructive libels of antisemitism.

The dysfunction at Penn came to a climax on December 9, with the resignation of President Magill and the board chair. President Magill had been unable to give a full-throated yes to Representative Elise Stefanik’s question about whether calling for genocide of the Jews would violate Penn’s policies. But as Penn’s now-former board chair Scott Bok said, President Magill’s downfall was that she gave an insipid legal answer to what was a moral question, and the moral and ethical bankruptcy in evidence at that moment was deafening. What kind of campus produces students in such significant numbers who demonstrate in favor of a terrorist group guilty of the worst murder of Jews since the Holocaust?

Then there is the compelling matter of consistency of policy. Penn, like so many other institutions, has suddenly hewed to the principle of free expression. How strange that it is emerging now, after October 7, on a campus where faculty and administrators have continued a multi-year effort to silence Penn Law Professor Amy Wax for speech they openly acknowledge is protected.

For example, it was Harvard’s Claudine Gay who stood by as distinguished biologist Carole Hooven was systematically ostracized and marginalized—effectively driven from her teaching career for supporting the incontrovertible scientific fact of biological sex difference. Claudine Gay has so far avoided the reckoning with her board and faculty. The finding that only 3% of Harvard faculty identify as conservative speaks volumes about that campus’s readiness to burst into pro-Hamas jubilation on October 8.

As significant as President Magill’s departure is, it is hardly the national catharsis needed to remedy the ethical bankruptcy of our current campus culture. Penn, its elite sister institutions, and many other American colleges have far more to do.

To see real course correction, new leadership with a deep commitment to free expression—armed with the authority to make these changes—is now required. Unfortunately, higher education leaders appear to be taking exactly the wrong lesson from the hearings and subsequent developments. Though they failed to speak when conscience alone would have summoned them to condemn the barbarity of Hamas, what they must not do now is intensify censorship and add to the already lengthy list of prohibited speech in yet another ham-fisted attempt to remediate their own sorry past performances.

Instead of policing speech, college presidents should remove barriers to free expression and worry exclusively about fairly enforcing codes of conduct that forbid violence and terroristic threats. If chanting the words “Whites only” at a campus rally is per se harassment, so should be “Globalize intifada.” Claudine Gay needs to think that through. Whether speech is protected is not dependent upon its content.

Further steps: Commit to regaining intellectual diversity among the faculty and administrators. Cashier the wasteful DEI bureaucrats who enforce the monoculture and police speech and thought. Eliminate all mandatory requirements for signed DEI statements and reestablish fair hiring procedures to ensure long-term intellectual diversity within and across departments and programs. Institute annual mandatory teaching modules that instruct everyone on campus about the history of free expression and the value of civil discourse and tolerance on campus.

As journalist and founder of the Free Press Bari Weiss observed in her November 10 Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture before the Federalist Society, “The proliferation of antisemitism, as always, is a symptom. When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying.”

The disappearance of intellectual diversity among faculty and administrators and the rise of the thought and speech police is a disease rampant on far too many college campuses, particularly the elite ones. We can only hope that the regime change at Penn will also be a harbinger of a thorough change of campus culture, there and elsewhere.

This piece appeared on Forbes on December 14, 2023.

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Unfortunately, that is a likely outcome. Before she resigned, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill said the university’s policies needed to be “clarified and evaluated.” A member of Penn’s Open Expression Committee has argued we need to restrict speech to fight antisemitism. The University of Michigan has announced a new institute to address antisemitism that is couched in the language of diversity, equity and, inclusion (DEI) – an ideology that fuels both antisemitism and speech suppression on campus. Harvard University’s response included expanding DEI resources as well.

Most American colleges and universities are dominated by monocultures that actively discourage and root out heterodox thinkers. Consider, for example, a recent survey that found only three per cent of Harvard University faculty are conservative, while 77 per cent are liberal or very liberal (progressive and leftist were not offered as choices). At the University of Pennsylvania, 99.7 per cent of faculty political donations went to Democrats last year. Should we give these majorities more power to suppress speech rather than less?

Academic institutions have abused individuals for daring to express unfashionable viewpoints. Biologist Carole Hooven was made miserable at Harvard for teaching that sex is binary. University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was disinvited from giving a lecture at MIT because he had written about the importance of merit, fairness, and equality in the sciences. Penn Law Professor Amy Wax is still under investigation at Penn for questioning affirmative action. Do we want to enable institutions to justify their actions in these cases and repeat the behavior?

Universities should be places to engage in intellectual pursuits for their own sake, but many of the people who inhabit these institutions treat the intellectual life as a means to their ideological ends. They protest rather than listen, act rather than think. Whole departments and programs have been created or colonized by activist ideologues who think this way and exclude anyone who disagrees with them. They use power rather than persuasion to achieve their purposes whenever they can. Why would we further enable them?

And the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better, as the upcoming generation is even more intolerant than the current one. The process of breaking the ideological monopolies on our college campuses and replacing conformity with freedom and intolerance with openness is going to be generational. Reacting in this heated moment with the wrong policies will only delay vital reform – or ensure that it never comes to fruition at all. We should be working to improve and solidify policies that can help the heterodox to withstand the pressures they will inevitably face rather than giving the next generation the tools to create an “unmitigated and grinding despotism,” to quote Tacitus.

At the same time, there are ways to confront antisemitism (and other forms of hate) on our campuses. Institutions should have clear (but viewpoint neutral) policies concerning public safety, discrimination, and harassment. They should have fair rules regulating student groups, on-campus events, and protests. And it is essential that they enforce these policies. Too often, university leaders back down, as MIT did when it threatened protesters with suspension during an unauthorized demonstration, but then failed to follow through when they refused to comply.

Universities must also make substantial educational and personnel changes, instituting curricula that do not begin and end with critical theory while ensuring that hiring processes support rather than subvert intellectual diversity.

Antisemitism is repulsive and must be confronted. But it would only exacerbate the tragedy of American higher education to respond to the outrages we have witnessed by implementing policies and setting precedents that will further enable the very people who are responsible for debasing our institutions to do even more damage to them.

This post appeared on The Telegraph on December 13, 2023.

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In stunning irony, the leadership of so many of the nation’s top colleges and universities, initially unable to give a full-throated condemnation of a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians of monstrous savagery, miraculously discovered institutional neutrality and murmured effetely instead. In response to the backlash, they appeal to free expression, but their campuses have only what Penn donor and alumnus Clifford Asness has called “asymmetrical free speech where some have it and some don’t.”

While Penn Carey Law School’s eminent Professor Amy Wax is placed under investigation with serious threat of termination for alleged racial insensitivity, a professor who posted the logo of the military wing of Hamas on Facebook days after that terrorist organization’s horrific attack on Israeli civilians receives nothing more than an email.

Roger Waters, a notorious antisemite, is allowed to speak on Penn’s campus, but young women forced to share a locker room with a biological male are told, “Don’t talk to the media. You will regret it.”

At Harvard, the same President Claudine Gay who was instrumental in punishing gifted African American economist Roland Fryer, who dared to advance a data-driven challenge to the meme of racist policing, says pro-Hamas students will neither be punished nor sanctioned. Carole Hooven, who was canceled for stating a biological fact, might disagree with President Gay’s claim that Harvard “embraces a commitment to free expression.”

When the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) first formulated the principles of academic freedom in its 1915 Declaration, the primary concern was undue pressure on faculty from donors and trustees. Times have changed. Now the greatest threat to free expression comes from within the institutions themselves. Hiring aims at ideological self-replication, and heterodox thinkers who somehow sneak in are punished as heretics if they speak up.

No one is surprised that these schools are ideological silos tilted to the left, but the numbers are still shocking. Only 3% of faculty at Harvard identify as conservative. An astounding 99.7% of political donations made by Penn faculty in 2021-22 went to Democrats.

Our institutions of higher education need reform, and the people inside them have shown little interest in starting the process. Many are in complete denial that anything needs to change. The American people think differently: Only 36% (19% of Republicans) say they have confidence in American higher education.

There are some internal signs of hope, such as the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, but the broader pattern among faculty and administrators is obstinate, self-righteous resistance. Normally, faculty complain that no one reads their work. Now that people are paying attention, the faculty senate tri-chairs at Penn complain that “freedom of thought, inquiry, and speech … are being threatened by individuals outside of the University who are surveilling both faculty and students in an effort to intimidate them and inhibit their academic freedom.” Where were these faculty leaders when dozens of their colleagues and students demanded sanctions against Amy Wax for daring to write that bourgeois values such as being “neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable” are drivers of success? They have been silent while Penn’s tribunal weighs terminating this distinguished professor, who has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court and received Penn’s highest award for teaching excellence.

Unwilling to defend academic freedom when it mattered, the faculty senate speaks now only to insult its donors and alumni. “Let us be clear,” the tri-chairs write: “academic freedom is an essential component of a world-class university and is not a commodity that can be bought or sold by those who seek to use their pocketbooks to shape our mission.” What gratitude! Not to be outdone, the Penn chapter of the AAUP, also silent on matters of academic freedom in recent years, complains about “donors directly contacting academic programs that rely on them financially” and says trustees and donors “have attempted to abuse the power that comes with wealth.” Is Penn holding a competition to see who can chase away the most donors?

The disingenuous administrators and faculty who run our elite academic institutions have had their chance to govern autonomously. We see where they have led us. Now is a time for trustees, donors, and alumni to intervene and give these institutions the gift of reform they so urgently need.

This post originally appeared on RealClear Politics on November 17, 2023.

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The program appeared to be running smoothly until the most recent legislative session, when an important amendment was approved to one subsection of the law. Heretofore approved religious private colleges became ineligible for the program if they “require a faith statement from a secondary student seeking to enroll in a postsecondary course” or “base any part of the admission decision on a student’s race, creed, ethnicity, disability, gender, or sexual orientation or religious beliefs or affiliations.” The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty brought a lawsuit against the state of Minnesota on behalf of two families whose high school-age children wished to take dual enrollment courses at two Christian colleges, Crown College and University of Northwestern – St. Paul. According to the complaint, “during meetings of the Senate Committee on Education Policy, members of the committee stated clearly their intent to exclude religious schools from receiving public dollars.”

The amendment may have initially withstood a constitutional challenge had it been enacted before this decade’s two important free exercise of religion Supreme Court cases. Then, the state would have argued that a case from 2004 called Locke v. Davey should control. In Davey, the Court ruled that a Washington state law prohibiting the use of public scholarship money for “devotional” degree programs (where the matriculant becomes a minister) was constitutional. While noting that Washington’s legislature could have allowed scholarship recipients to use their aid to receive devotional degrees, the Court decided 7 to 2 that their refusal to do so did not violate Davey’s First Amendment rights.

The 2020s have been a different story. In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the Supreme Court took up a case brought by a parent who wished to use state scholarship money to attend a private, religious secondary school. The state law permitted parents to use the money for their child’s attendance at any school in the state, parochial, private, charter, or public. The Montana Supreme Court ruled against the constitutionality of the state law, deciding that it violated the “no-aid” clause of Montana’s state constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 vote that the application of this state constitution clause triggered strict scrutiny review because it denied access to religious schools purely because of their religious nature.

The other relevant case is Carson v. Makin. There, a group of Maine parents challenged the state’s unusual scheme of funding public education. In Maine, there are 260 school administrative units, none of which is obligated to maintain a secondary school (at the time of litigation, 143 did not). Units without a secondary school may either decide to contract with another public school or approved private school for students residing in their unit, or pay the tuition at the public school or approved private school of the parent’s choice at which the student is accepted. The law allowed only nonsectarian private schools to be approved. The lower federal courts ruled in favor of the constitutionality of the state scheme, but the Supreme Court narrowly ruled (5-4 again) that the “nonsectarian” requirement violated the Free Exercise Clause.

These cases, along with the related Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer (which, like Makin and Espinoza was written by Chief Justice Roberts) make clear that governmental programs designed for the general public’s benefit cannot discriminate against religious institutions because of their religious character. That explains why the U.S. District Court issued a preliminary injunction on June 14 barring enforcement of the PSEO amendment. The plaintiffs don’t intend to stop there; Becket attorney Diana Thomson said, “The next step is for the court to strike down this ban for good.” Legislatures in other states with PSEO programs, like Washington, Ohio, and Florida, are now on alert.

The post Religious Freedom & Dual Enrollment: A Minnesota Case appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

The department seeks to rescind these regulations because it argues that “they are not necessary to protect the First Amendment right to free speech and free exercise of religion; have created confusion among institutions; and prescribe an unduly burdensome role for the Department to investigate allegations regarding IHEs’ treatment of religious student organizations.”[1] These arguments are simply not true. In fact, there are multiple recent instances in which religious student groups at public higher education institutions were treated unfairly due to their stated missions.

Consider the 2021 lawsuit between the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the student group Ratio Christi, an organization that seeks to advance, teach, and defend Christian beliefs. This group requested student activity funding of $1,500 from the university to invite Notre Dame University Professor Robert Audi to give a lecture on the rationality of believing in God. The university denied the group’s request, expressing that the school would not promote “speakers of a political or ideological nature,” even though student organizations with secular missions were regularly allowed to invite speakers without pushback from university administration. In response, Ratio Christi filed a lawsuit in Nebraska’s U.S. District Court, and in December 2022, two university officials agreed to settle the case, as well as change the university’s policies to ensure fair and viewpoint-neutral treatment of student groups.[2]

In 2020, the Students for Life group at the Georgia Institute of Technology filed a lawsuit against several officials, alleging that the group was discriminated against because it was denied a request for funds to invite pro-life activist Alveda King to an event. The lawsuit claimed that the student government association denied funding on account of Ms. King’s religious and pro-life views, a violation of the civil liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment. Later that same year, Georgia Tech officials agreed to a settlement with Students for Life and corrected the institution’s policies.[3]

Even though both lawsuits reached settlements and both institutions agreed to update their policies, these stories clearly demonstrate the necessity of the regulations that the Department of Education is proposing to rescind. All student organizations at both public and private colleges and universities should be afforded equal opportunities to advance their missions so long as their actions do not conflict with constitutional protections.

Furthermore, the Higher Education Act of 1965 requires religious liberty protections:

SEC. 112. [20 U.S.C. 1011a] PROTECTION OF STUDENT SPEECH AND ASSOCIATION RIGHTS. (a) PROTECTION OF RIGHTS.—(1) It is the sense of Congress that no student attending an institution of higher education on a full- or part-time basis should, on the basis of participation in protected speech or protected association, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination or official sanction under any education program, activity, or division of the institution directly or indirectly receiving financial assistance under this Act, whether or not such program, activity, or division is sponsored or officially sanctioned by the institution. (2) It is the sense of Congress that— (F) nothing in this paragraph shall be construed to modify, change, or infringe upon any constitutionally protected religious liberty, freedom, expression, or association.[4]

These stories, and others like them, along with existing statute, are reason enough for the Department of Education to continue to investigate allegations of unfair treatment of religious student organizations and, if necessary, to rescind full or partial grant funding until the institution corrects its policies.

[1] U.S. Department of Education, “Direct Grant Programs, State-Administered Formula Grant Programs Proposed Rule,” ED-2022-OPE-0157-0001, posted February 22, 2023, https://www.regulations.gov/document/ED-2022-OPE-0157-0001.

[2] Leah MarieAnn Klett, “Christian group wins lawsuit against university that denied funding of philosopher’s lecture on God,” The Christian Post, December 20, 2022, https://www.christianpost.com/news/christian-group-wins-discrimination-lawsuit-against-university.html.

[3] Michael Gryboski, “Pro-life students sue Georgia Tech over refusal to fund Alveda King event,” The Christian Post, April 3, 2020, https://www.christianpost.com/news/pro-life-students-sue-georgia-tech-over-refusal-to-fund-alveda-king-event.html.

[4] “Higher Education Act of 1965.” U.S. Government Publishing Office. Accessed March 23, 2023. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-765/pdf/COMPS-765.pdf.

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There are certain truths of American political life that antedate even the Founding and are as important for our age as they were for ages past. Among these are that demagogues hold most sway over the ignorant, that a free people must be an informed people, and that representative democracy requires widespread education to flourish. A self-governing people cannot be a foolish, deluded, or benighted people, else it will soon lose its liberty. For these reasons, Americans must become passionate learners, fearless truth-seekers, and searching critics in order to take up the responsibilities of citizenship and render themselves immune to the manipulations of opportunists and timeservers.

Universities are indispensable for a free and prosperous society. They are the engine that drives both scientific and social progress. They educate students for career and responsible citizenship and habituate them to self-discovery and the pursuit of truth. Their mission depends on a campus culture of free expression and intellectual diversity. Unless teachers, students, and researchers can inquire and speak freely and fearlessly, innovation will stall, questions will be left unasked and unanswered, and students will be ill-prepared for life, career, community, and citizenship. 

But we learn in story after story, year upon year, that colleges and universities have lost their way. Instead of encouraging students to explore different lines of intellectual inquiry and equipping them for the rough-and-tumble of a vibrant democracy, too many institutions seem to be training them for lives as informers, inquisitors, and isolated, distrustful individuals. Rather than teaching students how to engage productively with challenging new ideas, far too many colleges and universities build cozy bubbles in which only comfortable orthodoxies are permitted. They foster large, expensive bureaucracies to police infractions of vague (and often extralegal, if not outright illegal) rules against expressing ideas that someone might find offensive.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) seeks to hold American colleges and universities accountable to their missions. Progress depends on the freedom to pursue new ideas. Self-discovery requires uninhibited exploration of life’s timeless questions. Education for citizenship in a liberal democratic republic necessarily involves opening ourselves to all the perspectives we might encounter in the community at large, even silly and dangerous ones, so that we are prepared to live and negotiate with all our fellow citizens. All of this requires free expression, which is why the United States Supreme Court has so roundly affirmed, protected, and over time, extended our rights to that core freedom. American universities, of all institutions, should not be the ones to curtail it.  

ACTA now provides a blueprint to help higher education regain and live by this core principle. The ACTA Gold Standard for Freedom of Expression provides clear guidance for institutions to create a culture of free thought on their campuses. Steps ranging from adopting new institutional guidelines, to creating new on-campus initiatives, to eliminating abusive and unconstitutional rules can help colleges and universities reclaim their place as leaders within our liberal democracy. 

For more information, visit our Campus Freedom Initiative page here.

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One student told ‘Campus Reform’ about ‘openly conservative faculty being intimidated, demoted, and mistreated by the deans of their respective schools due to ideological differences.’

Conservative students across the country are facing difficulty when they attempt to start a right-leaning student organization on campus due to a lack of faculty members willing to serve as the advisor.

Most universities require prospective student organizations to obtain a faculty advisor before the school will consider recognizing the organization as an official on-campus club. 

Texas A&M University, for example, requires every “recognized” student organization to have a faculty or staff advisor. 

Campus Reform spoke to TAMU senior Cristina Bills who hoped to start a Young Women for America chapter on campus but was unsuccessful because she was unable to find a willing faculty member to serve as the club’s advisor. 

“As conservative women we wanted to start a Young Women for America chapter here on campus at Texas A&M. To be affiliated with campus, we needed a campus advisor to be over our organization. Sadly, we could not find a professor or faculty member that wanted to be affiliated with us,” Bills said.

Bills admitted that she and her fellow officers searched for a faculty member for nearly six months before deciding to end the search and host the club’s meetings off-campus instead. 

“Just because of our beliefs we couldn’t start the organization on campus, yet other left-winged organizations can and have advisors,” she told Campus Reform.

The University of Arkansas also requires that student organizations acquire a faculty advisor before being officially recognized by the university.

Junior Addison Pummill is the founder and president of the Network of Enlightened Women chapter at the University of Arkansas. She told Campus Reform that the “huge lack of conservative professors” at her university makes it “impossible” for her new club to meet the faculty advisor requirement.

Pummill is a Campus Reform correspondent.

University of Arkansas junior Nate Harris also told Campus Reform that it is “difficult” to find conservative faculty and staff on campus.

“It seems that there are only a few conservative professors present on the campus,” Harris said.

Even if a prospective club’s founders find a conservative-leaning professor, there are still obstacles to overcome, according to Pummill.

“Unfortunately, the rare conservative professor cannot take on another club because they are already the faculty advisor for too many other clubs,” she said.

Harris echoed this when he told Campus Reform that “vocal conservative” faculty members are “typically advising multiple groups and have little time for new conservative groups.”

Providing a hypothesis for why this is the case, Harris revealed that there is an “effort to drive out the conservative faculty members.”

“There are accounts of openly conservative faculty being intimidated, demoted, and mistreated by the deans of their respective schools due to ideological differences,” Harris said.

“This reality is disheartening and a barrier to political engagement at the University of Arkansas. The administration seems devoted to promoting ‘diversity’ but not intellectual diversity,” he continued. “Sadly, it seems that the administration will go on with business as usual in promoting a liberal agenda as well as continually making it difficult for conservative groups to form without impediments.”

“Without a more politically diverse faculty, there is no hope for conservative students to spread their ideas, educate their peers, and be involved on campus,” Pummill told Campus Reform. 

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni echoed Pummill’s sentiment in a statement to Campus Reform.

“Unfortunately, on most campuses, conservative faculty and administrators are on the verge of extinction,” the statement read. “While one’s political beliefs should never be the basis for hiring decisions, institutions must address when students do not have equal access to educational opportunities.”

Sophomore Cristen Lameira is attempting to start a Turning Point USA chapter at Miami Dade College Kendall Campus but is also having a hard time finding an advisor. 

Lameira is a Campus Reform correspondent.

She told Campus Reform that she is facing difficulty because “professors are afraid to lose their job if they are associated with political activist organizations like TPUSA.”

If Lameira does not find a faculty member willing to serve as advisor to her new club by September 24, she will be forced to “dismantle” her goal of starting the organization on campus.

In spite of the difficulties conservative students are facing on-campus, Bills offered a positive outlook on the situation to Campus Reform.

“Despite these hardships, we must keep up the good fight & be strong in our beliefs & know that they are true through these crazy times!,” Bills concluded to Campus Reform.

This article originally appeared here.

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If, to use the professor’s words, her department develops students who will be responsive to social needs and ready to address injustice, aren’t these exactly the students we want reforming our criminal justice system from within? Why the ritual apology? Ironically, some years ago, former president of George Washington University Stephen Joel Trachtenberg made it clear that campus police are guardians and consistently denied petitions from the campus police to obtain firearms. His successors have followed suit. But are we now getting to a perilous point at which higher education no longer establishes best practices but is expected reflexively to marginalize the police? Surely the academy can productively take up its unique opportunity (and duty) to define and model the approaches that can lead us to developing the police forces we need throughout the nation.

The George Washington University incident is one of many across the country in which campus activists demand that colleges and universities disavow the police. Dozens of student, faculty, and staff organizations have signed petitions calling for their institutions to terminate relations with local police departments and, in some cases, disband their own campus police forces. The University of California–Berkeley’s Independent Advisory Board on Police Accountability and Community Safety has submitted recommendations for sweeping changes that include: “Substantially defund general campus police and redistribute those resources to the study and development of alternative modes of campus safety that minimize and/or abolish the reliance on policing and other criminalizing responses.” The Berkeley report is now under review by the campus administration, as is appropriate. The extent to which the university will adopt or reject the recommendations remains to be seen.

There have been, to be sure, credible instances in which campus police have overreacted, and these call for intervention. But would anyone like to imagine students at Berkeley or UCLA or in other urban areas without a campus police force? Or any campus, for that matter, where emergencies, ranging from violent crime to drug overdoses to suicide attempts, necessitate urgent intervention.

Many of the responses of campus presidents to such demands have been appropriately judicious. New York University (NYU) noted the inevitable “serious emergencies or crimes at NYU or safety conditions beyond the scope of our Department of Public Safety.” In point of fact, NYU’s enlightened policy is, like George Washington University, to keep an unarmed campus force, without powers of arrest. University of Louisville President Neeli Bendapudi, for example, responded to the demand to break ties with the metro police department: “Your request for us to immediately terminate our relationship with LMPD would not make our campus or its constituents safer, and it would be an insufficient answer to a very complex problem.”

Indeed. Perhaps the most important way that colleges and universities can address the problem is by doing what they are uniquely and quintessentially created to do: dispassionately and carefully analyze and develop solutions from evidence and thoughtful consideration. Thus, the first and foremost responsibility of universities is to provide a forum for debate, deliberation, and the discussion of new ideas. Universities enjoy a privileged position: When the rest of the nation is embroiled in conflict, the academy’s role is to research, debate, and find solutions. The path forward means embracing a culture of free expression, in which all ideas, no matter how unorthodox or controversial, may be heard and discussed.

This will not be easy. Last month, University of Massachusetts-Lowell fired its Dean of Nursing, Leslie Neal-Boylan, ostensibly for putting the words, “everyone’s life matters,” into a tweet. University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig came under fire for comments criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and the call to defund the police, with petitions for his removal as editor of one of the top economics journals. Sadly, those petitions were signed by professional economists—experts in a discipline that has traditionally been open to some of the most unconventional and controversial views.

Higher education leadership needs to understand that nothing should be beyond investigation and debate, and that includes our own law enforcement system. In the case of the professor who criticizes the movement to defund the police or the student who supports it, the university need not support or endorse a view. In the words of the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars.”

Contrary to the George Washington University Sociology Department’s apology for promoting a police recruitment event, colleges must not scorn law enforcement as a legitimate career path. The fact is that there is a national dialogue about increasing educational requirements for law enforcement. There is also important work to be done on reshaping policies to hold law enforcement accountable to the public interest. Colleges and universities can create and maintain campus police forces that exemplify best practices. And they must have a central part in educating the police and national security personnel whose role it will be not only to ensure our safety, but also to envision and shape a better and more just future.

Michael B. Poliakoff, Ph.D., is President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Erik Gross is a communications officer at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

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“Who is the next Billy Graham? It is millions of contagious Christians who are trained, equipped, and deployed,” said Strobel. “We have a vision to fulfill this mission as quickly as possible.”

The Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics will offer accredited courses on the undergraduate and graduate levels—all designed to help churches, ministries, and individual Christians share and defend their faith naturally and effectively.

CCU is the preeminent interdenominational Christian university in the Rocky Mountain region, with an online impact that spans the globe. “We stand within the great tradition of Christian universities who are serious about faith and the gospel, and we’re thrilled to have Lee Strobel join our team,” said CCU President Don Sweeting. “Strobel’s background as a former atheist, portrayed in the book and film The Case for Christ, gives him valuable insight into how to reach people who are far from God.”

Described in the Washington Post as “one of the evangelical community’s most popular apologists,” Strobel has authored more than forty books and curricula that have sold nearly 14 million copies, including The Case for Faith, The Case for a Creator, and The Case for Miracles. The Yale-trained former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune also has been a teaching pastor at three of the largest and most evangelistic churches in the country.

The Center’s executive director is Strobel’s long-time ministry associate Mark Mittelberg, the best-selling author of such books as Confident Faith, The Reason Why Faith Makes Sense, and The Questions Christians Hope No One Will Ask (With Answers).

Through their Becoming a Contagious Christian training course, Strobel and Mittelberg have already equipped nearly two million Christians worldwide in how to reach others with the gospel. They have also led the outreach and apologetics efforts of one of the largest and most outreach-oriented churches in America, and for three decades have innovated evangelism and apologetics conferences, training seminars, national simulcasts, and outreach events.

Strobel explained that the word apologetics comes from a Greek term used in the Bible for defending the faith—something, he added, that’s needed more than ever in our increasingly skeptical nation. “We’re focusing on what we’re calling ‘applied apologetics,’ which means we’re going to equip Christians who will be actively engaged in the marketplace of ideas—in local churches and communities, in the media, in the entertainment world, on the Internet, and throughout popular culture,” he said.

Strobel and Sweeting agreed that CCU is the perfect home for the new center. Explained Sweeting: “It is a Strategic Priority of Colorado Christian University to share the love of Christ on campus and around the world, and to teach our students to be evangelists. The Strobel Center at CCU is an incredible vehicle to enable us to make new strides to achieve these priorities.”

One of the Center’s unique objectives is to train and certify evangelism directors for local churches, who will serve full-time, part-time or on a volunteer basis in partnership with the senior pastor in order to mobilize the church to reach their community for Christ.

“We believe in the power of leadership,” Mittelberg said. “The senior pastor can’t do everything himself. We want to equip, mentor, and deploy leaders who will work creatively and effectively under the direction of the senior pastor to reach everyone with the gospel.”

To facilitate that training, the Center’s courses will be offered through CCU Online so that people from all backgrounds and stages of life can study from the convenience of their own home. “The Center will feature the latest and most creative technology, the most current and proven content, and live interaction with passionate and credentialed educators,” Strobel said.

Other unique features of the Center include organizing a Think Tank, composed of leading Christian scholars, innovators, and practitioners, to collaborate on fresh ways of explaining and spreading the gospel, as well as hosting national conferences to share best practices and encourage churches in saturating their communities with the Christian message.

Founded in 1914, Colorado Christian University provides Christ-centered higher education that transforms students to impact the world with grace and truth. Located in Lakewood, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, CCU is consistently ranked in the top 2 percent of colleges nationwide for its core curriculum by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

CCU offers undergraduate and graduate degrees for traditional and adult students through its College of Undergraduate Studies and College of Adult and Graduate Studies. More than 8,000 students attend the University on the main campus, in regional centers throughout Colorado, and online. The Strobel Center’s courses are expected to begin Fall 2020.

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