Try reforming UW without using blackmail
In April of last year, a University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student filed a unique complaint with the campus’ “Hate Response Team.” He charged that a new Harry Potter mural on campus represented “white power,” “man power,” “cis power,” “able power” and “class power.”
In recent years, it has become clear that the halls of academia should be padded. Late last year, UW-Madison announced it would be offering a course called “The Problems of Whiteness,” and the university has recently come under fire for a program examining the “perceptions of masculinity.” The project, open to “men-identified” students, is the latest entry in a line of universities trying to purge campuses of “toxic masculinity“under the premise that, as National Review’s David French has put it, “Men would be better men if only they were more like women.”
For decades, universities have been a cocoon of progressive ideas that couldn’t survive if subjected to the scrutiny of the real world. People with jobs and families and mortgages typically don’t have time to sit around worrying about “intersectionality” or “triggers” or “privilege” or “microaggressions.”
It is true, universities desperately need to focus on “diversity,” but more on the ideological side. Lawmakers in Wisconsin have rightly begun pushing for more “intellectual diversity” on campus, as it will provide more balanced instruction and force progressive students to confront ideas that they may not consider to be “safe.” They don’t know it now, but it will make them better people in the long run.
But as is the case any time a single party controls state government for too long, the legislative overreach cometh. Some Republican lawmakers have begun to threaten to withhold funding from the UW System unless it shows more ideological diversity, as the Legislature would define it.
Last year, Assembly Republicans produced a sweeping slate of government reforms that included a promise to force universities to “embrace ideological diversity on campus and ensure diverse perspectives are present and protected in our classrooms and faculty lounges.” The university’s most ardent critic in the Legislature, Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater), routinely threatens to cut funding to the system whenever one of these issues boils up.
While the goal is laudable, this method would amount to ideological blackmail. Exactly who would be in charge of deeming whether a speaker is “conservative” enough to warrant more funding? What would be the standard for deciding where a professor stands on the ideological spectrum? Would the state write a check to the university any time one of its professors can correctly identify a picture of Ayn Rand? (I have actually spoken at the UW a number of times, but this column alone
might kick me out of the “conservative” designation.)
Hanging funding over the head of the university like the Sword of Damocles is also short-sighted. Democrats someday will once again control state government, and once the precedent is set that the Legislature gets to mold every detail of what is taught at the university, payback will be triggering.
It’s not even certain that the UW’s obnoxious progressivism has had much of an effect on the students that have escaped its hallowed walls. Donald Trump just became the first Republican to win Wisconsin in 32 years — does that seem like an electorate overly concerned with being microaggressed? If the UW’s decades of indoctrination were all that effective, would the state have elected Scott Walker or Paul Ryan or Ron Johnson? It’s not as if a conservative escaping the UW with a degree is like breaking free from Guantanamo Bay — the UW System has produced noted Marxists Reince Priebus, Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, and ... Steve Nass.
By micromanaging speech on campus, Republicans are trying to get into the progressives’ game. But policing speech using the power of the budget isn’t what conservatism is about. As conservatives, we can’t say we want less government but then deploy S.W.A.T. teams to enforce expression quotas on campus.