And 35,000 employee pay raises!

There is some irony in the presidents of Harvard and Penn defending campus free speech when that speech calls for the destruction of Israel and, by implication, the extermination of Jews. Given that conservative speakers espousing traditional values have been run off our supposedly most enlightened campuses.

The school presidents did such a poor job when subpoenaed before the Republican House of Reps this week that their jobs are in jeopardy, especially at Penn.

What did you expect? The “Universities” of Wisconsin hired $32 million worth of hate-speech monitors with the power to hire and, by denying tenure, fire. To penalize students and ban their clubs. Result? A 42-ton glacial boulder is accused or racism and escorted off campus (via a flatbed truck). 

Identity politics czars and their clampdown on dissent is a big reason why higher education ranks high among American institutions losing trust.

The Atlantic gives as an examples a Harvard evolutionary biologist who posited a binary world of two genders. Her departmental Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging task force bullied her off the faculty. A researcher was refused a podium at MIT to lecture on climate change because she had argued against affirmative action.

Throughout the hearing, the three presidents perfectly encapsulated the broader malaise of America’s most elite universities, which excel at avoiding lawsuits and increasing their endowments but seem to have little sense of why they were founded or what justifies the lavish taxpayer subsidies they receive. 

— “The universities that don’t understand academic freedom”

The compromise worked out by Republican legislative leaders and system President Jay Rothman would have addressed that — starting with a freeze on hiring all those DEI bean counters. Speaker Robin Vos had wanted their immediate dismissal. The Werkes called for the rollback before Vos did.

The Board of Regents quashed that compromise this morning by a 9 to 8 vote. Once again jeopardizing construction of a new engineering building and putting on hold pay raises for 35,000 systemwide employees. 

But almost the bigger loss was the creating a single endowed professorship at UW-Madison focused on conservative thought, classical economic theory, or classical liberalism. Imagine that! The chair to be endowed from private, voluntary donations! Someone familiar with John Locke, Adam Smith, Burke and Voltaire! 

Amounts to “allowing far-right policy to be enshrined in the public university system,” Assembly Democrats said of the now-scuttled Vos/Roth deal.  

Blaska’s Bottom Line: As if far-left policy isn’t taught at freshman orientation. Which it is. 

Or are you just auditing free speech!