The thousand deaths of today's feckless academic cowards

Faculty and administrators are rarely, anymore, profiles in courage. Well, you reap what you sow.

Photo by Parker Gibbons on Unsplash

Dozens of colleges and universities around the country have recently capitulated to pro-Palestinian protesters by canceling, altering, or significantly scaling back graduation ceremonies this spring. This is an unfortunate double-whammy for the vast majority of graduating students who just want to celebrate the milestone accomplishment of obtaining a college degree and who missed out on high school graduations four years ago due to COVID.

This insanity is possible because of faculty and administrative cowardice in not standing up to mendacious, far-left students supporting one of the most illiberal organizations in the world, Hamas, while ignoring the terrorist attacks committed by Hamas against Israeli citizens on October 7. Indeed, it appears that Columbia, Northwestern, Brown, Rutgers, Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota, and the University of California, Riverside, engaged in an informal competition to see who could up the ante the most in compromising with clueless dingbats.

Perhaps the most egregious of all this occurred at Dickinson College (in Pennsylvania), where leftist pro-Palestinian students succeeded in getting the commencement address by (and award of an honorary degree to) Michael Smerconish canceled because they objected to his passionately rational brand of legal and political analysis.

Smerconish, a centrist, is an unfailing advocate for free speech and one of the brightest, most fair-minded pundits in the media landscape. But Smerconish, with a dangerously moderate vision of the world, was evidently too much for the young minds at Dickinson, and Dickinson President John Jones rewarded their shameless immaturity by canceling the Smerconish address and honorary degree. Here is his statement:.

To the Dickinson community:

Dickinson’s mission is to prepare young people for engaged lives of global citizenship and leadership. We encourage students to listen and discuss ideas and perspectives that are challenging and force them out of their comfort zone. That is the role of a liberal-arts campus. 

We hold humility, reflection, engagement and dialogue as the most important values to build understanding of complex issues. As the controversy related to our Commencement speaker, who I have known for many years, developed, I found myself defending concepts that are inconsistent with those values.

It has become clear that our selected speaker, Michael Smerconish, faced overwhelming opposition from our faculty and students, particularly after recent comments he made. As a result, with the support of our Board of Trustees, I have decided to rescind the honorary degree and invitation to speak at Commencement.

I said previously that Commencement would not be canceled. Commencement is a celebration of our class of 2024 graduates and their families, of a journey successfully completed, and a new one set to begin. It is important to remember that this particular class lost their high school graduations in 2020 due to COVID-19 and had the start of their college experience interrupted.

We want this Commencement to be the most uplifting, memorable, and student-centered event for those graduating and for our community.

These are difficult days across the globe. I look forward to coming together and celebrating our seniors who are resilient beyond measure. 

John E. Jones III ‘77

Jones, a former federal judge and Dickinson alumnus, is no profile in courage. Notice that he professes to have known Smerconish for some time, which makes throwing him under the bus worse. With friends like Jones, who needs enemies? Also, I do not think that “resilient” means what he thinks it means.

Jones, unfortunately, is of a type all to common in the modern academy: long on erudition (well, kind of) and short on courage. If a one-word answer for what’s wrong with academia these days is what you seek, cowardice will do just fine.

It makes total sense that today's college students need trigger warnings, safe spaces, and protection from complex ideas that originate outside the confines of their neutron star-dense craniums because their mentors are people who are afraid of their own shadows. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. In this case, a thousand times over.

Anyone who knows anything about what goes on under the hood at most any institution of higher education will probably acknowledge that most academics aren’t particularly interested in gutsy open debate. Opposition in academic settings generally occurs in the form of undermining and backstabbing rather than hashing things out in the open face-to-face.

You go into a university meeting and call out the DEI people for lack of evidence, blatant discrimination, and rank idiocy, and you are very unlikely to get much more than a tepid pushback in person. But just wait until your next performance review or internal grant proposal review. Don’t ask me how I know.

I wrote a weekly newspaper column for most of my 25 years in higher education. In that column, I routinely called out bad science, bad scholarship, administrative bloat, corruption, lack of oversight, uncollegial governance, grade inflation, DEI, and pretty much everything on the spectrum of what’s wrong with higher ed. I went after our administration for trying to purchase a new home for the university president without public disclosure when we were near exigency during the 2007 financial crisis. I lambasted the faculty and administrators involved in a bogus nuclear science institute. I didn’t do any of this to burnish my Jules Ezekiel 25:17 credentials. I did it because, as an academic, it was my job. Nothing more, nothing less.

In decades, there wasn't a week that went by without someone—faculty, administrators, even a dean and a president—approaching me to write about something under my byline that concerned them. This despite the fact that the same newspaper would have been more than happy to run a column from them. There were never any takers because columns require a byline with an attached name. That’s a bridge too far for people who are more accustomed to stabbing Caesar than being Caesar.

So no, the fecklessness of Jones is no surprise to me. Most academics, across disciplines, have one thing in common: the ability to hide cowardice behind hifalutin prose and lofty-sounding ideals. I know that Jones, a former federal judge for crying out loud, knows better. He just lacks the resolve to do the right thing.

And to join him in academia, you have to get in line.

Along that line, anyone paying attention to the generally milquetoast response to the pro-Palestinian encampments has experienced an earful of pontification on the importance of “free speech” and “First Amendment” rights, often conflating the two. That’s unfortunate, as they are not the same thing.

The First Amendment prohibits the government from shutting down speech, petitions, religion, the media, and lawful assembly. It has no bearing on the vast majority of these protests, which are either at private institutions or are unlawful assemblies.

You have no constitutionally protected right in this country to trespass or to block traffic (pedestrian or vehicular). You have no constitutionally protected right to a heckler’s veto. You have no constitutionally protected right to prevent your fellow students from going to class, taking exams, eating in the student center, going to their campus housing, or participating in other campus activities.

No, to claim protection for those activities, one must shroud themselves in the more nebulous concept of free speech. Free speech is not a law; it is an ideal. Free speech is indeed, in some cases, protected under our constitution. The First Amendment's protection specifically forbids the government from interfering with your right to free speech, assembly, religion, and petition. Not from you, me, or anyone else unaffiliated with the government.

In almost the very definition of irony, as we watch the current parade of illiberal and often illegal campus protests under the claimed protection of free speech, Racket News has just today released the latest FOIAed documents obtained in their ongoing investigation of the “censorship industrial complex.” I haven’t had time to read the whole document dump just yet, but from what I have read, what stands out to me is the coterie of usual suspects—all associated with the left—who seem determined, despite numerous setbacks, to assist the government in circumventing the First Amendment under the guise of combating disinformation—something that our constitution actually forbids.

Aside from conflating free speech with the First Amendment, which is a mistake, the left, much of academia, and a lot of the media seem to not understand fundamentally why the First Amendment exists. The First Amendment is specifically intended to keep the government from deciding what is disinformation. That’s our call, not the government’s.

Also relevant in today’s news, see the testimony of Dr. David Morens, who spent a quarter of a century as the Senior Advisor to the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for all of the reasons why the government should not be the last word in almost anything.

But until we can raise the profiles in courage in not only academia but also in the media and government, expect more of the same.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.