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16 Mar, 6 tweets, 3 min read
This is an amazing article and today's must-read piece on higher ed. @EmmaJanePettit is killing it over at CHE. But she can't do it alone. I am once again imploring journalists working the campus free speech beat to start taking this stuff seriously.

chronicle.com/article/a-coun…
Northern Idaho College has about 4,300 students, roughly twice the size of Oberlin. And their board of trustees is currently run by a collection of madmen.
I'm kind of at my wits' end. There are journalists working this beat who have flat-out claimed that nobody believes the profs-are-indoctrinating-students theory. But this stuff is canon on the Right. Look what happens when it goes unchecked.

@conor64
Ah, what's the point? I'll just collect ten more episodes like this one and then write an article on them for Arc. That way people can spend an afternoon caring about rightwing attacks on higher ed. Rinse and repeat.
This is a very frank and fair description of the problem. Your average Extremely Online Free Speech Journalist can easily imagine themself at Oberlin, or pitching a book to Penguin, or working the book festival circuit. What do they know or care about what happens in Idaho?
This is one of the peculiar ways that media’s leftwing bias actually works to the Right’s advantage, as I try to explain here. And it’s why bills in Iowa, Arkansas, and Oklahoma that would literally censor faculty speech flew under the radar for so long.

vox.com/policy-and-pol…

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Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
18 Mar
This WSJ editorial on California's Ethnic Studies curriculum is incredibly misleading. I'll explain why in a moment, but first I want to really drive home the torrent of bullshit that critics are directing against the ESMC.

This one is going to be long.

wsj.com/articles/calif…
First, a bit of context. What's being debated right now is the 3rd and final draft of the ESMC. Most of it is boilerplate edu-bureaucrat-ese: This is what ethnic studies is, this is why it's important, this is how we might implement it, etc.

cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/esmct…
The firestorm is all over the contents of Appendix A. That's where you'll find 43 sample lesson plans that schools can adopt to satisfy the ethnic studies requirement. I want to stress that they're just samples. Individual schools are permitted to ignore them if they wish.
Read 30 tweets
Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
14 Mar
This entire piece from @BerkowitzPeter is deeply confused, but this section in particular begs the question.

realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/…
@michelleinbklyn cites two Arkansas bills, as Berkowitz notes. But then why refer to them as "the proposal", as if they were a single legislative act? Only the 1619 Ban was abandoned. The CRT ban, which is much broader and more ambitious, is (last I checked) still live.
I've read a dozen different defenses of these bills in the last two weeks. They all make the same cluster of bad arguments and I'm not going to rehash why all over again. You can read my take here.

arcdigital.media/supporters-of-…
Read 5 tweets
Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
14 Mar
An important piece from @samk_harris. The “CRT” bans being proposed in state legislatures are unconstitutional and a threat to free speech. Harris is no fan of the Left, but she knows far better than most what’s at stake here.
Though I continue to be skeptical about the Nevada lawsuit. Much turns on whether classmate ridicule constitutes compelled speech. That seems like a dangerous step.
One last thing. A plea, really. Don’t call it “indoctrination” when what you mean is “education about a controversial topic”. K-12 is filled with bald assertions by teachers: “The cause of WWII was this”, “The impact of slavery was that.” It is also filled with lessons...
Read 5 tweets
Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
12 Mar
On the Georgetown adjuncts: You can (and should!) fire a prof for engaging in discriminatory behavior. But what about for expressing an idea that makes students believe, reasonably or otherwise, that the prof engages in discriminatory behavior?
This has come up too many times to count, but obviously the closest case is Amy Wax. One way of thinking about it: Can a prof do her job if her students believe she is biased? If not, should she keep her job?
Like I said, that’s one way of thinking about things. But probably not the right way. After all, a lot of conservative students think they’re discriminated against by liberal profs, and given sone faculty speech, I understand why. But that’s no basis for hiring/firing decisions.
Read 6 tweets
Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
11 Mar
If you can look past the fact I speak in long, meandering, and grammatically questionable sentences, this interview with @seanilling more or less explains why I am so worried about our free speech discourse right now.

vox.com/policy-and-pol…
As I described at @ArcDigi, there is a legislative war being waged on academic freedom/free speech right now. Even if you dislike "woke" speech or critical race theory, you should be able to appreciate the danger we are in.

arcdigital.media/the-new-war-on…
Supporters of these bills will try to persuade you that the danger is overblown. Do not listen to them.

arcdigital.media/supporters-of-…
Read 5 tweets
Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
10 Mar
Assuming this is true (I don’t know if it is/is not, that’s irrelevant), this is a good example of unconstitutional compelled speech. There’s no need to invent new laws to deal with it. Existing law and court precedent like Barnette is more than capable.
Ah, I see from some of the replies that this is the Clark case in Nevada. I wrote a bit about it in one of my recent Arc pieces. It’s a lot more complicated than Ramaswamy’s tweet suggests — which makes sense, since it’s just a tweet.
Schools can have a good, constitutional reason to compel speech. The point of Barnette (powerfully described by Sean’s Shiffren) is that this speech should not interfere with the intellectual autonomy of students as thinking agents.

scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewconten…
Read 7 tweets

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