The Review: Do students have too much power?

Protests over a prospective faculty hire at UCLA raise complex questions. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. In a long and careful essay of the kind that has made her famous, the Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan [wrote]( recently in the London Review of Books about the state of campus politics — which today means electoral politics, too — in England and the United States. The immediate occasion is England’s new Higher Education Act, which among other things introduces the role of academic “free-speech tsar,” currently held by the Cambridge philosopher Arif Ahmed. As Srinivasan sees it, the Higher Education Act, sponsored by conservatives and ostensibly committed to the protection of academic freedom, participates in a right-wing moral panic and indulges in the “conflation — now commonplace — of free speech and academic freedom.” But then, toward the center of the essay, Srinivasan says something that surprised me, given the previous thrust of her argument: “To anyone who teaches at a British or U.S. university, it is obvious that the way students exercise power has changed in the last 10 years or so.” There has, for instance, “been a noticeable increase in no-platforming and disinformation campaigns,” as well as “demands … to fire faculty members perceived to have objectionable views.” Academics talk about these things constantly — although, “increasingly, these are conversations that those of us on the left prefer to have in private, because it is all too easy to fuel a conservative narrative which holds that the biggest threat to academic freedom today is our students.” Like so many of the sentiments on campuses now, Srinivasan’s tactical reserve about criticizing the methods and the demands of student activists has a precedent in the culture wars of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Gregory Jay and Gerald Graff, for instance, [wrote]( in 1995 that while “the anti-political correctness assault was and is orchestrated by politically motivated operatives,” nevertheless “the time has come when some serious efforts at left self-criticism have to be ventured, even if they give some aid and comfort to the enemy.” What if, pace Srinivasan, it is precisely the ginger refusal to discuss the censorial tilt of much campus activism that “fuels the right”? To critics of the phenomena Srinivasan reluctantly describes — the no-platforming, the misinformation, the punitive deployment of identitarian harm concerns against faculty members — the reluctance to acknowledge this common reality might be suspected of promoting polarization, not inhibiting it. The newfound power of students appeared dramatically in a recent controversy at the University of California at Los Angeles, where, as our Megan Zahneis [reported]( a psychology professor named Yoel Inbar was not offered a professorship after an open letter by graduate students criticized him for his insufficiently optimistic attitude, on a podcast four years ago, toward required diversity statements. “It is not clear what good they do,” he had said, “or how they’re going to be used.” (Those are, of course, live and open questions.) For this and related ideological shortcomings, the students wrote, “we are adamant that the hiring committee … not extend a job offer to Dr. Yoel Inbar.” It’s not possible to say whether the open letter resulted in the department’s decision not to hire Inbar. But on Inbar’s account, student reaction was a topic of distinct concern among the faculty members interviewing him. He recalls one faculty member asking, with regard to his skepticism about DEI statements, “Well, you know, we have some very passionate graduate students here, which is great, but what would you say to them if they were upset about this?” The university has so far denied an open-records request from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is preparing an appeal. In the meantime, Inbar at least seems to feel pretty certain about what happened. “Is there a cost to opening your mouth about this stuff?” he asked on a recent podcast. “Absolutely, there is.” SPONSOR CONTENT | K16 Solutions [A College LMS Transition Success Story]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. One aspect of this particular attempted exercise of student power, common to many American incidents of the type, is the alliance between some DEI administrators and some student activists. That alliance, in this instance, was merely rhetorical; in others, it has been genuinely institutional. (“The real danger,” as Srinivasan writes, “comes not from complaining students, but from the university administrators who — sometimes under political pressure — too often cravenly seek to appease them.” The most infamous recent [example]( is the Stanford Law students’ heckling of a conservative federal judge, which seemed to many to have been endorsed rather than defused by a diversity dean.) The UCLA students’ open letter condemning Inbar couched its criticisms in terms of “the values and standards we uphold as an institution and department committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).” They observe that Inbar’s skepticism toward required diversity statements appears to be in open conflict with UCLA’s official stance. “Our institution’s position on this issue,” they write, “is unequivocal: page one of the UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion FAQ proclaims ‘Equity, diversity, and inclusion are integral to how the University of California conceives of merit.’” Required diversity statements, as our Adrienne Lu [reports]( have come under fire in a number of red states in the last year or so. Nor are they only unpopular with Republican politicians. Another psychologist, John D. Haltigan, is currently suing the University of California system over the legality of its required diversity statements; the New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang, who encountered the requirement when applying for a job in the UC system, recently [called]( them “dumb and offensive.” Many job applicants feel the same way. In my experience, backchannel kvetching about these requirements is rife. But public criticism is rarer, perhaps out of some combination of the political qualms Srinivasan describes and professional prudence. After all, most academics don’t have the privilege of Kang’s [refusal]( “I will never apply to any job that requires you to fill one of those out.” Read Amia Srinivasan’s “[Cancelled: Can I Speak Freely?]( in the London Review of Books and Megan Zahneis’s [reporting]( on Yoel Inbar. UPCOMING PROGRAM [The Chronicle's Bootcamp for Future Faculty Leaders] [Join us in September]( for a professional development program tailored to the needs of midcareer faculty. 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