Better in their words…

This story first broke by the New York Times?
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By John J. Miller
WSJ 2/9/2017

Riots last week at the University of California, Berkeley stopped Milo Yiannopoulos, a rightwing provocateur who contributes to Breitbart News, from speaking on campus. The violence forced the cancellation of his event and inflicted $100,000 in damage to school property, according to administrators. Then it spread to New York University, where police arrested 11 protesters who tried to halt the libertarian comedian Gavin McInnes from talking to students. The American Association of University Professors has said nothing about this coastal turmoil. Yet it has condemned what it apparently regards as a greater threat: students who provide accurate reports on the shouted-down speakers in their auditoriums and the left-wing biases in their classrooms.

In a 1,000-word statement released last month, the AAUP bemoaned “new efforts by private groups to monitor the conduct of faculty members,” which it likened to “witch hunts.” Then it named names: Professor Watchlist, Campus Reform and the College Fix.

I know a little about the first two groups and a lot about the third: I founded the College Fix seven years ago. Every day the website publishes articles by student journalists, who work with our professional editors to tell true stories about campus politics and culture. Our goal is to create compelling and original content, while identifying a new generation of promising writers and editors before they make the mistake of going to law school.

In recent days, the Fix has carried accounts of the disturbances at Berkeley and NYU. Our writers also have covered Barnard College’s proposal to require attendance at workshops on “inclusion and equity,” plus Pepperdine University’s decision to remove a statue of Columbus, whose presence has became too “painful,” according to the school’s president, Andrew K. Benton.

The Fix also brings readers into classrooms, as it did last fall when professors turned their lecterns into bully pulpits. One article described how Bruce Conforth, a music lecturer at the University of Michigan, began an election-eve class by urging students to vote for Hillary Clinton because she favors abortion rights, a higher minimum wage, and tuitionfree college. Readers who questioned the article’s accuracy could watch an accompanying video of Mr. Conforth’s stump speech.

Professors who proclaim their own partisanship are bad enough, but some even turn their classrooms into semester-long re-education camps. Last fall at the Colorado Springs campus of the University of Colorado, history lecturer Jared Benson and sociology instructor Nicholas Lee taught a course titled “Resistance and Revolution.” In expletiveladen lectures, these self-styled Marxists called America’s founders “terrorists,” compared the Sons of Liberty to the Westboro Baptist Church, and ridiculed “the taxationwithout- representation argument” as “asinine” on the grounds that American revolutionaries were rich men who didn’t want to pay their fair share. They also insisted that Ronald Reagan had little to do with the demise of the Soviet Union and that Martin Luther King Jr. was a secret communist (which they meant as a compliment).

I know exactly what motivates the student reporters behind these stories, because I got my start in journalism by covering classroom shenanigans. For four years at the University of Michigan, I worked at the Michigan Review, a student publication. We wrote about the campus government, criticized the administration’s speech code, and praised Nirvana’s breakthrough album before most of our readers had heard of it. Nobody got paid for working at the Review, but we did get passes to a Nirvana concert.
One day in 1991, the Review’s phone rang. The editorial page of the Detroit News wanted a student to write about a course on race and ethnicity that the school was thinking about turning into a graduation requirement. Would I attend for a few weeks and draft something?

Sure, I said. The course proved to be revealing. One instructor said that he aimed to tell students a version of American history that included the dirty bits their high-school teachers had left out. Another explained that only white people can be racist because nonwhite people lack power. In the end the faculty approved the course, which remains a graduation requirement today. But I like to think that my account in the News gave Michiganders a glimpse of what their flagship public university was doing.

I wasn’t wrong to perform journalism on my professors, and neither are today’s students wrong when they tell the truth about what’s going on in their lecture halls.

The AAUP thinks differently. Although careful to mention First Amendment rights, its statement focuses on the rotten things that can happen when pesky students exercise free speech: They enable “stalkers and cyberbullies,” “threats of physical violence” and even “death threats.”

This is backward. Students who challenge their teachers are neither harassers nor censors. They’re journalists and whistleblowers, who find the one-sided politics of their professors to be newsworthy. In the name of academic freedom, the AAUP wants to pressure them into silence.

Mr. Miller is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College, a writer for National Review, and the founder and executive director of the College Fix.