From the FIRE blog post:

According to one eyewitness, he discovered a woman standing on a stack of issues, refusing to allow community members the opportunity to grab a copy. When he approached her, “She and others [said] that they have taken the papers and that they will be distributing them instead of us.” After notifying the campus police, the detective who arrived let the eyewitness take back the papers from the thief. As the eyewitness attempted to take the hostage issues back to where they belonged, “the woman and others then forcefully grab[bed] handfuls of them from my arms – IN FRONT OF THE POLICE DETECTIVE – who had displayed her badge.” Perhaps most troubling was that the police officer reportedly did nothing to intervene in this scuffle.

FIRE also reports that the university administration, exercising some remarkable jurisprudence, told the paper that it was perfectly fine for people to steal their issues, since they were free anyways. I’ll keep that in mind next time I want to eat a whole tray of free samples at Costco. In the meantime, let’s hope that UMass Amherst reverses this horrible, stifling decision. There is no excuse for such activities in a country that supposedly values freedom of speech.

David French over at Phi Beta Cons sums up why this a horrible precedent:

From a common-sense standpoint, this is absurd. Imagine telling a Baptist church that its search for a new pastor had to include equal consideration of Buddhist or Hindu candidates. Imagine telling a synagogue that they were engaged in unlawful “discrimination” if they categorically refused to permit imams from functioning as rabbis. How can student guarantee that they can maintain their distinctive voice if each group essentially has to be open to all students, regardless of those students’ beliefs or intentions?

Of course, the ruling extends beyond religious groups to any campus club or organization. Maybe it’s a reductio ad absurdum, but I wonder what this kind of “non-discriminatory environment” would look like at large. For example, the student publication I run at the University of Oregon has loose membership requirements, aside from my explicit “no hippie nonsense” rule. Could the magazine be defunded for not printing or associating with hippie nonsense?

Likewise, could I go to the radical leftist paper on campus and demand to have my articles on laissez-faire capitalism printed? Like French notes, what happens to distinctive voice when you have no control over membership? Or, as the late great Groucho Marx once said, “I don’t care to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”

At Central Connecticut University, a professor recently filed a complaint against a student, saying the student made the class feel “scared and uncomfortable” after he gave a presentation advocating concealed carry on campus. That night, the student was called into the campus police station, where police grilled him about the firearms registered in his name and where he kept them.

How wonderful that students are being harassed by universities and police for merely speaking up for the Second Amendment. I can’t really say anything more concise or to the point than the kicker quote at the end of the article, though:

“If you can’t talk about the Second Amendment, what happened to the First Amendment?” asked Sara Adler, president of the Riflery and Marksmanship club on campus. “After all, a university campus is a place for the free and open exchange of ideas.”

Hat tip to The Agitator.

Lopez’s presentation was on Christianity and included a section about his belief in traditional marriage. In response, his professor told him to “ask God” what his grade was. Furthermore, when Lopez appealed to the dean, he was threatened with expulsion, along with vague mentions of “hate speech.” Classy.

The story has been picked up by the L.A. Times, FIRE, Volokh Conspiracy and Townhall. Professor Volokh’s post is especially good:

Professors doubtless have a vast degree of flexibility in grading students, even in viewpoint-based ways. For instance, if a law student is told to construct the best possible argument in support of position X (as I often require on my exams), he may be graded down for instead constructing an argument opposing position X. [...]

Nonetheless, this flexibility can’t be unlimited, I think: When a professor refuses to give a grade, or (to take a hypothetical) even if the professor gives a low grade but for a reason that pretty clearly falls outside the academic subject matter of the class (for instance, because a student in a speech class expressed political viewpoints that the professor disapproved of), that violates the First Amendment.

This is pretty spot on. Professors do have latitude in the classroom. For example, I had a Writing 122 teacher in community college whose gentle, liberal ways made him cringe when anyone so much as raised their voice. He made several topics off-limits for opinion papers, such as abortion and gay marriage, arguing that they were too controversial and didn’t make for good papers. (In a sense, I feel like he was trying to avoid a situation like Lopez’s.) I disagreed, but it was the teacher’s prerogative to determine the curriculum.

On the other hand, Lopez’s professor was actively censoring him. He punished Lopez not for the quality of the presentation or its adherence to the rules (it was open-ended assignment), but rather the content of Lopez’s speech. That’s unacceptable.

You can read Lopez’s official complaint against the school district here. It includes the grading sheet on which the professor wrote “Ask God what your grade is” and “Proselytizing is unacceptable in public schools.” Lopez is being represented by the Alliance Defense Fund.

Among the biggest changes for higher education is the outright elimination of a $3.5 billion “higher education facilities modernization fund” designed to be divided among states to finance renovations of “shovel ready” campus buildings (the House bill contains $6 billion for such a fund). College officials, anticipating the injection of funds, have been dusting off proposals for facilities that have gone wanting because their states couldn’t finance them or they couldn’t raise outside money for them.

Which must be very sad news for college administrators, but at least religious students don’t have to worry about being kicked out of buildings. David French over at Phi Beta Cons explains very clearly why the provision was troublesome to many:

Here’s how the prohibition might work in the real world: A university dusts off an old modernization project for a large and aging classroom building. Prior to submitting its funding proposal to the government, the university counsel’s office works to ensure that the building complies with all applicable regulations, and in so doing finds that a Christian student group uses the building for its Friday-night Bible study. This is clearly “use” of the building for “sectarian instruction,” so—to be on the safe side, since millions of dollars are at stake—he issues a notice that the group move its activities to another building. The process is repeated as other buildings are made eligible for funding.

We appear to be in the clear for now, but there’s no telling how the stimulus package will end up in its final form after countless rounds of compromises and revisions. The provision could get slipped back in or appear in some other form. Who knows? This is the federal government we’re talking about, after all.

Hat tip to FIRE.

(2) PROHIBITED USES OF FUNDS.—No funds awarded under this section may be used for—(A) the maintenance of systems, equipment, or facilities, including maintenance associated with any permissible uses of funds described in paragraph (1); (B) modernization, renovation, or repair of stadiums or other facilities primarily used for athletic contests or exhibitions or other events for which admission is charged to the general public; (C) modernization, renovation, or repair of facilities— (i) used for sectarian instruction, religious worship, or a school or department of divinity; or (ii) in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission; or (D) construction of new facilities. [Emphasis added.]

As FIRE goes on to note, this could very well cause problems, not necessarily from the federal government denying funds, but from college administrators banning religious groups from using facilities for fear of losing their stimulus money. And that would be unconstitutional per the Supreme Court case of Widmar v. Vincent, 454 U.S. 263 (1981).

There has already been one attempt to remove the provision from the bill, but it failed 43-54. FIRE suggests not striking the provision but merely amending it to make exceptions for religious groups using facilities. Either way, the language as it currently stands is unacceptable. You can get in touch with your state Senators and let them know you oppose the provision (or, y’know, the giant stimulus bill in general).

Rhesus macaques share about 93 percent of their genomic sequence with humans and are thus popular with medical researchers.

Not so at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, in New Delhi, where a troop of 80 to 100 of the monkeys have terrorized the campus for several years, entering waiting rooms, biting people, and grabbing food from patients and visitors.

The article goes on to explain how the university has tried several novel methods of getting rid of said monkeys, including hiring a “monkey catcher” and bringing in another species of monkey that the Rhesus fear*. But nothing has proved effective. Crafty little devils, those monkeys.

*One is reminded of the old lady who swallowed the fly.

The annual meeting of the MLA has long been known (and frequently satirized) for the sexual puns and imagery of paper titles [...] As the MLA meeting concluded on Tuesday, however, one session sought to put sex at academic conferences center stage. Drawing on literature, theory and experience, panelists considered not only the role of sex at conferences, but talked about identity, love and (perhaps more timely to many MLA attendees) the dismal academic job market.

*Warning: The article talks about casual sex between academics, which might be inappropriate for children and those with strong mental imagery.

The panel goes on to analyze and categorize the phenomenon of the conference hook-up, specifically at the MLA conference. The whole thing is by turns surreal and strangely appropriate, given academia’s semi-cloistered environment and narcissistic tendencies. Also, (thinking of most of my professors) it’s pretty gross.

On the upside, the panel reported monogamous relations at the conference were on the rise. Take heart, potential suitors; those lone wolves of academia might be tamed yet!

Before the session began, members of the MLA Radical Caucus handed out a statement protesting the organization’s decision to invite Mr. Horowitz to speak. Mr. Horowitz “consistently misrepresents the views of academics whom he wishes to discredit,” the caucus said. “He is not a scholar but a liar of the Goebbels school.”

Ah, but of course. How perfectly reasonable to compare an outspoken critic of academia to the propoganda minister of Nazi Germany. (In Internet land, this is known as Godwin’s Law.) I would expect no less from the “radical caucus,” though. The rest of the article is just as amusing because the “scholars” attacking Horowitz come off as the real partisan hacks. To wit: name-calling, shouting, general rudeness, etc. In fact, they come off like the self-righteous college kids they teach. Coincidence?

Among the more surprising of the findings, FIRE also reports that public universities are more restrictive of speech than private colleges. Considering that public universities, being part of the state, are explicitly bound by the Constitution, one would expect the results to be opposite*.

FIRE also finds that the biggest trend in repressing free speech is the growth of “bias incidents” and broad-sweeping harassment codes. Public universities are increasingly placing the right to not be offended above the right to speak one’s mind.

*I’m reminded of this NYT article on Muslim students in France who are abandoning the strictly secular public schools to attend private Catholic schools, where they are allowed to wear headscarves and pray.