VANDALS STRIKE DORM OF HARVARD LAW PROF REPRESENTING HARVEY WEINSTEIN: “Winthrop House was vandalized with graffiti reading ‘Down w/ Sullivan,’ ‘Your Silence is Violence,’ and ‘Whose Side Are You On?'” This and other charming facts in my colleague Samantha Harris’ article on Prof. Ronald Sullivan in the New York Daily News.  And of course Harvard admins (last seen setting up a McCarthy-style blacklist of evil sorority sisters) are joining the pile-on by conducting a “climate review” of the dorm. Gee, I wonder how that’s intended to come out.

THE 10 WORST COLLEGES FOR FREE SPEECH, 2019: New York and Alabama both “lead” the nation with two colleges a piece. (While different states often have very different cultures in a general sense, the same is rarely true of their universities.) Is your school on the list? With a special appearance from “eminent domain!”

A GOOD DEFENSE LAWYER WOULD NEVER REPRESENT A BAD PERSON! Harvard students demand Winthrop House faculty dean (basically, resident professor) Ronald Sullivan, who is a defense lawyer, be removed for agreeing to represent Harvey Weinstein. They write, “For survivors, hearing about other cases of sexual violence and assault can be triggering, even if only from the daily news cycle… [L]iving in a House with someone who is a daily reminder of the Weinstein case could be deeply traumatic.” Worse still, Sullivan has insufficiently sworn an oath of fealty to whatever grab bag of politics Harvard is calling “Title IX” these days, as his comments on another case indicate a disqualifying “disdain for Harvard’s Title IX policy.” This guy sounds like a serious villain.

“WE ARE BRINGING IN EXPERTS TO TALK ABOUT WHAT WE CAN BAN:” The inevitable reaction by the University of Oklahoma after two students made an Instagram-type video where one of them put black paint on her face and used a (weirdly garbled) racial slur. The students, of course, “will not return to campus.” This foolishness must stop. There is one way to get people to stop being racist or doing racist things, and that is to convince them that it’s wrong. Black musician Daryl Davis has convinced 200 actual KKK members to quit the Klan by, get this, actually talking to them. How many racists will be persuaded they’re wrong by OU’s efforts to “ban what we can?” 200? 100? Will there even be a single one? Would banning one of your opinions convince you it was wrong?

I misspoke. This isn’t foolishness. This is cynical political and PR calculation pretending to be a sincere effort against racism. The best that can be said of OU here is that it hasn’t gone the full David Boren collective punishment route this time. Yet.

UPDATE: Well, this guy clearly has to resign as Governor of Virginia now. Right? If you think he shouldn’t resign, but that the OU student also should not be “returning to campus,” I implore you to think about what that says about OU’s response to the video.

HIGHER ED’S LOBBYING ARM OPPOSES TELLING STUDENTS THEY’RE PRESUMED INNOCENT: In responding to proposed Title IX regulatory changes, the American Council on Education says that while some colleges are OK with saying students should be presumed innocent, “other colleges would be uncomfortable with including a federally mandated statement in the institution’s notice indicating a ‘presumption’ in favor of one party… We recommend that the Department remove this
requirement.” They actually say doing so might “cause confusion.” Give me a break.

WILL THIS TITLE IX CAMPUS CENSORSHIP CASE END UP IN THE SUPREME COURT? George Leef at the Martin Center suggests it might. The Fourth Circuit’s disastrous opinion in a case at the University of Mary Washington (a Virginia public institution) suggests that colleges might be required to censor the Internet under Title IX, which I think we can all agree was not what those who voted for that 1972 statute had in mind.

THE LATEST THING THAT WILL PROBABLY KILL US ALL: The Hill reports that Washington is alarmed about “deepfakes,” an open-source technology for realistically (sort of) mapping someone’s face onto another person’s body. Obviously, this could be used in disinformation campaigns. (And, of course, people are using it for porn.) Time to panic? Don’t worry, lawmakers and “experts” have a plan, which appears to be:

1. Pass laws to ban the Deepfakes software and/or actually making videos with it, or even classify it as terrorism.
2. Completely ignore how ineffective and absurdly impossible this was last time, even our own country, where the law supposedly applies.
3. ???
4. Russians successfully prevented from interfering with election using Deepfakes software.

As usual, when it comes to making laws about technology or censorship, we are just not sending our best people. Sad!

INSPECTOR JAVERT HARDEST HIT: KC Johnson has the news that today yet another actual court found that a college student accused of sexual misconduct must be allowed to actually face his accusers in campus court, dealing another blow to the “single investigator” model of Title IX discipline. Colleges may yet catch up with the ancient Romans on this right, if and when the Education Department’s proposed Title IX regulations go into effect.

AS BAD AS IT SOUNDS: The Fourth Circuit has alarmingly decided that Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause might require colleges to block Internet sites or services if someone complains about anonymous online “harassment.” Yes, require, not allow. It’s that bad.

ACTUAL FACTS ABOUT CAMPUS DUE PROCESS: Amidst alarmism over the proposed changes to Title IX regulations that would finally bring some basic due process protections to those tried in campus courts, FIRE’s new due process report exposes what became of campus “justice” under the previous “guidance” regime. Of the nation’s top 53 national universities:

• 3 in 4 don’t bother to guarantee the presumption of innocence
• 9 in 10 do not guarantee meaningful cross-examination in cases of alleged sexual misconduct
• Only 1 out of 53 allows students to have an attorney participate without significant limitations

While there’s lots more to be upset about, I think the failure to explicitly guarantee that the accused are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty is the real “tell” about what schools are doing. There’s just no way an American with even a “watched Law & Order one time” level of awareness leaves that out by accident.

BERKELEY SCIENTISTS BUILDING CENSORSHIP AI: These folks, and others at the big social media companies, are literally building advanced artificial intelligences to more completely silence “hate speech.” This has to be among the dumbest things we humans have ever done: we’re putting our best minds to the task of building the most complete and efficient apparatus of totalitarian censorship imaginable. It’s just private companies, you say? Good thing no government would have an interest in “acquiring” this technology once it’s out there, right?

THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY: FIRE’s Samantha Harris and I are in today’s Washington Post discussing how some common tactics used in the campus conflict over Israeli/Palestinian issues are hurting American students and faculty members, while having no discernible effect abroad.

9 IN 10 AMERICAN COLLEGES RESTRICT FREE SPEECH: FIRE’s annual report on campus speech codes, out today, found that most schools still maintain policies stripping students of at least some free speech rights — though the number of schools with the most severe restrictions continues to drop. Of course, schools don’t always follow their own policies, but FIRE has received far fewer reports of censorship from “green light” schools with no unconstitutional speech codes. How does your school fare?

KAFKA IN CHICAGO: Will the University of Chicago decide to sue a student it expelled 4 days before graduation for the “offense” of keeping a copy of the evidence against him and using it to try to prove his innocence in a real court? That’s the only-in-2018 lede of this Chicago Maroon article about a campus sexual assault case.

WHY SHOULDN’T COLLEGE STUDENTS HAVE THE EQUIVALENT OF MIRANDA RIGHTS? If colleges are going to put students on trial — and they are — they’re going to have to make it as fair as they can. And what George Leef describes in this article isn’t it.

BRITAIN: WHERE HOMEWORK GETS YOU A VISIT FROM THE COPS. This is utterly horrifying, and totally destructive to academic freedom. But it’s not exactly a strain to imagine clicking on the “wrong” link at a college even in America might get you a visit from the campus “bias response team” in the very near future.

PAPER BALLOTS HAVE FAILED. It’s obvious that our election “system” cannot be trusted with either paper ballots or hackable computer voting machines. I have a solution: mechanical voting machines. 1. You can’t steal them, as they are huge and obvious. 2. You can’t hack them (without a machinist) and you certainly can’t hack them systematically. 3. It is hard to miscount with them – you literally look at the wheels on the back at the end of the night, add them up with a calculator, and call in the numbers. Done. Want a recount? Have someone else grab a calculator and look at the wheels. And don’t give me this “but they can break” stuff – if we can put in odometer in every car, I think we can handle this, and it’s not like the scanners and electronic machines aren’t breaking all the time.

UPDATE: Commenters are right that they cannot absolutely be protected from fraud committed by the actual election authorities. Even minimal procedures would make this pretty difficult, but yeah, I was probably not cynical enough here.

NEW TITLE IX/SEXUAL HARASSMENT REGULATIONS INTRODUCED: And they look pretty good, from FIRE’s perspective. Kudos to the Department of Education for moving to the Supreme Court standard for sexual harassment instead of using one that “just happens” to silence a lot of protected, but unpopular, speech.

COLLEGE HALLOWEEN MADNESS STARTS BEFORE TRICK-OR-TREAT: The fact that the mayor of New York City gets involved in making decisions about who can talk to NYU college classes is itself an indictment of our culture of speech suppression these days.

SLATE ON “THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF HATE SPEECH ON GAB.” Insufficient censorship is now “moral bankruptcy.” We’ve seen this before.

WHAT DO COLLEGE CHIEF DIVERSITY OFFICERS ACCOMPLISH? George Leef covers a recent paper that suggests that whatever it is they’re doing, it’s not increasing the number of diverse faculty members. I have met a few of these folks, and they are generally smart, well-intentioned people. Regardless of how you feel about their goals, if this job isn’t working, these folks shouldn’t be wasted on it — and neither should our money.

A NEW EFFORT TO “CHANGE THE TERMS” TO FIGHT ONLINE “HATE”: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some serious and valid concerns about this effort, saying, “Corporate Speech Police Are Not the Answer to Online Hate.” It’s difficult to think of any question for which “corporate speech police” will be a good answer.

WANNA GO FULL MCCARTHY? DO IT ON YOUR OWN DIME, HARVARD: “The proposed amendment would prevent any ‘institution of higher education that receives funds’ under the Higher Education Act from punishing students for joining any ‘constitutionally protected’ group — whether or not that group is affiliated with the school.” Harvard currently blacklists students for joining officially disfavored off-campus groups, and FIRE sees no reason taxpayers should have to pay for this.

PREVENTING THE RISE OF “FASCISM”: “I can think of no better way of doing this than excising the entire alt-right from YouTube.” Sorry, but that means you’re not thinking. If your response to aggrieved people is to add some entirely legitimate grievances to their list, it’s time to reexamine your strategy.

TIRED OF AD HOMINEM ATTACKS INSTEAD OF ACTUALLY ADDRESSING IDEAS? So is Conor Freidersdorf from the Atlantic, whose comprehensive takedown of a Guardian review of the bestselling book The Coddling of the American Mind on this basis is a sight to behold. (Disclosure: the book’s co-author is my boss.) And in Quillette, FIRE’s Pamela Paresky goes into further detail about how so much of what passes for “reasoning” these days is really the operation of taboo and “moral pollution.” If you’re one of the many people who just can’t stand political discussions these days (I quit posting to Facebook for just that reason), these articles go a long way towards explaining why.