Yale's latest PC encounter

Receiving an email letter from President Levin describing Yale's latest encounter with politically correct forces, this time involving 16 Yale students and recent graduates and the federal government's Civil Rights office, probably no longer comes as a  surprise to most graduates of the school.  Formal speech codes have been in place on many college campuses for a number of years and have been written about and attacked by David Horowitz's FRONT PAGE Magazine also for years.  Warrior that he is,  Horowitz travels to campuses all over the country trying to convince students and school administrations that these codes are the antithetical to the mission of a liberal education, free speech, and the democratic way of life.

In this WSJ article by Peter Berkowitz, a Yale College and Law School graduate, makes many of these same points.  The bottom line argument of both Berkowitz and Horrowitz is that limiting free speech in any way by schools or the federal government, other than with "suasion, example, and discussion"* is a dangerous and slippery slope leading inevitably to thought control and a loss of freedom.  What muddies the water at Yale, and other schools, is the federal purse strings and the threat that if the government endorsed and sanctioned correct language and speech is not observed, the subsidy spigot will be turned off.  In Yale's case that amounts to 500 million dollars directed largely to the school of medicine for research.  The prospect of losing these dollars results in the servile email from Levin announcing university-sponsored study groups and the like to get at the bottom of the complaints registered with the Civil rights Office by the 16 graduate and undergraduate female students.  It grates to think that the head of a leading institution of higher education could possibly value federal subsidies over freedom of expression and inquiry.  Just maybe Yale would be better off dipping into its juicy 15 billion plus endowment and funding research that way as opposed to groveling before some statist bureaucrats in the federal government who could care less about free speech and inquiry.

** The conclusion in 1975 of a committee appointed by the then president of Yale, Kingman Brewster to explore the conditions of free expression on the Yale campus:  "If the university's overriding commitment to free expression is to be sustained, secondary social and ethical responsibilities must be left to the informal processes of suasion, example, and argument."