Alan Charles Kors - professor and undergraduate chair of history, University of Pennsylvania; director of general honors program, University of Pennsylvania; chair, SAS Committee on Undergraduate Education; fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies; editor-in-chief, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment; president and co-founder, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education; coauthor, with Harvey Silverglate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses; editor-in-chief, Oxford University Press, Encyclopedia of Enlightenment; former fellow, Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University; creator, The Birth of the Modern Mind; recipient, Lindback Foundation Award and Ira Abrams Memorial Award; twice elected, Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility and School of Arts and Sciences Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility; cofounder, Van Pelt College House; graduated, summa cum laude, Princeton University, MA and PhD., European History, Harvard University. Philadelphia, PA.

 PROFESSOR KORS: I am singularly privileged to be in your company. It is rare in academic life that one finds oneself surrounded by warriors for human liberty, human responsibility and human dignity. It is truly a privilege to be here.

I should like to talk about the assault upon liberty and dignity in American higher education today.

By the late 1960s, students had destroyed most of the in loco parentis functions of the university, that is, university standing in the place of parents. In the past 15 years, however, the heirs of the +60s have changed their motto from "Don’t trust anyone over 30" to "Don’t trust anyone under 30."

Now in power, they have institutionalized their views in the in loco parentis role of universities. They have made their ideological analysis of American society, sexuality and oppression the official secular religion of academic life. In their view, undergraduates enter universities inadequately aware of the effects of American racism, sexism and heterosexism on their psyches, behaviors and society, a set of phenomena that academic administrators of student life must define and explain to them.

From this perspective, most Americans who are themselves so-called minorities (though each of us in fact is a minority of one, and indeed women are a majority) do not adequately understand the nature and methods of their oppression and have internalized the very values by which society oppresses them. Leninists labeled this phenomenon "fools’ consciousness." What could workers possibly know, compared to leftist intellectuals, about what workers actually wanted? And their murderous contempt for those whom they claim to love drowned our world in blood.

Today’s academics label it "internalized oppression," and they identify it most easily with any tendency to reject, resist or question their own left-wing view of reality.

Now countless courses in the official curriculum vilify the nature of American and Western civilization and society.

Indeed, it would clarify much at American universities if we divided our current programs in the arts and sciences into two distinct schools: the liberal arts, to which I believe the best minds would go, and a school of oppression studies, where adversarial culture truly could make its home more honestly.

Students in the latter school could take introductory courses on various neo-Marxist and gender/feminist theories of oppression. They could move on to area studies of oppression, the West and its influence anywhere in the world, and in senior year, they could take specialized seminars, the oppression of Ivy League women, for example. Such a division would clarify many things. But the growth of enough courses to create whole schools of oppression studies is insufficient for the ideologues and pathologues. Too many students remain independent and critical in their thought and values.

Most so-called minorities truly reject any radical politics. Most whites simply do not feel guilty about their birth. And women and men, far from perceiving each other as class enemies, continue to fall in love and even to write each other poetry. Thus, the full weight of administered authority must be brought to bear over students’ extracurricular and private lives, their speech, their humor, their thought and conscience.

The ideologues’ contempt for actual breathing students is as boundless as their benevolence toward undergraduates in the abstract. Once they refused to recognize the heirs of the ‘60s as their gurus and natural leaders, those campus radicals turned against students as beings without agency or dignity, obviously mystified and brainwashed by their families, churches, communities and culture -- little children who needed not education and deepening, but therapeutic political transformation.

The problem of American universities today is not students but the arrogance, wickedness and cowardice of the adults who teach them there.

A few practices and policies stand out on campuses today. One is so-called diversity and multi-cultural education. In theory, multiculturalism will invite the deep study, appreciation and celebration of a diversity of cultures.

Don’t hold your breaths.

The so-called multiculturalists most decidedly do not mean the deep study and appreciation of conservative Protestant culture, traditional Catholic culture, or black American pentecostal culture, nor of any assimilationist immigrant cultures, nor, to say the least, of white rural Southern cultures. They also do not mean the serious study of West African culture or of Confucian culture, both of which would require linguistic accomplishment and rigorous inquiry to achieve understanding. All that they mean is the appreciation and celebration of those radical intellectuals who think exactly as they do about the nature and causes of oppression wherever they are found and however non-representative they are of the broader groups they allegedly represent.

The best side of academic multiculturalism is culinary, and college cafeterias indeed will have their occasional and welcomed Korean or Jamaican food days. That is for public consumption. That is not what multiculturalism is about.

Here is precisely what the multiculturalists mean by the term. Their belief is that there is one singular, dominant, evil Western culture, Greek and Christian in its origins, that creates, enforces and spreads capitalistic and sexual injustice everywhere. That is monoculturalism. Any voice that challenges this satanic culture, and only those voices, are multi-cultural.

That is why black radicals are multi-cultural but black conservatives or business people are not. That is why the Sandinistas are multi-cultural but the Cuban entrepreneurs of Dade County, Florida, are not. That is why the Vietnamese Stalinists are multi-cultural but Vietnamese refugees, until and unless they see themselves as oppressed by American culture, are not. If one grasps that, one understands what the multi means in multi-cultural.

Further, the academic view of diversity is humanly and morally impoverished -- race and sexuality but not religion, ethics, personality, taste or private passions and commitments. In fact, the most marginalized groups on most major campuses are devout religious believers, often on their views of sexuality but indeed on issues of their most passionate beliefs.

The most morally heinous side of the regnant academic view of diversity, however, is its rejection of the moral individual, free and individually responsible for his/her being, for the academic cultural left as for the national socialists. Identity is the identity of the group, which brings me to my second theme, and it is the crime, for which this generation truly will have to answer before history, of officially designated group identities.

At the intellectual level, current notions of identity are crude and laughable. Universities speak of white, European, and Eurocentric as one single cultural phenomenon, linking all of those look-alike, think-alike Finns and Sicilians, French atheists and Eastern Orthodox slavs, basques and Iowans into one identity. Now that’s intellectually deep, isn’t it?

At the humane level, the assignment of official group identity fed by universities has been a dysfunctional approach that has worsened, not bettered, human relations and failed to take advantage of the open spirit with which most undergraduates enter higher education. Our campuses, under the multiculturalists, have become ever more segregated and more balkanized.

Morally, the mania of official group identity has entailed a denial of the only authentic meaning of liberation for any group, the right to individuate, responsible for one’s choices, free of external coercions and impositions.

Authentic liberation is the right of individuals to define themselves religiously, politically, in conscience and in terms of voluntary group affiliations. But at almost every campus, we have so-called women’s centers that operationally distinguish between on the one hand "real" women with appropriate radical consciousness, the vital constituency, and on the other ersatz or fake women, who have internalized their oppression, the lost souls in need of awareness. It is an unconscionable assault upon the dignity and responsibility of the individual.

 Power of such magnitude needs to demonstrate that it controls the symbolic and judicial environment, which brings me to my third theme, speech codes, all because no one has the courage to call them that, the verbal behavior or verbal conduct provisions of harassment codes.

In what should be a national scandal, given the crucial importance of an education in conditions of freedom to America, universities are the scene of a ferocious assault upon politically incorrect free speech. Almost every college or university restricts the free speech rights of their students and faculties in terms of verbal conduct that creates a "hostile environment," and most offer the most extraordinary and politically selective variations on that theme.

Private universities, being voluntary associations, may adopt, of course, whatever rules they choose within the law. That liberty, however, does not give universities the right to commit fraud, promising non-discrimination and then discriminating precisely by race or sexuality, promising academic freedom and then delivering selective academic oppression.

If one attends an evangelical college or a Benedictine seminary, one understands full well the openly advertised protected values and symbols of that community, a protection that one accepts voluntarily. But conservatives or other politically incorrect individuals who attend most of our so-called elite institutions discover that they have fewer rights than others only after their deposit checks have been cashed and only after it is effectively too late to go elsewhere.

Speech codes become intolerably wicked by virtue of their intended and systemic double standards. They represent in practice the triumph of the ultra left-wing notion, increasingly mainstream on our campuses, that tolerance and legal equality are repressive agencies and that universities should be in the forefront of reassigning rights unequally in order to achieve "progressive" ends.

Speech codes are almost always defended on the ground of protecting historically oppressed minorities from offense, but even on those terms they are reprehensible, denying the dignity and strength of meeting speech that one abhors with further speech, with reason, with evidence, with cold contempt, with moral outrage and moral and religious witness. Repressed, prejudice simply goes deeper into people’s souls, and no one has the chance to know how people think and how to respond in appropriate form. As Justice Brandeis correctly observed, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

Speech codes have created an arena of double standards of arbitrary partisan enforcement, of the raw use of power to enforce a political agenda in a nation whose minority rights ironically absolutely depend upon equal justice under law. The double standard of speech codes at our universities is teaching the worst possible lesson, that one’s freedom should depend upon one’s local power. Thus, Christian students are asked to bear the insults of Serrano’s sculpture, (it is the name he gave it) the Piss Christ, a crucifix immersed in the artist’s own urine, of obscene portraits of the Christian clergy, and of signs reading "Born again bigot, go away," explicitly in the name of freedom of speech and expression. If those Christian students offend their critics, however, it is labeled unbearable incivility or harassment. Has anyone ever been found guilty of anti-religious harassment?

In fact, as anyone honest who knows anything about universities could tell you, the most common terms of racial abuse on our campuses are not the crude epithets of the Ku Klux Klan but the hurtful and hateful terms Uncle Tom or Oreo (black on the outside, white on the inside) or banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) directed against blacks or Asians who have chosen to have white friends among their objects of affection or indeed who have chosen to study Western civilization. But no one ever has been prosecuted for those hostile terms.

You may call any Christian a Jesus freak; any veteran, but no one who has an abortion, a baby killer; any black with white friends an Uncle Tom; any anti-feminist a Barbie doll. It is an unconscionable hypocrisy. If any exhibit on our campuses displayed a la Serrano a Star of David or a portrait of Malcolm X immersed in urine, they would close down the gallery. They would send everyone to sensitivity training. They would have a day of shame on the university calendar to be remembered annually by candlelight vigils until the end of time.

This kind of hypocrisy now is back as universities seek to indoctrinate their students, which leads me to my final theme, the rise of in loco parentis social work.

Increasingly in today’s universities, in a process virtually ignored even by critics of political correctness, Offices of Student Life, from their chief administrator to the organizers of freshman orientations that have become ideological boot camps to the resident assistant in the dormitory, have moved from service providers to self-proclaimed progressive social workers whose mission is to bring the lost children of America into the enlightenment of their partisan political awareness. In choosing their residential and student life thought police and social engineers, universities have hung out "Not Welcome" signs for all those who dissent from their political ideology. No conservatives, Republicans, or non-liberal Christians need apply. They are all excluded from inclusivity.

And hidden beyond the veil of confidentiality of campus judicial proceedings, a large number of "crimes," charges of politically incorrect crimes, are adjudicated by a settlement, the academic equivalent of a plea bargain, in which the frightened respondent, who has as an alternative potentially crushing penalties, agrees confidentially to undergo intrusive and partisan sensitivity training on matters of race and sexuality, training done by the most ideological zealots and radicals on campus. Such sensitivity training is nothing less than thought reform more appropriate to the University of Beijing during the Cultural Revolution than to the institutions of a free society.

If just once a feminist professor was sentenced to sensitivity training for offending believing Christians and sent off to the Christian Varsity Fellowship for her moral betterment, the walls of the university would crumble. But supported by taxpayers, parents and philanthropy, the double standard rules unchallenged.

Students choose universities above all for the future value of a degree and for the quality of the learning, inquiry, social life and in the broader sense, discovery that will occur there. They do not choose universities to be their therapists, let alone a political police selectively enforcing restrictive rules governing voluntary relationships outside the classroom.

We must anathematize every university that, without truth in advertising, seeks group-think, unequal rights, the invasion of private conscience and the chilling of debate and expression.

Let them have the courage, if they truly believe what they say privately to me and to themselves, to put it on page 1 of their catalogs and fundraising appeals: "This university believes that your sons and daughters are the racist, sexist, homophobic progeny or victims of a racist, sexist, homophobic, eurocentric, Christian and oppressive society. In return for tuition and massive taxpayer subsidy, we shall assign rights on a compensatory basis and undertake by coercion their moral and political enlightenment."

Truth in advertising. They haven’t the guts to do it.

History, for better or worse, has made us all actors in this context. Our multiculturalism, increasingly defined tribally, has become the multiculturalism of the former Yugoslavia. Half a century after the defeat of Naziism, we distinguish by blood, and we equate blood with culture.

It will not last. America patiently has subsidized critics who have the utmost contempt for its values of individual identity, responsibility and rights. Indeed it has entrusted its young to such minds. That is a terrible folly, but it is also an act of tolerance and freedom truly unparalleled in all of human history. But it is an utterly absurd supposition that the victims of partisan codes, intrusions upon conscience and selective bias enforcement will acquiesce indefinitely in the double standards upon which their campus legal inequality depends.

Human patience can be remarkably enduring, but no majority in a democratic society will suffer injurious double standards forever. There will be a day of reckoning, but when it comes, where will one then find a broad coalition already formed around the love of liberty and legal equality?

 Universities so desperately need men and women for all seasons who bear witness to beliefs antithetical to the new tyrannies: the universalism of legal equality over the crude official division of race and sexuality; individual liberty and individual responsibility over the group politics of victimization and entitlement; privacy of conscience over the totalitarian intrusion into the innermost recesses of the soul. These are the moral values that in this world at least are the preconditions of our being free human beings with dignity, capable of morals. The struggle for that freedom at our universities is one of the defining struggles of the age in which we all find ourselves.

Do not just smile at academic follies. They strike deeply with wickedness and with malice at responsible liberty and at decency. However long it takes, let us struggle to reclaim our institutions of higher learning, where the very students whom you most would admire feel the most abandoned and the most alone. There are no sidelines. They must know that they are not abandoned and that they are not alone.

QUESTION: I have been astounded that almost nothing seems to have been done about these sensitivity things. I’m not talking about just at the universities. I’m talking about companies that are forcing people into them. Why has nothing been done? Or am I wrong, has there?

PROFESSOR KORS: No, you’re absolutely right, and your question is profound in two ways. One, how is it possible that this society has tolerated these intrusions upon private conscience at our universities, and how is it possible that now they have spilled over from our universities into corporate life itself? Before we get to the legal issue, one answer lies in the astonishing cowardice of our fellow citizens in this age. If one does not draw a line around the privacy and dignity of one’s soul and conscience, where would one ever draw a line?

There should be contractual limitations to the rights of one’s employer over one’s soul; if not legal, in terms of any legislative act or court finding, then let it be contractual.

Who in the corporate world would accept having to go against conscience to the church of one’s employer?

Who would accept being subjected to the inquisition and therapy of belief and conscience by someone of one’s employer’s choosing?

Employers, of course, are doing it on the advice of risk-limitation advisors. How do we prove that we’re not guilty of harassment? Well, we’ve had every employee talk openly at sensitivity training seminars about race or sexuality.

But at the universities, and I intend to fight this battle, the situation is different. People of the United States, through their representatives in Congress, passed the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Universities love one part of that, the part that allows them to keep their judicial systems secret and free from public scrutiny. But there is another part to that law that would deny federal funding to universities that have programs inquiring into the views and attitudes of students on matters of race and sexuality, private matters involving the student’s family that call upon students to reveal embarrassing or demeaning behavior, in short, that intrude upon the religious conscience, the family privacy and the individual privacy of a student. Our universities have been violating that law for the past ten years, and that is a fight that I intend to fight and to win.

QUESTION: I’m a senior at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin. Among my many quite-liberal professors, I have one who is confident enough in his Marxist ideology to hang the portrait of Marx in his office. I have him for my senior seminar. What would you recommend to students like me? How should we act in dealing with such professors?

PROFESSOR KORS: That is a wonderful question. I will tell you from experience. There’s no reason in theory why this should work, but from experience, this is what works.

Go talk to the professor in office hours and say, "Professor, I respect absolutely your right to hold your own political beliefs, but I want to make certain of something. Will I be graded down in this course for disagreement, for my mind and conscience, with your views or will you respect my academic freedom in this course?"

The professor will find some timid coward whom he knows disagrees with him to penalize. He will bend over backwards to prevent you from being the case.

The academic left are bullies, and like bullies everywhere, if you stand up to them with backbone, they crumble. The first shot across their bow is that question, "Professor, will I be graded down for sincere intellectual or moral disagreement with you in this class?" At that point, you have him over a barrel.

If I hung a portrait of Reagan in one of my classes, by the way, the university would come in and say I created a hostile environment for everyone but me. That’s right.

QUESTION: Professor, like everyone here, I very much enjoy your comments and appreciate your outspokenness. I’d like to ask you to comment on one thing that relates to potential avenues of solving things.

People tend to say, "Oh, it’s professors, because they have tenure." But as we both know, public universities have Boards of Regents that are typically business people who are appointed by governors who are supposed to be looking after these matters. I would very much appreciate your comments on the whole process and the roles played, not played, or that should be played, or maybe they’re out playing, by the Boards of Regents.

PROFESSOR KORS: I think your question is as important a question as can be posed. When universities act -- when university administrations act in these politically correct and new tyrannical manners, they always claim to have the right to do so in the name of the corporation. They understand that that is where legal power resides. But Boards of Trustees and Regents across this country in general have lost the root of the word fiduciary, keeping faith. They have lost the root of the word fiduciary and limited it to fiscal and investment and financial planning. They have abdicated their far-deeper fiduciary responsibility to pass on free institutions to a free society and to prevent the taxpayers’ funds from subsidizing private ideological fiefdoms.

Trustees are the victims of two things, it seems to me. But they need the moral and intellectual courage to overcome them both. First, there is an industry of the control of information to them by administrations. I’ve seen that at so many universities. The highest IQ’s are not on the faculty. The highest (heaven help us if they are), the highest IQ’s are those who control the flow of information to trustees. And trustees have almost no independent means of getting that information.

Two, trustees have bought into a model in which any concern for quality, for decency, for fairness, for liberty and for responsibility are deemed interferences in academic freedom.

So there they are, being cited as the compelling legal authority, the corporation that authorizes through its rubber-stamping of administrations to do what they do. But in fact the trustees who constitute the boards of those corporations accept an argument that if they "micromanage" anything beyond university investment and building strategies, that they are interfering with academic freedom. Well, it is time that they interfered with academic tyranny.