It’s no secret that Wisconsin’s taxpayer-funded colleges and universities are dominated by liberal thought and dogma. A University of Wisconsin System survey released earlier this year showed free speech under assault at the Badger State’s institutions of higher education.
The question is, what are lawmakers going to do about it?
The Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities this week held a public hearing on “intellectual diversity” on Wisconsin’s 13 four-year campuses. In four-plus hours of testimony from a national expert on campus free expression, a retired UW System professor and college students, the hearing drove home a growing problem: Conservatives are being silenced on college campuses.
“It’s very important to keep pushing on this subject,” State Representative Dave Murphy (R-Greenville), chairman of the Colleges and Universities committee, told The Wisconsin Daily Star. “The survey was done but if we don’t push on this, that survey is going to sit in a drawer.”
Murphy said he sees legislation on free speech coming out of the survey and the hearing. It could involve docking state funding from universities that curtail student and academic freedom, or rewarding higher ed institutions for hitting goals on real intellectual diversity, the lawmaker said.
“We may look at things on diversity, equity and inclusion. I think this needs to be fixed,” Murphy said of the woke social justice agenda. “DEI [advocates] really have a hard time defending what they’re doing.”
The University of Wisconsin System survey found nearly half of the students who responded believe administrators should ban the expression of views that some students feel cause harm to certain groups of people.
Some 68 percent of those surveyed say students should report an instructor who says something in class deemed harmful to certain groups.
As suspected, the survey uncovered polar differences in how conservative students, view speech on college campuses compared to their more numerous liberal peers. Republican lawmakers have frequently charged that Wisconsin’s public universities are labs of left-wing thought and that conservative perspectives are often not welcome.
When asked whether they had felt pressured by an instructor to agree with a specific political or ideological view being expressed in class, 15 percent of those who identified as very liberal said yes, while 64 percent of those identifying as very conservative said they’d faced such pressure.
Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of Republican students said they shied away from expressing their opinions in class because they feared the instructor would consider their views offensive.
Like similar free speech surveys at colleges across the country, the UW System questionnaire found students who often value “safe spaces” over the protections of the First Amendment.
Jacquelin Pfeffer Merill, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Campus Free Expression Project, told the committee free speech is under constant threat. In particular, Pfeffer Merill placed some of the blame on a “censorius minority” on college campuses amplified by social media.
“It may be that there are very few students who would use social media to post classroom students’ remarks,” Pfeffer Merill said, according to Wisconsin Public Radio. “But the damage that those few can do makes it just too chancy to express a view that’s outside the campus mainstream.”
Ali Beneker, president of the UW-Madison chapter of the right-leaning Young America’s Foundation, struggled to get clearance from the university’s powers-that-be to invite conservative activist Matt Walsh to speak on campus. His October speech was part of his “What is a Woman?” tour, critical of transgender policies.
“The hoops they made her jump through — over-regulation of her in comparison to other organizations on campus, which had their speakers approved at the snap of a finger,” Murphy said.
Even after the group received approval, the UW-Madison student union was vandalized with spray-painted messages attacking Walsh and his conservative hosts.
Democrats on the committee complained that Murphy was ‘cherry-picking” invited guests. He said he could have selected dozens of students and others to tell their stories, but there was only so much time for testimony.
State Representative Jodi Emerson (D-Eau Claire) asked whether banning speakers who espouse false views or disinformation would be acceptable.
“So, how do we deal with situations where a speaker comes in backing a topic, basing their lecture around something that is just factually inaccurate?” Emerson said, according to WRN.
Who decides? is the subsequent question. Americans in recent years have seen myriad examples of information deemed “disinformation” turn out to be anything but.
“There’s just a very different dynamic going on campus now,” Murphy said. “I like to say that 10 percent of professors are conservatives, 60 percent are liberal, and 30 percent are woke left. The 60 percent who are liberal who used to [debate] with the conservatives are deathly afraid of the woke left and will not challenge them.”
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Dave Murphy” by Wisconsin State Representative Dave Murphy. Background Photo “University of Wisconsin-Madison” by University of Wisconsin-Madison.
