by TimorousBestie | 2025-10-10 19:23:51+00:00
Let’s focus on #2: Marketplace of Ideas and Civil Discourse.

> Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.

Only conservative ideas receive protected status under this compact. Why? It is objectively false that only conservative ideas are punished, belittled, and met with threats of violence on the relevant college campuses.

> Such policies also shall recognize that academic freedom is not absolute, and universities shall adopt policies that prevent discriminatory, threatening, harassing, or other behaviors that abridge the rights of other members of the university community.

Read strictly, this clause implies no protests or demonstrations of any kind of a college campus, including e.g., the annual pro-life demonstrations at my alma mater (which occasionally became violent, by the way). It is naive to imagine this clause will be enforced equitably.

> Signatories commit to rigorous, good faith, empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints among faculty, students, and staff at all levels and to sharing the results of such assessments with the public; and to seek such a broad spectrum of viewpoints not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit.

Every biology department must hire creationist professors. Every astronomy department must hire flat-earthers. Every geology department must hire young-earthers. Every medical school must hire germ-theory-skeptical epidemiologists.

And across departments, too: we need mathematicians who believe in Fomenko’s new chronology and ultrafinitist historians.

I assume you’ll argue these are hyperbole, but I’ve encountered such people during my time in academia.

> Signatories acknowledge that the freedom to debate requires conditions of civility. Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views.

So, logically, a professor of classical philosophy must entertain homophobic assertions about Plato and Aristotle, and cannot sanction in any way the student interrupting class in this fashion.

I also see that a Christian student could occupy a Hillel building (a Jewish student organization) and could not be legally removed or administratively sanctioned for doing so under this section of the policy.

You might argue that these fall under the ban on “heckler’s veto” defined later in this paragraph, but strictly speaking they don’t. The “heckler’s veto” ban applies to the hypothetical Jewish students attempting to convince the Christian student to leave.

> Signatories shall adopt policies prohibiting incitement to violence, including calls for murder or genocide or support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.

Recall how NSPM-7 recently expanded the definition of “terrorist organization” to include groups that display some of the following “common threads”: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

How any Islamic student group, no matter how explicitly pro-Israel and pro-Christianity, survives this definition is an real question.

EDIT: To those who believe this example is unjustified, please see https://www.christianity.com/newsletters/breakpoint/understa... for a typical American Evangelical opinion on the status of Islam.

> The university shall impartially and vigorously enforce all rights and restrictions it adopts with respect to free speech and expression.

As we have seen, this concluding sentence is contradicted by the whole of the policy that appears before it.

How is that for a breakdown? I didn’t say “fascist“ once, may I collect my five pounds?