issued a statement<\/a> in opposition to the compact.<\/p>\n\u201cA government that can reward colleges and universities for speech it favors today can punish them for speech it dislikes tomorrow,\u201d concludes the statement. \u201cThat\u2019s not reform. That\u2019s government-funded orthodoxy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still others who support Penn\u2019s decision say that the larger issue with the compact is federal funding for higher education in the first place. The Center Square spoke with Dr. Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank.<\/p>\n
McCluskey emphasized that because education funding isn\u2019t enumerated in the Constitution, it isn\u2019t within the federal government\u2019s reach. Using federal money to dictate more limits on academic freedom would, for him, be a step in the wrong direction.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe right way for higher ed to operate is without government funding. That would mean there would be no federal student aid and then very little federal research money,\u201d said McCluskey, though he acknowledged that within the current system, that would be an impossible ask.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s easy to kind of blame the institutions and say, \u2018Well, if the institutions don’t like it, they shouldn’t take the money,\u2019\u201d said McCluskey. \u201cBut the federal money is so ubiquitous, it is almost impossible to be a viable institution that doesn’t take – especially – the student aid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Funding aside, McCluskey had concerns about the implications the compact has for academic freedom.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s particularly concerning about the compact is when it does things like say, \u2018Well, you have to have intellectual or ideological balance,\u201d said McCluskey. \u201cWho is going to determine – and how are they going to determine – whether or not your university has sufficient ideological balance? That’s not spelled out anywhere that I’ve seen. And so it’s an open question, and when you start to try and answer it for yourself, it gets pretty concerning.\u201d<\/p>\n
McCluskey also pointed out that there are variations within the broader body of the political left and right with a mix of positions on any number of issues. He noted that certain academic fields would lend themselves toward what might be perceived as a \u201cleft\u201d or \u201cright\u201d leaning political viewpoint. McCluskey was hesitant to cite specific areas where this would be the case, noting that his own expertise is in the field of education.<\/p>\n
One example of how these concerns could play out, however, might be climate science. While most scientists agree that climate change is influenced by humans, skepticism as a political position is almost exclusively seen among conservatives. To create an ideologically \u201cbalanced\u201d department studying climate change would be a highly inaccurate representation of the scientific community.<\/p>\n
Yet, while the debate as to why schools tend to lean to the left rages on in the U.S., the fact that liberals far outnumber conservatives among college faculty is undisputed. That\u2019s why despite his own reservations about the compact, McCluskey said he understood the underlying reasoning driving it.<\/p>\n
McCluskey said that, from what he\u2019s observed, conservative policy analysts largely disagree with the compact, \u201cBut I think they are sympathetic to the motivation behind it, which is that higher education has been very hostile to conservatives for a very long time and is happy to take conservatives\u2019 tax money, and they just feel that that’s unjust and that this would be a way to rebalance the scales.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(The Center Square) – About two weeks after receiving the proposal, the University of Pennsylvania announced it would…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4346,28,30,29],"class_list":{"0":"post-6349","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pennsylvania","8":"tag-higher-education","9":"tag-pennsylvania","10":"tag-pennsylvania-headlines","11":"tag-pennsylvania-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}