A significant interest of mine is how public elementary and secondary schools—government schools—force diverse people into conflict rather than, as the gauzy mythology tells us, bringing them together. After all, unless people are prepared to ditch deeply held values and opinions about what’s best for their kids, they have no choice but to engage in political (and sometimes actual) combat. And whether it’s over evolution or “Bong Hits 4 Jesus,” engage they do.
There is a corollary to this in higher education. All taxpayers are compelled to support colleges and universities, whether through direct aid to institutions or to students. As a result, either taxpayers are forced to support all academic speech—including speech they may find abhorrent—or government must deem some academic speech unacceptable. Either way, government impinges on individual liberty.
The negative consequences of this are not nearly as apparent as in K-12, where values-based conflicts make headlines almost every day. The reason such headlines aren’t nearly as prevalent in higher ed may be because far fewer people have strong connections to the ivory tower.
This is not to say that collisions of taxpayer funding and academic freedom never make a loud bang. When the Ward Churchill “little Eichmanns” situation blew up in 2005, Colorado Governor Bill Owens immediately seized on the compelled-support angle, stating that “no one wants to infringe on Mr. Churchill’s right to express himself. But we are not compelled to accept his pro-terrorist views at state taxpayer subsidy nor under the banner of the University of Colorado.”
Colorado taxpayers, however, were technically required to pay for Churchill’s “pro-terrorist views.” While academic impropriety—not his 9/11 essay—officially got Churchill canned, the academic accusations were almost certainly brought to the fore by Churchill’s essay-delivered infamy. Indeed, in 2009 a Colorado court concluded that Churchill had, de facto, been improperly let go due to his 9/11 essay, and awarded him $1 in damages. Just this past April, however, the state Supreme Court ruled that Churchill was neither entitled to back pay nor reinstatement.
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