Yo yo yo.
So this is fairly old news, and I'm sure many of you have heard about it before. I've heard about it before, but I'd never heard this much of the detail. It is apparently a lot worse than I'd imagined.
I'll post a link to the article with Bret and Heathers side of the full story, but for those of you who haven't heard I'll briefly explain. If you are already familiar or you intend to read the article anyway then I'd recommend that you skip this wall of text.
Here's the article
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/bonfire-of-the-academies-two-professors-on-how-leftist-intolerance-is-killing-higher-education Bret Weinstein was a professor of evolutionary biology at evergreen state college, and despite being a very liberal left wing person he got into some trouble with evergreens New diversity and equity panel (full article explains this much better than me). This ended up hitting the news after Bret refused to take part in a day of absence, which traditionally had involved black students and staff voluntarily excluding themselves for a day to make a point about what it would be like if they weren't there. However on this year the group of students who organised the day of exclusion decided that white people should exclude themselves, and Bret (who is white if you hadn't guessed) felt that this was wrong so he emailed the organisers to let them know it and he did not comply with their demand that he exclude himself. Obviously he was accused of racism over this, but quite surprisingly he was also confronted with a mob of students who shouted at him, intimidated him and his students and demanded his resignation. This was recorded by members of the mob and uploaded onto YouTube, where it gained infamy as a display of disgusting behaviour by SJWs/crazy lefties/whatever. Anyway, instead of these students actually being reprimanded in any way they had their demands acquiesced to and were encouraged to continue by the staff members who had been teaching them to "protest" in this manner to start with. Things actually escalated, with Bret and his students being physically threatened and somehow the college administration even allowed students to patrol the campus with portugaling baseball bats. Anyhow, it ended up with Bret and Heather (his wife who is also an evolutionary biologist and who also taught at evergreen) having to resign as they were refused to take a sabbatical. They opened a law suit and eventually settled for half a million, but they are out of employment, currently out of careers that they love and their former students have lost phenomenal teachers. Plus the college administration has afaik not admitted to any wrongdoing, not attempted to reign in these "protesters" (on the contrary these students are still being indoctrinated into these armadilloty viewpoints) and of course the college is still being supported by US taxpayers.
Anyway, the reason I wanted to open this thread is that (according to Bret and Heather) this whole debacle was actually encouraged and potentially engineered by the college administration and faculty members, which begs the question of what should be done to prevent university administrators from acting this way. Should there be more legal responsibility placed upon them? Is there enough already, or even too much?
Personally my feeling is that academic freedom should be paramount (or as close to as reasonably possible), and I'd generally be very wary of the state dictating how individual universities should behave. However it doesn't seem to me that university administrators are primarily interested in academic freedom, and I don't see how to encourage them to prioritise it without state intervention.
I know that Jonathon Haidt has been promoting a new ranking of universities according to their diversity of political/philosophical opinion among teaching staff (heterodoxacademy if you're interested) but I'm not sure how accurate such rankings would be, or how effective when it comes to actually convincing prospective students to enrol into highly ranked universities.
My own feeling of UK universities is that administrators are generally more interested in maximising revenue (which currently would mean cramming in as many undergraduates into courses as possible without increasing the resources required to actually teach those courses properly) and increasing their own salaries than increasing the quality of their institutions, but that is not something I have much evidence for.
Also I'm sure we've had threads on university political leanings before but I did a very lazy search and I also think it goes beyond that. And Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying are pretty damn awesome.