In a bit over a week Stanford University–or more properly the Stanford University School of Business in conjunction with the Hoover Institution–will hold a conference on promoting free speech in academia.

Predictably a bunch of Stanford professors are trying to cancel it, either literally or metaphorically, complaining that their voices will not be heard. Not that they weren’t invited to attend, of course, but rather that, having declined, they will not be just let in, presumably to protest and disrupt the conference. If they attended as invited guests they would be implicitly acknowledging that the ideas about which the conference is based upon are legitimate, and nothing Leftist dislike can be legitimized in any way.

The premise of the conference is laid out on the front page of their website:

Academic freedom, open inquiry, and freedom of speech are under threat as they have not been for decades. Visibly, academics are “canceled,” fired, or subject to lengthy disciplinary proceedings in response to academic writing or public engagement. Less visibly, funding agencies, university bureaucracies, hiring procedures, promotion committees, professional organizations, and journals censor some kinds of research or demand adherence to political causes. Many parts of universities have become politicized or have turned into ideological monocultures, excluding people, ideas, or kinds of work that challenge their orthodoxy. Younger researchers are afraid to speak and write and don’t investigate promising ideas that they fear will endanger their careers.

The two-day Academic Freedom Conference, arranged by the organizing committee, aims to identify ways to restore academic freedom, open inquiry, and freedom of speech and expression on campus and in the larger culture and restore the open debate required for new knowledge to flourish. The conference will focus on the organizational structures leading to censorship and stifling debate and how to repair them.

It is indeed true that the conference attendance has been limited to invited guests, but the reason for that is obvious: dissenters from the prevailing Narrative™ are unwelcome on college campuses. They are harassed, yelled at, shouted down, and occasionally worse. Comedians rarely visit campuses any more because they are dominated by a political monoculture where any deviation from accepted speech is unacceptable–which of course precludes comedy.

Visiting a college campus today reminds one more of China during the Cultural Revolution than anything recognizable to those of us who attended college or graduate school decades ago. The signs of the impending rot were there, but there was still room for dissent. One of the reasons I abandoned my PhD and left academia was a sense that there was no room for me any more on the modern campus. I believe I was right about that.

No longer does intellectual freedom exist on our campuses..

The lineup of speakers includes well-known scholars who are either conservative, centrist, liberal or libertarian, but who have established themselves as leading voices against an orthodoxy strangling free speech and dissent on campuses.

The goal of the conference, hosted at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, is to buoy its invitation-only audience of faculty members from across the nation to head back to their campuses ready to stand up for academic freedom, open inquiry and freedom of speech.

Critics of the conference are rude, snide, deceptive, and pretty much prove the point that it is impossible to engage in debate on campuses. They attack straw men, not arguments, and for all I can tell are impossible to reason with:

There’s mounting faculty opposition to an invitation-only, no-media-allowed academic freedom conference scheduled for next week at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. The conference, headlined by libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel and organized by the business school’s Classical Liberalism Initiative, has been criticized as pre-emptively limiting dissent in the name of open discourse.

Critics also fault the conference for platforming such speakers as Amy Wax, Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, who is known for making racist remarks—including to and about students. [If she had actually made racist remarks instead of said controversial things about race she would have been fired. She is a dissenter, not a bigot.–DS]

“While we respect the rights of free speech and academic freedom, both are meant to encourage debate and discussion that can test those assertions,” more than 30 Stanford professors from a variety of fields said in a statement asking Stanford to distance itself from the conference. “The organizers have in fact gone out of their way to create a hermetically-sealed event, safe from any and all meaningful debate, filled with self-affirmation and self-congratulation, an event where racism is given shelter and immunity.”

A conference on academic freedom “would indeed be a timely and urgent one, given today’s context where we find the passage of laws (e.g. in Florida) banning faculty from teaching about selected issues, the banning of books from public libraries, the banning of even particular forms of language, and the harassment of scholars working in certain fields of study, like Michael Mann working on climate change, or Jo Boaler on working on math curricula,” the faculty statement also says. “But the organizers of this conference have something else in mind.”

It is rich that a group of Left-wing professors complain of harassment of scholars, given that is 1) exactly what they are doing here; and 2) holding up Michael Mann, one of the most celebrated scholars on the Left, who often attacks anybody who disagrees with him rather viciously. Mann is also a fabulist. As for racism, that is the foundation of both academic practice these days (entry into schools is often based upon race) and of the curriculum, which is filled with critical race theory and denigration of anybody who might come from a background tainted with the blood of oppressors.

The Left is committed to censorship of dissent, and will often openly celebrate it as fighting “disinformation.” That is what the attendees of the conference are trying to address. The fact that the immediate reaction is to try to shut it down is proof of their point.

Anybody will be able to view what is being said because the conference will be live streamed, so this is no secret cabal conspiring to deprive people of freedom of speech. They just want to be able to have a rational discussion without the constant ridiculous interruption of people who scream, glue themselves to things, throw food, or want pots to piss in while attached to the floor. Since this would likely happen, they are wise to close and even bar the doors.

Academia, I am afraid, is lost. While the attendees and many other people devoted to debate and the search for the truth still exist in academia, many are or soon will be heading out the door. If one spends a decade working to get an academic job, and decades more suffering through the trials of being a free thinker on a campus, there is little to do but wait it out until retirement. It’s not like your skills are transferrable, and it certainly isn’t the case that a free thinker could find another job in this environment. I have friends who have retired early to escape the madness. Others are undoubtedly doing the same.

I hope I am wrong about this assessment, because the American higher education system has been up until recently one of the crown jewels of our civilization. But the Left has been on its “march through the institutions” for decades, and higher ed was the first place they took over. Now they not only own the Administrations, but faculty hiring is done by the faculty in the departments, and they are all Left. STEM fields have not escaped the rot, and I fear that our innovation in science and technology are at risk.

No idea how to fix a system so rigged. There is no way in to do so as far as I can see.

So let’s hope these big brains meeting at Stanford have a clue how to change things. I can’t see a way.