It's Not Fascism When We Do It

The Campus Climate Crusade

Liberal groups are out to sully the names of conservative professors and shut down programs funded by the Koch foundation.

By: Kimberley A. Strassel, WSJ Opinion, March 26, 2015

Conservative thought on campus these days is rare, though for some it’s still not rare enough. Witness the growing campaign by politicians, unions and environmentalists to intimidate into silence any academic or program that might challenge liberal ideology.

Congressional Democrats have grabbed most of the attention here, with their recent attempt to cow climate skeptics. Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT and a Cato Institute scholar, earlier this month described in these pages how House Rep. Raul Grijalva was targeting seven academics skeptical of President Obama’s climate policies, demanding documents about their funding and connections. A trio of Senate Democrats is working to muzzle more than 100 nonprofits and companies that have questioned the climate agenda, with a fishing expedition into their correspondence.

Largely unnoticed is that the congressional climate crusaders didn’t come up with this idea on their own. For several years a coalition of liberal organizations have been using “disclosure” to sully the names of conservative professors and try to shut down their programs. Their particular targets are academics who benefit from funding from the Koch Foundation, which has for decades funded free-market professors and groups on U.S. campuses.

Giving money to universities, and earmarking it for certain purposes, is common, though the left has largely cornered the market. Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer and his wife several years ago pledged $40 million to Stanford to start the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy. The Morningside Foundation, established by the family of the late T.H. Chan, last year gave Harvard $350 million to fund work on, among other things, gun violence and tobacco use. The Helmsley Charitable Trust has given money to several schools to advance Common Core.

Apparently the only kind of thought not allowed is that which might “undermine,” according to UnKochMyCampus, “environmental protection, worker’s rights, health care expansion, and quality public education.” Stopping such research is the mission of this organization, which is spearheaded by Greenpeace, Forecast the Facts (a green outfit focused on climate change), and the American Federation of Teachers.

The group’s website directs student activists to a list of universities to which Koch foundations have given money, and provides a “campus organization guide” with instructions for how to “expose and undermine” any college thought that works against “progressive values.” Students are directed to first recruit “trusted allies and informants” (including liberal faculty, students and alumni) and then are given a step-by-step guide on hounding universities and targeted professors with demands for records disclosure and with Freedom of Information Act requests. The AFT and the National Education Association devoted nearly a full day at a conference this month to training students on the “necessary skills to investigate and expose” any “influence” the Kochs have at universities.

This week Michigan State University released documents to student activists who had targeted political-theory professor Ross Emmett, director of the Michigan Center for Innovation and Economic Prosperity. His crime? Using Koch grant money to fund a reading group, called the Koch Scholars, that brings together students to discuss competing political economy ideas. The first two weeks were devoted to Marx, though the activists apparently couldn’t tolerate an equal discussion of capitalism.

Art Hall, who runs the Center for Applied Economics at the University of Kansas School of Business, was forced last year to file a lawsuit to try to stop a state records request from student activists demanding his private email correspondence for the past 10 years. Mr. Hall’s sins? His center got a seed grant from the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, and he testified against green energy quotas at the state legislature last year.

As for those defenders of academic freedom and integrity, the American Association of University Professors several years ago defended climate scientist Michael Mann against a conservative group’s demands for his records. Now the Kansas chapter of AAUP helped fund the students’ demand for Mr. Hall’s records.

These UnKoch tactics are spreading. In February, Right to Know, a California nonprofit opposed to genetically modified food, filed freedom of information requests at four universities, demanding correspondence between a dozen academics and outside agriculture companies and trade organizations. The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, a left-leaning organization, recently forced the University of Louisville to release information about the founding of a new Free Enterprise Center, partly funded by Koch money.

Congressional Democrats are simply getting in on the game, using the power of government inquiry to up the ante. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin ran a campaign in 2013 against the free-market American Legislative Exchange Council, demanding information from its donors, trying to embarrass them out of funding ALEC. It worked.

Disclosure is becoming the left’s new weapon. And it’s shutting down debate across the country. 

Money for the Children?

Voters Keep Falling for Bond Issues Because They Are  
The Pension Sink Is Gulping Billions in Tax Raises
Remember that ‘temporary’ tax hike for California schools? Most is now going to public worker retirements.

By: Steve Malanga, WSJ Opinion, Jan 12, 2015

California Gov. Jerry Brown sold a $6 billion tax increase to voters in 2012 by promising that nearly half of the money would go to bolster public schools. Critics argued that much of the new revenue would wind up in California’s severely underfunded teacher pension system. They were right.

Last June Mr. Brown signed legislation that will require school districts to increase funding for teachers’ pensions from less than $1 billion this year in school year 2014-15, which started in September, to $3.7 billion by 2021, gobbling up much of the new tax money. With the state’s general government pension fund, Calpers, also demanding more money, California taxpayer advocate Joel Fox recently observed that no matter what local politicians tell voters, when you see tax increases, “think pensions.”

Californians are not alone. Although fiscal experts have warned about the worsening condition of government pension systems for years, many taxpayers felt little impact from the rising debt—until now.

Decades of rising retirement benefits for workers—some of which politicians awarded to employees without setting aside adequate funding—and the 2008 financial meltdown have left American cities and states with somewhere between $1.5 trillion and $4 trillion in retirement debt. Even with the stock market’s rebound, the assets of America’s biggest government pension funds are only 1% above their peak in 2007, according to a recent study by Governing magazine.

Under growing pressure to erase some of this debt, governments have increased pension contributions to about $100 billion in 2014 from $63 billion in 2007, according to the Census Bureau’s quarterly survey of state and local pension systems. But the tab keeps growing, and now it is forcing taxes higher in many places.

A report last June by the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators found that nearly every school district in that state anticipated higher pension costs for the new fiscal year, with three-quarters calculating their pension bills would rise by 25% or more. Subsequently, 164 school districts received state permission to raise property taxes above the 2.1% state tax cap. Every one of the districts cited rising pension costs.

Meanwhile, the deeply troubled Philadelphia school system’s pension tab increased to $159 million in the current school year, which started in 2014 and goes to mid-2015, from $55 million in 2011. To bail it out, the Pennsylvania legislature crafted a special deal to increase cigarette taxes in the city by about $60 million annually.

In West Virginia, where local governments also face big pension debts, the legislature recently expanded the state’s home rule law—which governs how municipalities can raise revenues—to allow cities to impose their own sales taxes. The state’s biggest city, Charleston, with $287 million in unfunded pension liabilities, has already instituted a $6 million-a-year local sales tax devoted solely to pensions, on top of the $10 million the city already contributes annually to its retirement system. At least five more cities applying to raise local sales taxes, including Wheeling, also cited pension costs.

In April two-dozen Illinois mayors gathered to urge the state to reform police and fire pensions, which are on average 55% funded. The effort failed, and municipalities subsequently moved to raise taxes and fees. The city of Peoria’s budget illustrates the squeeze. In the early 1990s it spent 18% of the property-tax money it collected on pensions. This year it will devote 57% of its property tax to pension costs. Reluctant to raise the property levy any more, last year the city increased fees and charges to residents by 8%, or $1.2 million, for such items as garbage collection and sewer services.

Taxpayers in Chicago saw the first of what promises to be a blizzard of new taxes. The city’s public-safety retirement plans are only about 35% funded, though pension costs already consume nearly half of Chicago’s property-tax collections. Strong opposition forced Mayor Rahm Emanuel to temporarily table a proposed a $250 million property-tax increase to help pay off pension debt. Instead, as a stopgap measure Chicago instituted a series of smaller tax and fee hikes, including a boost in cellphone taxes, to raise $62 million. But the city’s pension bill will double next year to more than $1 billion, so a massive property tax hike is still on the table.

Chicago residents also face an enormous state retirement bill. The Civic Committee of Chicago recently estimated that if the Illinois Supreme Court sustains a lower-court decision overturning 2013 pension reforms, Illinois taxpayers will pay $145 billion in higher state taxes over the next three decades.

Burdened by so much debt, taxpayers in some places are unlikely to see relief soon. When California passed its 2012 tax increases, Gov. Brown and legislators promised voters the new rates would expire in 2018. But school pension costs will keep increasing through 2021 and then remain at that elevated level for another 25 years to pay off $74 billion in unfunded teacher liabilities. Public union leaders and sympathetic legislators are already trying to figure out how to convince voters to extend the 2012 tax increases and approve “who knows what else” in new levies, says taxpayer advocate Mr. Fox. It’s a reminder that in some places the long struggle to pay off massive government pension debt is just starting.

Mr. Malanga is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Heckler's Veto

Havens of the Closed Minded

IMF's Lagarde Won't Speak at Smith, Part of a Growing List

Protests by Students, Faculty Have Derailed Several Commencement Addresses This Spring

By Douglas Belkin, WSJ Article, May 12,1994

The head of the International Monetary Fund on Monday joined an elite group—those whose plans to give commencement addresses this graduation season were derailed by student or faculty protests.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde
 was derailed by activists.

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, was scheduled to speak this coming Sunday at Smith College, but she withdrew her name after nearly 500 people signed a petition objecting to the policies of the IMF. Similar outcries foiled speaking engagements by former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers University and human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis University, among several others.

"I call it disinvitation season," said Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group. "Not everyone gets disinvited, but there is such consistent effort to get rid of people."

Mr. Lukianoff said the trend is clearly growing. According to a tally by his group, between 1987 and 2008, there were 48 protests of planned speeches, not all for graduations, that led to 21 incidents of an invited guest not speaking. Since 2009 there have been 95 protests, resulting in 39 cancellations, according to Mr. Lukianoff's group.

Earlier this month at Rutgers, students and faculty protested Ms. Rice's involvement in the Iraq war, prompting her to pull out of her scheduled address at the New Jersey school. In April, Brandeis withdrew an honorary degree for Ms. Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch lawmaker who has spoken out forcefully against Islam. At Haverford College, the commencement selection of Robert J. Birgeneau, a former university administrator at Berkeley, also has drawn fire.

"There are serious implications for what is going on here; universities are becoming havens of the closed minded," said Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which says it promotes academic standards and accountability. "What we are beginning to see is a heckler's veto."

Rudy Fichtenbaum, president of the American Association of University Professors, defended the rights of students and faculty to protest, petition and otherwise make their voices heard.

Condoleezza Rice

"There's a long history of protests in the United States; that's what we were founded on, and I think student protests are partially an introduction to democracy," Mr. Fichtenbaum said.

The disputes can put schools in a difficult spot. At Brandeis, officials found much to laud in Ms. Hirsi Ali before withdrawing her honorary degree, citing "certain of her past statements that are inconsistent" with the school's values.

The controversies haven't been limited to colleges. Last month, the White House said Michelle Obama would deliver the commencement address to graduating seniors in the Topeka, Kan., school district. But after parents complained about limited seating for family and friends and about the first lady's distracting from the celebration of seniors, the plan was retooled. Mrs. Obama now is scheduled to speak a day earlier—this coming Friday—at a "senior recognition day" in Topeka.

Protesting commencement speakers isn't entirely new. In 1987, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, withdrew from delivering the commencement address at Lafayette College, where she also was to get an honorary degree. In 1993, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell weathered activists' ire and delivered Harvard University's graduation speech.

More recently, protests have greeted luminaries on the left, like playwright Tony Kushner, who faced protests at Brandeis in 2006 over his critical views of Israel, and 1960s activist Bill Ayers, who was disinvited from the University of Nebraska in 2008, according to the FIRE tally.

At Smith, a women's liberal-arts college in Northampton, Mass., past speakers have included Rachel Maddow, Gloria Steinem, and, last year, Arianna Huffington. This year, the protesters said in their petition that by selecting Ms. Lagarde as commencement speaker, "we are supporting the International Monetary Fund and thus going directly against Smith's values to stand in unity with equality for all women, regardless of race, ethnicity or class."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali 

The IMF, which essentially acts as emergency lender to countries in need, often requires governments to tighten their belts by reining in state spending, including on public workers and social security. The group has said it engages only with member countries that request its assistance and that bailout programs are developed with the requesting governments.

Smith President Kathleen McCartney wrote that Ms. Lagarde contacted her over the weekend to withdraw. An IMF spokeswoman said Ms. Lagarde "did not want the IMF participation to divert attention from the remarkable achievements of the graduating students."

"The issue isn't that we're against debate but that we're only hearing one side of the debate continuously," said Nandi Marumo, a 22-year-old junior at Smith, who signed the petition against Ms. Lagarde. "We hear the same narrative from every person, from the media, from everything."

At Smith, meanwhile, Sunday's commencement will instead be delivered by Ruth Simmons, a former school president.

—Ian Talley and Colleen McCain Nelson contributed to this article.

Write to Douglas Belkin at doug.belkin@wsj.com

In The Shadow of The Berkeley Free Speech Movement

SNAPPED

Obama Unleashes the Left

How the government created a federal hunting license for the far left.

By: Daniel Henninger, WSJ Opinion, May 8, 2014

In the U.S., the politics of the left versus the right rolls on with the predictability of traffic jams at the George Washington Bridge. It's a lot of honking. Until now. All of a sudden, the left has hit ramming speed across a broad swath of American life—in the universities, in politics and in government. People fingered as out of line with the far left's increasingly bizarre claims are being hit and hit hard.

Commencement-speaker bans are obligatory. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice withdrew as Rutgers's speaker after two months of protests over Iraq, the left's long-sought replacement for the Vietnam War. Brandeis terminated its invitation to Somali writer Hirsi Ali, whose criticisms of radical Islam violated the school's "core values."

Azusa Pacific University "postponed" an April speech by political scientist Charles Murray to avoid "hurting our faculty and students of color." Come again? It will "hurt" them? Oh yes. In a recent New Republic essay, Jennie Jarvie described the rise of "trigger warnings" that professors are expected to post with their courses to avoid "traumatizing" students.

Oberlin College earlier this year proposed that its teachers "be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression." The co-chair of Oberlin's Sexual Offense Policy Task Force said last month that this part of the guide is now under revision.

I think it's fair to say something has snapped.

Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich was driven out as CEO for donating money to support California's Prop. 8. An online protest tried to kill Condi Rice's appointment to the Dropbox board of directors over Internet surveillance. Incredibly, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston didn't cave.

Earlier this year, faculty and students held a meeting at Vassar College to discuss a particularly bitter internal battle over the school's boycott-Israel movement. Before the meeting, an English professor announced the dialogue "would not be guided by cardboard notions of civility."

In the Harvard Crimson, recently, an undergraduate columnist wrote: "Let's give up on academic freedom in favor of justice." How would that work? "When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue." She explicitly cited for suppression the work of conservative Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield.

It's obvious that the far left has decided there are no longer constraints on what it can do to anyone who disagrees with it. How did this happen? Who let the dogs out?

The answer is not university presidents. The answer is that the Obama administration let the dogs out.

The trigger event was an agreement signed last May between the federal government and the University of Montana to resolve a Title IX dispute over a sexual-assault case.

Every college administrator in the U.S. knows about this agreement. Indeed, there are three separate, detailed "Montana" documents that were signed jointly—and this is unusual—by the civil-rights divisions of the Justice and Education Departments. Remarked DoJ's Joceyln Samuels, "The government is stronger when we speak with one voice."

That's real muscle. But read the agreement. It is Orwellian.

The agreement orders the school to retain an "Equity Consultant" (yes, there is such a thing) to advise it indefinitely on compliance. The school must, with the equity consultant, conduct "annual climate surveys." It will submit the results "to the United States."

The agreement describes compliance in mind-numbing detail, but in fact the actual definitional world it creates is vague. It says: "The term 'sexual harassment' means unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature." But there are also definitions for sexual assault and gender-based harassment. All of this detailed writ is called "guidance." As in missile.

No constitutional lawyer could read this agreement and not see in it the mind of the Queen of Hearts: "Sentence first, verdict afterwards!" Indeed, the U.S. Education Department felt obliged to assert that the agreement is "entirely consistent with the First Amendment."

First Amendment? It's more like a fatwa. The Obama administration has issued a federal hunting license to deputize fanatics at any university in America. They will define who gets accused, and on what basis.

The White House enabled these forces again last week, releasing an Education Department list of 55 colleges that are "under investigation" for possible Title IX violations. Not formally cited but "under investigation." The list includes such notorious Animal Houses as Catholic University, Swarthmore, Knox College, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard Law School. In truth, every school in America is effectively on the list.

Make no mistake, universities under constant pressure from the Obama administration and the most driven members of their "communities" will comply and define due process downward. If the liability choice falls between the lawyer brigades at the Holder Justice Department or some 19-year-old student or an assistant professor who didn't post the course's "trigger warning," guess who will get tossed to the Marcusian mobs at Harvard and Vassar?

If it's possible for the left to have its John Birch moment, we're in it. Wave goodbye to cardboard civility.

Government Schools

We Don't Need No Education

Let's call our public schools what they really are -- ‘government’ schools

By John Stossel, October 2, 2013, Foxnews.com

People say public schools are “one of the best parts of America.” I believed that. Then I started reporting on them.

Now I know that public school -- government school is a better name -- is one of the worst parts of America. It’s a stultified government monopoly. It never improves.

Most services improve. They get faster, better, cheaper. But not government monopolies. Government schools are rigid, boring, expensive and more segregated than private schools.

I call them “government” instead of “public” schools because not much is “public” about them. Members of the public don’t get to pick their kids’ schools, teachers, curriculum or cost.

By contrast, supermarkets are “private” yet open to everyone. You can stroll in 24 hours a day. Just try that with your kid’s public school. You might be arrested.

Now a school choice movement has given government schools a sliver of competition. Private schools, charter schools, vouchers, education tax credits and the Web offer competition. Not all the alternatives work, but with competition, bad alternatives die and good ones grow.

This will help all kids.

But so far, the alternatives reach only a small number of kids. Unions and bureaucrats don’t want competition, and they use their political clout to stifle it. But gradually, they’re losing.

After fighting homeschooling for years, they’ve stopped trying to ban it, and today homeschoolers fare better on tests and college admission. So, some in the government monopoly claim that if your kids are homeschooled, they will not be properly socialized (in the sense of interacting with peers, that is, not in the sense of belonging to government).

But homeschooled kids participate in all sorts of social events with other homeschooling families -- plus theater, ballet, karate and other classes that most kids get and that some only wish they did.

Homeschoolers do just fine. Somehow, without government control, they prosper.

Defenders of government schools often claim their schools are what create the American “melting pot.” Different races, ethnic groups and income levels mix together in government-funded schools.

Bunk. If it was ever true, it isn’t now.

University of Arkansas education professor Jay Greene examined school classrooms and found that public schools were more likely to be almost entirely white or entirely minority.

He also looked at who sat with whom in school lunchrooms. At private schools, students of different races were more likely to sit together.

We don’t do poor kids any favors by keeping them trapped in the poorly run government system. If you really care about “the public,” you should let people go where they get the best service.

When government gets bad results -- high dropout rates, poor test scores -- its defenders say schools need more money. But spending per student has tripled. There are more computers, teachers, social workers, reading specialists, principals, assistant principals, etc. But test scores haven’t improved.

Unpredictable things happen when you leave people free to experiment, and competition produces better results than one tired monopoly.

A bizarre column in Slate recently, arguing that school choice might drain resources away from government schools, was titled, “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person.”

The columnist wrote, “If every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve ... It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.”

This is how leftists think. Everyone must jump into the government pot. Even if it is mediocre (or worse), we’re all in this together. Otherwise, the rich will get all the goods, and the poor will suffer.

Don’t they notice that cellphones, cars and air conditioning keep improving yet poor people are able to buy them? No.

They don’t understand that market competition helps everyone, especially the poor.

I think those who want to force a single-government solution on everyone are just confused -- but if I were as judgmental as that Slate columnist, I’d be tempted to conclude that they’re bad people.

Baby Step Toward Fiscal Sanity on Student Loans

Washington's $279 Billion Fraud

Elizabeth Warren and Harry Reid fight Obama and the GOP on student loans.

WSJ Editorial, July 1, 2013

If you think the federal student-loan program looks like a bad deal for taxpayers, imagine how it would look with honest accounting. And now you don't need to imagine thanks to a new report that's receiving far too little attention. Turns out that the official "savings" for taxpayers of $184 billion over the next decade really add up to $95 billion in losses.

Here's the scam: Lawmakers peddle what is a massive subsidy for universities while claiming that student loans generate a windfall for the taxpayer. This phony windfall is conjured by creative accounting that politicians mandated via the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990. Specifically, the law requires a deliberate under-counting of the cost of defaults.

This is partly how a Democratic Congress and President Obama managed to enact ObamaCare in 2010 while claiming that their big entitlement expansion would reduce costs. The health plan was paired with legislation that made the U.S. Department of Education the originator of roughly 90% of all student loans, which in turn generated billions in imaginary budget "savings."

To its credit, the Congressional Budget Office has noted on various occasions that while the law forces it to use this Beltway math, CBO knows it's not accurate under fair-value accounting. And in a new report on the costs of student loans made in the decade ending in 2023, CBO quantifies the size of this discrepancy at $279 billion. CBO adds with its typically wry understatement that Washington's mandated accounting method "does not consider some costs borne by the government."

That's for sure. Now keep in mind that the $95 billion net loss for taxpayers happens under current law. This includes Monday's doubling of rates that pushed subsidized Stafford loans for undergrads up to 6.8% from 3.4%. Politicians on both sides of the aisle say they don't want the rate increase to stick, and they are working on a bipartisan compromise that would be retroactive to July 1.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren

It's too much to hope that the politicians will swear off fraudulent accounting or try to reduce defaults. But one positive development is a growing bipartisan consensus that student-loan rates should rise as the government's own costs of borrowing rise.

The House has already passed a bill that would prevent student rates from doubling but would also protect taxpayers in the future by floating the rates at some spread above the 10-year Treasury note rate, depending on the type of loan.

Senate liberals like Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) came into the debate demanding that subsidized Stafford loans remain at a fixed 3.4%. Freshman Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) even introduced a plan to lend to kids at the Federal Reserve's discount window rate, currently 0.75%. Senator Warren claims to understand finance, by the way.

Refreshingly, someone at the White House budget office figured out that offering low fixed rates to students could be disastrous as the Treasury's own borrowing costs start to go north. Since Mr. Obama and Democrats have driven private firms almost entirely out of this market, the private lenders can't be squeezed anymore to pay for the next round of subsidies. So the President's budget also calls for tying rates to the 10-year Treasury note, though his plan is more taxpayer-unfriendly than the House bill.

The President's baby step toward fiscal sanity seems to have caught his liberal allies by surprise. Hence the recent hilarious spectacle of Ms. Warren, a Democrat, resisting a GOP effort to force a vote on the President's proposal.

Ms. Warren feared the vote because moderate Democrats increasingly accept that rates have to be tied to something resembling economic reality. Last week Senators Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and Tom Carper (D., Del.) joined Maine Independent Angus King and Republicans Lamar Alexander, Richard Burr and Tom Coburn to introduce a compromise plan that ties rates to the 10-year Treasury.

But bitter-enders including Majority Leader Harry Reid still want to gore the taxpayer with a fixed 3.4% rate, financed by tax increases. When Congress returns after this week's recess, expect Mr. Reid to force a vote on a one-year extension of his sweetheart rate for colleges. Fortunately for taxpayers, the Senate will also likely vote on the bipartisan plan that moves toward market rates.


If Mr. Reid wins, a $95 billion taxpayer hit will look like a lowball estimate. Either way, you can count on politicians like him to keep claiming they're saving you money.