Free Speech on Campus Pt. 1: Are Conservative Speakers Having their Free Speech Rights Violated?

I believe it was way back in college that I first heard of some finding it controversial that there are few right-wing university faculty and staff members. The reason for that seemed obvious to me even at the time: It's all about money. A right-wing ideology tends to go hand-in-hand with a pursuit of profit. The life of an academic involves years or decades of the opposite of profit, so it is a path that few profit-motivated people pursue.

I learned a few other things when I worked on a college campus for ten years. One notable item was that business and engineering programs often charge higher tuition than arts and sciences programs in large part because professors in those fields tend to come from industry rather than academia, and therefore command higher salaries than their Ph.D. counterparts in other disciplines. The same is true of law schools. This is of course a chicken-or-egg cycle in which those fields command high salaries so that the people in those fields can pay for their education which is so expensive because universities have to compete with industries that command high salaries.

The research generally supports my assertion that the left-leaning university phenomenon is more a product of self-selection than of bias in hiring. Right-leaning people don't flock to university environments like left-leaning people do. It's no surprise, then that right-leaning speakers, especially those who are more about entertainment than politics, have poor receptions at universities. Nevertheless, the right prefers to characterize this phenomenon as an infringement on said speakers' individual - and, in general, the right's - free speech. This recently-published column clearly and succinctly summarizes why I think that argument is bogus.

I appreciate being challenged, and my sharing of the above-referenced column on Facebook resulted in a challenge. Thoughtful arguments were raised by a person who disagrees, and I welcome the opportunity to respond. These six speakers are representative of the phenomenon I believe we are discussing.

Before addressing the questions, I would like to underscore the fact that the column focuses not on "conservatives" or "Republicans," but on "modern conservatism," otherwise known as the Party of Donald Trump. People who identify with what's generally known as the right really need to examine whether they want to identify with what this president stands for, in ideology and in deed. Those who continue to support - even revere - him are making a statement that they need to be prepared to be judged for.

Are Conservative Speakers Having their Free Speech Rights Violated?

Developments in Federal Bathroom Law

Introduction and Disclaimer

Restrooms are only one part of the discussion. I believe the root of many of society’s problems is our obsession with genitalia; that is, in using genitalia to assign “male” and “female” and then assuming that those assignments are relevant and useful ways to socially classify people. This has been something that courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have assumed since their inception. The only change since then is to what extent we classify and regulate. We no longer tolerate “but she’s female” as a reason to deny women law licenses or prohibit them from working as bartenders; indeed, it seems ridiculous to do so in 2016. Yet it remains the case that it is typically taken for granted that a gender-inclusive educational facility requires separate living accommodations for men and women.

Thoughts on Scalia: Conspiracy and Consistency

When my husband came home yesterday afternoon, he asked me if I'd heard that there's now suspicion as to whether Supreme Court Justice Antonin "Nino" Scalia died of natural causes. I began typing "Scalia death" in Google on my phone.

"Oh," I said, "apparently the conspiracy theory is that he was smothered with a pillow."

It appears that in one interview the owner of the ranch where Justice Scalia was found dead said that Justice Scalia was found "with a pillow over his head." Add to that a Texas law which allows justices of the peace to declare cause of death without seeing the body, a family who turned down an autopsy, and a picture of the ranch owner shaking hands with President Obama, and you've got a conspiracy theory on your hands.

For the record, I actually know a dude who sleeps with a pillow on his face.

Mother Jones has an excellent guide to the assassination theories. I haven't seen anyone try to suggest that he arranged his own death yet, so I'm going to have a go at it.

Toward a Nuanced View of "Drugs"

This morning, Hsiu-Ying Tseng became the first doctor inhistory convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to a prison term forreckless opiate prescriptions. Apparently, she had been notified that three of her former patients died from opiate overdoses, and she kept prescribing them “to young patients who traveled long distances and paid cash for their prescriptions. She wrote them without performing meaningful medical exams and despite there being no medical necessity for the drugs. She ignored pleas from parents and loved ones concerned about the worsening addiction of sons and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters.” She was prosecuted for the deaths of three patients who died of opiate overdoses prescribed by her after she learned of the first three deaths.

Other doctors have been arrested and charged with other crimes relating to the overprescribing of opiate painkillers, and it is well-known that much heroin addiction begins with prescription painkiller abuse. Deaths and near-deaths from painkiller overdoses are common.

And yet, the DEA has painkillers classified as a schedule I drug, and marijuana classified as a schedule II drug.

Two days ago at a town hall appearance in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton said that she would change marijuana from a schedule I drug to a schedule II drug, and encourage research on the medical benefits. In the same breath, she spoke of the need to address the overdose problem. She then correctly noted that opiate addiction leading to heroin use is a primary culprit.

Nothing she said was untrue, but it was completely inappropriate to jump from a medical marijuana discussion to an indictment of drugs leading to overdose. No one has ever died from a marijuana overdose. There are conflicting stories about actions that marijuana users have taken that have been dangerous and/or fatal, but no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to find a story of someone who died simply from smoking, vaping, or ingesting too much weed.

I live in a small Colorado mountain town, where there are three marijuana dispensaries for a population of 2,200 and plenty of people are routinely stoned. Colorado is in its second year of legal weed, and the sky has not fallen. Other than a questionable ballot outcome in the last midterm election, our fair state is doing just fine, with so much of a boom in tax revenue from pot that we had to have a marijuana tax holiday last year.

And yet, so many – not just the puritanical – continue to wring their hands at the idea of legal weed. The stigma remains. Even in states where marijuana is legal and common, we hesitate to invite neighbors over for a bong the way we might invite them over for a cocktail.

Society’s attitude toward so-called drugs has to be more nuanced than “drugs are bad, mmmkay?” Now that more and more people understand that prescription opiates have a dangerous propensity to lead to serious addiction problems, and more and more people have the opinion that weed is no worse than alcohol, it’s an excellent time to reexamine all drug priorities and encourage the thoughtful, comprehensive reevaluation of federal drug laws. Non-enforcement is not enough; as long as marijuana remains illegal on the federal level, the tension between state and federal laws will continue to confuse, and to expose would-be entrepreneurs in a fledgling industry to unfair and unnecessary risk.

It’s great that attitudes toward marijuana are changing. It’s also great that attitudes toward more dangerous but more “legitimate” drugs are changing. Now is the time to put it all together and work toward comprehensive drug reform.