For the first time in over two decades, I did not give to either of my alma maters this year. I, like many of you, had grown disillusioned with the illiberalism on many college campuses and was unable to continue to support it with an annual contribution. While higher education has always leaned left, the divide has increased in recent decades. Data on faculty ideological leanings was analyzed, the American Enterprise Institute reported that “in less than 30 years the ratio of liberal identifying faculty to conservative faculty had more than doubled to 5.” 

At Harvard, where I attended graduate school, the faculty political imbalance is particularly striking. According to a 2021 survey by The Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper, out of 236 faculty replies only 7 people said they are “somewhat” or “very conservative,” while 183 respondents indicated that they are “somewhat” or “very liberal.” A similar problem plagues my undergraduate college, Bowdoin. 

My little gifts won't make a difference to the institutions I attended, which each have billions in endowment funds. Big alumni contributors at several of the nation's top colleges, on the other hand, are using their clout to promote free thinking and inquiry on college campuses.

A recent Wall Street Journal article reported on alumni from major universities who are holding back on giving large donations due to frustration over campus culture and policies. For example, after MIT disinvited a University of Chicago geophysicist who is critical of campus "diversity and inclusion" practices, Cornell alumnus Carl Neuss withheld his seven-figure donation and helped to found the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, while MIT alumnus Tom Hafer withheld his donation and helped to found the MIT Free Speech Alliance. FEE Hazlitt Fellow Brett Cooper wrote last summer about other alumni organizations that are pushing back against current campus policies.

According to the Journal: “Universities around the country have fired or demoted politically outspoken professors on the right and disinvited conservative speakers who criticize things like the push toward diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Other professors, such as Portland State’s Peter Boghossian, quit over their university’s policies and climate that they have found to be repressive of intellectual inquiry.  “​​But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible,” wrote Boghossian in September. “It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.”

He continued: “Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.” 

Alumni contributors, large and small, may speak out against increasing campus illiberalism and put their money where their mouth is during this end-of-year giving season. We may support organizations and institutions that appreciate and encourage individual rights and freedom of expression while avoiding organizations and institutions that do not.

Children haven’t changed, but our expectations of their behavior have. In just one generation, children are going to school at younger and younger ages, and are spending more time in school than ever before. They are increasingly required to learn academic content at an early age that may be well above their developmental capability.

In 1998, 31 percent of teachers expected children to learn to read in kindergarten. In 2010, 80 percent of teachers expected this. Now, children are expected to read in kindergarten and to become proficient readers soon after, despite research showing that pushing early literacy can do more harm than good.

In their report Reading in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose education professor Nancy Carlsson-Paige and her colleagues warn about the hazards of early reading instruction. They write,

When children have educational experiences that are not geared to their developmental level or in tune with their learning needs and cultures, it can cause them great harm, including feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and confusion.

Hate The Player, Love the Game

Instead of recognizing that schooling is the problem, we blame the kids. Today, children who are not reading by a contrived endpoint are regularly labeled with a reading delay and prescribed various interventions to help them catch up to the pack. In school, all must be the same. If they are not listening to the teacher, and are spending too much time daydreaming or squirming in their seats, young children often earn an attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) label and, with striking frequency, are administered potent psychotropic medications.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that approximately 11 percent of children ages four to seventeen have been diagnosed with ADHD, and that number increased 42 percent from 2003-2004 to 2011-2012, with a majority of those diagnosed placed on medication. Perhaps more troubling, one-third of these diagnoses occur in children under age six.

It should be no surprise that as we place young children in artificial learning environments, separated from their family for long lengths of time, and expect them to comply with a standardized, test-driven curriculum, it will be too much for many of them.

New findings by Harvard Medical School researchers confirm that it’s not the children who are failing, it’s the schools we place them in too early. These researchers discovered that children who start school as among the youngest in their grade have a much greater likelihood of getting an ADHD diagnosis than older children in their grade. In fact, for the U.S. states studied with a September 1st enrollment cut-off date, children born in August were 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than their older peers.

The study’s lead researcher at Harvard, Timothy Layton, concludes: “Our findings suggest the possibility that large numbers of kids are being overdiagnosed and overtreated for ADHD because they happen to be relatively immature compared to their older classmates in the early years of elementary school.”

This Should Come as No Surprise

Parents don’t need Harvard researchers to tell them that a child who just turned five is quite different developmentally from a child who is about to turn six. Instead, parents need to be empowered to challenge government schooling motives and mandates, and to opt-out.

As universal government preschool programs gain traction, delaying schooling or opting out entirely can be increasingly difficult for parents. Iowa, for example, recently lowered its compulsory schooling age to four-year-olds enrolled in a government preschool program.

As New York City expands its universal pre-K program to all of the city’s three-year-olds, will compulsory schooling laws for preschoolers follow? On Monday, the New York City Department of Education issued a white paper detailing a “birth-to-five system of early care and education,” granting more power to government officials to direct early childhood learning and development.

As schooling becomes more rigid and consumes more of childhood, it is causing increasing harm to children. Many of them are unable to meet unrealistic academic and behavioral expectations at such a young age, and they are being labeled with and medicated for delays and disorders that often only exist within a schooled context. Parents should push back against this alarming trend by holding onto their kids longer or opting out of forced schooling altogether.

Perhaps nowhere is the sweeping and intrusive government response to the coronavirus more apparent than in recent orders and advisories related to Thanksgiving celebrations in the US. For example, California enacted a new stay-at-home order and curfew, while mandating that no more than two households can gather together at a time. (California governor Gavin Newsom was recently caught violating his own rules while attending a birthday party for friends at an upscale restaurant.)

Vermont governor Phil Scott announced that no one is allowed to gather with anyone outside of their own household (indoors or outdoors) until mid-December. He then amended his order to say residents can go for a socially-distanced walk outside with one person beyond their household. Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota issued a similar order, banning residents from getting together with anyone outside of their household, indoors or outdoors.

Small Gatherings Are Not Responsible for Case Surges

These new government restrictions, which essentially crush traditional Thanksgiving plans for many families, are not based on any sound science. The New York Times reported this week that many public officials are touting the idea that the coronavirus is surging due to private household gatherings. “But many epidemiologists are far less certain,” writes the Times, “saying there is little evidence to suggest that household gatherings were the source of the majority of infections since the summer. Indeed, it has become much harder to pinpoint any source of any outbreak, now that the virus is so widespread and Americans may be exposed in so many ways.”

The data presented by the Times suggests that private social gatherings are not the main source of coronavirus spread, prompting one interviewed infectious disease modeler to call the new bans on household gatherings “bizarre.”

According to the Times:

“In Colorado, only 81 active cases are attributed to social gatherings, compared with more than 4,000 from correctional centers and jails, 3,300 from colleges and universities, nearly 2,400 from assisted living facilities, and 450 from restaurants, bars, casinos and bowling alleys. In Louisiana, social events account for just 1.7 percent of the 3,300 cases for which the state has clear exposure information.”

How To Eat Your Turkey

Even in places where families and friends are allowed to gather for Thanksgiving, government officials may require caps on attendees and provide extensive guidelines on how these holiday celebrations should be conducted. For instance, my city of Cambridge, Massachusetts tells residents not to talk while unmasked and to “take turns eating or drinking so that two people are not simultaneously unmasked.”

If you are celebrating Thanksgiving with others outside of your household, please remember you should not talk while unmasked. People should take turns eating or drinking so that two people are not simultaneously unmasked, Learn more - https://t.co/EUCft50Ojk #CambMA pic.twitter.com/HZzPGbtgL3

— City of Cambridge (@CambMA) November 24, 2020

More concerning than these Thanksgiving orders is the willingness of citizens to acquiesce to government authority. This was emphasized in a recent Boston Globe article:

“‘That people take their lead from the government is natural,’ said one 32-year-old in Cambridge who has struggled to find common ground on pandemic safety with his roommate, who spends time in settings he thinks are unsafe, including gyms. He asked to stay anonymous out of concern that his roommate, the one person he sees regularly, would be upset. Reopening ‘puts more undue burden on the individual’ to determine what is safe, he said.”

As the renowned economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: “Planning other people’s actions means to prevent them from planning for themselves, means to deprive them of their essentially human quality, means enslaving them.” It seems that increasingly people prefer the government to do the planning for them.

When we get to the point where individuals find it “natural” for the government to tell us how to take turns eating our Thanksgiving turkey, a pandemic is the least of our concerns.