The Shift Toward non-US Universities is Upon Us. (Oh, and I'm now in Ireland)
I took last week off from posting content here on Dorf on Law. Why? Because I have accepted an appointment as Visiting Full Professor at the Sutherland School of Law at University College Dublin (UCD) in Ireland, where I was a Sutherland Fellow this past October. A week ago, I left Toronto and moved to Dublin. Settling in will of course take some more time, but I wanted to get back to my writing as soon as possible. Here, I will offer some thoughts on this latest of my lateral moves and discuss some recent controversies in higher education in the United States.
Upon hearing that my move to Ireland was in the works, a friend commented wryly: "I'm sure your Scottish forebears are rolling over in their graves." Quite so. After all, I am not merely of Scottish descent but am the son of a minister of the Presbyterian Church (one branch of which is the Church of Scotland) whose first name was Calvin and who held a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Edinburgh. But biology and family history are not destiny, and it was easy for me to make the decision to move to Ireland and become part of the vibrant intellectual community at UCD. Dublin is a beautiful city, and I already feel at home here. (Note: Although my position title includes the word "visiting," this could well be a very long visit.)
My decision is not in any way meant to cast aspersions on Canada or the University of Toronto, where I was a visiting professor during the last two academic years. Everything about those two years was great, and I am glad to have moved there when I negotiated early retirement from the University of Florida (UF) to become Professor Emeritus. This is a matter of having more than one good option, and Dublin might well be the last move I make both professionally and personally. I certainly have reasons to be optimistic.
The only negative reason to leave Canada was Donald Trump's 51st state annexation insanity. Although that weird obsession has been in abeyance for a few months, his track record suggests that he could start rattling that sabre again at any moment. That alone, however, would not have been enough of a stick to make me leave Canada, because I honestly cannot see how the annexation could happen. But the carrots of crossing the Atlantic and living on the coast of the Irish Sea were plentiful.
Clearly, one cannot say the same thing about the United States. When I left UF and the US, I did so because Florida had become a Petri dish (or maybe the better comparison would be to a meat grinder) of reactionary political attacks on academia. The Florida Republican Party had taken away tenure in all but name, instituting instead a faculty review system in the most chaotic way possible, enforcing vague standards that all but guarantee that firing decisions will be made for political reasons by hacks with no knowledge about or commitment to higher education.
One of the most pernicious laws that the gerrymandered majorities in the Florida state legislature passed (back in 2022) was HB7. Perhaps all anyone needs to know about that law is that its official title is the "Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act," which allowed the governor and his allies to call it the Stop WOKE Act. Sheesh. But the bill is not merely tired culture war propaganda. It has made it difficult-to-impossible for professors and teachers in Florida even to know what they can say in class.
I have always found that one particular provision of HB7 is admirably (though perversely) revelatory, which is that it defines "discrimination" as subjecting any student or employee to anything that "espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such student or employee to believe any of the following concepts," one such concept being: "An individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin." Nothing vague about that, right?
And what happens when a professor "advances" something that makes a kid feel anguish about, say, a genocide that his ancestors perpetrated? My former UF colleague Katheryn Russell-Brown's excellent critique of HB7 notes on p. 365:
Sanctions include both administrative relief and court action. Violations constitute actionable discrimination under the Florida Civil Rights Act (FCRA) and the Florida Educational Equity Act. A complaint can be filed with the Florida Commission on Human Relations (FCHR). The law allows for a private cause of action that could entitle a successful complainant to injunctive relief, back pay, and compensatory damages up to $100,000.
But all of this is old news by now. Why bring it up again, especially in the context of my celebratory announcement today? Because it is getting worse and worse at UF, and the attacks on higher education that were road-tested there have gone nationwide.
I will most likely write a separate column soon about the recent embarrassing mess around the failed effort to name now-former President of the University of Michigan Santa Ono as UF's President, but I do want to point here to the galling hypocrisy of those who sank Ono's nomination because he was supposedly too friendly to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at U of M. A New York Times article summarizing the hatchet job on Ono quoted a member of the university system's board (who is also a former Speaker of the state's House of Representatives) as follows: "Higher education can’t operate where there’s this heavy-handed, ideological orthodoxy lording over people." He is right. Right?
Meanwhile, The Times also ran a story last week about a huge controversy this past semester at UF's law school, where a second-year student was openly espousing White supremacist views. The Times's story included an "I never thought I'd ever read this" sentence: "After he wrote in late March that Jews must be 'abolished by any means necessary,' the university suspended him, barred him from campus and stepped up police patrols around the law school." That student also received the top grade (known at UF as a Book Award) for a course in which he wrote a paper taking a position that was, shall we say, unusual. As The Times summarized it:
In his capstone paper for the class, [the student] argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against "criminal infiltrators at the border."
Professor Segall's column here on Dorf on Law yesterday shredded UF Law's weak case that the student's paper had to be honored lest it be seen as attacking free speech rights. My reaction was that the people at UF who are not part of the Republican political machine are honestly and understandably scared of doing anything that will anger their overlords, even to the point that they fear taking a simple administrative action regarding a person who has said that it "would not be manifestly wrong" to call him a Nazi. The cowed administrators are now saying that "viewpoint neutrality" ties their hands, knowing that the state's Republicans would scream "woke" and punish the school even in this extreme situation.
After the Ono nomination was torpedoed, a reporter contacted me and asked if I felt "validated" in my decision to leave UF. Similarly, when Professor Dorf forwarded the piece about UF's Nazi student to me (did I just type the words "UF's Nazi student"?), he wrote that I might want to discuss that situation in today's column, "perhaps as further vindication of your abandonment of UF." So, two recent controversies at UF, two vindications? Heck yeah. I am more than willing to indulge in some I-told-you-so's, because this was yet another situation in which too many people insisted on pretending that things were not as bad as they obviously were.
Even so, feeling vindicated is not the same as feeling happy. A month ago, I wrote that "Those who attack universities do so because they know that they cannot get their way if there are still people around who teach and value critical thinking." The United States has long enjoyed preeminence in higher education, in both its state and private universities. Other countries, certainly including my new home, still uphold academic standards that the US is now casting aside.
As a result, universities in Ireland, Canada, the UK, and all around the world are now reaping the benefits of the US brain drain. I would have happily moved to Dublin simply because I know I will love it here, but being invited to be part of an already excellent university made it impossible to imagine being anywhere else.
- Neil H. Buchanan