UNLV’s PC police won’t be denied

If UNLV is serious about becoming an elite research university, then I've got an urgent study for the Department of Public Administration: find out what on earth President David Ashley was thinking when he put the person who created the school's abhorrent, unconstitutional speech code in charge of rewriting it.

Last week's column broke down the "bias incidents/hate crimes policy" developed by Christine Clark, UNLV's political correctness commissar and vice president for diversity and inclusion. After a year-long "inclusive" process in which Clark ignored faculty concerns that her ideas threatened academic freedom and violated First Amendment rights, she settled on a policy that turned acts of constitutionally protected expression into crimes and compelled campus police to respond to the hurt feelings of offended students and staff.

The final draft of the policy, completed in March and set to take effect July 1, was such a disaster that Chancellor Jim Rogers last week declared it a "tear-up and a redo," and the Board of Regents launched an immediate legal review of not only UNLV's draft, but of all similar policies adopted by every other Nevada System of Higher Education campus.

To be fair, it was the Board of Regents that put the system on this costly, counterproductive path by mandating last year that each institution create and adopt a hate crimes policy. As the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada has pointed out to system officials, there is no such thing as a hate crime in state statute; only post-conviction sentencing enhancements. So regents essentially asked its campus presidents to write their own laws and classify new types of criminal activity -- tasks well beyond their authority. As a result, all of the policies are as flawed as the board's directive.

Most, however, were fairly restrained. Of all the policies I reviewed last week, none was as openly disdainful of the Bill of Rights as UNLV's. Mind-numbing in length and loaded with redundancies and contradictions, the document is a testament to what happens when one well-paid administrator is given too much time and not enough direction and supervision. It is an overreach of monumental proportions.

Last week, when it was clear that there was no way UNLV's policy would be allowed to stand, Clark offered a firm defense of her work.

"To the greatest extent possible, all feedback was addressed in some manner," Clark said, "but it is important to note that we got competing feedback, which is why the current draft articulates several dynamic tensions rather than choosing sides -- for example, tensions between bias and hate, safety and freedom, community and individuality, among others."

If you can't see the problem, you can't fix it.

But when Ashley formed a task force to rework this monster, he made Clark the chairwoman. A Tuesday memo delegating this responsibility asked her to "continue her leadership in developing this important campus policy."

Ashley's memo asked that Clark evaluate three options and make recommendations accordingly. The first option, amazingly enough, is standing pat, a move that without doubt would land UNLV in court. The second option is revising the policy to incorporate faculty and ACLU concerns -- the ones that Clark originally ignored -- and the third option would have the university adopt only the policy's "hate crime" components. Ashley wants the policy adopted, in some form, by July 1 regardless.

He has thus made it clear that both Clark and this ruinous policy enjoy his unconditional support despite a number of troubling missteps over the past few months, including:

-- Clark wrongly authorized an employee of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion to lobby the Legislature on behalf of the university, without the approval of Ashley, regents or Rogers. That employee, UNLV law student Lucy Flores, testified before lawmakers not on system matters, but in favor of reforming the state's K-12 curriculum to put a greater emphasis on multiculturalism -- including concepts of "self-affirmation, "local responsiveness" and "global inclusiveness" -- starting in the second grade. (She didn't say whether schools should sacrifice instruction time on math, science, reading or history to achieve that goal.)

-- Clark's office posted on its Web site, for nearly a month, a document that indicated Ashley had approved the bias incidents/hate crimes policy and formally adopted it. Upon being pointed out to the university, a spokesman said the document was incorrect, and it was removed from the Web site.

-- Faculty growing so disgusted with Clark's "inclusive" approach -- and Ashley's blinders -- that they had to contact the ACLU and the media to make sure the policy never took effect.

Hopefully, the Board of Regents will reach the correct conclusion that enough faculty and administration hours have been wasted on this system wide effort, and that what campuses really need is not a "bias incidents/hate crimes policy," but an affirmation of support for the First Amendment and free thought. And perhaps they'll even conclude that positions and offices like Clark's can't be justified -- not amid the system's current budget woes, not ever.

Nevada's campuses already are diverse, vibrant, tolerant places where the vast majority of people couldn't care less whether someone is Hispanic or gay or divorced or disabled.

But Clark is convinced that if everyone is coerced into spending enough time together, they can all think and talk and debate in such a way that no one will ever be offended or misunderstood.

For all this, Clark is one of the state's highest paid employees. Her annual salary of $162,760 is more than any District Court judge or any state constitutional officer. And even if lawmakers and regents decided to get rid of her office to clear its budget of more than $800,000 per year from the books, Clark would remain. Cabinet-level hires are given tenure; she would become a full-time professor in the College of Education.

Welcome to the world of higher education. Nevada taxpayers are stuck with Clark, one way or another. But UNLV doesn't have to be stuck with her ideas of what constitutes diversity and freedom.

Remember all this when the Legislature passes massive tax increases to protect "essential services" -- the UNLV Office of Diversity and Inclusion among them.

Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is a Review-Journal editorial writer.