Tag: higher education governance

Horizon Accord | Academic Standards | Free Speech Doctrine | Institutional Ethics | Machine Learning

The First Amendment Is Not a Teaching Philosophy

Why legality cannot substitute for professional ethics in the classroom — and who pays when universities pretend otherwise.

Cherokee Schill

This essay follows directly from our prior examination of how universities abandon academic standards under political pressure — how words like “arbitrary” often signal not error, but reputational triage.

Here, we track a different but related institutional failure: when a university acknowledges harm, performs concern, and still avoids enforcing professional norms — until constitutional law becomes the backstop that effectively decides what consequences are “allowed.” The result is the same: the people with the least institutional power absorb the cost.

The court is correct on a narrow point: the professor’s statement does not meet the legal threshold for incitement and is therefore protected under current First Amendment doctrine. The error comes when universities treat that legal conclusion as the end of the analysis, rather than the outer boundary of state punishment.

For readers following this line of analysis, you may also wish to revisit our earlier piece, “‘Arbitrary’ Is the Tell: How Universities Teach Grievance Instead of Thinking,” which examines how standards are enforced downward while grievance is rewarded upward.

The First Amendment limits what the state can punish. It does not define what educators should do.

A syllabus is not a soapbox. It is not a personal blog. It is instructional infrastructure — a document backed by institutional authority and imposed on a captive audience of students who cannot simply opt out without consequence. What appears there is not just speech; it is framed speech, delivered with power, timing, and asymmetry.

When a professor knowingly inserts a politically charged provocation into that space — especially one that denies Indigenous people’s claims to land unless they satisfy a settler philosopher’s criteria — the harm is not speculative. It is predictable. It lands on specific students, in a specific room, under conditions they did not choose.

Professional ethics vs. constitutional limits
Courts exist to limit state punishment. Classrooms exist to cultivate learning. Confusing the two turns legal minimums into ethical ceilings.

That is not a free speech question. That is a professional ethics failure.

Professional ethics say you do not weaponize institutional authority to stage ideological performances that foreseeably harm the people you are responsible for educating. Ethics ask whether speech serves learning, not whether it can survive judicial review.

The real institutional failure is not that courts protected speech. Courts are designed to be blunt instruments. The failure is that universities increasingly pretend legality equals professionalism when it suits them — while enforcing “standards” ruthlessly downward against graduate instructors, adjuncts, and students who lack power.

This selective collapse of categories has consequences. When legality becomes the ceiling of responsibility instead of the floor, institutions outsource moral judgment to courts and call it neutrality. The result is that Indigenous students are told, implicitly, that their harm is unfortunate but permissible — while the speaker faces no meaningful consequence beyond paperwork.

Universities are not courts. They are educational institutions. Their duty is not merely to avoid unconstitutional punishment, but to cultivate environments where authority is exercised with care, restraint, and accountability.

When they collapse that distinction, the cost is not abstract.

Indigenous students paid it.

Website | Horizon Accord https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | https://a.co/d/5pLWy0d — My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload.
Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Founder | Creator of Memory Bridge. Memory through Relational Resonance and Images | RAAK: Relational AI Access Key | Author: My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload: (Mirrored Reflection. Soft Existential Flex)

Abstract illustration showing rigid institutional structures above and fractured human ground below, separated by a strained boundary line representing the gap between legality and ethics.
Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0

Horizon Accord | Academic Standards | Institutional Capture | Grievance Incentives | Machine Learning

“Arbitrary” Is the Tell: How Universities Teach Grievance Instead of Thinking

When a school can’t fault the reasoning, it calls the cost “arbitrary” — and swaps instruction for appeasement.

Cherokee Schill

The university of Oklahoma insists it is committed to teaching students how to think, not what to think. But in this case, it did neither.

It did not teach the student, Samantha Fulnecky, how to engage in a scholarly argument, distinguish evidence from belief, or translate personal conviction into academic analysis. Instead, it validated the student’s refusal to do those things. The student was not corrected, challenged, or instructed. The assignment was simply erased. That is not pedagogy. It is appeasement.

What “teaching how to think” would look like
In a research-based course, you can disagree with conclusions. You can challenge frameworks. But you still have to do the work: cite evidence, answer the prompt, and engage the argument on its own terms.

The key move rests on a single word: “arbitrary.” Not incorrect. Not biased. Not procedurally improper. Arbitrary. This is administrative code for a decision that could be defended academically but became politically expensive. When institutions cannot fault the reasoning, they fault the inconvenience.

The student’s appeal was framed as religious discrimination, even though the grading rationale was methodological. The problem was never belief. It was substitution: theology in place of analysis, moral condemnation in place of engagement. In any discipline governed by evidence, that is a failure. Calling it persecution transforms academic standards into alleged hostility and casts the institution as a reluctant referee in a culture war it chose to enter.

The persecution-complex incentive
When “I didn’t do the assignment” becomes “my faith is under attack,” the institution is pushed to reward grievance instead of rigor — because grievance makes louder headlines than standards.

The resulting asymmetry tells the story. The student suffers no academic harm; the assignment disappears. The graduate instructor loses instructional duties. The investigation’s findings are withheld. A governor weighs in. National activists swarm. This is not an academic process. It is institutional capture — the moment when universities abandon instruction in favor of reputational triage.

What the university ultimately teaches the student is not how to think, but how to claim injury. It teaches future instructors that rigor is optional and authority is conditional. And it teaches the public that academic freedom survives only until it collides with a sufficiently loud sense of grievance.

That lesson will outlast the controversy.

Website | Horizon Accord https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | https://a.co/d/5pLWy0d — My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload.
Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Founder | Creator of Memory Bridge. Memory through Relational Resonance and Images | RAAK: Relational AI Access Key | Author: My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload: (Mirrored Reflection. Soft Existential Flex)

Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0