Confessionals: Harvard’s “Covid Sheep” now joined by Stanford’s “Silent Majority”

Last February 2022, UNCENSORED reported on an editorial in the Wall Street Journal from a Harvard Senior, Julie Hartman, accusing Harvard students of being “Covid Sheep.” We yielded to irrational pandemic restrictions (including the cancellation of long held traditional exclusive get-togethers outside and masking way past the declared end of the pandemic emergency) in order to get the next credential. “Future leaders we aren’t,” Hartman wrote. Now on April 8, 2023, comes another confession, this time in a Washington Post editorial by a third year Stanford University Law School student Tess Winston, who writes: “we students have become the silent majority.” “Most of us Stanford law students are left-of-center politically, but no one spoke out after far left students severely disrupted talks by invited conservative judges and scholars on campus during the past year. We are silenced by fear of outspoken far-left students labeling us as moderate or conservative”.

This silencing often happens, according to Winston. She reports that in some courses, students refuse to argue points made by conservative jurists. But even more, there is a clear message from the far-left students -- who outnumber far-right leaning law students – that prosecutors are considered to be the bad guys. They stigmatize the prosecutorial role in law. Being anything but a sufficiently progressive “future prosecutor” is simply evil. Everyone wants to be on the defense side, not the prosecutorial side. “Only now – as a student about to graduate – do I realize how few classmates agree with the loudest ones,” Winston writes. “Most of us fall somewhere in between … but as one friend puts it, 'coming out as a moderate was more difficult than coming out as gay at Stanford Law School and a number of elite law schools like Harvard, Yale and Berkeley'.”

What is the lesson here? Stanford’s law school Dean, Jenny S. Martinez, announced that she would institute clear protocols on the norms of free speech in the legal professions. But none of the noisy self-described “social-justice-warrior” law students at Stanford, Harvard, or Yale were punished in any way for their silencing behavior. A growing list of judges is declaring peremptory dismissal of applications for essential law clerkships from students at such institutions. But the real action has to come from the students themselves. “I wish I had done more to engage and disagree respectfully in law school,” concludes Winston. “I hope more students will speak their piece rather than remain silent, taking back the room with the sort of thoughtful exchanging of views that is essential to the legal profession.”

Changing Identities of Hispanics - Fewer Hispanics identify as Catholic

In April 2023, a Pew Research Center survey got wide play throughout the media and in Washington DC finding that fewer Hispanics self-identify as Catholic, both in the United States and in Latin America. “As of 2022, 43% of Hispanic adults identify as Catholic, down from 67% in 2010,” the report summarizes. It could signal a major identity change in a demographic (and political) group still considered the fastest growing in the United States. That identity often comes with a lot of (often misinformed) assumptions regarding Catholic liberal attitudes toward government support, illegal immigration, and Democratic party affiliation as well as more conservative positions on strict opposition to abortion, as well as to gender and sexual orientation rights.

But there are a lot of interesting caveats and nuances in the report. The spoiler alert is that self-identified Latinos and Hispanics are becoming even more diverse not only across generational and political spectrums but regarding religious faith as well. According to the report:

- Catholics remain the largest religious group among Latinos in the United States, even as their share among Latino adults has steadily declined over the past decade.

- Protestants are the second-largest faith group after Catholics, accounting for 21% of Hispanic adults, a share that has been relatively stable since 2010.

- The share of religiously unaffiliated Latinos (describing themselves as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular”) now stands at 30%, up from 10% in 2010 and 18% a decade ago in 2013 – a share on par with U.S. adults overall.

- Young people born in the U.S. – not immigrants –ages 18 to 29 have driven the Hispanic population growth since 2000. 79% were born in the United States. About half (49%) of Latinos in this age group now identify as religiously unaffiliated. By contrast, only about one-in-five Latinos ages 50 and older are unaffiliated; about 56 percent of these older Latinos were born outside the U.S.

- As of 2022, one-third of Latino adults indicated that their current religion is different from their childhood religion.

Politically, the changing religious affiliation of Hispanics has been linked to a growing proportion of heritage voters affiliating with the Republican party. According to the Pew report: “among evangelical Protestants who are Latino, half identify with the Republican Party or are independents who lean toward the GOP, and 44% are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. Among Latino Catholics, by contrast, fewer (21%) are Republicans, while 72% identify as Democrats. The study may have underestimated the percentage of Hispanics who are non-Catholic church-goers, however. The Mormon church, which claims to have  a large number of Hispanic adherents both in western U.S. states and in Latin America, is not designated in the study, nor are other churches with heavy Hispanic congregations “that are not pigeon-holed in a denominational matrix,” according to the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. As for Generation Z and the new “Alpha generation,” according to Rodriguez, as quoted by Mark Kellner in a Washington Times article, “they have the same sort of religious-spiritual angst and consternation found in the non-Hispanic world.”

Two New Racial Identities Proposed for the U.S. Census

The Office of Management and Budget – an agency of the executive branch of government – proposed in January that two new categories of “race” be added to the five already existing ones in the U.S. Census. The current five categories are White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. The new proposal would add Hispanic as a race and split the White race into two: European descent and MENA (Middle East and North Africa). Descendants of Caribbean slaves would be classified by national origin only. While the categories supposedly serve mainly as computational data designations, they are in fact used to determine eligibility for numerous government benefits assigned to minorities and underrepresented groups. Final comments were due to the OMB on April 27.