“When I first joined PPGA, that first day on Quad Day, I never thought that we would come this far,” said Karen A., the group’s current vice president and former health policy director. (She asked Salon not to publish her last name out of concern for her family’s immigration status.) “Obviously, I wanted to make a difference on campus and help students feel seen and supported. But to see our work go so far as to help so many other people across Illinois university and college campuses, is just mind-blowing to me.”

The students of PPGA at UIUC started the 2025-26 academic year by scoring a huge win. Last month, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a likely 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, signed HB3709 into law, a bill that requires health centers at public colleges and universities to provide students with contraceptives and the abortion pill. This all stemmed from the PPGA activists’ 2023 campaign to implement that policy at Urbana-Champaign through a campus referendum. With this statewide legislation, Illinois becomes the first state in the Midwest to require access to abortion care in public institutions of higher education.

“It is so surreal to just see where all of this has gone, especially being there for the original writing of the referendum,” Katie Holland, PPGA at UIUC co-president, told Salon. “I’ve seen this referendum since its birth, and it is just absolutely mind-blowing to me that this became what it did.”

One of two reproductive health bills Pritzker signed into law in late August, HB3709 amends the state’s Public Higher Education Act to require any public university or college that offers student health services to provide access to contraceptives and access to professionals who can prescribe medication abortion (better known as the abortion pill). It also requires referral agreements with outside providers that can provide gynecological services, in case someone has complications from a medication abortion or needs further consultation.

The bill passed along party lines in the Illinois House and Senate last spring, where Democrats in each chamber hold majorities of about 20 votes. In a press release, Pritzker’s office championed the legislation as a fulfillment of his campaign promise and a step toward challenging the efforts of “anti-choice extremists” to curtail abortion access across the country.

“Six years ago, I made a promise to the women of this state: As governor, I will ensure that your medical decisions will be your own,” Pritzker said. “Today is another step forward in fulfilling that promise.”

The work that made the bill possible started more than a year earlier, Holland said, in a PPGA board meeting during the spring term of the 2023-24 academic year meant as a brainstorming session on how to effect change on campus. The group had successfully advocated the previous year for the student health center to provide emergency contraceptives, also through a campus referendum, and wanted to push for more.

That’s when access to mifepristone, the principal medication used to induce an abortion, came up. Abortion is legal in Illinois up to the point of fetal viability, meaning around 24 to 26 weeks of pregnancy, with no restrictions. That was a result of the 2019 Reproductive Health Act, which recognized access to abortion and reproductive care as fundamental rights. Still, access varies across the state, from the dense urban and suburban landscape of Chicago to rural agricultural regions of southern Illinois. Medication abortion was difficult for college students, partly because patients from other Midwestern states were seeking care in Illinois facilities.

“So we were like, ‘What if students could get this on campus? We have this health center. What if we could put it there?’” said Holland, who was PPGA treasurer at the time. The group’s universal feeling, she said, was, “This is a great idea. Let’s see if we can do this.”

Student activists, led by original referendum writers Emma Darbro, Sydney Turner and Grace Hosey, started handing out flyers, urging their peers to vote during student council meetings and those of other campus groups, and posting on social media, Karen A. said. In the student council elections of February 2024, the group put campus access to mifepristone on the ballot, and nearly three-quarters of the 6,354 students who voted supported the proposal, according to Illinois Public Media’s Student Newsroom.

Despite that overwhelming support, UIUC administrators initially refused to provide the abortion pill on campus, with the executive director of the McKinley Health Center telling the outlet that the facility lacked “the expertise in-house to provide abortion services” but would refer students, through the center’s website, to nearby providers.

Holland said that she and the other PPGA board members “were crushed” at the time, but did not back down. They received support that fall from Planned Parenthood of Illinois Action, which awarded the student group its 2024 Trailblazer Award and honored them in a ceremony in Chicago. After the students’ acceptance speech, they were approached by a handful of Democratic state lawmakers who wanted to lend their support. When Darbro, then the PPGA president, discussed the referendum effort at an Illinois State University conference dedicated to women’s health, Pritzker’s office noticed.

Further momentum built, and what followed was a months-long lobbying effort in the Illinois General Assembly, with lawmakers, including state Rep. Anna Moeller, a Democrat and the primary bill sponsor, considering the legislation and signing on as co-sponsors.

Days of lobbying started early, Karen A. said, with a briefing from the statewide Planned Parenthood organizers. Then they’d head to the Capitol in Springfield in the afternoon and find state lawmakers from their districts, telling them about the policies and the barriers they faced as college students in accessing abortion care, including stigma, lack of financial resources and geographical distance.

Darbro and Hosey, who graduated in spring 2025, testified before legislative committees to move the bill along.

“I feel like being there, actually in person, talking to them, putting a name to a face, helped these lawmakers realize that these policies aren’t just a paper that they sign,” Karen A. said in an interview. “These are actually affecting real people. They affect people in their own communities and students like us.”

PPGA at UIUC also garnered support from PPGA chapters at other schools across the state, who came to the Capitol to support them. Bianca O’Shea, now the group’s special events coordinator, told Salon that residents in her hometown of Ottawa, a small city southwest of Chicago, supported the group’s efforts.

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“There was a lot of support from people from my town,” she said, “simply because they’re seeing these young people do something that is so important to them, and especially in a time where a lot of people felt kind of at a loss.” The Planned Parenthood clinic in Ottawa had closed, she said, “and at that point, we were a little unsure on what to do.”

HB3709 made its way through the Illinois legislature in April and May and was signed into law by Pritzker on Aug. 22, with Darbro, Holland and other student activists on hand to witness.

“To be recognized as an organization for the work that we’ve done is so rewarding,” Holland said. “It really makes me — and I’m sure everybody else — feel seen as college students, because sometimes you feel a little bit powerless as an individual, that your individual voice doesn’t matter. To be shown that it really does, that what students say, what they believe, the work that we do as a group matters and people are listening” is highly gratifying, she concluded.

A few weeks into the school year, university health centers are now tasked with implementing the new mandates. PPGA leaders hope to continue educating their peers on sexual health and reproductive justice. O’Shea has a meeting planned in October to educate students on supporting abortion patients and others who openly discuss sexual health issues. More activities are in the works.

With many state legislatures in Republican-dominated states working to curb abortion rights across the country, supported by Supreme Court rulings and the Trump administration’s executive actions, student leaders say they hope their group’s success will empower others — not just college students, but Americans of all backgrounds — to continue fighting for their rights.

“You’ve got to have the courage to speak up. You can’t just give up,” Holland said. “Yeah,  with the referendum, they weren’t able to implement it right away. But did we give up? No, and look at where we are now.”

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I intend to work my way back around to the instructive case of Columbia president Minouche Shafik, who apparently believed she could galaxy-brain her way around the protest crisis — and avoid the fate of ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay, among others — by capitulating in advance to the House Republicans’ witch-trial caucus, taking a hard line against alleged or actual antisemitism, and finally calling the cops on her own students. Spoiler alert: None of that was a good idea, and she probably didn’t save her job anyway.

First of all, it’s more accurate to say that the media-consuming public is riveted by the contentious political drama surrounding those scenes of campus discord than by the protests themselves, which are a striking sign of the times but hardly a brand new phenomenon. My own college graduation, in the mid-1980s, was disrupted by a student walkout over the university’s involvement in nuclear weapons research and its non-divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa. Strident moral positions and overheated rhetoric are features of student activism, which is sometimes effective and at other times purely symbolic; every generation, it’s fair to say, inherits or creates its own iteration.

It’s also worth noting that America’s extraordinary narcissism — another quality shared across the political spectrum — creates a global distortion effect whereby the deaths of at least 34,000 people in a conflict on the other side of the world are transformed into a domestic political and cultural crisis. Nobody actually dies in this domestic crisis, but everyone feels injured: Public discourse is boiled down to idiotic clichés and identity politics is reduced to its dumbest possible self-caricature. When the apparent issues are about who has said the most hateful things, who feels more “unsafe” and in what context, and which political party can get away with twisting events to suit its preferred narrative, then we’re stuck in the TikTok reboot of Plato’s cave, staring at flickering shadows long since severed from reality. 

None of that is the student protesters’ fault, exactly, although they have played an instrumental role in reprocessing the Gaza war — launched, of course, in response to the horrifying Hamas attack on Israel last October — as a theatrical spectacle or “simulation,” full of signs and symbols whose meanings are subject to endless debate. Most of them are expressing genuine (if histrionic) outrage that the U.S. government, self-appointed avatar of democracy and defender of the “rules-based order,” is funding and supporting Israel’s campaign of mass killing, wanton destruction and systematic deprivation against a virtually imprisoned civilian population. 

Exactly how much this student movement has been contaminated by intemperate, hotheaded or outright antisemitic rhetoric is, shall we say, a question of interpretation — but not one that can be credibly answered by Bibi Netanyahu, Elise Stefanik or Mike Johnson. As for those who seek to what-about the current wave of protests by observing that worse things have happened in recent history without driving the students of Emerson College to risk mass arrest in the Boston streets, they are correct while deliberately missing the point. 

Whatever world-historical culpability the U.S. may have had for the genocidal conflicts in Darfur or Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia, for Russia’s massively destructive war in Chechnya or China’s brutal oppression of the Uyghurs or whatever atrocity you’d like to name, those events were not the direct results of U.S. policy and did not carry the White House seal of approval. The Gaza war is, and does. 

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a longtime friend and admirer of Joe Biden, wrote last week, “Gaza has become the albatross around Biden’s neck. It is his war, not just Benjamin Netanyahu’s. It will be part of his legacy, an element of his obituary, a blot on his campaign,” in much the same way as the Vietnam War permanently stained the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who was undermined by the massive antiwar demonstrations of 1968 — including the student rebellion at Columbia, exactly 56 years ago this week, as it happens. 

Biden made a series of catastrophic miscalculations in the wake of the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, Kristof argues, and the net effect has been to make the U.S. look weak, hypocritical and profoundly cynical. Longtime British politician and diplomat Chris Patten, a pillar of center-right establishment thinking, told Kristof that Biden had made “a terrible, terrible error” that fed into “Chinese and Russian narratives that the West employs double standards and doesn’t really care about principles.”

I would describe Biden’s predicament as a symptom of the moral and political failures of liberalism, as well as the peculiar status of the United States, a still-dominant global superpower now in irreversible decline. The president did not or could not grasp how rapidly and decisively world opinion would turn against Israel and the U.S., or how little the world trusts American foreign policy after the last six decades or so of misbegotten wars and disastrous blunders. 

Furthermore, and this one is amazing too: Neither Biden nor anyone in his inner circle seemed aware that core Democratic constituencies — Black voters, younger people, progressives — already sympathized with the Palestinian cause and viewed the current Israeli government as a criminal rogue state (or worse). Or perhaps they didn't care: Mainstream Democrats tend to dismiss the significance of the youth vote, assume that Black voters will stick with them no matter what, and are eager to purge or bulldoze the activist left on any available pretext.

But those failures, all damaging enough on their own terms, were amplified and undergirded by Biden’s inexplicable faith that Bibi Netanyahu would somehow turn out to be a responsible leader and partner in a time of crisis, rather than a power-mad racist zealot with years of experience at manipulating American presidents. This miscalculation may seem mystifying when you consider Biden’s long years of public service and his vaunted expertise in foreign policy; Kristof certainly finds it so.

It makes more sense if we understand liberalism, of the 21st-century Biden variety, as faith in the power of human reason, and specifically in its power to bridge differences between competing interests and establish common ground for civil discourse and political compromise. If we lived in a world of rational, self-interested beings willing to acknowledge the perspectives of others — a world of liberals, in other words — that might work out. But we don’t, and in the real world Biden’s miscalculation regarding Netanyahu was a potentially fatal mistake — fatal for Biden’s presidency, fatal for Israel, fatal for the future of the Middle East.

That brings us back at last to Dr. Renat Shafik, who prefers the nickname Minouche, and whose full title in the British House of Lords is the Right Honorable Baroness Shafik DBE. She arrived at Columbia last July, with no experience in American academic life, touted as a champion of diversity and inclusion. (By birth and parentage, she is both Arab and Muslim.) Less than a year later, she summoned the NYPD to the Morningside Heights campus for the first time since the legendary student takeover of 1968. If Joe Biden represents the tragedy of liberalism in its pathetic form — no reasonable person can doubt his good intentions — Shafik represents something darker, and almost farcical. 

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If you wanted to choose one individual as the face of “neoliberalism” for an encyclopedia entry, you could do a lot worse. Shafik holds an economics PhD from Oxford and a résumé of high-ranking positions at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England, three institutions that have been instrumental in driving developing nations into unsustainable debt in pursuit of a disastrously failed model of progress. She came to Columbia after six years of pushing fiscal austerity as director of the London School of Economics, where just last spring she helped defeat a student/faculty strike, reportedly by slashing salary payments and lowering graduation requirements to hustle student protesters out the door.

After the Gaza protests erupted at Columbia, Shafik evidently surrounded herself with high-priced lawyers and consultants drawn from the orbit of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who persuaded her that she could save her job by abasing herself before the Republican witch-hunters in Congress and giving them everything they wanted, up to and including confidential university documents they had no right to see. 

This spectacular abdication of any pretense of academic integrity made her look like a liberal of the most craven and spineless kind, the kind who would rather surrender to a police state than stand up for the frequently uncomfortable principles of free speech. To the surprise of absolutely no one, or at least no one outside Shafik’s neoliberal policy bubble, that did nothing to placate Stefanik and Johnson and the rest of the House Republicans, who did not want to be placated and had no interest in reasonable dialogue. 

They wanted to watch Shafik squirm and grovel and then they wanted her head on a spike, while amplifying a largely invented crisis that delights their base and divides core liberal constituencies against each other. They have already achieved two of those three goals, and after alienating nearly everyone on the Columbia campus through her appalling cowardice, Shafik is surely numbering the days. 

Given her record, no one could have expected her to behave differently than she did. The real question is what we might learn from Shafik’s failure, and from the larger set of cultural and political failures it represents. After this disastrous week, one might be tempted to conclude that the slow, agonizing decline of American higher education has finally reached its nadir, and that American liberals will finally be forced to recognize that reason is useless against the enemies of reason. I’m not holding my breath.

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Decades ago, universities across the country began making cuts to the liberal arts. The humanities, fine arts and social sciences are endangered everywhere, as evident by the staggering variety of state colleges and private universities no longer invested in their survival. In 2023, West Virginia University eliminated its world languages department, reduced its education department by a third and slashed its programs in art history, music, architecture and natural resource management. In the same year, Lasell University, a small private school in Massachusetts, killed five majors, including English and history. In Ohio, numerous of the state's best-known institutions of learning have announced cuts to the liberal arts, including Kent State, the University of Toledo, Miami University, Youngstown State, Baldwin Wallace University and Marietta College.

But the academic carnage in the Buckeye State is hardly an outlier. A quick Google search reveals intellectual wreckage piling up across the nation. The University of New Hampshire permanently closed its art museum, the University of Tulsa eliminated degrees in history, and the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin system has instructed all 25 of its campuses — which enroll more than 160,000 students every year — to prepare for reductions in liberal arts programs.

My alma mater, Valparaiso University, is now preparing to join in the self-destruction. A Lutheran liberal arts college on the shores of Lake Michigan, 50 miles or so southeast of Chicago, Valparaiso recently announced that it is considering the “discontinuation” of 28 programs, including philosophy, public health, theology and the graduate program in English Studies and Communication, where I earned a master's degree. When I graduated in 2010, Valparaiso had a regional reputation as a small, private institution with excellent educational standards, bolstered by an emphasis on the arts and humanities.

The English Studies and Communication program was a hybrid, requiring study of creative writing, journalism, English literature and mass communication theory. Professors collaborated with the directors of the campus art museum and instructors in the social sciences and business departments, to demonstrate that knowledge is impossible to segregate or compartmentalize. A truly educated person should be adept at making connections across disciplines, cultures and different sectors of society.

Gore Vidal defined an intellectual as “someone who can deal with abstractions.” Valparaiso, at its best, did exactly that — equipping its graduates with an ability to handle abstractions, while showing that abstractions aren’t all that abstract. What might seem abstract in the academic context, as recent American history ought to have taught us, may soon transform into the concrete, creating situations of urgent social consequence. Arguments about democracy, disinformation, the public good and moral philosophy are inseparable from such issues as climate change, gun violence, the effects of new communication technology and the struggle to defeat autocracy.

In the 14 years since my graduation, Valparaiso has suffered from poor leadership that has caused consistent damage to its reputation. In 2020, it shut down its law school after years of lowering its standards to attract enough more students. Last year, the university's current president, José Padilla, launched a bizarre crusade to fund the renovation of a first-year dormitory by selling off a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, along with other signature works of art from the campus museum. Despite widespread opposition from students and faculty, and condemnation from the American Alliance of Museums, Padilla seems determined to proceed with this philistine maneuver (I wrote about the proposed sale for the New Republic.)

The potential gutting of Valparaiso's liberal arts programs is one small part of a much larger social and cultural trend of viewing education as nothing more than a business proposition. As Matthew Becker, a theology professor at Valparaiso, wrote, this decision, "if implemented, will completely dismantle the stated mission of the university":

Valpo will no longer be "grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith," nor will it really be preparing students "to serve in both church and society." With the elimination of foreign languages, music, the theology programs, and other programs in the humanities, Valpo will no longer be a liberal arts university.”

My nephew, Justin McClain, a recent graduate of the endangered public health program, stated the obvious: “On the heels of a pandemic that resulted in millions of lives lost and trillions in economic losses … educational institutions should be embracing students interested in joining a field that has proved far too valuable to the functioning of society at large yet remains chronically understaffed.”

Becker identified Valpo's plan of self-destruction as “completely market-driven,” and that's a critical point. Padilla and other university leaders have offered exclusively economic reasons to explain their agenda.

Time and again, college and university leaders across the country have cited financial justification and a business-model imperative for transforming their institutions into glorified vocational schools. And this wrecking-ball campaign runs in parallel with an ideologically motivated war on learning.

Right-wing governors and legislatures in many states, including Florida, Texas and Tennessee, have attempted to strip-mine universities, often by eliminating diversity, equity and Inclusion programs, prohibiting instruction in topics related to race and gender, and even threatening to deny loans to students who want to major in an “impractical” discipline.

This anti-intellectual campaign of destruction against higher education takes place alongside book-ban campaigns in many of the same states, where astroturf organizations funded by right-wing groups have worked to remove books from school curricula and libraries that focus on issues of racial justice or LGBTQ equality. 

It may be worth noting that many of those who claim to hate education are blatant hypocrites. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a defender of book bans who routinely bashes institutions of learning, also has a Harvard Law degree, as well as a B.A. in public policy from Princeton. Even Donald Trump — despite his incoherent rambling and his impressive lack of knowledge on almost every conceivable topic — doesn't technically qualify as “poorly educated.” Although exactly how and why Trump was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania in the first place remains unclear, he holds a B.S. in real estate from Penn's Wharton School. 

For all their phony anti-educational posturing, Republican officials and pundits have succeeded in selling ignorance as virtuous to their voters and viewers. A 2022 Pew Research survey found that 76 percent of Republicans now believe that colleges “affect the country negatively,” while 76 percent of Democrats said they believe colleges “affect the country positively.”

A good rule to follow is never to trust highly educated people who tell you that education is a waste of time. A good question to ask, after that, is why they want so many people to remain ignorant.

If democracy is to function as intended, it demands a well-informed and reasonably sophisticated citizenry. Without an intelligent electorate, democratic governance is under threat from despots and demagogues who can acquire power by appealing to base emotions and instincts. Thomas Jefferson called information the “currency of democracy.” America is now at risk of bankruptcy.

Jefferson was also one of the founders of the University of Virginia, where organized a committee to develop a holistic program of learning that, in today’s ruthless, profit-obsessed climate, would not survive at Valparaiso, at West Virginia University or at countless other schools. Its program was to include “ancient and modern languages, mathematics, physio-mathematics, physics, botany and zoology, anatomy and medicine, government and political economy and history, municipal law, and Ideology (rhetoric, ethics, belles lettres, fine arts).”

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George Washington advocated for a national university that would teach the arts and natural sciences, along with literature, rhetoric and criticism. But the father of our country might now have pariah status on most campuses — perhaps as an adjunct instructor with no health benefits, begging for a summer course.

In an age of extreme partisan rancor, there is dispiriting bipartisan unity on one point: Most Americans are increasingly hostile to the liberal arts. While only Republicans are overtly hateful of higher education as a whole, many students and administrators no longer claim to see the value in programs that, according to their standards, lack immediate and practical application to the job market. Recent data indicate that only 10.2 percent of college students major in any humanities discipline, and barely over 1 percent major in history or political science.

High schools across the country, meanwhile, have been cutting courses in civics, the social sciences, humanities and fine arts for decades.

Richard Hofstadter, one of the premier historians and public intellectuals of the 20th century, explained in his 1963 classic, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” that most Americans view intelligence as merely functional. Brainpower, in this view, should serve some practical and tangible purpose, typically one that can be measured in dollars and cents. Abstractions, to return to Gore Vidal’s remark, are seen as irrelevant distractions from learning the skills that can earn a bigger paycheck.

One of the numerous things people seem to have forgotten amid this rat-race competition is the question of how to maintain a democratic system of governance. Representative government is complicated, and often moves slowly. It requires sustained wrestling with the complex and thorny questions of ethics, personal freedom versus social responsibility, and balancing the progress driven by new knowledge and new ideas with the benefits of existing norms and traditions.

That kind of intellectual labor is taxing enough for those with a decent formal education, but with no training in the study of government, culture or mass communication, Americans are increasingly likely to fall for bad arguments and stupid ideas. Divorcing education from philosophical, political and social ambitions creates a culture in which people view public-health measures during a pandemic as stepping stones to the gulag, convince themselves that a racist con man most famous for hosting a game show could not possibly have lost a free and fair election, or believe that information about transgender people is more dangerous than assault rifles.

Democratic voters hope — as should everyone else with a conscience — that Joe Biden can overcome his poor approval ratings and doubts about his age by appealing to Americans' belief in democracy. He will have to consistently remind the electorate that his opponent presents an unprecedented threat to the system that millions of voters take for granted. For many Americans, however, democracy is a hazy concept at best. Survey results consistently show that large proportions of the American public don't understand the Bill of Rights, cannot name the three branches of government and are unfamiliar with the most important and basic facts of U.S. history.

Tech journalist Kara Swisher, author of the new history and memoir “Burn Book,” recently observed that leading figures in Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, have "no sense of history." If so, they are little different from the average citizen in that regard, yet they are routinely heralded as geniuses. It is hardly surprising that they’ve allowed hate speech, deceitful propaganda and other harmful material to proliferate on their platforms.

A society actually grounded in the liberal arts might see Zuckerberg and Musk as allegorical characters, perhaps as archetypal warnings against the reckless pursuit of wealth and the refusal to balance technical wizardry with more mature forms of insight and wisdom. But that is not our society. The outsized influence of Zuckerberg and Musk — not to mention Donald Trump —makes clear that we are at risk of handing our country over to cynical, power-mad morons who are, at best, indifferent to hate, poverty and violence. A little education might help.

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But some faculty members felt concerned, reading between the lines in a state that has become ground zero for the nation’s education debates — where Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump-style Republican with his eyes on the White House, has imposed gag orders and mandates on K-12 schools and described universities as “hotbeds of stale ideology” and “indoctrination factories.” 

Flagler’s institute would, the proposal said, promote “free inquiry” and “critical thinking,” which struck some faculty members as a confusing restatement of what was already their primary job. Then there was the promise to promote “a balanced world-view,” “the value and responsibilities of citizenship,” or what the college’s president characterized as classical education without an “ideological slant,” which sounded like potentially coded language for the sorts of measures DeSantis and his allies had been promoting. 

It didn’t help that one Flagler trustee perceived as being a key driver of the proposal, John Rood, a former ambassador under George W. Bush, also chairs the governing board of the Jacksonville Classical Academy — part of the nationwide charter school network created by Hillsdale College, a private Christian college in Michigan that has become a major player in America’s culture wars. To some faculty, the proposed institute felt like an attempt to “make Flagler College the Hillsdale of the South.” 

RELATED: Salon investigates: The war on public schools is being fought from Hillsdale College

Flagler’s vice president of academic affairs, Arthur Vanden Houten, said in an interview that while Rood had “enthusiastically responded” to plans for the institute, he wasn’t its only supporter or inspiration. If the proposal is ultimately funded, Vanden Houten said — it was approved by the legislature in March but still awaits DeSantis’ review — it will only help Flagler continue the work it already does. 

While the outcome at Flagler is still unclear on multiple levels, there were legitimate reasons for faculty to be alarmed, given the range of recent conservative assaults on public education, particularly but not exclusively in Florida. At a number of prominent colleges and universities around the country, big-money conservative interests are proposing and creating a roster of educational centers dedicated to conservative ideology or laissez-faire economics, often wrapped in the language of “classical education,” “civics” or “freedom.” The concept in itself isn’t new; right-wing philanthropists have been creating academic programs in their own image for decades. But these days, the model has been adopted by Republican-led legislatures too, effectively using taxpayer dollars to implant conservative ideology in public institutions. 

“It’s not that the faculty suspect the administration is scheming or duplicitous in any way,” said Flagler history professor Michael Butler, director of the school’s African American studies program. “The concern is that the culture wars of 2022 are moving into higher education, and we’re not sure what that means for Flagler College. This proposal does not come in a vacuum.” 

Ron DeSantis and the response to “critical race theory”

When Flagler faculty pictured what they didn’t want the institute to become, they didn’t have to look far. Also included in Florida’s proposed 2022-23 budget — or, more specifically, in an education bill attached to the budget, which details how Florida’s new restrictions on teaching about racism in higher education should be enforced — is a similar proposal to create a think tank at the University of Florida in Gainesville, the state’s flagship higher-ed institution. In more explicit terms than the Flagler proposal, the “Hamilton Center for Classical and Civics Education” at UF would be dedicated to “the ideas, traditions, and texts that form the foundations of western and American civilization.” 

That plan has gotten little attention so far, beyond approving mention in conservative publications like Campus Reform or the College Fix. Gov. DeSantis’ combative spokesperson, Christina Pushaw, has called it an important part of the administration’s crusade to foster “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity within higher education.” 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

According to the legislation, the center would be tasked, along with two other schools — the Florida Institute of Politics at Florida State University in Tallahassee and the Adam Smith Center for the Study of Economic Freedom at Florida International University in Miami — with helping create materials for the state’s recently overhauled K-12 civics curriculum, whose stated aim is now to create patriotic, “upright and desirable” citizens. 

Specifically, these centers will help develop a series of “oral history resources” called Portraits in Patriotism that will include, for example, videos of Florida immigrants who fled countries like Cuba and Venezuela, to impress upon students “the evil of communism and totalitarianism.” When DeSantis discussed the project with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in 2021, he suggested that this project would also serve as Florida’s response to “critical race theory.” It also seems these centers may become training grounds for Florida’s K-12 instructors; DeSantis has previously offered $3,000 grants to teachers who undergo training in the new civics standards. 

All this, of course, takes place against the larger backdrop of Florida’s ongoing attacks on public education: Within the last year or two, DeSantis and the GOP-led legislature have enacted broad bans on teaching about racism and LGBTQ issues, barred numerous materials from classroom use and empowered citizens to sue schools they believe are “indoctrinating” students. While the first wave of that assault was largely directed at public K-12 schools, it’s increasingly expanding to higher education as well.

This spring, Florida’s public universities began conducting annual surveys of students and faculty to ensure that campuses contain sufficient “viewpoint diversity,” in accordance with a law passed last year. Schools that appear to lack conservative viewpoints, DeSantis has suggested, may lose state funding. That same law also granted students broad permission to record their professors during classes or lectures. Other recent measures require faculty to undergo new reviews every five years to fight “indoctrination,” effectively ending the tenure system, and also require extensive documentation of resources used in course instruction and complicated new procedures for university accreditation. 

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The last measure, in a strange way, is seen as an attempt to shield the University of Florida from the consequences of its own defensive moves to crack down on academic freedom. Last fall, UF sparked tremendous backlash after first blocking three political science professors from testifying in a lawsuit about Florida’s new voting restrictions — their testimony, the university suggested, was contrary to the interests of the state — and then demanding that a professor revise a course that had the words “critical” and “race” in its title. Those incidents prompted investigations by both Congress and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, which provides UF’s accreditation. 

“Our university is well known for anticipatory obedience,” said Meera Sitharam, vice president of UF’s faculty union. Neither Sitharam nor two other faculty members at the university said they had been told much of anything about UF’s proposed Hamilton Center, but from the little they had learned, they also had concerns. 

“There’s nothing particularly wrong with saying there should be more Western canon and classical liberalism in the classroom,” said Sitharam. “What I’m against is the idea that this should replace CRT. I don’t know what one has to do with the other.” 

She expressed similar concerns with the plan for the institute to curate DeSantis’ Portraits in Patriotism series. “You can teach what the problems of authoritarian regimes are, but why single out the communist ones? Look at Pinochet, look at Argentina — there’s been more than enough right-wing authoritarianism in Latin America, even if we’re restricting ourselves to Latin America for some reason,” she said. “The one-sidedness is what’s problematic. They’re always seeing it from one side, then claiming they are the ones who are critically thinking.” 

Malini Johar Schueller, an English professor who joined UF’s Coalition for Academic Freedom after last fall’s controversies, was more emphatic. “I think it’s thoroughly shameful of UF to accept an educational endeavor, if you can call it that, which is so blatantly racist,” she said. When it comes to terms like “Western civilization” and “American exceptionalism,” she continued, “We all know what those are about. Those are code words for people who feel they’ve had enough of books teaching the histories of minorities.”  

What does “classical education” mean, anyway?

Back at Flagler College, religious studies professor Timothy Johnson said that if Flagler’s proposal had been framed with such an explicit emphasis on Western civilization, there would have been even stronger pushback. “Not because we’re not in favor of Western education,” he said, “but because that comes nowadays with certain ideological baggage.” 

But to a certain extent, added Butler, the Flagler history professor, “classical education” has become an equally loaded term. “Is the purpose of ‘classical education’ to teach the classic works of literature?” he asked. “Is it to return to ‘Western traditions’?” When schools like Hillsdale use the term, he said, “they make no bones about what they’re trying to accomplish.” 

By strict definition, “classical education” refers to a series of liberal arts emphases on subjects like grammar, logic, rhetoric and math. Multiple approaches to classical education exist, from varied ideological perspectives. But in recent years in the U.S., the term has been freighted with additional meaning. Right-wing publications like the Washington Examiner, National Review and the American Conservative have all rolled out the phrase to mean the most conservative model of education or “the natural replacement” for “critical race theory and other liberal curricula.” Ryan Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, which campaigns against CRT, suggested in the early months of the pandemic that conservatives should seize the opportunity of disrupted classrooms to remake education along classical lines, since that approach alone could offer “a perspective on history that doesn’t teach [children] that the American system of government is inherently evil.” 

“It’s tricky to know what’s going on because classical or liberal arts education is not merely an ideological project adopted by the American right,” said Lorna Bracewell, a political theorist at Flagler. “I understand myself to be involved in classical and liberal arts education, and I’m basically an anti-fascist lesbian. So I don’t think it’s only code, or only a dog whistle. And yet, because there has been this concerted effort by the American right to appropriate that language, it makes one wary.”

Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida (David Gutierrez/Creative Commons)

But for most of those who’ve turned “classical education” into a buzzword or a franchise in recent years, it basically means exalting Western civilization, American exceptionalism and the notion that America was founded on “Judeo-Christian” principles. Hillsdale College’s classical education offerings, for instance, include its “1776 Curriculum,” a right-wing answer to the “1619 Project” that declares the U.S. “an exceptionally good country,” casts slave-owning founding fathers as covert abolitionists and calls progressivism “a rejection of the principles of the Declaration of Independence as well as the form of the Constitution.” 

Among the classical public charter schools Hillsdale has helped found, some proclaim their unapologetic focus on the works of white men, which are said to represent the best of Western thought and the foundational heritage of any American student, no matter their racial or ethnic background. At the Jacksonville Classical Academy (overseen by one of Flagler’s trustees), the mission statement emphasizes a vision to “train students to be stewards of the Western Tradition and the pillars of a free society.” The largest classical charter school network in the country, the Texas- and Arizona-based Great Hearts America, was engulfed in scandal in 2018 after one of its public charters directed students to balance the “positive” and “negative” aspects of slavery.

“What they’re trying to do is stop the clock on what counts as ‘canon,'” said Bethany Moreton, a historian at Dartmouth College who has written extensively about the right and is author of the forthcoming “Perverse Incentives: Economics as Culture War.” The enshrinement of a core “Western canon” to represent classical education, she notes, is not some timeless tradition, but a relatively recent creation born in the 20th century with the goal of assimilating new demographics of university students into a common national culture. Today’s renewed conservative focus on the model, Moreton continued, has similar aims. “This is not an innocent selection of the greatest that was ever said and thought. This is an identity project in itself.”  

“A separate patronage system” for right-wing thinkers and activists

In early April, Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist and Manhattan Institute fellow widely credited with driving the right’s crusade against “critical race theory” (CRT), delivered a speech at Hillsdale College, calling on conservatives to “lay siege to the institutions.” While the most headline-grabbing aspect of his speech was Rufo’s admission that the best way for conservatives to lure people away from public schools was to surround them with endless controversy — over CRT, pandemic health measures, LGBTQ students and whatever else — a brief aside during the Q&A session was arguably just as important. 

Responding to the widespread conservative belief that liberals are winning the culture war, no matter what happens in Washington, Rufo suggested that the right should fight back by staging its own institutional takeover. Specifically, he said, Republican state lawmakers should dedicate public funds to establish “conservative centers” within flagship public universities. These could serve multiple purposes, he said, acting as “magnets” for conservative professors, creating right-leaning academic tracks that would influence incoming generations of students and, not least, founding “a separate patronage system” for conservative thinkers and activists. 

“Some people don’t like thinking about it that way,” Rufo continued. “But guess what? The public universities, the [diversity, equity, inclusion] departments, the public school bureaucracies are, at the end of the day, patronage systems for left-wing activists. And as long as there’s going to be a patronage system, wouldn’t it be good to have some people representing the public within them?” 

That may be a fair description of UF’s proposed Hamilton Center. But it’s not the only example.

In 2020, the Florida legislature also created the Adam Smith Center for the Study of Economic Freedom at Florida International University in Miami. Headed by former Trump official Carlos Díaz-Rosilla, the center’s stated mission includes studying “the effect of government and free market economies on individual freedom and human prosperity,” especially in the Americas.

Green Library at Florida International University in Miami. (Andres Limones Cruz/Creative Commons)

Six years earlier, in 2014, Florida’s legislature also funded a professorship at Florida State focused on “economic prosperity.” That one position has since been transformed, with the help of private donations from the network of right-wing libertarian mega-donor Charles Koch, into a full-scale institution, the L. Charles Hilton Jr. Center for the Study of Economic Prosperity and Individual Opportunity.

“It’s funny” that the right claims a need to create a separate patronage system for conservative academics, said Bethany Moreton, “because they’ve been doing this since the mid-1970s.” For decades, right-wing donors have sought to establish beachheads in colleges and universities across the nation, from which they hoped to create an academic foundation for conservative or libertarian policies.

In her 2017 book “Democracy in Chains,” Duke University historian Nancy MacLean chronicled the creation of the first such center, founded at the University of Virginia and later moved to George Mason University. This flagship program, nurtured by the vision of right-wing economist James Buchanan and then fattened with Koch foundation funds, helped inspire conservative funding of academic departments, endowed chairs and standalone centers at more than 300 universities in the decades since. 

Institutes like George Mason’s Mercatus Center today serve as “nerve centers” for conservative policy agendas, said MacLean, and also as talent pipelines, allowing funders to boast that they are rearing the next generation of staff for conservative think tanks and advocacy groups. And that’s by explicit design. 

A 2018 report by the progressive organization Unkoch My Campus describes Charles Koch’s conviction that right-wing donors should focus less on targeting unreliable politicians to enact a pro-business agenda and more on building support for their ideas through donations that could trigger a long chain of outcomes. In a 1974 pamphlet, “Anti-Capitalism and Business,” Koch wrote that conservative philanthropy should aim to achieve a “multiplier effect,” and that for that purpose, “education programs are superior to political action, and support of talented free market scholars is preferable to mass advertising.” 

That perspective was elaborated by Koch’s key adviser, Richard Fink, then the president of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, in a much-referenced paper from 1996 entitled “The Structure of Social Change.” Fink argued that grants to universities to support the work of economists committed to radical free-market capitalism could inform policy proposals from conservative think tanks. That work, in turn, would inspire advocacy organizations (either grassroots or astroturf), which create the appearance of broad public support, which ultimately leads politicians to pass laws that deregulate capitalism or defund the welfare state.

“They see it as this industrial process where they fund all four stages and the end product is social change,” said Ralph Wilson, founder of the progressive watchdog group Corporate Genome Project and coauthor of the recently-released “Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War.” Wilson began researching the impact of the Koch network on education years ago while a student at Florida State, which made an unsavory deal with Koch donors, taking their money in exchange for allowing them a say in hiring and curriculum decisions, and, at one point, having a Koch-funded economics program create pro-capitalism lesson plans for both college and K-12 instruction. (One product of that agreement, Wilson noted, was a K-12 curriculum called “Common Sense Economics,” which included, incredibly, a paper titled “Sacrificing Lives for Profit,” which argued, “Corporations routinely sacrifice the lives of some of their customers to increase profits, and we are all better off because they do.”) Within that process, Wilson said, “the university is recognized as the key first stage of investment for social change, so the more they can capture universities, the more successful their political program will be.” 

That model, added MacLean, works in tandem with the steady defunding of higher education over many years. “As taxes are driven down by the same [conservative] elected officials, school administrators are just desperate for funds,” said MacLean. “So they become a willing audience, and in some ways even accomplices, to this expansion of right-wing influence in higher education that has not been earned on the merits of any intellectual argument or research.”

At the University of Florida, religious studies professor Bron Taylor recognized that pattern. Taylor said he personally believed that “teaching the history, philosophy and religion of the so-called Western world is something we should be doing, and doing well,” and worried that certain traditional subjects had fallen so far out of fashion that students might graduate without a strong grounding in basic civics. But he said he also believed that outside funding with strings attached could distort the educational mission. 

“When big money comes into a university, of course the university tends to welcome that. It’s one of the ways they accomplish things they want to accomplish,” he said. “But it’s also the case that in an institution that’s supposed to be run by faculty governance, you end up with administrators whose status and prestige interests are served by raising money, and the donors then can exercise undue influence on the priorities of the university.”

“In this kind of case the devil’s in the details,” Taylor continued. “Who is going to decide the shape and priority of this institute? Will the donors have any say in who is appointed to lead it?” Under current conditions at UF, he said, “DeSantis doesn’t have to say, ‘If you do X, we’ll cut your funding,'” because administrators already know. “There’s always this Damoclean sword hanging over the university, that if you stray from their political agenda, you’ll be looked at disfavorably when it comes to budgets.”

For the last 10 years, Wilson, who previously helped found Unkoch My Campus, has focused attention on academic centers funded by private donors. As that pattern has become more widely known, efforts to build or expand Koch-related centers at numerous schools have encountered pushback from students and staff, as with a recent effort to build a free-market Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Brown University. 

But now the right has a new playbook: Leveraging direct funding from state governments. 

“Using state legislatures as an avenue for the creation of these centers seems to be a new tactic,” said Wilson, which can expedite the entire enterprise. “There’s no decision-making process that involves a faculty legislature” if state governors and lawmakers are making the decisions. “It removes any avenue for students, faculty or administrators, for that matter, to have a say in the creation of these centers.” 

“A late-stage example of corporate capture of the state”

That’s largely what happened in Arizona five years ago, when the state’s right-wing legislature poured millions of dollars into transforming two “freedom schools” at Arizona State University, initially created with funding from the Koch network, into a new program, the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, which was deemed necessary because, according to a group of conservatives hired to develop the program, ASU suffered from “conformity of opinion” and “lack of debate.” 

“The legislature basically held the university hostage to force them to create tenure-track faculty lines for the freedom center,” said MacLean. Writing in the Washington Post, Matthew Garcia, the former director of the school’s historical, philosophical and religious studies department, argued that what had once been two conservative centers subject to the normal process of faculty oversight and hiring procedures became an unaccountable institution exempt from normal governance, which spent lavishly on first editions of “foundational” books and subsidized international trips for its students, and where a university official allegedly said the program “would never hire anyone that Koch doesn’t approve.” Garcia resigned, and now teaches at Dartmouth. 

But Wilson added that the program at ASU now receives so much direct state funding that the Koch network has largely been able to drop its support. Both ASU’s new center and another Koch-backed “freedom” center at the University of Arizona have been called upon to develop the state’s K-12 civics curricula. In January, Arizona Republicans proposed their own “Portraits in Patriotism” oral history series, much like Florida’s, as a requirement for high school graduation. 

“This is a late-stage example of the corporate capture of the state,” said Wilson. “As these donors are trying to gain intellectual and cultural influence for their ideology, they’ve been frantically trying to set up shop in universities that will help legitimize their movement.” In states like Arizona, Texas and Florida where far-right donors have amassed considerable political influence, “they have so much control that they can start implementing their agenda from the top down. They can use the state to help them further capture the state.” 

Since the changes at ASU, there has been a flurry of similar proposals for new conservative centers at flagship public universities.

In Texas last year, a new state initiative, championed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, allocated an initial $6 million to create a think tank at the University of Texas at Austin, “dedicated to the study and teaching of individual liberty, limited government, private enterprise and free markets” and envisioned as a $100 million public-private partnership modeled on Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Documents obtained by the Texas Tribune made clear that university administrators worked closely with Republican lawmakers and school donors who saw the center as a means of bringing “intellectual diversity” to the campus. 

One such document describes the institute’s mission as educating students “on the moral, ethical, philosophical and historical foundations of a free society” and included plans to create a related civics course for high school students, much as in Florida and Arizona. 

Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Another document noted that the center was necessary because a “growing proportion of our population lacks a basic understanding of the role liberty and private enterprise play in their well-being.” What “liberty” and “free society” mean in this context may be clarified by the involvement of private donor Bud Brigham, a libertarian oil tycoon who blames academics for fostering the “global warming scam” and funded the production of not one but two movie adaptations of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” 

The Liberty Institute at UT Austin was controversial from its inception, with student government calling on administrators to reject the offer and faculty expressing frustration with the lack of transparency. The documents obtained by Texas Tribune also suggest that some of the project’s supporters called for the institute to be exempt from the university’s normal governance process, with its own budget and the power to appoint its own faculty. 

In February, the institute came into the news again in the aftermath of Patrick’s angry vow to eliminate tenure at Texas’ public universities following a resolution passed by UT Austin’s faculty council supporting scholars’ academic freedom to teach critical race theory. Patrick responded by writing on Twitter, “I will not stand by and let looney Marxist UT professors poison the minds of young students with Critical Race Theory. We banned it in publicly funded K-12 and we will ban it in publicly funded higher ed. That’s why we created the Liberty Institute at UT.” 

Similar plans have also arisen recently in Tennessee. When Gov. Bill Lee delivered his “state of the state” address in late January, the biggest headlines were reserved for his announcement that Tennessee would partner with Hillsdale College to roll out more “classical education” charter schools, funded with taxpayer dollars, across the state. But Lee also said that the “informed patriotism” that characterized that endeavor “should stretch beyond the K-12 classroom and into higher education.” 

“In many states, colleges and universities have become centers of anti-American thought, leaving our students not only ill-equipped but confused,” Lee continued. “But, in Tennessee, there’s no reason why our institutions of higher learning can’t be an exceptional part of America at Its Best.” 

To that end, Lee announced, he was budgeting $6 million to create a new “Institute of American Civics” at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which he said would serve as “a flagship for the nation — a beacon celebrating intellectual diversity at our universities and teaching how a responsible, civic-minded people strengthens our country and our communities.” 

This move came in the wake of pressure from Tennessee Republicans to drop plans to address diversity at several state universities, including both UT Knoxville and the University of Memphis. In April, after students at Yale Law School protested a speaker from the anti-LGBTQ legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom, Lee released a statement saying that his new Institute for American Civics was designed “to be the antidote to the cynical, un-American behavior we are seeing at far too many universities.” 

Are you teaching history “the right way”?

At Flagler College in St. Augustine, it’s still not clear where the proposed Institute for Classical Education fits into this complex picture. Much of the faculty uncertainty or apprehension isn’t about what Flagler administrators have actually proposed but rather the context surrounding it: the coded meanings of “classical ed,” the updated model of state-funded university infiltration and the overall atmosphere of hostility to public education in Florida and around the country. 

Earlier this year, Flagler historian Michael Butler was supposed to deliver a training seminar on the civil rights movement to Florida elementary school teachers. It was canceled by local officials who feared it might fall afoul of new prohibitions on teaching about race. When he tells people he’s a historian these days, he said, they increasingly respond by asking him whether he teaches history “the right way.” 

“The whole dynamic has to be understood in the broader context of what’s happening in Florida with regards to education and how people interpret that,” said Flagler’s Timothy Johnson. He doesn’t think Flagler’s proposal is a “Trojan horse” for a particular political project, he said, and if the state wants to support the school’s efforts to retain first-generation college students, that’s a good thing. If, however, he said, “the state of Florida wants to give $5 million to the college and dictate the concept and content of ‘classical education,’ then I completely oppose the initiative.”

Flagler’s administration has taken pains to distinguish their proposed center from the larger swirl of polarization, saying that any hiring or curriculum decisions would go through the traditional process of faculty oversight, not outside interests from either the board of trustees or state government. When eight professors, including Butler, Johnson and Bracewell, brought a resolution before the faculty senate in April, affirming that the center would remain “under the jurisdiction and control of the faculty,” it passed unanimously, with senior administrator Art Vanden Houten and the college president in support. 

Whatever ultimately happens at Flagler, versions of this model, and the accompanying controversy, are certain to be replicated elsewhere, in schools with less supportive administrations. At the University of Florida, Malini Johar Schueller said the school’s failure to solicit faculty input about its proposed center was “quite in keeping with this administration.” She expressed little optimism that things would improve soon.

“This is going to continue, unfortunately,” she said. “All we can do at the university level is not be cowed down, do what we have to do and put up a good battle.” 

“The right was thinking long-term when they started doing this in the ’70s, thinking ahead to a moment like this one,” said Bethany Moreton. “They do not support education as a good in itself, but as a means to an end that they should define. And the further you remove education from democratic oversight, the more likely it is that freestanding institutes like this become a way to have what they always dreamed of: a university without the disruptive forces of actual thought, contestation and new knowledge.”

Read more on the American right’s latest wave of assaults on education:

• A new age of fascist politics brings a war on youth — but young people are ready to resist
• Betsy DeVos and Ron DeSantis: GOP dynamic duo team up to defund public schools
• What is “social emotional learning” — and how did it become the right’s new CRT panic?

The post EXCLUSIVE: Now the far right is coming for college too — with taxpayer-funded “classical education” appeared first on Salon.com.

The campus free speech debate is heating up. Last month I made the case (first in a Twitter thread and then again at the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage) that there is no campus free speech crisis. Around the same time, similar arguments were made by Matt Yglesias (at Vox), Aaron Hanlon (at NBC), and Mari Uyehara (at GQ). The gist of our collective argument was that young people and university students are generally supportive of free speech, that university enrollment is associated with an increase in tolerance for offensive speech, and that a small number of anecdotes have been permitted to set the terms of public debate.

Unsurprisingly, these debunkings have attracted some debunkings of their own. The most detailed of these was a pair of posts by Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt at the Heterodox Academy. In addition to restating the case for why the campus free speech crisis is real, Stevens and Haidt make a number of additional claims for why alarm is warranted. I am grateful for their critique, but I am not persuaded.

The claim: Young people aged 18-24 are significantly less supportive of free speech than older generations

In their two response pieces, Stevens and Haidt acknowledge that young people overall are supportive of free speech, but argue that those born after 1995 are different. For a variety of reasons (elsewhere Haidt has identified changes in child-rearing practices, the development of social media, and political polarization), young people aged 18-24 (Stevens and Haidt call them “iGen”) are much less tolerant of offensive speech than older millennials or other Americans in general.

The evidence does not support this claim. Stevens and Haidt place special weight on the results of a 2017 Cato/YouGov survey of Americans’ attitudes about various speech-related issues. In particular, they focus on a set of questions asking whether respondents would support a ban on speech offensive to ten different kinds of groups (e.g., white people, Muslims, the police). On average, the youngest two age groups (18-24 and 25-35 year olds) support banning offensive speech 44 percent and 43 percent of the time, respectively, whereas the two oldest age groups (55-64 and 65-plus) support them only 33 percent each.

So iGen is different, right? Not so fast. First of all, the Cato/YouGov survey asks dozens of other speech-related questions and in many of them young people lead the way (e.g., in their support for freedom of the press). While I understand why Stevens and Haidt chose to focus on speech bans, I suspect they would agree that those questions tell us only part of the story.

And anyway, the story they tell does not support the iGen theory. A comparison between all generations (and not just the two youngest versus the two oldest) shows that iGen’ers are much less out of the mainstream than Stevens and Haidt suggest.

Source: 2017 Cato/YouGov Free Speech and Tolerance Survey
Note: “Don’t know/refused” are excluded.
Figure 1: Support for banning offensive speech

Yes, if you look closely, you will note that iGen’ers are slightly more supportive on average of banning certain types of offensive speech than older generations, but there is no sudden spike or sweeping change. If these numbers are meant to show that iGen’ers are different, you need to really squint to see it.

There are other problems with Stevens and Haidt’s theory. Not only are young people’s attitudes in line with national averages, but their intensity levels are too. This becomes obvious once we distinguish between degrees of support for speech bans, which the Cato/YouGov survey allows us to do.

Source: 2017 Cato/YouGov Free Speech and Tolerance Survey
Note: “Don’t know/refused” are excluded.
Figure 2: Support for banning offensive speech, with intensity

As this figure shows, not only are the opinions of iGen’ers within the mainstream, but so is the intensity with which they hold them. In fact, iGen’ers are less likely to strongly favor speech bans than 25-34 or 45-54-year-olds, and are tied with 35-44-year-olds. The upshot is that if you were on the hunt for a radical anti-free speech fringe, you would be better off looking among older millennials or the middle aged.

A decade of data from the Knight Foundation on high school students tells a similar story. Support for the First Amendment is currently at its strongest level yet recorded, with a majority of high schoolers (56 percent) disagreeing with the statement “The First Amendment goes too far in the rights it protects.” Note that there is no change during the years when iGen would be entering high school.

Source: 2016 Knight Foundation Future of the First Amendment Survey
Figure 3: Support for the First Amendment among high schoolers, 2006-2016.

High schoolers display similarly consistent levels of support when presented with specific speech-related scenarios. Again, the entry of iGen makes no visible difference.

Source: 2016 Knight Foundation Future of the First Amendment Survey
Figure 4: Support for specific free speech scenarios among high schoolers, 2004-2016.

And contrary to Haidt’s theory about the relationship between social media and free speech, the Knight Foundation survey also found that high schoolers who actively engage with news on social media – discussing stories, posting comments, and linking to articles – consistently demonstrate greater support for free speech, not less.

But there is a deeper problem with Stevens and Haidt’s theory about iGen. Strictly speaking, their argument is not that young people are hostile to free speech. After all, young people do not stay young forever, and if their attitudes about free speech are just a function of age, then the “problem” will largely take care of itself. Instead, Stevens and Haidt argue that their attitudes are a function of cohort, and as such will endure over time.

Unfortunately, they do not present any evidence to substantiate this claim, and for an understandable reason – there is very little longitudinal data comparing generational support for free speech. But without that data, it becomes impossible to know whether iGen’ers are really different or just really young.

The claim: There is a “politically correct” range of acceptable speech on campus, and it leans heavily to the left of the political spectrum

This claim may be correct, but we should be cautious about how we interpret it. Stevens and Haidt cite the 2017 Knight Foundation Free Expression on Campus survey showing a rise in the number of college students who say that “the climate on my campus prevents some people from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive”, from 54 percent in 2016 to 61 percent in 2017.

However, with only two data points to work with (there is no earlier data), it is impossible to know whether what we are seeing is random statistical noise or the beginnings of a trend. Moreover, this increase is being driven by perceptions of self-censorship among Democrats and independents. The number of Republican students who reported a censorious climate on campus actually dropped, from 62 percent to 53 percent.

Source: 2017 Knight Foundation Free Expression on Campus survey
Figure 5: Perceptions of a censorious climate on campus, 2016-2017.

Even so, Stevens and Haidt are probably correct that liberal students have an easier time expressing themselves on campus. According to a 2017 FIRE/YouGov survey, conservative-leaning students were more likely to report that they censor themselves than liberal students, both in the classroom (60 percent vs. 53 percent) and outside of it (47 percent vs. 40 percent). And while most of this was due to a desire to fit in or avoid hurting someone else’s feelings, conservatives who self-censored were more likely than liberals to offer reasons like fear of receiving a poor grade from their professor (77 percent vs. 26 percent) or getting in trouble with a campus employee (17 percent vs. 5 percent).

These are concerning numbers, though the mechanisms at work need further study. Does the content of the speech matter? Are certain types of courses or classroom environments more censorious than others? How is the fear of retribution (from professors, administrative staff, other students, etc.) generated and distributed? More research is clearly needed.

However, it bears noting that Americans are, in general, a self-censoring people. Fifty-eight percent of us self-censor, according to the Cato/YouGov survey. And while the disparity between conservative and liberal self-censorship is real, it is actually smaller on campus than it is off. Conservative students self-censor less, and liberal students self-censor more, than do their counterparts among the general population. In other words, to the extent that there is an ideological divide over political correctness in America, universities are a relative exception.

The claim: The political left is a bigger threat to campus free speech than the political right

This final claim is the most subjective and therefore the most difficult to critically evaluate. Threats to free speech on campus can come from many directions, including from students, faculty, administrative staff, alumni, the local community and politicians. Many of these may have no clear political identity or agenda as such, but are concerned instead with things like avoiding embarrassment or pleasing donors.

Nevertheless, politics can be a factor. Stevens and Haidt cite data from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE) Disinvitation Database to show that the political left is responsible for the vast majority of “disinvitation incidents,” defined as episodes in which members of the campus community attempt to block an outside speaker from speaking on campus.

But we should be skeptical of this conclusion. First of all, the Disinvitation Database is incomplete. It especially undercounts disinvitation incidents at religious colleges and universities, of which there have been many over the years. All these examples were instigated by the right. All were successful. None are in FIRE’s database. And while some were cancelled due to quiet intervention by the university, others were the result of well-funded, nationwide campaigns. Whatever the cause, the absence of these cases makes the imbalance between the left and the right seem much greater than it actually is.

Even so, we should expect there to be more disinvitation attempts coming from the campus left than from the right. After all, that’s where more of the students are (35 percent vs. 22 percent of incoming freshmen, according to one recent survey). The implication of Stevens and Haidt’s argument is that liberal students are worse on free speech than conservatives. Maybe. Or maybe there are just a lot more of them.

Not convinced? Consider another way that free speech on campus might be threatened: terminating faculty for political speech. Are faculty whose speech is perceived to be political more likely to be fired due to criticism from the left or the right? It is an important question, one that re-entered public debate recently following a Fresno State professor’s controversial remark.

To begin to answer this question, I gathered together all cases from 2015 to 2017 involving:

• a faculty member at an American degree-granting postsecondary nonprofit institution;
• who was fired, forced to resign/resigned as part of a settlement, or demoted/denied promotion;
• due to speech perceived by critics as political.

Sources included the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, AAUP, FIRE and Campus Reform. You can view the resulting dataset here.

Inevitably there were ambiguous cases. Some involved professors who resigned over withering public criticism but retained the support of their institutions (e.g., Areej Zufari at Rollins College, Dale Brigham at the University of Missouri). In others, the evidence was suggestive but ultimately too thin to establish causation (e.g., Daniel Browning at William Carey College). Such cases were excluded from the dataset. On the other hand, I chose to include deans and comparable non-faculty academics (e.g., Nicholas Christakis at Yale University, N. Bruce Duthu at Dartmouth College) on the grounds that doing so contributes to an overall assessment of the campus free speech situation.

What remains are 45 cases from 2015 to 2017 where a faculty member was fired, resigned, or demoted/denied promotion due to speech deemed by critics as political. Of these, more than half (26) occurred in 2017, the clear majority (19) being over liberal speech. This disparity persists even after removing terminations occurring in private religious institutions.

Source: The US Faculty Termination for Political Speech Database
Figure 6: Faculty termination by speech type, 2015-2017.

For liberals, the most common types of speech to result in termination were those perceived by critics as “anti-white” or “anti-Christian” (e.g., George Ciccariello-Maher, Phillip Lestman). For conservatives, they were “anti-minority” or “anti-diversity” (e.g., Susan Quade, Paul Griffiths).

These cases can be further analyzed in terms of faculty ranking, which show an especially sharp increase in 2017 in the number of terminations involving contingent faculty (e.g., adjuncts, visiting scholars, graduate student lecturers). However, due to data collection problems, this number probably significantly undercounts the phenomenon.

Source: The US Faculty Termination for Political Speech Database
Figure 7: Faculty termination by rank, 2015-2017.

Finally, most of the increase in faculty terminations is taking place at public institutions. Considering the First Amendment rights that such employees enjoy, this may be surprising. However it is important to keep in mind that public institutions also employ the vast majority of faculty. Also, note that due to categorization issues, these figures probably undercount the number of terminations at religious colleges and universities.

Source: The US Faculty Termination for Political Speech Database
Figure 8: Faculty termination by institution, 2015-2017.

There are many ways to think about this data. The most straightforwardly partisan one is to focus on the large disparity between terminations due to criticism from the right versus the left. Certainly there exists a vast infrastructure of organizations on the political right designed to monitor the academy and publicize disagreeable speech. No equivalent infrastructure exists on the left, perhaps explaining the disparity.

There is probably some truth to this explanation, but I would caution against relying on it too heavily. After all, the professoriate leans significantly to the left as well, so we should expect left-leaning speech to make up the bulk of terminations. As with the skewed findings of FIRE’s Disinvitation Database, we are not talking about a population where political ideology is uniformly distributed. It is possible for liberals to constitute the majority of faculty terminations and also for conservatives to be terminated at an equal or higher rate. Nonetheless, the size of the disparity in 2017 bears watching, as it may mark the beginning of a trend in precarious liberal speech. A proper assessment would also need to take stock of the data categorization issues surrounding religious institutions, where terminations for political speech are especially difficult to capture.

Ultimately, the worst thing to happen to the campus free speech debate was its conscription into the Culture Wars. Each side has its facts that it can cite, its scandalous anecdotes that it can wave about to shame and intimidate. But free speech on campus is too important an issue to be handed over to such partisans. Besides, the research is simply too sparse, and the definitions too subjective, to ever reach a firm conclusion.

*  *  *

Of Stevens and Haidt’s three claims, only the second is persuasive – and even then, it should be interpreted with caution. Caution, however, seems to be in short supply these days. Whipped up into a populist fervor, politicians from across the country are rushing to pass ill-conceived bills that would restrict student protests, abolish tenure, and even cut off federal funding for specific universities. Coming at a time when public support for higher education is already low (both financially and in terms of popular approval), this is a distressing trend. Meanwhile, a new breed of grifters has emerged that only seem interested in campus free speech to the extent that it can be monetized, weaponized or used to “trigger the libs.”

Still, I am hopeful that the free speech “crisis,” whether on campus or among the young, will eventually go the way of other moral panics and fade away. Much depends on how we handle the available data. That means looking beyond the scandalous headline or alarming anecdote to see the larger story. It is a familiar one. A boring one. And given our current levels of hysteria, one that is, on the whole, reassuring.

The post There is no campus free speech crisis: The right’s new moral panic is largely imaginary appeared first on Salon.com.

Since the 1980s, higher education has been subject to devastating attacks as a result of punishing neoliberal austerity policies and ongoing attempts by conservatives to both privatize and defund public institutions. Right-wing attacks on the public good, the corporatization and militarization of higher education and a growing authoritarianism in the culture have led, as Christopher Newfield observes, “to the abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses.”

The effects are visible in the gutting of tenure-track positions, increases in tuition, an onslaught of administrative positions, and the redefinition of higher education as a competitive and profit-making institution. The attacks on tenure have been especially effective in transforming higher education into an adjunct of corporate interests. Writing in the College Post, Marianne Besas reports that “in 2018, 23.7 percent of faculty members at institutions across the country were tenured, and 10.2 percent were on a tenure track.” Tenure, along with the power of faculty, is in absolute decline. Only about one in five of the overworked and beaten-down faculty members in the academic labor force have tenure. 

At the same time, students are relegated to the status of clients. No longer viewed as a democratic public sphere, post-secondary education has forfeited its willingness, if not its responsibility, to instill in its students and the wider public the shared values, ideals and social practices crucial to developing democratic institutions and an informed and critically engaged public. Instead, it has become complicit with a cultural and political crisis — characterized by lies and bungling political leadership — which on the one hand has turned lethal with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic and on the other hand has been mostly silent regarding the threat to democracy posed by the growing racism and authoritarianism in the wider society.

Under such circumstances, higher education has failed to create on a mass scale not only a shared national civic purpose, but also a wider formative culture promoting the habits, sensibilities, dispositions and values crucial to democracy’s survival. It has detached itself from the obligations of citizenship and social responsibility, while harnessing itself to economic interests. Defined by neoliberal values, higher education has surrendered its purpose and mission to a culture of commercialism and exchange. The new normal in higher education is based on the brutalizing assumption that knowledge, ideas and visions are only valuable if they can be measured and aligned with the culture of business and the market. Everything is rated according to its monetary value and turned into an object of consumption — nothing appears to escape its regressive spiral of commodification, social atomization, and reification. 

Neoliberalism freezes the scope, range and depth of education in the culture of market fluctuations and investor interests. This is especially detrimental to the role of higher education as a public good, considering that the fate of democracy’s future is linked to the domain of culture — a domain in which people have to be educated critically in order to fight for securing freedom, equality, social justice, equal protection and human dignity. Agency is not being eliminated; it is being reconfigured in the image of an instrumental rationality, a market-driven model that conceals its own aggression in the name of choice, meritocracy and individual interests. 

RELATED: Fighting back against the age of manufactured ignorance: Resistance is still possible

The signs of higher education’s failure to define itself as a public good are everywhere, but such signs are particularly resonant in its indifference to the dark and menacing forces of a racist and totalitarian cultural politics that now engulfs American society. The collapse of conscience is widespread in a system of higher education that defines itself as a satellite of corporations. One consequence is a growing indifference to addressing larger political and social problems such as the rise of right-wing extremist movements, the spreading racial hatred and the increasing resort by the state to violence against Black people, undocumented immigrants, public health workers, school board members and women arguing for reproductive rights. 

 Without apology and most distinctively, the legacy of Jim Crow, with its layered racist rage and propensity for violence, has returned, asphyxiating the United States in a toxic cloud of voter suppression laws, the resurgence of police assaults against Black people and the emergence of a right-wing cultural politics. Cultural politics has become a powerful medium for social and civic death, endorsing white nationalism, pseudo-appeals to patriotic education and ongoing attempts by right-wing politicians to implement a form of apartheid pedagogy at all levels of schooling. 

Rethinking cultural politics as an educational force

Education has always been a compelling element of politics yet is rarely understood as a crucial site of struggle over culture, agency, identities, values and the future itself. As Stuart Hall once noted, what has been lacking is a sense of politics being educative in order to change the way people see things and understand the larger world. The latter is an especially important insight given how the right-wing has weaponized social media as a pedagogical medium in order to spread its racist and anti-democratic ideas and values. Driving such a politics is a counterrevolutionary political and educational movement whose methods and goals are to destroy civic literacy and freedom and undermine the values and institutions necessary for sustaining human development, the planet and a thriving democracy.

What is new in the current historical moment is that right-wing cultural politics have influenced higher education and the larger society with unprecedented success. That is, as Paul Gilroy says, “the weaponization of culture and information has been much more successfully exploited by the neofascists than their disorientated opponents.” 

The culture wars waged against “critical race theory” have a broader political function, in that they are part of a larger battle waged by right-wing white nationalists to control and destroy education as a critical site of power, especially in its capacity to foster the common good and equip young people to hold power accountable. In the current historical moment, educating a critically literate citizenry has become dangerous. In the age of Trumpism, culture has become a battlefield, and the war is being won by extremists in the political and corporate worlds.

The current wave of Republican Party extremists understand a fundamental lesson about the power of culture, one that was brilliantly articulated by the great Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci. He noted that culture deploys power and that such power is always pedagogical. Moreover, in the current age culture is a crucial site and weapon of power and has assumed an unparalleled significance in the structure and organization of agency, identities, knowledge, social relations and the question of who inhabits the public sphere and who doesn’t.

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Unfortunately, resistance on the part of universities to the cultural assault waged by the current wave of white supremacist politicians has been timid. Nobel-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee is right in arguing that resistance has been “weak and ill organised; routed, the professors [have] beat a retreat to their dugouts, from where they have done little besides launching the intermittent satirical barb against the managerial newspeak they are perforce having to acquire.”

Repressive forms of education no longer exist on the margins of society, nor are they present in only public and higher education. They are now being enabled from the centers of power. Education infused with a neoliberal racist orthodoxy now permeates a range of corporate-controlled sites that extend from newspapers to the new digital platforms, which inundate the public with massive amounts of information defined mostly by the script of cost-benefit analysis and the need for ever-increasing profits. At the core of these repressive educational practices is a resurgence of white nationalism, a culture of fear and contempt for the truth. One result is not only the deterioration of political culture but also, as Gilroy observes, “The archive of ineffable horror [has drifted] into an indeterminate space where information is untrusted.”

White nationalist educational practices, infused with neoliberal racist orthodoxy and the politics of disposability, operate increasingly through state repression, the passing of racist and sexist policies, and sanctioned police violence. They are also present in the colonization of identities, the production of manufactured ignorance and the power of a cultural politics that creates zones of abandonment where those marginalized by race, class, and religion become voiceless and unknowable. This widespread assault on rationality and truth is part of an image-based and ocular pedagogy engaged in a politics of falsehoods and erasure. In its most extreme pedagogical forms, a politics of racial hatred and exclusion cloaks itself in the false claims of “patriotism” and the right-wing call for “patriotic education,” functioning largely as a form of  trickery, deceit, and organized irresponsibility. 

Historical amnesia coupled with a culture of lies runs amok in American society, assuming the force of a national disease, corrupting the public imagination and civic culture. Education as a vehicle for white supremacy now moves between the reactionary policies of Republican legislators who use the law to turn their states into white nationalist factories and a right-wing social media machine that uses the internet, Facebook and other online services to spread racial hatred and undermine the necessity to be reminded of the horrors of history that are resurfacing once again. White supremacy has once again turned deadly and has put democracy on trial.  

The spectacle of Trumpism and its brew of white supremacist ideology and disdain for the truth undergirds the further collapse of democratic visions in higher education and broader public spheres. This is reinforced by a pandemic-generated obsession in higher education with methodologies, the growing dominance of instrumental reason and, as Peter Fleming observes, the return of “unforgiving management hierarchies that have replaced academic judgment, collegiality and professional common sense.”

Universities increasingly define themselves as part of a business culture and education industry, which “incentivize students to envision themselves not as citizens of a republic but as self-marketing, indebted buyers and sellers.” This shift away from its civic mission makes it all the easier for higher education to become obsessed with technocratic methods focusing on delivery platforms such as Zoom and Teams. The robotic language of instrumental rationality is everywhere in higher education. The English critic Marina Warner sums it up well:

As universities are beaten into the shapes dictated by business, so language is suborned to its ends. We have all heard the robotic idiom of management, as if a button had activated a digitally generated voice. Like Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, business-speak is an instance of magical naming, superimposing the imagery of the market on the idea of a university – through ‘targets’, ‘benchmarks’, time-charts, league tables, ‘vision statements’, ‘content providers’ [terms] that accumulate like dental plaque.

The Return of Jim Crow politics and the attack on “critical race theory”

Jim Crow politics are back with a vengeance, worn as a badge of honor. The signs are everywhere. Both during and in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the Republican Party has dropped any pretense to democracy in its affirmation of authoritarian politics and embrace of white supremacy. Moreover, it has become a party of unhinged cruelty. This has been evident in the weaponizing of identity, support for a range of discriminatory policies of exclusion, construction of a border wall that has become a symbol of resurgent nativism and, under the Trump regime, the internment of children separated from undocumented parents at the southern border.

The rush to construct a homegrown form of authoritarianism is also clear in the passing of a barrage of voter suppression laws introduced in Republican-controlled state legislatures, all based on baseless claims of voter fraud. Voter suppression has become the new currency of a rebranded form of racialized fascist politics. As of Sept. 1, 361 bills had been put into play in 47 states, while 19 states had enacted 33 laws that make it harder for Americans to vote, particularly poor Black people.  

Voter suppression laws breathe new life into white supremacy and fit nicely into the racist argument that whites are under siege by people of color who are attempting to dethrone and replace them. In this case, such laws, along with ongoing attacks on equality and social justice, are defended by right-wing extremists as justifiable measures to protect whites from the “contaminating” influence of immigrants, Black people and others considered unworthy of occupying and participating in the public sphere and democratic process. Similarly, voter suppression laws are defended as legitimate attempts to provide proof that votes are cast by “real Americans,” code for defining people of color as “counterfeit citizens.” In actuality, these laws are not only racist in intent but also meant to enable permanent minority rule for the Republican Party, the endpoint of which is a form of authoritarianism. 

The attacks on critical race theory are a barely disguised effort by white supremacists to define who counts as an American, and form part of a long legacy in which those groups deemed unworthy of citizenship disappear. The language of historical and pedagogical erasure extends from the genocide inflicted on Native Americans to the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow. It includes the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the current rise of the racialized carceral state. Forgetting has become a convenient adaptive strategy for privileging the eternal present while emptying the past of its contradictions and genocidal horrors. There is more at work here than the whitening of collective identity, the public sphere and American history. There are invocations of whiteness, as Paul Gilroy suggests, that enhance “the allure of [a] rebranded fascism.” 

The Republican Party’s labeling of critical race theory as “ideological or faddish” both denies the history of racism as well as the ways in which it is enforced through policy, laws and institutions. For many Republicans, racial hatred takes on the ludicrous claim of protecting students from learning about the diverse ways in which racism persists in American society. For instance, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has stated, “There is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.” DeSantis has not only labeled critical race theory as “false history,” but has extended the discourse of his unhinged attack on any vestige of critical education and critical race theory to almost unrecognizably repressive lengths. As Eric Lutz points out, DeSantis has taken

the deranged culture war a step farther, signing laws that will require students and staff at public universities to be surveyed on their political beliefs; bar higher education institutions from preventing access to ideas students may find “uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive;” and force-feeding K-12 students “portraits in patriotism” that contrasts America with communist and totalitarian regimes.

In this updated version of apartheid pedagogy and historical cleansing, the call for racial justice is equated with a form of racial hatred, leaving intact the refusal to acknowledge, condemn or confront the history and tenacity of racism in American society in the public imagination. Apartheid pedagogy transforms the criticism of racial injustice and structural racism into a breach of law and makes it an object of malignant state oppression and violence. Borrowing from Judith Butler’s critique of the criminalization of knowledge in higher education, apartheid pedagogy interprets the call for democracy as sedition, and the call for freedom as a call to violence.  

The attack on critical race theory restricts what educators can say and teach in the classroom and does so by invoking the language of fear and retaliation. Many teachers are not just confused about what they can and cannot say in the classroom about social justice issues but also live in daily fear over the consequences they may face “for even broaching nuanced conversations about racism and sexism.” Such fears point to more than the curtailing of freedom of expression and the idealizing of history by whitewashing it. They also identify America’s slide into a rebranded fascist politics that is difficult to ignore. The threat of white supremacy has even been acknowledged by President Joe Biden in a speech he delivered marking the centennial of the Tulsa race massacre. Biden warned that U.S. democracy was not only in danger but that Americans had to recognize and challenge the “deep roots of racial terror.”

Legalizing racial oppression and apartheid pedagogy

The racialized climate of fear, intimidation and censorship is spreading in the United States. This is evident in the fact that anti-CRT bills have become law in eight states, while 15 state legislatures across the country have introduced bills to prevent or limit teachers from teaching about the history of slavery and racism in American society. These reactionary attacks on critical thought and emancipatory forms of pedagogy echo an earlier period in American history. Such attacks are reminiscent of the McCarthy and Red Scare period of the 1950s when heightened paranoia over the threat of communism resulted in a slew of laws that banned the teaching of material deemed unpatriotic “and required professors to swear loyalty oaths.”  

Such repression is never far from an abyss of ignorance. Right-wing attacks on critical race theory also ignore work by prominent Black scholars ranging from Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois to Angela Y. Davis and Audre Lorde. There is no mention of Derrick Bell, the founder of critical race theory in the 1980s. Nor is there room for complexity, evidence or facts, just as there is no room for either a critique of structural racism or the actual assumptions and influence that make up CRT’s body of work. Such attacks raise fundamental questions about the goal of higher education and the role of academics in a time of mounting authoritarianism.

This is especially true at a time when higher education has become a site of derision, an object of censorship and a way of demonizing faculty and students who critically address matters of racial inequality, social injustice and other crucial social problems. Let’s be clear. For the Republican Party, higher education has become a battleground for conducting a race war waged in the spirit of the Confederacy, conducted through the twin registers of censorship and indoctrination.

Right-wing politicians now use education and the power of persuasion as weapons to discredit any critical approach to grappling with the history of racial injustice and white supremacy. In doing so, they undermine and discredit the critical faculties necessary for students and others to examine history as a resource in order to “investigate the core conflict between a nation founded on radical notions of liberty, freedom, and equality, and a nation built on slavery, exploitation, and exclusion.” Novelist Francine Prose observes that educating young people through the indoctrinating policies and practices of  “patriotic education” will further America’s slide into

 a nation of con artists and their hapless marks, a country of liars and of people who have never been taught how to tell when they are being lied to…. Children who are prohibited from discussing the most critical issues of the day will gravitate into progressively more atomized and irreconcilable factions, unable to participate in the free and open exchange of ideas on which our democracy depends.  

Apartheid pedagogy is about denial and disappearance. It promotes a manufactured ignorance in the service of civic death and a flight from ethical and social responsibility. The right-wing attempt to impose “patriotic education” on educators is part of a longstanding counterrevolution that conservatives have waged since the student revolts of the 1960s. The calls in that decade to democratize the university and open it up to minorities of race and color were considered by many liberals and conservatives as dangerous expressions of dissent. In one famous instance, this was duly noted by ruling-class elites such as Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in the Trilateral Commission of 1973, who complained about what was called an “excess of democracy” in the United States.

This counterrevolution also fueled the ongoing corporatization of the university, in which business models defined how the university is governed, models that viewed faculty as part-time workers and students merely as customers and consumer-spectators. Another register of this ongoing counterrevolution with its embrace of apartheid pedagogy includes an attempt by university trustees to remove faculty from making decisions regarding matters of administrative governance, faculty appointments and control of tenure. 

In addition, right-wing legislators have introduced laws to limit funding for higher education institutions that teach critical race theory. For instance, Ohio state Rep. Sarah Fowler Arthur, a Republican, introduced a bill titled the “Promoting Education Not Indoctrination Act,” which threatens to cut state funding by 25% to any Ohio public university that allows the teaching of critical race theory. Arthur’s disdain for democracy was also evident in her attempts to erase from state-mandated curriculum guidelines any mention of the notion of the common good, a view in sympathy with her repugnant views of racism, environmentalism and critical thinking itself. 

Such attacks are being funded by foundations such as the Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute, which often rely on the endorsement of conservative scholars such as Thomas Sowell. Some of the most powerful enablers of the attack on “anti-racist programs” in higher education and elsewhere include organizations such as the Koch brothers’ foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The latter is particularly pernicious given that it increasingly provides the template for anti-critical race theory bills, which are then used by many state legislators. This is apartheid pedagogy parading as educational reform. 

Rethinking higher education as a democratic public sphere  

The U.S. slide into the chasm of white supremacy demands a revitalized understanding and rethinking of the relationship between democracy and higher education. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students and others is the need to address the role and mission of higher education in a time of tyranny. Central to such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy. What will it take for higher education not to abandon its role as a democratic public sphere? What work must educators do to create the economic, political and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? What kind of language is necessary for higher education to redefine its mission, one that enables faculty and students to work toward a different future than one that echoes the authoritarian present, to confront the unspeakable, to recognize themselves as agents, not victims, and to muster up the courage to act in the service of a substantive and inclusive democracy? In a world where there is an increasing neglect of democratic and egalitarian principles, what will it take to educate young people and the broader public to be critically engaged citizens? 

Addressing this challenge means recognizing that over the last 40 years, under the reign of neoliberalism, the role of education in cultivating a critical citizenry capable of participating in and shaping a democratic society has been undermined, if not lost. Lost also is an educational vision that takes people beyond the world of common sense, functions as a form of provocation, teaches them to be creative, exposes individuals to a variety of great traditions, embraces the arts and creates the pedagogical conditions for individuals to expand the range of human possibilities.

Under the rule of a market-based society, higher education is largely defined as a financial investment whose goal is to ensure that young people are trained to compete in a global economy. In this logic, colleges and universities are reduced to sites for training students for the workforce — a reductive vision now being imposed on higher education by Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Netflix and Google that advocate what they call the entrepreneurial goal of education.

Increasingly aligned with neoliberal interests, higher education is mostly primed for teaching business principles and corporate values, while university administrators are prized as CEOs or bureaucrats in an audit culture. Many colleges and universities have been McDonaldized as knowledge is increasingly viewed as a commodity, This results in curricula that resemble a fast-food menu while devaluing knowledge that stresses humanistic values.

In the age of precarity and flexibility, the majority of faculty have been reduced to part-time positions, have been subjected to low wages, have lost control over the conditions of their labor, and have seen their benefits slashed or eliminated. Many of these academics are barely able to make ends meet because of their impoverished salaries, and some even receive food stamps.

If faculty are treated like service workers, students fare no better, and are relegated to the status of customers and clients. They are not only inundated with the competitive, privatized and market-driven values of neoliberalism, but are also punished by those values in the form of exorbitant tuition rates, astronomical debts owed to banks and other financial institutions and, in too many cases, a lack of meaningful future opportunities once they graduate. 

What might it mean to make pedagogy meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative? What might it mean to defend education as a bulwark of a democratic society and use higher education as a protective space where young people can articulate their needs and learn how to write themselves back into the script of democracy?

Given the crisis of education, agency and memory that haunts the current historical conjuncture, educators need a new political and pedagogical language. Such a language needs to be self-reflective and directive without being dogmatic and needs to recognize that education is always political because it presupposes a vision of the future, legitimizes specific forms of knowledge, values and social relationships and, in doing so, produces particular forms of agency. 

Educators also need to connect the rigor of their scholarship with the clarity necessary to address a wider public. They must be attentive to the everyday conditions that shape people’s lives, and be willing and able to speak to them. In this case, academics need to use a language in which people can recognize themselves and the problems they face. They need to merge theoretical rigor with the language of accessibility, without compromising either. At stake here is a pedagogical principle that recognizes that for a successful mode of communication to take place, there has to be a moment of identification on the part of the reader. To put it differently, such interventions must engage in a form of pedagogical recognition that sheds light on the everyday problems under which most people labor in the public domain.

There can be no authentic politics without a pedagogy of identification. Lacking this understanding, pedagogy all too easily either becomes irrelevant or is reduced to a form of academic jargon, one that assaults and shames, in one instance, and obfuscates and confuses in the other. At the same time, if academics are going to function as public intellectuals, they need to combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen while developing a language that connects everyday troubles to wider structures and presses the claim for economic and social justice. Such a language must offer a comprehensive politics capable of connecting diverse issues, move beyond a regressive notion of self-interest, reject a notion of freedom tied exclusively to consumerism and individualized responsibility, and develop a form of pedagogical citizenship that, when practiced thoughtfully, embraces a solidarity grounded in mutual responsibilities. In addition, such intellectuals can develop modes of pedagogy, along with a broader comprehensive vision of education and schooling, that are capable of winning struggles against those who would deny education its critical function — and this must apply to all forms of dogmatism and political purity across the ideological spectrum.  

One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students and others is the need to address the question of what higher education should accomplish in a democracy. How can educational and pedagogical practices be connected to the resurrection of historical memory, new modes of solidarity, a resurgence of the radical imagination and broad-based struggles for an insurrectional democracy? How can education be enlisted to fight what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher once called neoliberalism’s most brutal weapon: “the slow cancellation of the future”?

Such a vision suggests resurrecting a democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality and endless assaults on the environment, and which elevates war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes and market values, and an unreflective immersion in the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed market-driven society. Education and pedagogy should provide the conditions for young people to think about keeping democracy alive and vibrant, not simply training students to be workers. Yes, we must educate young people with the skills they need to get jobs. But as educators we must also teach them to learn, as Zygmunt Bauman wrote in 2001, “to live with less or no misery [and] to fight against those social sources” that cause war, destruction of the environment, “inequality, unhappiness, and needless human suffering.” 

As Christopher Newfield argues, “democracy needs a public,” and higher education has a crucial role to play in this regard as a democratic public good rather than defining itself through the market-based values of neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, if such a role is to emerge, the conditions of labor for faculty have to change. Educators must be given the opportunity to speak the truth to the dominated, and bring ideas to the public realm that bear on society as a whole. This is especially important at a time when neoliberalism, through the dictates of a finance-obsessed managerial elite, overwhelms faculty and students with what Terry Eagleton has called “commodity breeding.” The heads of universities are expected to govern as if they were running Goldman Sachs, the value of research is determined by its ability to secure grant funding, and faculty are expected to occupy academic silos from which they preach market values and disciplinary irrelevance.

Instead of students being provided with opportunities for civic responsibility and cultural literacy, they are offered high tuition rates, student centers that mimic the mall and crushing debts that close off the dreams of a dignified future. What gets lost here are not only radical ideas, socially engaged students and socially responsible academics, but also, in Eagleton’s words, “the very notion that there could be a serious alternative to the present.” As universities are turned into training centers, no longer invested in the life of the mind and its crucial connection to the common good, the toxic cloud of fascism and white supremacy expands, engulfing the nation in a fog of anti-intellectualism, manufactured ignorance, hate and a growing propensity for violence. 

One of the most serious challenges facing administrators, faculty and students in colleges and universities is the task of developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect classroom knowledge, values and social problems with the larger society, and do so in ways that enhance the capacities of young people to translate private troubles into wider systemic issues while transforming their hidden despair and private grievances into critical narratives and public transcripts. At best such transcripts can be transformed into forms of public dissent, or what might be called moments of rupture or empowering transgressions. Democracy cannot work if citizens are not autonomous, self-judging, curious, reflective and independent — qualities that are indispensable for students if they are to make vital judgments and choices about participating in and shaping decisions that affect everyday life, institutional reform and governmental policy. 

Resistance in this sense begins with the refusal to accept a crudely functional view of education that only values those modes of research, knowledge and teaching that can turn a profit. It rejects educational views that consign administrators, faculty and students to the prison-house of common sense and cynicism. In this instance, education becomes a terrain of struggle, which refuses one’s erasure or voicelessness and resists the dictates of an audit culture. It is a type of resistance that speaks out against the power of bean counters to align educational research with the idolatry of data, which attempts to define the unmeasurable, promotes a deadening instrumental rationality that suffocates consciousness and rewards empirical frenzies that turn courageous ideas into ashes, all the while degrading civic virtue and ignoring the dark shadow of a fascist politics engulfing the globe. 

Elements of an alternative vision for higher education 

I want to offer several recommendations, however incomplete, that provide an alternative to some of the oppressive conditions now shaping higher education in the age of multiple pandemics and the rise of fascist politics. 

First, higher education needs to reclaim and expand its democratic vocation and, in doing so, align itself with a vision that embraces its mission as a public good. Educators need to promote a national conversation in which higher education is defended as a democratic public sphere, and the classroom as a site of deliberative inquiry, dialogue and critical thinking. The project of defining higher education as a democratic public sphere should also provide the platform for a more expressive commitment to reaching across national boundaries in order to develop an international social movement in defense of public goods. This is a vision driven not by profits, instrumental rationality, and military interests but by the battle over democracy itself. 

Second, educators need to acknowledge and make good on the claim that there is no democracy without informed and knowledgeable citizens. This suggests placing ethics, civic literacy, social responsibility and compassion at the forefront of our pedagogical practices. This necessitates taking seriously those modes of knowledge, ideas, values, traditions and histories that promote a sense of dignity, self-reflection and compassion. In addition, students need to learn to understand how power works across social, cultural and political institutions. This is crucial if they are to learn how to govern rather than merely be governed. Education should be a place where students realize themselves primarily as critically engaged and informed citizens contributing not simply to their own self-interest or self-development but to the well-being of society as a whole. 

Third, higher education needs to be viewed as a right and needs to be free, as it is in many countries such as Germany, France, Norway and Finland. When education is not free, it not only limits access to those who lack the wealth and resources to get into higher education, but also allows higher education to function as a sorting machine that largely reproduces social, racial and class hierarchies. Moreover, free access to higher education enriches a student body, through its diversity and the richness of its possibilities, to promote dialogue across a range of identities, backgrounds, religions, gender, class and ideological positions. Such diversity keeps alive the critical function of higher education at the level of everyday classroom and social interactions. In addition, by not saddling young people with crippling debt — a form of colonial control — it gives them the opportunity to choose careers dedicated to public service. 

Fourth, educators need to enable students to engage in multiple literacies extending from print and visual culture to digital culture. They need to become border-crossers, who can think dialectically and learn not only how to consume culture but also how to produce it. This presupposes learning how to situate ideas, facts and knowledge historically and relationally. Not only does historical memory become a consequential resource for thinking and acting, it also enables students to connect isolated issues to a comprehensive vision of society that does not rely on banking modes of education, insular disciplinary narratives and deadening forms of instrumental learning. A critical pedagogy needs to incorporate practices that enable students to become cultural producers both to expand their sense of agency and politics and their ability to shape the world in which they live. 

Fifth, critical education is about more than the search for truth, appropriating work skills and developing a broad and comprehensive form of literacy; it is also about the practice of freedom. Such a task suggests that critical pedagogy should shift not only the way people think but also encourage them to shape the world in which they find themselves for the better. As the practice of freedom, critical pedagogy arises from the conviction that educators and other cultural workers have a responsibility to unsettle power, trouble consensus and challenge common sense. This is a view of pedagogy that should disturb, inspire and energize a vast array of individuals and publics.

Such pedagogical practices should enable students to interrogate common-sense understandings of the world, take risks in their thinking, however difficult, and be willing to take a stand for free inquiry in the pursuit of truth, multiple ways of knowing, mutual respect and civic values in the pursuit of social justice. Students need to learn how to think dangerously, push at the frontiers of knowledge, and support the notion that the search for justice is never finished and that no society is ever just enough. These are not merely methodical considerations but also moral and political practices, because they presuppose the creation of students who can imagine a future in which justice, equality, freedom and democracy matter and are attainable. 

Sixth, in opposition to increasingly dominant instrumental views of education, I want to argue for a notion of education that is inherently political — one that relentlessly questions the kinds of labor, practices and forms of teaching, research and modes of evaluation that are enacted in higher education. While such a pedagogy does not offer guarantees, it defines itself as a moral and political practice that is always implicated in power relations, because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, our physical and social environment and the future itself. What it rejects is a form of politicizing education that imposes dogmatic certainties, refuses critical dialogue and engages in what might be called a form of pedagogical terrorism. In opposition to politicizing education, political education is directive and opens up the possibilities for students to learn how power works, engage in critical analysis, think beyond common-sense assumptions, learn how to be self-reflective and engage the conditions that bear down on their lives.

Neutral, objective education is an oxymoron. It does not exist outside relations of power, values and politics. Educators need to cast a critical eye on those forms of knowledge and social relations that define themselves through a conceptual purity and political innocence, clouding the fact that the alleged neutrality on which they stand is already grounded in ethico-political choices and never removed from relations of power. Higher education is a crucial space for creating knowledgeable, critical and engaged citizens.  

Seventh, another serious challenge facing educators is the need to make despair unconvincing and social change a possibility. Despair does more than undercut social change; it also isolates, alienates and ultimately depoliticizes people often paralyzed by cynicism. Without a mutually informing language of critique and what I call educated hope, educators become complicit with a culture of ignorance and repression now being reproduced at the highest levels of power, one that has become a signature feature of the current Republican Party. The effects of such ignorance are on full display when school board members are threatened for implementing rules to save children’s lives, COVID-19 testing centers are attacked, adults who wear masks are bullied while accompanying their children to school and science is undermined through the proliferation of conspiracy theories. This suggests not only a failure of politics and the collapse of conscience, but also the failure of education.

 A radical shift in consciousness on the part of the public is needed in order for matters of truth, justice and science to offer the resources necessary to protect human life and sustain an informed public. Learned ignorance is never innocent. In the face of a tsunami of lies, hope becomes senseless, and ignorance combines with rage and conspiracy theories as the first resort of the powerless. When shaping a mass movement, ignorance does more than expand the disintegration of political culture; it also makes possible the reproduction of the horrors of racial cleansing and violence as tools of governance. 

Conclusion

If higher education defaults on its role as a critical institution, it becomes either irrelevant or complicit with totalitarian politics. In the face of the rise of white supremacy and a fascist politics, students need to stretch their imagination to be able to think beyond the limits of their own experience. They also need to reject the disparaging notion that the future is nothing more than a mirror image of the present. In this instance, I am not referring to a romanticized and empty notion of making the impossible possible. I am suggesting an education that refuses an obsession with self-interest, expands the imagination, teaches students to live without illusions and embraces the practical difficulties and risks involved in meaningful struggles for real change, while at the same time being radically optimistic.

The late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman insisted that the bleakness and dystopian politics of our times necessitates the ability to dream otherwise, to imagine a society “which thinks it is not just enough, which questions the sufficiency of any achieved level of justice and considers justice always to be a step or more ahead. Above all, it is a society which reacts angrily to any case of injustice and promptly sets about correcting it.” While hope has fallen on hard times under the dark shadow of the resurgence of white supremacy, a sense of collective passion and struggle is far from a historical relic. 

As educators, we have a responsibility — as Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, once warned — to recognize that “Every age has its own fascism.” In a society in which democracy is under siege, it is crucial to remember that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs is a precondition for making radical change possible. At stake here is the courage to take on the challenge of what kind of world we want. What kind of future do we want to build for our children? How might we reassert a notion of the social that reclaims through the radical imagination the terms through which we are connected to each other and the planet? What is the role of hope in an age of racialized visceral terror? Philosopher Ernst Bloch insisted that “hope taps into our deepest experiences and that without it reason and justice cannot blossom.” 

In his “Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin went a step further, adding a sense of urgency and a call for resistance to this notion of hope. He wrote: “The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible has to examine society and try to change it and to fight it — at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.”

Baldwin’s words are more resonant today than ever before. Democracy is in free fall and has reached a dangerous turning point. The horrors of a past committed to racial cleansing and a fascist politics are with us once again. But the tactics used in the past to fight fascism must be rethought and updated. The power to change consciousness by making education central to politics has to be married to the need to change material relations of power. There is more at stake here than the repudiation of manufactured ignorance, the scourge of white supremacy and a corrupt political system. In the shadows of this escalating crisis, it is crucial to mobilize a mass movement to uncover and fight on multiple levels this rebranded notion of fascism and its mounting wreckage before hope becomes an empty slogan and democracy a relic of the past. 

More on the education wars of the Trump era:

• Betsy DeVos and the politics of fear: A not-so-fond farewell to Trump’s education secretary
• How higher education has been weaponized in the age of Trump — and how it can be redeemed
• This is real resistance: Teachers strike back against neoliberal assault on public education

The post How higher education can win the war against neoliberalism and white supremacy appeared first on Salon.com.

“It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas,” DeSantis said in a press conference last week. “Unfortunately now, the norm is really these are more intellectually repressive environments. You have orthodoxies that are promoted and other viewpoints are shunned, or even suppressed. We don’t want that in Florida.”

Though the motivations behind the measure seem clear enough, the bill’s language evades any explanation of what the survey’s findings might be used for. Florida Republicans have largely stayed mum on this point — except for DeSantis himself, that is, who last week suggested the data might be used to dictate state funding. 

“We do not want [universities] as basically hotbeds for stale ideology,” DeSantis said. “That’s not worth tax dollars and not something we’re going to be supporting moving forward.”

Given the Republican obsession with “cancel culture,” DeSantis’ threat to go after “thoughtcrime” (in George Orwell’s phrase) could have a chilling effect on the Sunshine State’s educational landscape. 

State Sen. Lori Berman, a Democrat who opposed the bill in Education Committee meetings, told Salon that she thinks DeSantis made “a serious threat” that could dampen the free speech rights of professors and students.

“It’s quite possible this could result in certain professors being dismissed on the university level,” she said. “I wouldn’t put it past our governor to pull funding from universities if they don’t dismiss these professors or change some things they’re not happy with.”

Though the bill has already been enacted, it remains unclear precisely how the surveys will be conducted or what questions will be asked.

Berman noted that the bill does not require participation from students; it merely mandates that the surveys be distributed to students. This could lead to significant participation bias, where students who feel ideologically at odds with their surroundings are overrepresented among respondents.  

Democratic state Sen. Tina Polsky, who also serves on the Committee on Education, echoed Berman’s concerns, telling Salon that HB 233 has “so many problems.”

“We have no idea what the implications are, whether it’s getting professors fired, or having to hire professors of different ilks to fill some kind of ‘thought diversity’ quota,” she said. “And of course, funding is a concern.”

“No one really knows what the point of the surveys is,” Polsky added. “Nobody knows who’s going to fill it out, how many students, or whether it’s going to be accurate.”

Salon reached out to more than two dozen professors and school administrations throughout Florida’s public educational institutions to gauge their feelings toward HB 233. 

The University of Florida, the state’s flagship research university, responded with a statement: “In keeping with the best traditions of higher education, the University of Florida is a marketplace of ideas where a wide variety of opinions are expressed and independent inquiry and vigorous academic deliberation are valued. We believe the survey will reflect that, and we look forward to widespread participation across campus.”

No administrators at other colleges or universities responded to Salon’s inquiries.

Berman said that Florida’s state schools are “in a position where they’re not going to want to speak out against anything the governor and Republican leadership is supporting,” adding, “If it comes to it, I hope they support their faculty.”

Dr. David Canton, director of the African American Studies Program at the University of Florida, told Salon in an interview that the bill is “a political stunt – a diversion or way to carry over to November 2022 [i.e., DeSantis’ re-election campaign] due to a lack of any policies.”

“If you look at the data and numbers,” he added, “the reality is that it’s hard to get a diversity course as a requirement; you get so much resistance from some students.” Florida colleges and universities, he said, are “not liberal bastions of indoctrination.”

Canton also noted that the bill does not serve the state’s long-term economic interests because it could drive top-tier scholars away from graduate programs or faculty positions in Florida schools. 

Other provisions in HB 233, beyond the mandatory surveys, have also become controversial. One such provision allows students to “record video or audio of class lectures for their own personal educational use.”

While the state of Florida has a two-party consent law — meaning that all individuals in any form of communication must consent to being recorded — the bill appears to carve out a specific exemption for college and university classrooms, which have previously been understood as private spaces. 

Karen Morian, the president of United Faculty of Florida, one of the state’s faculty unions, told Salon in an interview that the provision “was created to allow the creation of ‘gotcha’ videos or reputation-destroying videos,” in which conservative students record and leak evidence of their professors promoting “radical leftist” views. 

During the bill’s consideration, Morian said a host of concerns arose around illegal sharing of such videos, the potential for deceptive editing, and the non-consensual recording of minors. “All these questions were raised in committee and debate, but none of them were clarified nor was the language revised,” she said.

In recent years, professors at many academic institutions across the country have been the subjects of “whistleblowing” by conservative students who feel their voices have been stifled. In April, the Intercept reported on an organized “whistleblowing” effort by Campus Reform — a billionaire-backed conservative nonprofit that trains student activists to expose “liberal bias” in higher education. It found that the conservative group targeted hundreds of professors with “online harassment campaigns, doxxing, threats of violence, and calls on universities to fire [them].” According to a survey this year by the American Association of University Professors, 40% of professors targeted by Campus Reform reported receiving threat by email, phone, or social media.

In 2016, Turning Point USA, another conservative youth advocacy group funded by right-wing billionaires, similarly launched the Professor Watchlist, an online registry of academics who it suggested “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The site also led to a number of threats made against professors, including threats of rape and lethal violence. 

Apart from video and audio recordings, HB 233 also addresses attempts by school administrations to “shield” their students from discomfort. The measure defines “shielding” as “limit[ing] students’, faculty members’, or staff members’ access to … ideas and opinions that they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive” and prohibits the practice altogether, which conceivably restricts or removes administrators’ ability to decide who should be given a platform on campus. 

Morian told Salon that administrators “have the safety of students to consider when making those decisions.” 

In 2017, the University of Florida allowed neo-Nazi Richard Spencer onto campus to give a speech, a move that was angrily rejected by much of the student body. After the event, police arrested three of Spencer’s supporters who made “Nazi salutes, repeated Hitler chants and then shot at a group of protesters.”

Administrators should have the flexibility to deny such speakers access to university platforms, either for educational or campus safety reasons, Morian said. “The legislature has seemingly taken those decisions away from our institutions. So we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Though HB 233 has received considerable media attention recently, it is best understood as part of Florida’s broader effort to crack down on the perceived or apparent influence of the left in both K-12 and higher education. 

During this year’s legislative session, the state Senate attempted to pass a bill to reduce the amount of scholarship money given to students who major in lower-paying fields in the humanities. That bill failed to reach the governor’s desk. 

More recently, DeSantis signed a bill last week that will require Florida K-12 schools to teach their students that communist governments are undesirable. The governor said Florida’s public school curriculum will now paint “portraits in patriotism,” and provide “first-person accounts of victims of other nations’ governing philosophies who can compare those philosophies with those of the United States.”

Polsky, the Democratic state senator, called the latest attempt by conservatives to wrest control over Florida’s educational system especially ironic. “It’s a big government situation,” she said. That’s what “they say they’re against.”

The post Rising GOP star Ron DeSantis goes after campus thoughtcrime with vague, threatening new law appeared first on Salon.com.

In response, campus workers at Georgia College in Milledgeville, part of the University System of Georgia, are holding an on-campus “die-in” Friday to protest what employees see as the school’s “willful negligence” in failing to control the coronavirus through the first weeks of classes.

The COVID tracking page on the school’s website has posted 495 cases since June, 450 of those among students who have returned to campus since the week of Aug. 17. The New York Times college case tracker ranked the school 14th nationwide in total cases Thursday. That number represents about 7% of Georgia College’s total 7,000 enrollment, easily the highest rate of the top 25 schools on that list.

By comparison, the Times’ tracker ranks infections at the University of Texas in ninth place overall — but that represents just 483 reported cases out of 50,000 enrolled students. Aside from Texas Christian University, which has about 10,000 students, and University of Alabama at Birmingham — a ranking that some of its 17,000 students and administration both protest — none of the schools ahead of Georgia College on the Times’ list have fewer than 20,000 students, and no school has reported more than 1,000 cases. Large state schools with enrollments of 50,000 or more, such as the University of Michigan, University of Florida and Penn State, have fewer cases than Georgia College.

(Disclosure: The reporter attended Georgia College for graduate school and later taught.)

The workers’ action is part of the United Campus Workers of Georgia’s (UCWGA) statewide campaign to hold the University System of Georgia Board of Regents responsible for outbreaks due to what a UCWGA press statement calls a “forced campus reopening.”

“Union members demand choice in online teaching and learning, increased testing capacity, quarantine housing for positive students, hazard pay for all essential workers, and no layoffs in the event of campus closure,” the statement says.

A non-tenured faculty and union member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the school is “acting as if they can’t do anything, but there are a number of reasons to believe they could be doing more,” pointing to in-person regulations.

The die-in is in solidarity with Georgia College’s sister school, the state flagship University of Georgia, which held one earlier this year.

The action, scheduled for two hours from 8 to 10 a.m. will feature faculty and staff lying on the grass — socially distanced — with signs with messages such as, “We don’t want to die” and “We don’t want our students to die.”

Georgia College President Steve Dorman posted a welcome video last week urging students to practice social distancing. Administrators plan to work with private off-campus apartment complexes to dissuade students from holding large gatherings, which the school holds responsible for most of the surge.

A tenured faculty member told Salon that the circumstances were “some dark shit.”

“I think what I fear the most is that they’ll get away with it — with treating faculty, staff and students, not to mention the local community, as utterly expendable. This is some dark shit,” the professor said. “You can feel the long arm of the Republican money machine all over it.”

Faculty were reportedly told that they could teach remotely only if they could prove one of a dozen or so health conditions on a list — such as high blood pressure, or being over 65 — but that did not extend one degree further, for example, to faculty members who may live with someone who is elderly or ill or has underlying conditions.

“Many faculty and students here are very, very disturbed by the willful negligence on the part of the USG and our own administration,” another faculty member told Salon, again on the condition of anonymity.

In a statement provided to Salon, the university supported the right to free speech and concern for well-being on campus. 

“Georgia College fully supports the freedoms of speech and expression for our faculty, staff and students,” the school said, adding that “The health and well-being of our students and campus community will always be our top priority.”

“The university and it’s faculty members are doing all they can to ensure that students have an outstanding academic experience. For students in quarantine, faculty members will work to make sure learning continuity continues until they are able to return to campus safely,” the statement said.

However, faculty argue that the school has not established independent quarantine facilities, and the school did not answer Salon’s specific question about the matter.

Faculty working groups developed a multi-part reopening plan over the summer, including rules and policies, one of those being that classes must be in-person but office hours and student meetings could be virtual. Though faculty were included in these policy groups, multiple professors told Salon that many concerns were dismissed out of hand, and they did not expect that in-person teaching would continue if case numbers surged as they have.

“Most people in these groups, I think, thought that if case numbers went up, they would go to the all-remote plan, to ensure everyone’s safety,” the tenured professor said. “So here we are, two weeks in. Some people have 50 percent of their class populations in quarantine or isolation.”

Campus workers say that the university administration seems to be displacing blame onto students, threatening them with suspension if they attend parties and sending students who fall ill home, with no reserved quarantine locations in place.

The school, which pointed out that it has spent “the past several months” preparing for in-person classes with social distancing and “other mitigation measures,” pointed to the students in its statement.

“We continue to remind our students that COVID-19 can spread rapidly at off-campus social gatherings, where social distancing and other mitigation measures are not maintained. With only 21 employee cases at Georgia College since June, our data is showing that the spread of COVID-19 is largely happening in off campus locations among our student population,” the statement said.

“I think most faculty find this appalling,” a professor said. “Those in the wrong are the people running the show, who brought the students back into what was, in early August, already a precarious environment.”

That environment extends to Milledgeville — which has itself registered as a coronavirus hotspot, month after month — a relatively poor city of about 19,000 residents, with the college campus dominating its manicured antebellum downtown.

The Milledgeville Union-Recorder reported earlier this month that Navicent Health Baldwin Hospital’s intensive care unit has been full since the pandemic hit the city in mid-March.

Todd Dixon, the hospital’s CEO, told the paper that they have experienced about a 3% overall increase in admissions from previous years.

“We also have seen a 26 percent increase in our average daily census,” said Dixon.

On the other side of Milledgeville — which was the capital of Georgia from 1804 to 1868, and was left untouched by Union Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s scorched-earth march through Georgia during the Civil War — sits another campus: The empty, cratered brick dorms of Central State Hospital, which was originally called Georgia Lunatic Asylum and was once the largest mental hospital in the world, with 12,000 inmates.

Central State has seen at least 10 coronavirus deaths, according to local news reports, including staff.

Shawn Brooks, vice president for student affairs at Georgia College, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week that no students have reported serious symptoms, a claim faculty say is flatly false.

One non-tenured professor told Salon that students had in fact been admitted to the hospital for “quite serious symptoms — not one, but multiple,” but would not provide further details out of fear that it might reveal identifying information to the administration.

The school, which has mandated masks on campus, struck a partnership with the state to provide testing at a local health outpost, private providers and two local pharmacies, but results can take up to a week, according to faculty and reports in the Journal-Constitution. There is reportedly no mechanism in place to compel students or employees to report results to the school, so public statistics are derived entirely from self-reported cases.

Brooks told the Atlanta paper that the spike traced to students who were overexcited after returning to campus in August.

“They get off campus and relax their methods of masking and social distancing,” he said.

However, faculty members told Salon that the school had reneged on its promise that fraternity and sorority rushes, held before classes start, would not occur in person. Furthermore, students weren’t required to be tested before arriving.

The school did install distanced desks and tables in classrooms as well as plexiglass barriers, and loaded up on hand sanitizer — though it is still not available in all classrooms.

“Rooms are only cleaned once a day, and many of us still don’t have hand sanitizer in the classroom,” a professor said. “There was none in buildings for first two weeks.”

“It’s not easy to take collective action here. As you can imagine, many are afraid to speak up for fear of retaliation,” the tenured faculty member said. “But the lack of ethics and of general humanity is stunning. And apparently it’s largely about housing revenue.”

Rolling Stone reported Aug. 11 that it had seen documents that a property-management company called Corvias had pressured the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia not to impose limits on dorm capacity this fall.

In response to the letter, Rolling Stone reported, the Board of Regents considered directing at least one school, Georgia State University, to lift its 75% occupancy cap on all dorms controlled by Corvias.

The post Union workers at Georgia College to stage “die-in” to protest nation-leading COVID rate appeared first on Salon.com.

Holloway’s America and mine was still the country where Joan Baez, a progressive’s progressive, had moved audiences of all persuasions by singing Robbie Robertson and The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” a song that enfolds the Confederacy’s “lost cause” romantics empathetically into a larger American civic culture. If there wasn’t much controversy in 2009 about Calhoun College and the title of “master,” it wasn’t because no one was “woke” to history’s cruelties and ironies; it was because there was more hope for a shared civic and political culture. No one was more “woke” to that culture’s defaults than Holloway, an intellectual historian of black America. But he had wiser ideas and inclinations, honed since his childhood, about how to confront America’s racial cruelties and ironies.

Now that Yale is stirring again, as it was in 2015, with controversies over renaming — a somewhat nasty rehashing of what was accomplished and lost in renaming Calhoun College, this time in order to name a new residential college for the late, pioneering Yale computer scientist Grace Hopper, and in the form of a rising resistance to the university’s renaming of its historic Commons dining hall as the “Stephen A. Schwarzman Center” —  we need to reassess Holloway’s admonition that “The real work for a place at Yale is not about the name on the building. It’s about a deep and substantive commitment to being honest about power, structural systems of privilege and their perpetuation.”

By renaming Calhoun College for Hopper, the university acknowledged but merely finessed Holloway’s call for substantive commitment to interrogate and challenge structures that perpetuate and deepen the country’s inequalities. Renaming Commons for Stephen A. Schwarzman openly flouts any such commitment by giving Yale’s imprimatur to self-celebrating, self-exculpating philanthropy. No donor is pure, but Yale’s acceptance of this donor and donation was unnecessary. Undoubtedly, there are several reasons why Holloway has left Yale to become the provost of Northwestern University, but I can’t imagine him being happy when, as dean of Yale College, he was tasked with co-chairing the committee on reconfiguring Commons to become the Schwarzman Center, in whose redesign Schwarzman himself has been intimately involved.

Born in 1967, Holloway grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, and other places from which his Air Force father — later to become the first black instructor at the Air War College — flew front-line missions in Vietnam and other hot spots. When Jonathan was six years old, the Air Force wanted to improve its public image by making his father a general in the Strategic Air Command. Jonathan’s “Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940,” a gripping memoir-cum-meditation, reports that the higher-ups believed that his father and mother were raising “the right kind of family” to integrate both the Air Force and the all-white Montgomery Academy that some military children attended.

Holloway and his siblings became the first black students to take the school’s admissions test, but news reports of that breakthrough enraged local racists. Soon after, his father nixed the plan: He’d become disillusioned with the military, he wasn’t a civil-rights activist, and he didn’t want to head a “poster family” for integration. “Was his personal silence [about racism and American war-making] something that he felt he needed to pass on to his children?” Jonathan wonders in his book. “Is that [silence] what made us the ‘right kind of family?”

Whatever it was, Holloway’s father resisted being showcased not only because he was “woke” against tokenism but because he was wise about the tactical importance of bending history’s arc toward justice without being so histrionic about it that one becomes counterproductive. (I learned a similar lesson while following black protest politics in Brooklyn in the 1980s, writing “The Closest of Strangers” as Al Sharpton’s and others’ histrionics marginalized wholly legitimate grievances. Holloway learned the lesson far more fatefully and felicitously and mastered the art of winning over presumptive enemies instead of demonizing them.)

In 2015, Holloway resisted the clamor to rename Calhoun College because, as he explained later, he preferred making a “powerful statement about the redemptive power of the American experiment that an African-American — one who specialized in the African-American past, no less — could run a college named for John C. Calhoun…. The very fact that Calhoun could not imagine someone like me teaching at Yale … offered a commentary on how far we had come as a country.”

Small wonder then that, a year before controversy erupted over the “master” title and the Calhoun name, I watched Master Jonathan Holloway, with his trademark mix of immense dignity and friendly accessibility, read from “Jim Crow Wisdom” to a rapt Calhoun College audience as he stood near its mounted oil portrait of none other than John C. Calhoun. Sitting in the audience, ramrod straight, restraining his pride, was Holloway’s father, a witness to the redemptive power of the American experiment as his son trans-valued enough of the values that had surrounded Calhoun to make the latter roll over in his grave. Holloway’s dignity and courage made dropping the title of “master” seem more a dodge than an enlargement of that word’s benign meanings.

A couple of historical analogies are worth pondering there. If medieval Spanish Catholicism were still the only official and permissible religion in Los Angeles, then the city’s thousands of Muslim, Jewish and other non-Catholic residents might well object to the fact that the original name of the city (by some accounts) was El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula — The City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels of the River Porciuncula. Today, though, those who are even aware of the city’s old name enjoy its harmless antiquity.

The case of Rhode Island’s full name — The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations — is more problematic. A decade ago, some of the state’s black legislators sought but, in a statewide referendum, failed to remove “Providence Plantations” for reasons similar to those given by Yale students who associated the title of “master” with slave masters in the Old South. But when Rhode Island was settled and led by the dissident Puritan Roger Williams, who abhorred slavery and interacted with the area’s Native Americans as their guest and brother, not their conqueror, “plantation” was merely a generic English term for settlements in America. Still, however fine Williams’ example may have been, the brute fact of colonization made the seemingly neutral English term “plantation” a carrier of injustice. Unlike “master,” it hasn’t carried other, more benign meanings into our time. But if that’s true, shouldn’t whites — the descendants and beneficiaries of the colonizers — remove not only the term “plantation” but also themselves from the former colonies? Not if they treat the past as Jonathan Holloway did at Yale — as a prod to bend history’s arc toward justice.

Holloway eventually did accept the renaming of Calhoun College, but even then he wrote that “I am riven” — torn between his own, more powerful statement and his recognition that “we are living in an era when nuance has lost so much value and when withering excoriations play better in a universe of likes and retweets…” When Yale’s convulsions came in 2015, he was confronted one day on campus by distraught black undergraduates who, although middle-class, were finding Yale unbearably cold and demeaning, not because they were “privileged” but because they were burdened with others’ outsized or low expectations, as well as occasional malevolence, and hadn’t grown up with options quite as rich and disciplined as those that had helped Holloway to earn his BA at Stanford and his PhD in history at Yale. The symbolism in a name change couldn’t offset the American experiment’s and Yale’s deepening complicity in perpetuating structural systems of privilege, inequality and illegitimate power. True enough, racist and anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise, but that’s partly because inequality among Americans of all backgrounds is rising, too.

That brings us to the tragedy of Commons, the vast, baronial dining hall in the university’s semi-sacred civic center that was built for Yale’s bicentennial in 1901. Commons is connected to Memorial Hall, a rotunda where the names of hundreds of Yale men who died in the country’s wars are inscribed in icy marble under apothegms such as, “Courage Disdains Fame and Wins It,” and to Woolsey Hall, the university’s grand auditorium, home to one of the world’s largest, most renowned Romantic organs, whose thundering brought Schwarzman, me and a thousand other young, overwhelmingly white men in dark suits to our feet on Sept. 13, 1965, as our induction into Yale began.

Were we being inducted into liberal education’s great conversation across the ages about lasting challenges to politics and the human spirit? Or were we being inducted into a thundering nationalism and imperialism? Or both? What would Socrates have said? The name “Commons” had taken on democratic as well as aristocratic resonances over the years: Anyone at Yale could eat there, and Socratic dialogues did ensue over some meals. But all those names engraved in the rotunda a few yards away suggested that we were supposed to become Plato’s republican guardians, elite “good shepherds” of society, in competition only with a few other “guardians” similarly endowed and entitled.

In his book “What It Takes,” Schwarzman recalls something different: “Commons … seemed like a train station full of hundreds of people eating,” unlike his high school cafeteria, where, he writes, “I had known everyone. At Yale in the fall of 1965 … I didn’t know a single one. … The loneliness was crushing. Everyone and everything intimidated me.”

Others of us felt alone and intimidated too, but some of us also felt challenged to become worthy of something much larger than ourselves. I wasn’t sure just what that something might be, but Schwarzman’s response to feeling small was to make himself so much larger than what Commons represented that he would reconfigure and rename it for himself. New York Times style writer Jacob Bernstein portrayed him recently as “a flash point for income inequality, a man with more money than respect” whose poor reputation “seldom stops him from having the last laugh, or getting the multi-million-dollar tax write-off.” The adjacent Woolsey Hall auditorium, by comparison, is named for Theodore Dwight Woolsey, a political economist who was Yale’s president from 1846 to 1871, including throughout the Civil War.

Schwarzman’s business practices and collaborations with President Trump, which I’ve outlined in The Washington Monthly and Dissent, are a civil war’s distance from Holloway’s call for “a deep and substantive commitment to being honest about power, structural systems of privilege and their perpetuation.” His insatiable drive to name things after himself is even more distant from courage that disdains fame and wins it.

Like Holloway, I’m “riven” about Yale’s decision to drop the name Calhoun and the title of master instead of trans-valuing them, as he did. But I’m certain that swapping the civic and historical resonances of “Commons” for the conceits of “Schwarzman,” giving him the pleasure of turning the tables on an institution that daunted him, is a blunder. So is the silence about it from those who’ve demanded or resisted the defenestration of Calhoun. Yale has been seduced by a $150 million “bells and whistles” student center into traducing the best of what it and Holloway have stood for. More faculty, including the Faculty Senate, should say so. So should more students, some of whom have written trenchant analyses of this folly, as I’ve recounted in the columns linked above.

The post Hope, history and common ground: The story of two Yale buildings — and America appeared first on Salon.com.

In 2018, four Republican-controlled state governments pushed through legislation that sought to deploy law enforcement to force a fallacious “balance” into campus debates and speech. Pushed by ultraconservative groups like the Goldwater Institute and big-money Republican donors like the Mercer family, under the guise of protecting the rights of controversial conservative speakers, the new laws actually seek to punish dissent.

Now the president of the University of Arizona is defending his school’s decision to seek criminal charges against three students who protested the presence of Border Patrol agents on campus. No violence took place during the March 19 demonstration, yet the school concluded that the students broke Arizona law when they publicly “harassed” the agents, a Class 1 misdemeanor that could result in up to six months of jail time.

“From the letter of the law, I think the chief obviously deliberated about this, in a very tough situation, and decided that the actions of the students did disrupt the presentation that was being made,” university president Robert Robbins told the Arizona Republic after the charges were made public on Thursday.

20-year-old Denisse Moreno Melchor, 22-year-old Mariel Alexandra Bustamante and 27-year-old Marianna Ariel Coles-Curtis were finally charged this week after video of their demonstration was widely shared by conservative outlets like Judicial Watch and Breitbart as proof that college campuses are hotbeds of radical left-wing thought that stifles free speech. Art Del Cueto, a border patrol union official, publicly called for the students to be investigated. At least so far, citizens cannot legally infringe upon another’s free speech. So Arizona officials instead charged the students with interfering with the peaceful conduct of an educational institution and threatening and intimidating the agents.

In a video that went viral in conservative circles, two agents can be seen giving a presentation inside a classroom while people in the hallway call them “murderers” and “an extension of the KKK.” Students then chant “murder patrol” as the agents leave campus. According to the New York Times, on the same day these border officials were on the university’s Tucson campus, a local family was arrested and detained just a few miles away.

Robbins said he agreed with the decision to criminally charge the two students because “free speech doesn’t give one the right to disrupt an ongoing presentation in a classroom.” Free speech advocates, however, strongly disagree. 

“Filing criminal charges against students for campus speech that may be protected by the First Amendment will chill protected student speech,” the free speech advocacy group FIRE said in a statement. “Students will rationally decide to self-censor rather than risk the possibility of criminal charges.”

The Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of speech untrammeled by government interference. It emphatically does not guarantee the right to an agreeable audience or a  “respectful” hearing, especially in a public forum like a state university. Heckling, jeering, booing and similar “disruptive” acts are all constitutionally protected freedom of speech. The government is allowed to place reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on protests, but the possibility of jail time for peaceful protest certainly appears egregious. Furthermore, while students can be punished for disruptive behavior, such punishment cannot be based on the content of their message. It is clear here that the objection was to the content of the message of the protesters. While traditionalists may be unnerved by the controversial tactic known as “de-platforming” — which amounts to drowning out an objectionable message, or denying it an audience — it is without question a valid form of protest and an exercise of free speech.

As this case demonstrates, right-wing astroturfing about threats to free speech on college campuses is nothing but projection. In a recent essay for Salon, journalist and Yale professor Jim Sleeper aptly  described it as “a lavishly-funded, brilliantly orchestrated, politically poisonous lie about college students and their deans that riveted millions of Americans during the run-up to the 2016 election.”

As future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell’s infamous 1972 memo dictated, propagating this lie is a centerpiece of the right-wing strategy to dismantle civil institutions to allow for corporate dominance. While college Republicans and elite liberals alike bemoan the rise of “social justice warriors” and “safe spaces,” modern conservatism has now become a sort of “protected class” on college campuses and dissenting voices have been criminalized. 

“I’m always using my voice. That’s a must as a Latina who has citizenship,” Bustamante told the Guardian this week. She said she has received death threats and a visit from law enforcement at her home following her protest of the Border Patrol. “I never thought I’d face repercussions for doing so.”

The supposed free speech warriors who have fanned the flames of moral panic over perceived threats to campus discourse will likely have little to say now that the arm of the law has been used to silence student protests. For his part, Robbins, the university president, released a more cautious second letter — following a first one that praised the Border Patrol’s presence on campus — confirming that he was aware of threats issued against people on “both sides” of the issue. Perhaps he didn’t mean to echo President Trump’s rhetoric after the Charlottesville riots of 2017, but the resonance is unmistakable.

The post What campus free speech? Arizona case shows how far the right will go to stifle dissent appeared first on Salon.com.

Before his visit to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, a page called “John Jay Students Against Hate” appeared on Facebook with Kanazi’s face next to a uniformed cop, painting Kanazi as anti-police. When Kanazi crossed the country a few days later to visit San Jose State, a nearly-identical Facebook page popped up, this one called “SJSU Students Against Hate,” with Kanazi’s face superimposed over an image of military graves. Paid Facebook campaigns promoted both pages.

Despite their names, the Facebook campaigns were run by professional Washington political operatives who work for a group called the Israel on Campus Coalition, according to promotional materials obtained by ProPublica and the Forward.

In the materials, which the Israel on Campus Coalition distributed to its donors, the group describes each of the Facebook pages as an “anonymous digital campaign.” The group says it paid to promote the campaign, which reached tens of thousands of people.

The social media campaigns provide another example of how well-funded advocacy organizations are using deceptive strategies to promote their cause online. The Israel on Campus Coalition launched these campaigns during the 2016 election season, at the same time that entities linked to the Russian government bought misleading Facebook ads on a range of political issues.

The Israel on Campus Coalition didn’t respond to requests for comment. The group had a budget of $9 million in its fiscal year ending in June 2017, according to federal tax filings. Its funders include the foundations of billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer and philanthropist Lynn Schusterman.

Asked about the Israel on Campus Coalition pages, a Facebook spokesman said they “violate our policies against misrepresentation and they have been removed.”

In response to criticism of Russia-linked ads, Facebook recently created new rules requiring disclosure of who is paying for political ads on the site. How the company defines what is political remains murky.

Anonymous digital campaigns appear to be a central part of the Israel on Campus Coalition’s efforts to combat pro-Palestinian activism on U.S. campuses. This past spring, the ICC appears to have set up at least one anonymous website to oppose a George Washington University student government resolution that called on the school to divest its endowment from certain companies that students said were profiting from Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, the Forward reported.

The Israel on Campus Coalition’s leaders discussed their covert social media tactics in an unaired Al Jazeera documentary featuring hidden camera footage of Washington pro-Israel advocacy officials.

“With the anti-Israel people, what’s most effective, what we found at least in the last year, is you do the opposition research, put up some anonymous website and then put up targeted Facebook ads,” said the Israel on Campus Coalition’s executive director, Jacob Baime, in the Al Jazeera documentary, which was filmed in 2016. The film was viewed by ProPublica and the Forward.

Baime also said in the documentary that his organization’s work is based on a doctrine used to fight al-Qaida and the Taliban. “It’s modeled on Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy,” Baime said. “We’ve copied a lot from that strategy that has been working really well for us, actually.”

McChrystal, who led the U.S. military’s special forces and the NATO war effort in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, emphasized so-called “offensive information operations” to embarrass and discredit violent insurgents.

The Al Jazeera documentary, in which a journalist went undercover as an intern for a pro-Israel advocacy group in Washington, has been the subject of months of international intrigue and has never been aired by the network. Decrying the undercover tactics, pro-Israel groups and members of Congress have pushed back against the documentary series and Qatar, which funds Al Jazeera. The network, which has faced public criticism from its own journalists for not airing the documentary, said in April it did not buckle under pressure from a pro-Israel group in deciding not to broadcast the program. A spokesman didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Footage in the documentary also shows Israel on Campus Coalition officials describing their working relationship with the Israeli government.

Baime says in the documentary that Israel on Campus Coalition officials “coordinate” or “communicate” with Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, an Israeli government department that has become the hub of the Israeli government’s overt and covert efforts against the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement in the U.S. and around the world. A spokesman for the agency didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In the same hidden camera footage, Ian Hersh, the Israel on Campus Coalition’s director of operations, said that the Ministry of Strategic Affairs participates in the group’s “Operations and Intelligence Brief,” a regular strategy meeting.

In recent days, some aspects of the Al Jazeera documentary as well as a short clip have been posted on the website Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian news site whose executive director, Ali Abunimah, appears as an interviewee in the film.

Baime and Hersh didn’t respond to requests for comment about the footage of them in the documentary.

READ MORE: Why do people share conspiracy theories and fake news? Maybe it’s the human “need for chaos”

The Israel on Campus Coalition’s online efforts against Kanazi, the Palestinian-American poet, began in November 2016 while he was touring college campuses to promote his book, “Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up From Brooklyn to Palestine.”

According to the Israel on Campus Coalition’s donor materials, the group identified and worked with a non-Jewish military veteran and San Jose State University student to write a blog post critical of Kanazi. The precise nature of the group’s work with the student is unclear from the donor materials, and the student did not respond to requests for comment.

The Israel on Campus Coalition then created and paid to promote the “SJSU Students Against Hate” page, which linked to the blog post.

“Kanazi preaches hate on the campuses he visits,” the student wrote in the post, which appeared on the website Medium and has since been deleted.

Kanazi said that he does not recall being aware of the anonymous Facebook pages at the time. “These insidious tactics are part of a larger campaign to smear students, professors, and anyone who dares speak up for Palestinian human rights at universities,” he said in an email.

The post Pro-Israel group secretly ran misleading Facebook ads targeting pro-Palestinian activist appeared first on Salon.com.

II

First, a brief flashback. As chair of the German department and head of the appointment committee, I played a large role in the decision to offer Avital Ronell, on her second attempt, a professorship at NYU. Three years before that, I had been asked to resuscitate a moribund German department and to help it find legs upon which to stand. During negotiations, the dean pledged four professorships to me. I wrote a comprehensive position paper describing what a German department in the academic landscape of New York and the United States should look like. This task drew me to New York.

Before I offered Avital Ronell her job, I’d had many in-depth conversations with her. She engaged my queries with what seemed like understanding. She said she’d throw herself into the building of an integrated study and research program. She promised actively to contribute to department research, conferences and publications. Once she had assumed the position, however, she broke all her promises. She did her best to sabotage the program. She pursued one goal: The work of Avital Ronell and Jacques Derrida must be at the center of all teaching and research. Instead of an academic program, we were left with boundless narcissism. Once she’d become the head of the German department, she had her secretary announce in a departmental meeting that in the German department no student’s written work would any longer be acceptable unless it cited Derrida and Ronell.

At that point, I understood the question the dean had posed during my interview, namely, where do you stand on deconstruction? I was still naïve and answered as though he had asked me what I think of Leibniz. After I’d arrived in New York it took me a while to understand what was really behind the dean’s anxious question. We were at war, and, as in any war, there was only a yes or a no, for me or against me.

In Professor Ronell’s opinion, I was not enough for her. So she began, after an initial period of acclimatization in the department, to undermine my position as department head. When she spoke, I noticed deviations from the facts; in her deeds, the signs of disloyalty. An unpleasant tension took root. I didn’t expect gratitude, but I could not have imagined such disloyalty. If Martin Heidegger obliterated the name of his predecessor, ejecting him from the offices he eventually occupied, as Ronell claims (in “The Telephone Book“), then obviously he was her role model.

The university belongs, like the church and the military, to the social institutions that are situated at a considerable distance from democracy and adhere to premodern power structures. Professor Ronell was unusually skilled at manipulating these. Nothing is so important in these power plays as the unconditional support of the dean of faculty. Luck was on her side. The dean had changed, and the new dean admired her and her publications, of which, I suspect, he had not read a single one. If he had, he would have had to disown his own. But his confidante in the comparative literature department provided him with evidence of theory-queen Ronell’s genius. He took every opportunity to throw himself at her feet.

Working with the dean, she achieved a coup. After I’d returned from a semester in Berlin, I found a letter from the dean on my desk, informing me I was no longer chair of the department. Professor Ronell now occupied my position. No consultation or information preceded this announcement. No appeal, no protest, no reference to my arrangement with the former dean, who had in the meantime left NYU, was relevant. No reason for my demotion was given. The plan I had developed and had begun implementing for the department had evidently been scuttled. Having made Professor Ronell acting chair and installed her in that position before my trip to Berlin, she seamlessly continued as chair.

But squeezing me out wasn’t enough for Ronell. Any means were justified in her attempt to destroy my reputation. A friend from Princeton had warned me against hiring her, predicting she would, after a short while, denigrate me as a male chauvinist. This reproach did not escape her lips. After all, it would have been implausible, since, of the five positions I had filled in the department, four were given to women.

However, she had another arrow in her quill. At a public event she labeled me an anti-Semite. Not that she actually believed this smear. But the accusation, once uttered, was not easy to unhear, and since it fit into her political calculations, she had no scruples deploying it. Even if no one believed the charge, it would still have the desired effect for her. Semper aliquid haeret, as the Romans used to say: Something always sticks.

With that, the first step to her goal was taken, namely, to discredit me and to destroy my standing at the university. All of this she did from behind a veil of smiles and verbal niceties. Hypocrisy reigned.

Since I usually learned only indirectly of her slandering me, I had no means of defending myself. Circumstances didn’t allow for more than a frustrated silence. A colleague, a professor of economics whom I respected and who was on the committee that appointed me to NYU, one day did not know me, turning on his heel when we met by accident on the street. I can only guess why he reacted this way.

III

From her second semester onward Professor Ronell reigned with an authoritarian hand, gloved in her well-proven hypocrisy. Instructors whom I had brought to the department either submitted to her regime or lost their jobs, always according to the letter of the law and in discussion with the dean, never in consultation with members of the German department. Once, she drafted a secret dissenting opinion against the unanimous decision of a commission and submitted it to the dean. The protest we as a department made to the dean against the dismissal of a junior professor fell on deaf ears. He would make no decision that ran counter to the will of the chairperson. The cynicism of Professor Ronell’s reasoning was hard to beat. The dismissal of this junior colleague was in this professor’s best interests, she explained, for she would not have felt comfortable in the department. In fact, Ronell wanted this colleague to leave because she was not prepared to be subservient. Someone else was found to fill in. Sure, the new hire had no experience, but at least she was ready to submit to Professor Ronell.

She dismissed a lecturer in the German language who had been hired by my predecessor and had for years done a great job. Occasionally, he had been a bit aloof around Professor Ronell. For that he had to pay. When he returned to his office to pack up his things, Professor Ronell appeared to commiserate with him and assure him of her sympathy, until he broke into tears and fled the room.  

The quality of teaching in the department unraveled. The carefully planned program of teaching German literature was ignored. Many students arrived in the department with minimal knowledge of German literature or history. The courses that were meant to correct this no longer existed. Now philosophy, from Hegel to Judith Butler, was taught. But multidisciplinarity quickly deteriorated into dilettantism. Students were encouraged to take philosophy seminars at other universities. Soon, students who had learned about deconstruction and feminism in Paris, but who had no idea who Gottfried Benn, Joseph Roth and Alfred Döblin were, were no exception in the department. As one student told me, “We study in a German department where French theory is taught in English.”

I am amazed even today that we succeeded in preventing the inclusion of a clause in the German department’s charter that would have exempted students from mastering the German language. It was Professor Ronell who, in all seriousness, made this suggestion. In fact, however, she admitted students who spoke English and French, but not a word of German — but they had studied in Paris and proven in their term papers that they were Derrida connoisseurs.

Included in Professor Ronell’s instruments of domination was the absolute control of information. Information streams were strictly controlled, and a thick net was spun that captured and distributed them as she saw fit. At a department meeting Professor Ronell let it be known through her secretary that no member of the department would be allowed to make contact with any dean at NYU without her (Professor Ronell’s) explicit consent. Soon after that, there were no more department meetings. Information was exchanged only in one-on-one conversations. Whoever did not belong to the inner circle had no access to information. Uncertainty grew, and the department became a rumor mill. This fostered all sorts of manipulation that in turn served to strengthen the inner circle. As in a conventicle [a secret or illegal religious meeting], access to information was gained through eavesdropping on the proclamation of the divinity’s message. Inquiries and criticisms were unwanted.

The rules for the formation of Ronell’s congregation functioned within as without. Necessary to maintaining this body of followers was the placing of a few people in strategically advantageous positions, a journal in which colleagues could review one another’s work, and a flock of admirers. These conditions either existed already or were manufactured. An editor from a publisher was introduced to me with the sentence: “He discovered me!” I received, presumably as a test, an offer to review a book in “one of our” journals. The book had been written by “one of our own.” My review was critical; I saw no reason to praise the book. Further offers to review books were not forthcoming. I’d flunked the test.

IV

The interests of graduate students counted for little. In a department meeting, all students were informed they wasted the professors’ precious research time by asking for guidance and advice.

Sharpening the critical faculties of students was no longer the goal of the department under Professor Ronell. Quite the contrary. Before students were allowed to practice  criticism, they had to learn to subject themselves to authority. Every objection, every doubt, brought punishment with it. Dissent was heresy, and heretics would be reprimanded or excommunicated — and not always with a smile, but often ironically, derisively, maliciously.

Two students told me about a seminar in which the “O” in Heinrich von Kleist’s novella “The Marquise von O” was under discussion. Pauline Réage, in her pornographic novel “Story of O“ explores the relationship between sexuality and extreme forms of submission. This subject can certainly be discussed in a university seminar — but in one on Kleist? And the obvious question of the relation between university teaching and submission was, according to the students’ report, not dealt with. There was a reason for that.

I have saved a letter from a student who was close enough to Avital Ronell to study her in detail. He was an older student who had completed training as a psychotherapist. He had wanted to write his dissertation under her guidance. After one year, he gave up, disillusioned, and left the department. I quote from an E-mail he wrote to Professor Ronell  :

From my interactions with you and observing you
in various settings, you give the impression that you suffer from a well-known mental illness referred to as malignant narcissism in a borderline structure …

There are clear clinical descriptions of sadistic object relations. You may get some sense of why your criticisms of students are so often felt to be destructive and disillusioning: you appear to be unable to control your sadism. Don’t you realize that the metaphor you expressed to me in front of other faculty, that you liken your role to that of a Procrustean bonsai master who prunes and places wires on her students, probably points to a destructive, violent and sadistic phantasy that is only worsened by the self-satisfied relish with which you related it? This disorder, were it found to 
be present, would also account for why you sometimes seem to me slightly unkempt. These comments are meant to be helpful. I hope you will seek out a proper professional evaluation to identify whatever
 the problems are and have them addressed. I am concerned for you and I hope you will take this caution seriously …

This student had the financial means to leave. Other students were not in such fortunate positions. They were dependent on Professor Ronell’s approval if they didn’t want to put their stipends at risk. How quickly this approval might disappear she made crystal clear. As soon as a student’s admiration was deemed lacking, Avital Ronell withdrew her support. The department became a hand-selected group of disciples. Whoever didn’t fit in left voluntarily or was pressured to do so. One such student said to me by way of farewell: “Avital never should have been made chair of this department.”

Trust cannot grow in a department where the chair repeatedly stresses her commitment to the success of staff and students, but in truth has only her own success in mind. As the dismissed junior colleague said, the learning environment under such leadership grew cold. Hypocrisy, suspicion and intrigue were all that blossomed.

Under the mantle of hypocrisy, Professor Ronell’s abuse of power was the order of the day. If a relationship between Ronell and a student had a sexualized tincture, its end spelled personal catastrophe for the student. The initiation of a sexualized relationship is never  only an ethical violation; it is also a major breach of professional conduct that inevitably influences a student’s professional training. I know of a student who lost her stipend after a personal conflict with Ronell. This meant she wasn’t able to continue her education, which meant she lost her visa and had to return to her home country. Later, I met her by coincidence at a conference in Berlin. She lived from gig to gig and off of grant money. But her judgment of her former advisor hadn’t changed: Ronell, she insisted, was a genius, the greatest living literary theorist. Once a member of the sect, always a member. Tunnel vision forever.

One time I was away from the department for a few weeks, and a student had used my office and computer. When I returned, I found a letter on my desktop that the student had written to Ronell. Never in my life had I read a cry of such groveling submission and howling guilt. She begged forgiveness because she had failed to appear at a scheduled meeting. She confessed: She had not been sick. Instead, she had not had the inner strength to meet Avital in person at her apartment. Would Avital forgive her one more time?

Other students kept their appointments with Professor Ronell. I remember a student from Iran. Ronell had pressured him to write his PhD thesis on Goethe’s “West-East Divan“ under her guidance. He acquiesced, bowing to necessity. After a conference with his new mentor, he slunk into my office. He closed the door and dropped his voice (the walls had ears), and said: “I am sick to my stomach. I need to take two days off to recover.” Most students reacted differently through self-humiliation and self-abnegating subjugation. They were ever-stricken with a guilty conscience and an identification with their aggressor. The question of guilt played a large role in Professor Ronell’s machinations. Her steady accusation was this: “You are guilty and deserve to be punished by me.” Students translated this as: “Yes, I am guilty and deserve to be punished by you.” The severe über-mama was always in the right.

READ MORE: When a woman is accused of sexual misconduct: The strange case of Avital Ronell

Going against her prohibition of making any unauthorized contact with university officials, I arranged a meeting with a new dean. I could no longer look on in silence, and I told her about the desolate state of teaching in the German department and the psychic pressure students were forced to endure. The dean’s response: There are no faculty police to ensure the enforcement of rules. If there are problems, they need to be solved within the department. This, in my view, provided carte blanche for abuse. A few days later, Professor Ronell inquired of me if I “still” found it necessary to stay in contact with the deans. On the same day she found a new way to humiliate me. The continued bullying — needling and more serious harassment — had no end.

V

Even when one is acquainted with the hermetic world of the modern academy, it is still hard to believe how many years had to pass before awareness of Ronell’s abuse of power made its way to a public forum, or before her sexualized pedagogy would even be mentioned.

Now, however, a few commentators will have us know that the case of Ronell is a fresh example of the oppression of a leftist feminist by conservative white men. This political polarization is crude, and its goal transparent: This is war, and ranks are closing around Ronell.

Leftist? Avital Ronell’s father figures are Martin Heidegger and, often quoted and paraphrased, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Who could possibly describe them as left-leaning theorists? If Ronell has a political agenda, it is the liquidation of the legacy of 1968.

In the German newspapers Die Zeit and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Ronell has been elevated to the “shining light” of feminist studies. I had to read this description twice before I could believe my eyes. Anyone trying to find a substantial contribution to feminist thought in her work will be searching for a long time. And “shining light”? If pure ignorance did not produce this phrase, then it is simply the reality-denying militancy of ideology. If “light” is supposed to refer to the Enlightenment, this is also a perversion of standards. Few other books in recent years have served the Counter-Enlightenment as well as Avital Ronell’s books. Her hypocrisy serves the commentators’ lack of insight. She likes to cast herself as diabolical and loves the color black — but only in the sanctuary of her inner circle. As soon as her audience grows beyond those confines, she performs a new role, namely, that of the fragile and vulnerable woman.

The quality of her publications is trotted out as one reason she should remain immune from criticism. But should even a brilliant book protect someone from accusations of sexual harassment and abuses of power? Moreover, not everyone agrees that Professor Ronell’s books have made significant contributions to theoretical debates. And not everyone who declares her guilty of intellectual charlatanism (for example, for her fantasies of a conversation between Martin Heidegger and the SA in Berlin, or her musings about Flaubert and the crack wars) are old, misogynist men thirsting for the blood of emancipated women.

How could such a polarization emerge? I remember a conversation I had with a colleague after one of Ronell’s lectures. In private and with a glass of wine in hand, we agreed without hesitation: It was a convoluted mess replete with incomprehensible longueurs. As soon a third person joined us, however, the conversation shifted to high praise. The intervention of Ronell’s network of supporters was working splendidly.  

She is expert at translating incomprehensibility into pseudo-profundity. The following convoluted remarks were Avital Ronell’s attempt at clarifying the convoluted structure of her book “Crack Wars.” Her purpose was not, she argued, to show complicity with the “metaphysics of continuity” — what could this mean?

In fact, I wanted to move with a disruptive flow characteristic of the types of experience which we can still have which are discontinuous, rhythmed according to different moments and impulses, urges. I was trying to play precisely with the question of speeding and slowing down, and the relation of artificial injections to the way we can think about temporality. So the book is on different types of drugs, too: there’s the more psychedelic moments, there’s the narcotized moments where it slows down into a heroin experience, and there’s the speed freak moments. Different articulations. There’s different angles and approaches (or reproaches) to the problem. Since it’s also trying to argue for the relationship of drugs to technology, I do try to sequence it according to this discontinuous flow, in the sense that the electronic media “makes sense” only by discontinuous flows. So it would be an instance of non-technological resistance to try to produce an uninterrupted linear argumentation. 

Professor Ronell’s confused efforts at originality don’t convince every reader. Terms such as “ontic,” “identity,” “Dasein,” “a priori” and “totality” are generously scattered throughout her books and give the impression of philosophical rigor. In such a lexical environment, the following banalities and meaningless sentences have a patina of significance: “As for Hölderlin, he did not watch television,” or “A woman’s voice is perfectly suited to perform a phallic penetration” (from “The Telephone Book”). “That’s how I want to write,” sighed a student whom Ronell had helped to make the jump from Bielefeld to New York. He wasn’t the only one who took burbling nonsense for profundity.

One rarely sees posed the question of whether her writings have meaning beyond the suggestive allure of their incomprehensibility or their playful associative quality. Judgment is preordained; admiration is programmed. To keep this charlatanism alive, her cultivation of her communications network is essential. At one of the last faculty receptions I attended the year I finally threw in the towel, one of the, by that time, many deans, vice-deans or sub-deans said, “But her research!” just moments after bemoaning from one corner of his mouth the deficiencies of her administration.

Whoever masters the art of manipulating deans and colleagues has won the game. I must admit that I once unwillingly took part in that power game by offering her a professorship. At a similar faculty function, I remarked that as chair of the department I had made gravely misguided decisions. Avital, who stood nearby, immediately understood what was behind this remark. “That can only have been me.” She never wanted for presence of mind and intellectual sharpness, for what, in the 18th century, was called “wit.”

VI

Ronell’s supporters warn of the loss to NYU and the academic world if she is disciplined. But what, exactly, would be lost? In an open letter, available online, philosopher and visiting professor at NYU Slavoj Žižek bemoans the potential loss to the academy, because it is in need of her  “ironic, mocking, sardonic” language.

Ronell’s high-profile supporters blame the students for misunderstanding her modes of communication. Such self-justification is scandalous. Whom are university professors meant to serve? Are they there for their own entertainment and self-affirmation? As her student in the quoted letter observed more than 10 years ago, Ronell’s students found her language destructive and injurious – contrary to Žižek’s glowing assessment of their effect. But Professor Ronell, he added, was obviously incapable of seeing the sadism at work in her language. If she conceives of her verbiage as the equivalent of a bonsai master’s craft, one based on cutting and constraining, then this destructive and sadistic fantasy will merely be strengthened by the self-justified pleasure she obviously takes in cutting down her students.

Can it be anything but false solidarity that is now practiced as a diagnosis from afar, or, in the case of Žižek, who after a mere two weeks at NYU, sees in Ronell an understanding and caring professor? Whoever wants to whitewash the misconduct of Avital Ronell does so either out of ignorance or  is eager to make a contribution to this undeclared war. As in all wars, truth is the first casualty, and these alternative facts do a disservice to the cause of women. The critique of asymmetrical power structures in universities, which the case of Avital Ronell would allow, will be prevented by the ranks now closing around her.  Avital Ronell’s supporters will ensure that existing power structures remain in place.

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The post A witch hunt or a quest for justice: An insider’s perspective on disgraced academic Avital Ronell appeared first on Salon.com.

DeVos’ efforts to undermine the rights of victims of harassment and assault have not met with all that vigorous a pushback, in no small part because universities themselves have a lot of institutional resistance to fulfilling their Title IX obligations to address sexual violence on campus. Victims’ rights advocates on campus often find themselves at odds with school administrators, who clearly worry that their schools’ reputations may be harmed when victims speak publicly about their experiences.

Survivors and their supporters have repeatedly alleged retaliation from universities for reporting rape. In one incident, the president of Columbia University seemed to avoid shaking the hand of a graduating student who had made national news with her art project protesting the school’s unwillingness to expel the young man she accused of raping her.

“There’s a real perception that when these investigations go public, that may send a signal to prospective students about problems associated with sexual assault and how universities handle claims,” Isaac Swensen, an economics professor at Montana State University, told Salon. “That motivates some concern from administrators and perhaps even motivates a lack of transparency.”

READ MORE: Could overturning Roe v. Wade lead to a nationwide abortion ban? It’s possible

Swensen, along with researchers from American University and Texas A&M, decided to test that concern by looking at what happens to applications, enrollments and alumni giving after a school is subject to a Title IX investigation by the federal government. Such an investigation would usually involve one or more students filing complaints about a school’s handling of sexual abuse issues.

Title IX investigations tend to get a lot of coverage, especially from local media in the communities around a college campus, leading to fears that the schools involved will take a hit to their reputations. What Swensen and his colleagues found was not only that such investigations don’t seem to hurt the bottom line for universities, the schools typically see an increase in applications and enrollments after a Title IX investigation is opened.

“We’re surprised,” Swensen said about the finding.

The research, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economics, also finds that Title IX investigations don’t really affect the levels of alumni giving, either. But the rise in the number of applications and enrollments, the researchers felt, was statistically significant enough to suggest that Title IX investigations may actually be encouraging more students to apply and enroll in a school.

Yes, it certainly seems counterintuitive, but a school’s reputation may somehow get a boost when there’s a Title IX investigation. Interestingly, the post-investigation surge was seen among both female and male students.

The researchers report that they’re not sure how to account for this effect. Some possibilities raised in the paper are that the coverage somehow enhances a given college’s reputation as a “party school” or, conversely, that the fact an investigation has been opened reassures prospective students that such issues will be taken seriously going forward. But the likeliest explanation, Swensen said, is simple salience.

The salience bias has been long known to behavioral researchers. It’s simply a fancy way of stating the obvious: People pay more attention to things that receive lots of attention, and often this effect can shape the way people make choices about things — like which colleges to apply to.

“These investigations lead to news headlines that are noticeable,” Swensen said, “and may cause these schools to stand out.”

Title IX investigations are still relatively rare. The researchers used a federal database tracking Title IX investigations, and from their set of 1,170 schools only 80 had experienced investigations. Discovering that a school has had such an investigation might make it stand out for some students, and that attention could cause a student to spend more time looking at the school and considering it seriously. Ultimately, name recognition may have more impact than vague concerns about what a Title IX investigation means.

Because of this, the researchers cheekily named their paper, “Any Press Is Good Press?” Taken as a whole, it’s not irrational for students to react this way. There’s no evidence to suggest that a Title IX investigation, in itself, indicates that a school is uniquely dangerous. Sexual assault, sadly, is too widespread for that.

Nor does it mean, as many conservatives in the media have suggested, that young men are afraid that they’ll be unfairly railroaded by false accusations. These reports apparently didn’t deter young men from applying to schools that are under pressure to start taking rape more seriously.

Regardless of why this is happening, Swensen believes the main takeaway is that university administrators should not be overly concerned about the hypothetical damage to their schools’ reputations that comes from dealing openly with campus sexual abuse.

“This should be reassuring to college administrators,” he explained, since simply responding to pressure “to improve processes for reviewing accusations of sexual assault . . . doesn’t seem to come at the expense of broader university goals.”

This should also suggest that colleges and universities should speak out against Betsy DeVos’ campaign to undermine Title IX protections, instead of sitting quietly on the sidelines. Instead of feeling nervous about the possible consequences of dealing frankly with the issue of sexual assault, schools can now feel confident that such public accounting helps not just female students, but the school itself.

The post Do campus rape investigations damage colleges? Actually, the opposite may be true appeared first on Salon.com.

College professors and other instructors are taking the time to do the writing and research that most have to put aside during the school year to attend to the demands of teaching and navigating the bureaucracy that comes with a career in higher education. Like many students, those underpaid college instructors who do not have year-long contracts and are employed on an “as needed” contingent basis, are working during the summer to survive those long months without a paycheck as well as subsidize what they hope will be a job in the next school year. There are other college professors who have seen those routines and rituals greatly disrupted.

The American right has been waging a war against American higher education for decades. With the election of Donald Trump it seems to have reached a new crescendo: Across the United States faculty members who have been deemed too “liberal” have been targeted by right-wing organizations for harassment and eventual firing. This war on academic freedom is part of a larger campaign against critical thinking in defense of the anti-intellectualism that has typified American conservatism since at least the 1950s — and in service of a neoliberal model of education and society where citizens are to be “productive” drones rather than engaged citizens.

Ted Thornhill is one of many educators who has felt the weight of Trumpism and the right-wing movement that is fighting to remake American education in its own image come crashing down upon him.

Thornhill is a professor of sociology at Florida Gulf Coast University. Last January he offered a course entitled “White Racism.” The reaction to this course was immediate: his life was threatened, armed guards had to be posted outside his classroom, the right-wing media led by Fox News mobilized its public against him, he was the target of a coordinated harassment campaign, and right-wing student activists, including white supremacists, schemed to undermine his authority as a scholar with the ultimate goal being the termination of his employment.

I recently spoke with Professor Thornhill about the perils of teaching courses about race in the era of resurgent white backlash, academic freedom, truth-telling and the color line, and the new McCarthyism that is targeting America’s teachers and professors.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. A longer version of this conversation can also be heard on my podcast.

There is a right-wing network of activists, interest groups, politicians and media figures who are trying to remake American education in radical ways. Part of their strategy is to harass and force out of their jobs any educator who defies your orthodoxy. You experienced this personally. What transpired when you taught your course on white racism?

I’ve been teaching courses on racial stratification for about a decade. When it was time to come up with my list of classes that I would teach in the spring, I knew I wanted to teach a course on that topic. I wanted a title for the course that would capture the subject matter. Thus, I thought that the term “white racism” was an appropriate one. I knew that some white folks would get upset by it, but I can’t concern myself with them. We look to engage students, pique their interests. I wanted them to be excited and take the course. Things got out of control because student Republican groups and libertarian groups went online and used Facebook to say that I was racist against white folks. These students then looped in Fox News and a local NBC affiliate. Then other right-wing reactionary media groups got involved back in October and November and it grew from there.

You are describing a well-oiled right-wing outrage machine. How did it target you?  

The producer for Fox News’ Tucker Carlson tried to get me on his show four separate times and I’ve ignored them. I think what had these racist conservatives going apoplectic was the fact that I would not apologize or say that maybe I should have moderated my tone and the title a bit. I didn’t cede any ground to them. I think they took offense from that, and then got even more upset. I don’t have anything to concede. If you’re not a white racist then you shouldn’t be concerned with the title of the course.

What is their logic, in terms of saying you should apologize or that the title of the class is racist?

Everything from these folks is predicated on a belief that our society is “post-racial.” They all think that we’ve eclipsed a point where race matters, except in some exceptional cases where people are wearing the hoods and the robes. Moreover, they wanted to silence me. They believe the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction now that white people — white conservatives in particular — are being oppressed.

Some people have actually asked me, “Why didn’t you just title the course ‘Institutional Racism’?” They actually believe that institutional racism impacts them. They think affirmative action is actually an example of institutional racism negatively affecting the life chances of whites. I actually think that these folks are delusional. It’s either they are delusional or they are indifferent. When you know the data the truth is screaming at you. These white folks know what the history of this country is. I think they derive pleasure from it.

How have the university administration, as well as your department chair and fellow faculty members, responded to all of this?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the strong support I’ve received from the president of the institution. Because it’s certainly the case that faculty members who were under assault by these right-wing folks are often thrown under the bus, or they release these weak, tepid statements intended to reaffirm the institution’s  commitments to “diversity,” “inclusivity,” “tolerance” and “multiculturalism” — all that kind of stuff.

I’m pleased that the president of my university is respecting and protecting my academic freedom. There have been some folks at the institution, within the power structure let’s say, who have not been antagonistic. But they’ve been a bit reticent about the title of the course.

Why is the very statement of the fact that white racism has in many ways defined modernity so provocative?

I think it’s predicated on their way of producing these false equivalencies. Many people, especially those who are harassing professors like myself, believe that racism, first of all, is not a structural phenomenon. It’s something that is limited to the level of thoughts and beliefs and attitudes. By me titling the course “White Racism,” I’m being very blunt in making a claim that you white folks and your ancestors and your white-controlled institutions are responsible for the gross differences and social outcomes between whites and folks of color. That’s just too direct for them to stomach.

One of the most salient things that I’ve learned so far from this experience is that we’ve had these courses called “Systemic Racism” and “Race and Class in American Culture” and “Race and Ethnic Relations” in sociology and other disciplines for a long time. It must be the case that these people who are protesting my class must be thinking that those courses were not focused on systemic racism and that they were simply focusing on this idea that we are all racially prejudiced. “You’re bad, I’m bad. We should all just be kind to one another and the world would be a better place.”

I didn’t realize how deeply they believed that, because such people and groups are not attacking all these other courses. They’re going after courses which are explicitly about race. They’re going after courses which examine topics such as the abolition of whiteness, the problem of whiteness or white racism.

One of the ways white privilege works is through how invisible and normal it is for white folks. White privilege also takes the form of interpersonal and structural violence against nonwhites. To actually name a thing for what it is — that’s simply too psychologically and emotionally disruptive for many white folks, especially those deeply invested in white privilege.

I think that is the case. You’ve got to be able to name something before you can fight it. They know that, because these folks — despite the fact that I think that they are incorrect on understanding racial matters — do still have some brain cells operating. They’re sophisticated enough to know that these types of courses represent a possibility for other people to be persuaded by the empirical evidence which shows the continuing significance of race and racism globally. That is why they have to use right-wing, guerrilla-style tactics to try to shut us down.

Let me offer up a very basic question you might have heard from these people: Shouldn’t we stop talking about race to get past racism?

You can’t address a problem without talking about it. There are processes and practices and laws and traditions and customs that have been in place for generations, and whose negative effects continue to this day. By refusing to talk about race and racism, or even to collect data, they want to ignore reality.

Imagine the audacity and the arrogance necessary for these individuals to think that other folks should silence themselves and not communicate about the racial problems in this society. I don’t have a lot of patience for that.

What are some basic concepts and theories that people who study the color line in a serious way understand and take for granted that may be challenging for students and the general public?

White supremacy. Whenever I try to explain that concept to folks, they immediately go to the Klan and the neo-Nazis and the skinheads. It’s so clear to me that we have this structural system in place and all these elements of the system work together — that there’s a logic to it. White supremacy has permeated all aspects of society within formal organizations, within the minds of people, within belief systems and within ideologies that circulate among us.

It seems so clear. People who are in denial about this reality will say or think things like, “How are you saying that there’s a system in place? We have laws that say you can’t discriminate.” I respond that we also have laws that say you can’t drive over the speed limit and text people while you drive and things of that nature, but it still happens. I think it’s hard for them to understand the structural and systemic nature of racism. Even when I show them the data, it’s just really hard for a lot of white students and some confused students of color. That’s the one concept that I seem to have difficulty conveying.

They have a caricature of the Klan and Nazis in their heads but they don’t want to look in the mirror and ask themselves, “How am I reproducing these power relationships? How do I benefit from the system?” Because then they have to ask hard questions about their own human decency, morality and behavior.

I think for some it calls into question, “Am I a good person? Am I a good white person?” Well, you might be good, but good people can be complicit too. That’s the part they don’t like. They just don’t like the idea that they could be complicit in the system, and they don’t believe they have any animus in their heart. They don’t see how they can be contributing to the maintenance of white supremacy. Another concept that’s difficult for many white folks, and others, is the myth of meritocracy. They get stupefied: “What do you mean? People achieve things because they work hard!” It’s connected because they simply can’t fathom that we have a system where people work hard and don’t make it. That’s another one that’s really challenging for many people to reconcile.

When you were putting together the syllabus for this course on white racism, what was the general outline and what were some of the high points?

In all my syllabi I have an introduction that is more detailed than the typical course description. There I offer a narrative about the origins of the United States as a white supremacist society. It is axiomatic. We are not going to debate about whether this nation’s history actually happened or not. I just don’t go there. Then the first week of class we talk about the race concept itself and how race is a biological myth. Race is a social construction. It is a political, social and cultural idea. But it is not biologically real. Race is real in its social consequences.

From there we move on to discussing different sociological theories of racism, racial ideologies and social institutions. We also talk about the concept of “colorism” in the class. Then at the end of the semester, we have time to actually discuss some strategies that students and individuals in general can use to push back against and challenge white supremacy and white racism.

What’s the one lecture or conversation you’re really excited about?

I get really excited when we talk about colorblind ideology. Yes there is a resurgence of these overt white racist hate groups. But they are not the principal mechanism through which folks of color have their life chances constrained, limited, truncated and reduced. It actually is these seemingly nonracial processes and practices and traditions that do that work. It is not only conservatives but also well-meaning, tender-hearted white liberals who reproduce those outcomes.

As someone who felt the weight of the Trump era bearing down on him, how do you think he was able to get elected president of the United States?  

I think an element of it was how people on the left thought it was so inevitable that Hillary would win. They didn’t even go to the polls.

There’s certainly this element of the white working class being resentful. Mexicans are coming to take their jobs. Muslims are coming and taking over and we’re going to have sharia law all over the country. That the gains of the civil rights movement have gone too far and the opportunities for the everyday white working Joe and Jane have gone away. They can’t make it. Another element was an incorrect belief that clearly people are too intelligent to vote for Donald Trump.

This is a really racist country. These folks voted for him because they thought that he would work for them and make their lives better. Trump either felt the pulse or had people advising him who had the pulse of these groups. He spoke in a way that was attractive to his base. Somehow they forgot the fact that this guy was a billionaire, has nothing to do with them and has no relationship to them except that their skin color is the same.

Given everything that’s happened, are you at all hopeful about America’s future? What are you concerned about?

I’m a follower of the late Derrick Bell’s work. I’m not particularly hopeful with regard to racial progress in our lifetime. I think things can get better than they are now. The problems we have can change, but it will be a matter of degree. I think racial contestation will persist. Perhaps during this demographic transition that the census is forecasting, some coalitions could be formed among communities of color that are sometimes at odds, and also with anti-racist whites. There’s a possibility. But I don’t see that happening for decades and decades.

The one thing on a personal level that encouraged me, since I’m so negative and pessimistic generally speaking, is the positive response I got from people via email after all this went down. Yes, I was getting all these threats and hate mail. But I also got a lot of positive emails of encouragement and support from probably a couple hundred people from all over the country and outside the U.S.. That hit me in a way emotionally that I don’t usually get touched. That has prompted me to perhaps tamper some of my pessimism and my cynicism. But it is still there.

Maybe there’s a little bit of hope for me if I see some changes. Perhaps the 2018 election will give me a little bit of hope. Then we’ll at least have an opportunity to get some progress in some more positive directions. That’s the best hope that I have right now.

The post Professor targeted by right for teaching course on “white racism”: “These folks are delusional” appeared first on Salon.com.

At present, the United States is struggling to reconcile how the threat of fascism, in the form of Donald Trump’s presidency, could be birthed in a country with supposedly strong democratic political and cultural institutions. To make this paradigm shift even more challenging, Trump’s ascendancy has been accompanied by a record increase in hate crimes, a resurgent white supremacist movement, and a full-on rejection of such modern values as cosmopolitanism and equality by many American conservatives.

On university and college campuses these trends have manifested themselves in controversies over free speech. Across the United States, right-wing activists have also engaged in a systemic campaign of harassment against those “liberal” and “left-wing” faculty members whom they view as being “un-American” and a threat to the anti-intellectual ideology that typifies today’s American conservative movement. In effect, the radical right wants to silence its foes wherever it finds them. Notions of academic and intellectual freedom are seen as obstacles in this war on critical thinking and empirical reality.

Ultimately, the myth of “liberal higher education” is being exposed as such by risk-averse university administrators who are more interested in protecting endowments and high tuitions than in standing up against the right-wing media and activists – -as well as influential donors and sponsors — who are waging war against teachers who dare to speak truth to power.

Some educators have dared to speak out against this new type of McCarthyism. Writing in response to the white supremacist terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Dorothy Kim, a professor of English at Vassar College, made the following demand of her colleagues in the field of medieval studies:

Today, medievalists have to understand that the public and our students will see us as potential white supremacists or white supremacist sympathizers because we are medievalists. The medieval western European Christian past is being weaponized by white supremacist/white nationalist/KKK/Nazi extremist groups who also frequently happen to be college students. Don’t think western European medieval studies is exceptional.

Kim continued:

As Catherine Cox recently presented at [a meeting of the Modern Language Association], ISIS/ISIL also weaponizes the idea of the pure medieval Islamic past in their recruiting rhetoric for young male Muslims. If the medieval past (globally) is being weaponized for the aims of extreme, violent supremacist groups, what are you doing, medievalists, in your classrooms? Because you are the authorities teaching medieval subjects in the classroom, you are, in fact, ideological arms dealers. So, are you going to be apathetic weapons dealers not caring how your material and tools will be used? Do you care who your buyers are in the classroom? Choose a side. Doing nothing is choosing a side. Denial is choosing a side. Using the racist dog whistle of “we must listen to both sides” is choosing a side. I am particularly struck by this last choice, since I want to know: would you also say this about ISIS/ISIL?

In response to these comments, Kim was subjected to a coordinated campaign of harassment by right-wing activists and their supporters. She was also criticized by scholars of medieval history who felt that their field of study should remain outside contemporary politics.

How should colleges and universities respond to the increasingly bold and aggressive white supremacist movement inspired by Donald Trump? Are some academic disciplines politically neutral? What is the obligation of the teacher-scholar to stand up against fascism and other illiberal values and beliefs? Why are white supremacists obsessed with medieval and ancient Europe? How are they trying to use their distorted version of Europe’s past to advance their agenda in the present?

I recently spoke to Dorothy Kim to address these questions and others. A longer version of this conversation can be heard on my podcast, which is available on Salon’s Featured Audio page.

What is the source of the controversy about what seem to be basic observations about the political nature of teaching and the classroom, as well as about the presence of nonwhites in medieval Europe? 

I think the source of the controversy is twofold. First is the fact that we are even discussing why and how white supremacists love the Middle Ages. This then means that the faculty who teach the subject can’t be imagined as neutral or innocent anymore. In addition, I think it’s also about a deep discomfort in regards to thinking about one’s scholarly field as somehow connected to white supremacy.

What was the inspirational moment for your deciding to write your essay, “Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy”?

In my essay I specifically argued that we couldn’t go into the classroom after Charlottesville and just teach medieval studies in the way we’ve always taught it. The Middle Ages is being weaponized by various extreme right-wing groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis and the broader white supremacist so-called alt-right. This has to do with other extreme hate groups as well.  I have colleagues who also analyze the materials that ISIS and ISIL actually use to recruit young men and they use some sense of a pure Islamic history and path in the same way.

How are your critics imagining the study of medieval Europe to somehow be apolitical and apart from the concerns of the “real world?” 

In the field of medieval studies there might be a discussion of, “Well, these topics are not really applicable because we’re pre-racial or pre-colonial or pre-immigrant or pre-migrant.” In fact, of course that’s incorrect . These concepts and ideas may function and look differently, but they are being worked through as well in the past.

Why are white supremacists and other members of the right wing so obsessed with and fascinated by ancient and medieval Europe? How are they using those historical periods to create a “usable past” to fuel their political agenda?

White supremacists and other “alt-right” types imagine medieval Europe as the last cultural space of pure white history that they can basically hook themselves into and argue that there were no people of color present. They’re very interested in how Western Europe becomes this kind of idealized white beginning and origin myth. It’s not a surprise, for instance, that in Charlottesville the white supremacists were carrying torches and circling around Jefferson’s statue.

He wanted Virginia to be Anglo-Saxon England. We know from medievalists and scholars that, for instance, after their defeat, the former Confederate states became very interested in thinking of themselves as the defeated Anglo-Saxons after the Norman foreigners basically took over. We also know the Ku Klux Klan is obsessed with white knights. This has had a long history in American culture and history. White supremacists have really grabbed onto the Middle Ages because they do feel like it’s their small heritage. This is why they get so angry and frustrated when  academics and others point out that people of color were present in the medieval past.

If you were to offer some basic facts regarding how white supremacists and others lie to themselves about medieval Europe, what would you highlight?

No. 1, that people of color were present in medieval Europe.

No. 2, that it was not entirely all Christian. It was multi-faith, multiracial, multicultural and multilingual. I would also include the fact that Africa is not a country and that there were actually African medieval civilizations and cultures. This is important, because that often gets used as a discussion point in burnishing this idea of medieval Europe. You can talk about medieval Mali and Timbuktu. You can talk about medieval Ethiopia. You can talk about medieval Nubian culture.

I would also tell them that they have to understand that medieval Western Europe was really considered the hinterlands, the proverbial outskirts or boonies. Actual innovation in the medieval world was coming out of the medieval Mediterranean, and was coming through via medieval Islamic culture. Medicine and science and so many other things were basically being circulated to medieval Europe.

I would also say that race existed in medieval Europe. For white supremacists and others to imagine that medieval Europe was empty of anyone of color, and also that these structures weren’t necessarily present, is incorrect. Talking about race in the medieval past is not anachronistic.

Much of the white right’s obsession with medieval Europe is a type of political theater. Who are the players?

The “alt-right” is a conglomeration with multiple nodes. You have the “men’s rights” types. There are white nationalists and white supremacists. There is of course the Ku Klux Klan.  And there are people who call themselves Odinists. There is lots of overlap there with a racist,  antifeminist, anti-Semitic idea of a pure white culture and related concepts.

For the angry white men attracted to the “alt-right,” what is the appeal of medieval Europe?

I think they imagine that it somehow allows them to do and say these things that they feel like they can’t say and do right now. As with ISIS/ISIL, for example, the gateway drug to those groups is anti-feminism. In this imagined past, white men and others can imagine a time when they did not have to deal with gender equity and these ideas that women should have access to work, fair pay and equal rights. It is very interesting to note that both extremist groups are using the same kinds of strategy to radicalize their members.

How would you characterize the hostile and hateful response to your essay on medieval studies in the wake of Charlottesville?

It’s played out in pretty intense ways. Obviously there have been racial attacks. Of course, there are also threats of sexualized violence. I think you can see what the patterns are. In their distorted view of the past and obsession with TV shows like “Game of Thrones,” I am also some kind of  non-Christian infidel.

How do you locate this experience within the larger political and social trends in this country and elsewhere?

It is an example of what has happened to those people who have been organizing online against white supremacy and the broader right wing for social justice and human dignity. It is an example of what happened to my female colleagues when they were discussing inclusiveness and gender in video games and digital culture. Yes, there are white supremacists. But there are also a lot of black and brown people who are fans of medieval fantasy and history who are fighting back and doing more than traditional academic experts to engage with politics and the public sphere on these issues.

The post Alt-right catches knight fever — but medieval scholars strike back appeared first on Salon.com.

No doubt there are some instances where young people, puffed up on self-righteousness and still sloppy about politics, go way too far with the P.C.-policing. But Monday’s resignation of Tim Wolfe as the president of the University of Missouri system in the wake of a wave of racial ugliness on campus should be a reminder that while a few loudmouthed lefties who overplay their hands may be annoying, young people—particularly young women and people of color—are less victimizers than victimized. All this chatter about “trigger warnings” and the supposedly over-coddled young has served to cover up the real story: Young people are under assault from reactionary forces and most of their grievances are not about imagined slights, but about very serious problems they are facing, on and off campus.

As this timeline from the Maneater, the student newspaper at the University of Missouri shows, the revolt against Wolfe didn’t come out of nowhere. The accusations that Wolfe was indifferent to a handful of racist incidents on campus are only the tip of the iceberg. It appears that, for months now, the campus has been the staging ground for all manner of conservative attacks on the wellbeing of young people not just on campus, but across the state.

Over the summer, the school tried to take away health insurance subsidies for graduate students, blaming Obamacare. That didn’t last long, but it certainly put students on notice that their basic access to health care was under threat by conservative forces. Then the university got caught up in the state’s heightened anti-choice politics, after state legislators strong-armed the school into forcing a doctor who worked at the school to quit providing abortions at a local Planned Parenthood. The school also canceled contracts with Planned Parenthood that allowed medical and nursing students to gain hours there, in response to the hoax videos that came out over the summer falsely accusing Planned Parenthood of selling body parts. They eventually came to their senses and renewed the contracts, but, as with the graduate student health program, the message was sent: The school was listening to and willing to interfere with the health care and educational access the students had, to pander to the whims of a bunch of delusional culture warriors.

While all this is happening, black students on campus are reporting a series of racist incidents. Campus protests were invigorated by the protests against police brutality in nearby Ferguson, but it also appears that all this tumult is invigorating racists, too, who are getting increasingly confrontational and provocative. While many news reports suggest that the main complaint against Wolfe was that he was insufficiently responsive to student concerns over this, it was actually much worse: Students report that a car driving Wolfe actually revved up the engine in the face of students who were blocking him in an anti-racism protest, and that one student was bumped by the car. It was likely unintentional, but still the result of treating the very real concerns of students at the center of this culture war whirlwind as if they are nothing but an annoyance.

Any one of these incidents, in isolation, doesn’t seem like a big deal, but taken together, it becomes easier to see why so many students feel under attack. Nor is this just about the University of Missouri. Young people in general have very real reasons to feel under attack in this country, and the shit show at Missouri is just a boiling over of pressures being felt from coast to coast by young people.

The culture war is usually discussed in this country in terms of religion, gender, or race, but it’s very rarely discussed in terms of age. But young people are definitely feeling the pain. Police violence is disproportionately dished out on young people of color. The attacks on Planned Parenthood are mostly about depriving teens and women in their early twenties access to contraception and STI services—services that women a little older usually can get through other means. Sexual assault on campus is endemic, but Republicans have responded by trying to make it harder for young women to get protection from their assailants.

Even the war over Obamacare has a generational aspect to it. Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are the most likely to be uninsured and therefore have the most to gain under the Medicaid expansion and federal subsidies available through Obamacare. Surprise surprise, these happen to be the aspects of the law getting attacked the most by conservatives. That, and contraception coverage, which again is needed the most by young women who are having sex but may struggle to pay full price for their preferred contraception methods.

Colleges are becoming a staging ground for this hostility towards young people, where students have to face soaring tuition rates and unmanageable levels of student debt, with elders too busy making fun of “trigger warnings” to worry about the economic destruction being dished out to young adults. Wolfe himself was hired not from the world of academia but from the business world, brought on for his skills at cutting costs more than his commitment to quality education. His hire was a demonstration that the state of Missouri prioritizes slashing education budgets to fund tax cuts over investing in young people’s futures.

So yes, young people sometimes do silly or nonsensical things in the name of social justice. But if young people in this country feel that they are under attack from reactionary forces, it’s because they are. They struggle to get health care, they pay too much for education, they face dismal job prospects in the real world and far too many of them, particularly young people of color,  have to live in fear of police violence. If their reactions are sometimes imperfect, their heightened emotions in this environment are entirely understandable. As Wolfe’s resignation shows, the culture wars on campus are about something much deeper than a few scuffles over Halloween costumes or trigger warnings. While it’s always fun to make fun of overwrought student leftists who go too far, it’s time to start paying some real attention to the serious problems that young people are really facing, in Missouri and in the rest of the country.

Check out our video summary on what’s happening at the University of Missouri:
[jwplayer file=”http://media.www.salon.com/2015/11/UofMiss_Asha_11.10.2015.mp4″ image=”http://media.www.salon.com/2015/11/Screen-Shot-2015-11-10-at-2.36.09-PM.png”][/jwplayer]

The post “PC” is another right-wing lie: Missouri proves reactionary forces really are waging war against college kids appeared first on Salon.com.