About the Guest:
Bradford Vivian is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State. His latest book is Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education (Oxford University Press).
Episode Transcript:
Cory Barker: In 2023, a viral video claimed that a professor at a major university failed a student for citing the Bible in a paper. The story spread fast. News segments, Op-Eds, endless commentary on social media. Outrage followed. Lawmakers tweeted. A few even cited it during committee hearings. Except, it wasn't true. The professor had never banned religious sources. The student had failed for plagiarism, but the damage was done. The lie traveled far, and it stuck. That's the power of misinformation, especially when it's weaponized and aimed at universities. Stories like this don't just appear out of nowhere. They're often manufactured by political operatives, think tanks, and trolls who see higher Ed as a battleground in the culture wars. And once those stories enter the media ecosystem, they self-replicate. Bad headlines get amplified. Nuance gets lost. Outrage gets clicks. This isn't just some PR problem for universities, it's a problem for democracy. Because when we distort the role of higher education, when we paint it as the enemy of free speech, we erode public trust and institutions that are meant to educate, question, and expand our thinking.
Matt Jordan: To help us unpack how misinformation about universities is spreading and who's
behind it, we're going to talk with Dr. Brad Vivian. He's a Professor of Communication, Arts, and Sciences at Penn State and the author of Campus Misinformation—The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. Brad's research focuses on rhetoric, public memory, and how cultural narratives shape the way we see the world and each other. He's also one of the sharpest thinkers out there when it comes to misinformation, political framing, and the real challenges facing higher Ed. Brad Vivian, welcome to News Over Noise.
Brad Vivian: Thank you for having me.
Matt Jordan: So, there's a lot of the university in the news right now. And those of us who work in the university setting, this is a period where we are actually having to think about misinformation on a real time and pragmatic level. So, I'm wondering if you could say when you see these misinformation campaigns about the university starting historically and what they have been aiming to do?
Brad Vivian: Well, in many ways, what I call the misinformation campaign about universities is several decades old. It's not new. It's just a new version of a story that's long been told by certain political and media actors. But the new ingredient is what's important. So let me take the first one—the fact that this is, in some ways, a dated plotline. The template for it remains kind of surprisingly, a text like William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale. And this is, I always like to say, a McCarthy era text. What Buckley said was that universities are becoming dangerously liberal in ways that are unpatriotic and disloyal to both traditional moral values and the United States of America. And if that sounds familiar, that's because, again, this template has hung around for a long time. And I always like to say that when Buckley is making these arguments about his alma mater, Yale, in the 1950s, that's before any significant desegregation movement in higher education and took place at a time when Yale was among the most cloistered, elitist, conservative places you could go to in America. What he's really doing, if you look through those pages, is he's saying, well, yes, these Yale faculty members are pro-capitalist patriotic and conservatively religious. But in all cases, not enough for me. It's a project of ideological monitoring to keep things as resistant to change as possible. And we've seen different iterations of the vocabulary that he created about asking, is a campus conservative or liberal? Is it split roughly down the middle? That's remained super continuous.
But this was largely the vocabulary think tanks and relatively closed or cloistered, I should say, elitist, conservative, and libertarian spaces. The new ingredient is a wave of international anti-university discourse that's coming from authoritarian regimes. And it's becoming popular in the Western world. Places like Russia and Hungary over the last decade, decade and a half have seen the liberalization in quotation marks of universities as a threat to their authoritarian societies. And time and time again throughout history, if you have Western style universities with at least a modicum of liberal arts, secular-based education, those will be moderating forces in society. And those, particularly Russia, authoritarian countries in the Putin regime from the early 2000 forward watched revolutions in formerly Soviet states like Georgia, Ukraine. And all the time, those pro-democratic, pro-Western revolutions, peaceful revolutions had as key components significant university support. Student movements were crucial to those democratic gains and were crucial to crushing those movements on behalf of Russian interests. So, this is a classic kind of duplicitous rhetoric that says universities are against patriotic values, against conservative values. The two are meeting in the middle—the international and the long gestating, low functioning McCarthyism of these anti-university interests in the United States.
Cory Barker: In your book, you argue that campus misinformation is not just a threat to colleges, but also a threat to civil liberties in the US. Can you explain a little what you mean by that?
Brad Vivian: Absolutely. Throughout different parts of history, a classic symptom of rising authoritarianism is political actions against universities. There are legion examples of this. Every time you see a rising dictatorial or authoritarian regime, one of the first steps they're going to take is to try and seize control of universities, along with the free press. And universities then are places where if you're going to have a university that functions to its maximum promise, you will have people pursuing at least some variety of scientific as well as humanistic topics, and you'll have people asking questions. You'll have them analyzing, why have things come to be as they are? And how could they be different? For an authoritarian regime, they don't want people commonly asking those questions and thinking for themselves. So, I think it's really important to say when we think of a university, that is the achievement of two things in particular, at least as we're used to it in the United States. One is the enlightenment. And the Enlightenment was an anti-authoritarian movement. It was a way to say you have an individual right to judge for yourself what you think is a persuasive argument and what you want to believe. And then the United States itself, in many ways, is inexplicable without understanding the rise of colleges and universities from the 19th century forward, that we wouldn't have the United States as it exists today. And there's all kinds of ways to talk about this in terms of our critical infrastructure as well as our pluralistic society and values without universities, so that universities then become test cases for asking, well, how can we shut down that individual right of questioning an individual interpretation of the truth, as opposed to a conformist one in line with the state?
Matt Jordan: So, one way of thinking about misinformation campaigns is that they tend to use whatever current events are out there in order to recirculate stereotypes. It's the kind of Walter Lippmann view of how public opinion is formed in the news, because the news doesn't do a great job of giving a lot of descriptive information for that. So how and who are circulating these sticky narratives about universities being these places that are infected with the woke mind virus and other kind of sticky narratives like that? Where do they find themselves inserted into the system and how do they circulate?
Brad Vivian: Well, my emphasis in all of this writing is on language or different forms of rhetoric, argument and persuasion. And a lot of the ways in which people are consuming reports about universities now in terms of scientific polling and data markers. So, what I try to do is to say, well, those surveys and those poll results are being used in a way that is spinning disingenuous or sometimes outright false and dangerous narratives. So, the question of who is doing it? There's a number of factors but let me list off three quickly. One is people in, say, Russia and the United States who are equally opposed to LGBTQ rights, and particularly in the trans movement in the 2010s. And if we remember when all the discourse in the United States about how undergraduates are opposed to free speech because they want you to call them by their preferred pronouns, or that we're worried about Title IX being overreaching on college campuses during the Obama administration. To answer your question, it's circulating among those groups as a kind of code. Instead of saying we're opposed to full equality for LGBTQ citizens and faculty members, we'll say, well, we're concerned that Title IX is going too far in enforcing those rights, or that with that movement to call people by their preferred pronouns, that's anti-free speech, for some reason. That actually doesn't make sense as a claim. So that kind of anti-LGBTQ coalition that's international, again, when universities are operating as they should toward a healthy pluralistic society, you will have more moderation on those campuses because people from all kinds of walks of life have to come together and freely associate. So, a lot of groups that want to shut that full membership for LGBTQ people down. But also secondly, then I think for that reason, that bigoted set of ideas was marketed from the late 2010s until the present as seemingly enlightened intellectual commentary, which is why we get people who have been traditionally described as liberal, if not centrist commentators in US Op-Eds and media spaces saying, well, should people have so many rights? Is the trans movement unhealthy or with reference to what you call wokeism, this idea that, well, our people who want social justice, are they too aggressive in their promotion of full equality and so forth? And you get the anti-DEI movement because of this. So, there's a lot of popularization of things which aren't super present on campuses. I mean, they're there, but people are not in positions of power making enormously weighty decisions by throwing the word woke around or the phrase DEI and so forth. There's a lot of misinformation in those allegedly centrist and liberal spaces too. And then finally, I was listening to your excellent episode recently on the Brosphere and all these podcasts and so forth. And you have this proliferation of media spaces which are incredibly revenue-generating. You can become a celebrity that way while being very ignorant about topics of the day. And you can spew all kinds of misinformation. And one of the most seemingly popular revenue generating ones is invective and outrage about what's allegedly happening on college campuses.
Matt Jordan: So, what you're saying is that it's usually an Op-Ed writers who aren't having to show their work. They're just fomenting moral panic. What do those things look like? Is it personal experience? Is it somebody who felt icky having to go onto campus and hear this? Is it somebody who was bothered having to address people's pronouns? I mean, what's the evidence that they're using to make these outrageous claims?
Brad Vivian: Well, all of the above. But the fact that you can take those off so quickly indicates what I'm always struck by which is that when you read one of these Op-Eds, the Lede is something like universities have become infested with wokeism or there's no free speech at universities anymore. It's absolutely paint by the numbers in the majority of cases. It's very anecdote driven. The other example is poll-driven because it's very easy to cite a poll. And so, if you look at Op-Eds in major newspapers and magazines in the United States for the past decade or more, you'd think that there was this overwhelming amount of polling data which indicates intolerance and anti-free speech views. And so, you take one or two polls, and you make that argument. The problem is you can cherry pick these things. You can write a survey so that you get these cynical results that make it seem like because somebody has an opinion about the educational value of invited speakers of a certain extremist mindset, that must mean they're anti-free speech. So the anecdote, the individual polling result, and then finally, the common genre is to take a student who is in college or recently in college who identifies as conservative or libertarian, and have them talk about how they felt on college campus, that they felt their views weren't listened to and so forth, and that they were shut down in class. Nobody else is interviewed. Student voices aren't interviewed. Faculty aren't interviewed. It's more almost a kind of quasi-religious narrative about how they were persecuted for their conservative or libertarian beliefs. And that would be terrible for any student on a college campus. But if we're really going to analyze the state of the learning environment, let's have a rigorous look at what's actually going on in those circumstances, as opposed to that kind of anecdote-based self-reporting after the fact.
Matt Jordan: If you're just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I'm Matt Jordan.
Cory Barker: And I'm Cory Barker.
Matt Jordan: We're talking with media scholar Brad Vivian about misinformation, political framing, and the real challenges facing higher Ed. There seems to be a growing kind of right-wing media ecosystem that is littered with people who come from this place of having somebody having teased them for something in college, and then they parlay that into a Substack. And one of the things that seems to have become central to that ecosystem is a kind of right versus left or conservative versus liberal framing of everything. In your book, you write about viewpoint diversity as being a place in the rhetoric and discourse on what goes on at universities as being where this kind of gets worked out. How has that worked? And maybe what do you see as an antidote to that?
Brad Vivian: So, the right/left framing is dominant. And this is also one of the ways in which a kind of super conservative viewpoint or perspective about universities has become dominant and pervasive. And I have to use in conversations like this the kind of conservative liberal right/left framing because it's become so dominant. But I always like to say, as an antidote that, that is one of the worst ways in which you can try and assess what's taught, what's learned, the social intellectual climate of any given college, campus, or university. There's no conservative or liberal ideas—there's just ideas. And we evaluate them based on evidence and persuasiveness of argument. So, I always try and bracket that out as something that's become naturalized but is super artificial. And it's the same clay that a lot of hyper-partisan actors ran in US media and political journalism. So as opposed to just giving and evaluating information, you're already prepackaging it. And super redundant, stereotypical ways that make the public actively less informed about how our political institutions function. So, I always stress the importance of just rejecting that whole question. Our campus is liberal or conservative as a question that is totally unproductive and misleading. But you're right, there's this larger vocabulary that's been introduced in order to obscure and maybe do a better, more pernicious job of disseminating these messages than even that right/left framing does. Viewpoint diversity is originally a concept that comes from some excellent social, scientific, academic research. If you want to understand how a business, how a religious community, how a civic organization operates, you want to understand what the circulation of viewpoints are. And there are people bringing fresh new ideas and perspectives there. So that's something you can study from an academic perspective. The problem is that figures like Bari Weiss and Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have written the Bible on the viewpoint diversity concept in a much more polemical, opportunist way. So, they say that affirmative action has gone far enough or diversity measures on college campuses have gone far enough. And that in the interests of viewpoint diversity, we need to ratchet things back to looking primarily at people's sociopolitical orientations for admissions to college. The whole idea being that you want to basically achieve a right/left, conservative/liberal balance, some kind of equanimity there. That's meant to be a pro-free speech argument, but it's pro-free speech or viewpoint diversity based on an extraordinarily narrow definition of what would count as meritorious perspectives on college campuses. It's also lazy. It's just a reduplication of that lazy left/right upright framing that has made our political journalism have so many problems.
Cory Barker: One of the things that I just noticed as a news consumer is the intense focus surrounding these issues on Ivy League institutions. How does the mainstream news focus on that small number of institutions influence how the public ultimately understands or misunderstands these issues?
Brad Vivian: Yeah, I think the Ivy League, it's not only a focus, but I’d also say it's nearly a fixation or an obsession. And I think it's important to remember, for the listening public at large and such, that the Ivy League is so extraordinarily unrepresentative of higher education in the United States, which includes thousands of community colleges, state systems, but also vocational schools, private religious schools, and so forth. What's benefited the nation writ large so well is that the diversity and decentralization and relative educational access for traditionally underserved populations has been historically one of our most successful drivers of upward social mobility in work and professions and so forth. The Ivy League, however, is enormously unrepresentative of that experiment. And I think why there's such fixation is because many of the leading journalists come from those schools, and many, especially powerful political and business actors come from those schools. The Ivy League is also really important because it does ineluctably set the agenda in some ways. It's not representative, but the research dollars that the federal government gives to colleges and universities to do amazing things with innovation that have benefited the republic, I think well over 90% of that goes to only a very small fraction of institutions. And most of them are Ivy League. So that when we hear the current presidential administration wants to cut federal funding to Harvard University by literally billions, it would be easy for the maybe untrained consumer of information to be struck short by, well, why do they have so many billions going to them? It's because there have been long ingrained pathways there. And so, there's a lot of very influential people that think about Ivy League campuses as being very influential and just important to the legal, political, journalistic societies in the United States writ large.
Cory Barker: Some of this story is a story about the decline of local news. So we don't have as many strong local news outlets across the country in college towns or even in major metropolitan areas, so that the elite columnists or the folks who went to Ivies who work in the newsroom at the times or the post or the Atlantic are the ones that get to set the agenda and create the discourse about what's happening in college campuses. And there's not quality reporting maybe happening in those communities as a result of some of the larger shifts that have happened in the news industry.
Brad Vivian: I think that's enormously important. And it's one reason that I'm kind of continually frustrated by the antipathy for universities that a lot of the major newspapers now seem to have in their political journalism and in their Op-Ed spaces, not in their very high-quality investigative reporting about higher Ed, which has been there, but in the more revenue generating clickbaity kind of content. And I'm continually frustrated by that for the reason you cite, because rising authoritarian sentiment, the classic indicators that are always paired to some degree are attacks on universities and restrictions on the free press. And one of those restrictions that we've seen in the US has been operating at a low level. I'd call it a restriction, which is that decreased opportunities for self-sustaining local, independent journalism we have. And I'm no expert on this, but I think it's just true as an evident fact, our information spaces are dominated by corporate style, large conglomerations of media outlets. They're not concerned primarily with the public interest. They're concerned primarily with their revenues. So, in that space, I think it's been kind of interesting. And I don't want to be overly optimistic, but I think something significant is happening right now when we see the current presidential administration and also state legislatures that have been moving very aggressively to defund university systems. And they've been defunded for a while, but to really make them inoperative in a sense. And you're starting to have some local journalistic reporting which notices, well, if you shut down this community college or this second or third level state school in a particular rural part of the country that's stereotypically conservative, that's going to hurt a lot of people's bottom lines beyond that university itself. So, I think we're in for some pain. But if I had a hope, I'd hope that, that reality resonates through, because a lot of these policies right now are being driven by the kind of more elitist, Ivy League oriented, politically elitist think tanks. And those think tanks, in a sense like the Heritage Foundation, have handed over these policies to the administration to just decimate the Department of Higher Education, decimate all these programs in all parts of the country. And that think tank brain is meeting the economic reality, which is that in many parts of the country, colleges and universities are really essential economic engines and mainly in rural spaces of the country.
Matt Jordan: Massive economic engines, to be sure. I work in a university; you work in a university. And the thing I stress every day is that there are 20 sides to every issue once you start to get into the specifics, right?
Brad Vivian: Absolutely. I always say that if you want to really probe a topic in a university setting or any educational setting and promote actual diversity of viewpoints, the first step should be to stay away from any conservative liberal framing. So yeah, there's a really dangerous idea, I think, that has taken hold and it's kind of a two-sided danger. One, it's that we evaluate what colleges and universities are doing in the classroom, in faculty research, and in administrations by asking what their private political views are. Are they a conservative or liberal? That's patently McCarthyst. That doesn't have anything to do with anything. If I identify one way or another as a particular private political orientation, that doesn't mean anything about the decisions I'm making in a professional space. It's a massive non-sequitur. But then also in terms of just educational content, what a university is for and what a healthy educational space is for in my view is to get away from those presuppositions, to get away from modes of communication and decision-making and thought in which you are obligated to only think within a narrow set of stereotypical boxes. Authoritarian systems love that because they can say, here's the person with the right views, here's the person with the wrong views. And we all fit things in those nice conformist boxes neatly. A university setting should be the antidote and the opposite to that circumstance. And so, what's been, I think, helpful to the current administration's really aggressive political attack on academic freedom and university systems is the idea that universities are somehow—they somehow should be punished. They've gone too far, they've failed, and so forth. All of this comes at a time when healthy understanding of the evidence indicates it's completely the opposite picture. Universities have never been as decentralized as they are now in many ways. Never as diverse. Never as open to true meritorious diversity of thought. So, in some ways, it's the meeting of two significant factors then 1, the idea that, again, just cynicism about universities and wanting to punish them has become popular. But that's meeting in the middle with this long standing, hyper partisan set think tanks and private political operatives who see universities as obstacles to their power and authority. And it's no surprise, then, that I think that the current Trump administration has been so embraced by Amazon, by Google, by Apple, Elon Musk's companies. Because these are companies where the economic model, if I understand correctly, is to continually take up territory, to absorb other smaller companies, quickly refashion them for large profits, and then move on to the next thing. And so, the workforce there that you want is one that's not university trained. It's pliable. It's super dependent on the largesse of the billionaire-owned company, and is not going to be unionized, for example, is not going to think in terms of larger civic interests, but just in terms of the economic bottom line. And these are even companies that are paying people not to go to university. They're diving into university recruit pools at leading institutions like Stanford, for example, and saying, come work for us for a lot of money, actively don't go to university. So, I think that kind of political movement and the popularization of anti-university sentiment now has a set of powerful corporate political actors that really want to make that idea that you don't need a university education. You won't benefit from it, much more of a reality at a time when—again, that's an indicator in some ways that the expansion of higher education to more of the US population than ever before has been successful to a certain degree in destabilizing those hierarchies.
Matt Jordan: Well, Brad, this has been really helpful in terms of helping us understand what are the signs and symptoms of bad faith misinformation on the university. And we want to thank you for speaking with us today.
Brad Vivian: No, thanks for the invitation. I appreciate it.
Matt Jordan: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Dr. Brad Vivian, a Professor of Communication, arts, and Sciences at Penn State. To learn more and to hear an extended version of this interview with additional content, download the podcast at wherever you subscribe to podcasts or at newsovernoise.org. I'm Matt Jordan.
Cory Barker: And I'm Corey Barker.
Matt Jordan: Until next time, stay well and well-informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
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Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
