If we listen to the politicians and pundits, college campuses have become fiercely ideological spaces where students unthinkingly endorse a liberal orthodoxy and forcibly silence anyone who dares to disagree. These commentators lament the demise of free speech and academic freedom. But what is really happening on college campuses?
"Campus Misinformation," a new book from Penn State professor Brad Vivian, shows how misinformation about colleges and universities has proliferated in recent years, with potentially dangerous results.
Taking a non-partisan approach, Vivian argues that media reporting on campus culture has grossly exaggerated the importance and representativeness of a small number of isolated events; misleadingly advocated for an artificial parity between liberals and conservatives as true viewpoint diversity; mischaracterized the use of trigger warnings and safe spaces; and purposefully confused critique and protest with censorship and "cancel culture."
Vivian is a professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State. His research focuses on public controversies over collective memories of past events.
Episode Transcript
Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with Brad Vivian making his second appearance on the show. He is back to talk with us about his brand new book, campus misinformation, the real threat to free speech and American higher education. And this book in the conversation with Brad touch on several things, several themes that we've explored on the shows in various ways before I'm thinking about our episode, earlier this year with Michael Berube and Jennifer Ruth about academic freedom. We've certainly talked about the notion of higher education role in democracy. So Brad kind of touches on all these things. But he also brings in this idea of moral panics and manufactured controversies, which he argues is very much what's at stake in, you know, discussions about the, quote, problems on college campuses, or the notion of what's happening on college campuses.
Candis Watts Smith
You know, one of the things I think that Brad touches on and what you're speaking to, is this kind of these ideas of partial truths and moral panics, you know, it sounds right, it feels right, to kind of have this suspicion about whatever it is that you know, people do at universities and colleges, increasingly, there is this kind of side eye toward well educated elites, and the extent to which we should believe and give, you know, share faith. And scientist, for example. So, you know, some of I think what Brad talks about helps us to understand this phenomenon, that people we have, over time, shared so many so called controversies on college campuses. And so Brad does, I think, a really good job of kind of pinpointing where this controversy gets manufactured, and what its meaning, what the ramifications are, for how we think about colleges and universities, how we what we think about its role in democracy. And these are like the ramifications are real insofar as state legislators and congressional members put forth bills that can limit funding resources, or even the speech of people who work at colleges and universities.
Chris Beem
The other thing is that, you know, we're talking about the partisanization and I've talked about this before the partisanization of American life, where there is no aspect of our culture that is not torn asunder by red and blue. And in this case, it's absolutely true. You know, I just was, I was looking for polls, when I when I when, you know, when we started this, and there's one from Pew 2018, I believe, where it says, you know, do you believe that faculty professors smuggle in their own agenda to students? 17% I believe that Democrats believe that 80% 79% of Republicans believe it, it's just a dramatic split. Right. And, you know, we can talk about why that is and how that's manifested. And you know, how it is kind of, of a piece with the with this, you know, kind of populist dimension of, of the Republican Party, the dominant pot, dimension to the party. But it's also just, you know, it's just the case, that there are, there is no, like, there is no nonpartisan place to stand here, even though most of what higher education is about is not directed towards some partisan end, right. I mean, you know, critical thinking, learning to, you know, examine your presuppositions thinking, clearly writing well, these are not partisan agendas at all. There's nothing partisan about them. But yet in this context, you simply cannot you can't talk that way. There simply is assumed to be a partisan agenda, especially apart upon obviously, those on the right.
Candis Watts Smith
So I don't disagree. On its surface, a poll like that will reveal that partisan polarization is eating up, you know, is has has a place in every domain of American life. But one of the things that I appreciate about Brad's work is that he notes that there are 5000 universities, colleges across the country. And I wonder if you know, when people were asked that question by Pew, if what they were thinking about is Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Duke, whatever we ask. But if we ask them about liberty, if we ask them about Pensacola, Christian College, if we ask them about BYU, if we ask them about some, you know, some number of HBCUs, or, you know, if if they were primed to think about a wider array of colleges and universities and community colleges, if they would have given that same response. So I don't disagree that there is a partisan division around the way people evaluate colleges and universities. But I also wonder if that has to do with the kind of dominant image and the dominant, you know, colleges and universities is that come to people's mind when they make that choice. And I think that like one of the things that Brad kind of breaks down and highlights is that if we start to think about the many kinds of universities and the many kinds of colleges,
Chris Beem
The other thing that's worth pointing out is that most Americans do not go to college. And so they don't have a notion of what goes on there. And so when you tell them, tell them these these stories, you know, episodic not not not representative stories. They they Oh, no, that's false. I mean, they don't know that that's not what's really going on. And so, so I think it is it does kind of fit, right. But my only point about the media was that it's it's a similar narrative where there is a notion that that forms and these peoples that is that is directed by these by certain media outlets to create a narrative, an idea, a frame, by which you should understand everything. And there is no nuance in that present presentation.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, well, there's clearly a lot to talk about here in this book. I think it also hits all of us maybe in a particular way. And I think many of our listeners as well, because we all work on college campuses. So we kind of see these narratives play out in the media and in our own lives. And I talked about some of that with Brad as well. Let's go now to the interview.
Jenna Spinelle
Brad Vivian, welcome back to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us.
Brad Vivian
Thank you so much for having me.
Jenna Spinelle
So your research and your scholarship focuses on issues of public memory and these sorts of things. We had you on the show several years ago, talking about Charlottesville and Confederate monuments. And this project, in some ways seems like a departure from that. But I'm wondering what what made you want to maybe turn the focus inward, so to speak to look at issues of speech and rhetoric around that on college campuses.
Brad Vivian
It is a bit of a departure. And in a sense, I was involved a few years ago in some administrative positions, say, the Center for democratic deliberation here. And as a Director of Undergraduate Studies in my home department, communication, Arts and Sciences at Penn State, my service and those roles coincided with a temporal focus in this book 2017 2018. These are real high points of a lot of what I describe as manufactured controversy about free speech and intellectual diversity on college campuses. And I am all for healthy, rigorous debates on those topics. And I think there's many things to say from many different informed perspectives. And I think there's much worse work to be done in universities on those topics. But a lot of times the descriptions of say, for example, why universities allegedly were no longer good places for free speech and intellectual diversity. The descriptions of college campuses and universities just didn't match up with what I'd experienced, talking to other students talking to faculty working in different universities at different locations for about 2025 years at that point. And so I just saw a contribution here to try and use my background in rhetoric and communication and argument debate, to have a more constructive conversation.
Jenna Spinelle
And so you you open your book campus misinformation with this, this phrase WhatsApp happening on college campuses, which was seen in you know many headlines and, you know, speeches given by intellectuals like Jonathan Haidt, John McWhorter, I'm sure. Well, we'll talk more about them later. But can you just take us back to kind of the origin of of that question and and how that came to be that particular frame?
Brad Vivian
So I think there's two basic responses to that. One is that that kind of question became very fashionable in the media. And it became a way for this is one of the chapters in the book is for op ed writers, and people who wanted to promote themselves as public intellectuals, which is great, those are great ways to make a living if one chooses, but they became very marketable stories about quote, unquote, what's happening on college campuses, acquired a kind of meme fashion. So in many ways, I describe some of those stories, a good portion of them as misinformation. Because the way misinformation operates is it takes things that are technically true, and builds up more elaborate and potentially deceptive narratives about them. And it gets recycled through, as I say, in the introduction, figures from different walks of life, political, social orientations, people are susceptible to misinformation, because it seems to confirm existing prejudices about groups of people or institutions. And then when you delve into the facts, in this case of how University actually operates, or the fact that colleges and universities, the nearly 5000 of them in the US can be very different from one another in terms of how they operate, even if they look like one another. So this became a very marketable thing above and beyond universities. And again, I'm all for criticism of institutions. But I think we need to base this on student bodies and faculty bodies and administrators having an equal voice. But very briefly, the second reason is that the thing I'm concerned about is oftentimes exceedingly negative arguments about higher education and universities are connected to anti democratic or pro authoritarian movements. And for my tastes, there's too much of a resemblance between specific things that get said about universities now, in the US, and some of those anti University movements abroad, whether now or in the past.
Jenna Spinelle
Let's put a pin in that for a second, I want to come back to you mentioned that that misinformation often has has truthful or or factual elements at its core. In this this example of the you know, what's happening on college campuses, remind us what are some of those kernels of truth of this case?
Brad Vivian
Great question. Let me give you two classic examples that I think people, even if they're casual followers of certain media reports would be familiar with. The two examples are information about, quote, unquote, trigger warnings, and also mobs or shutdowns of controversial speakers on campuses. So especially in the 2010s and 20s, early 2020s. There are people on college campuses who, in classroom spaces, put trigger warnings on their syllabi. And occasionally, sometimes, and this happened very recently, there are controversies over speakers on campuses. 2017 and 18. Were the high point of those things, because there was a lot of very intentional information. And my argument is a lot of misinformation about those things. So sometimes people do use trigger warnings, meaning in my understanding, I've never used them, but instructors will say, you know, there are things that could activate post traumatic stress symptoms for certain students in this reading material or whatnot. In my understanding, they're actually statistically rare or not terribly common. It's more of a cliche, as opposed to something that's mandated. Universities and Colleges, in general have very few official policies about saying you need a trigger warning on your syllabus, that sort of just not a thing. This is just a personal anecdote, but in about a quarter century of teaching and research and three different institutions of higher education. I think I've only encountered one person who ever use them. And it's a very myopic focus, too, because if you're going to focus on sort of this idea that trigger warnings are shutting down viewpoints in the classroom, we're going to have to focus on a lot of different things as well how that syllabus is written in other parts of it. Whether or not somebody says I have a trigger warning policy, then do they ever bring it up again? Or is this something that actually what would it mean to mandate that it's very vague, actually, if you begin to ask questions, and not terribly common. The other one is this idea of controversy, old shutdowns and so forth. A lot of the episodes in terms of misinformation again, yes, there have been controversial episodes. But oftentimes, these are intentionally manufactured conflicts where outside groups will try and host or get onto campus and create events where other extremist groups are likely to show up. And you create a whole fractious and an ugly incident and violence. One of the most famous is Berkeley in 2017, a, quote unquote controversial speaker was invited, and there were protests which led to all kinds of violence within the city. My understanding is based on reporting, no faculty or students at Berkeley University, were cited for any arrested cited for violence or anything of that nature. What happened is a bunch of opposing extremist protesters showed up. And these two groups like to go out one another, and university campuses are vulnerable for that reason. And also, on any given day where you can cite a sort of incident like this on college campuses, you have dozens, if not hundreds of university classrooms and speaking events that go off without a hitch. What these are events where people are intentionally trying to create ugly conflicts,
Jenna Spinelle
And then that gets picked up in this this media ecosystem. You call it up a viewpoint diversity echo chamber of of journalists and others, and then it kind of goes on from there. Can you talk more about how that cycle works?
Brad Vivian
Yes, I think in in large respect, once you have people in, say a prominent op ed saying very broad things on the basis of pretty slim evidence. And again, I'll refer to say controversial speakers as sort of a classic case. So there's a sort of industry now I try and say in one of my chapters, which is I call it an industry about reporting on certain preconceived notions of what higher education is from a very cynical viewpoint, which is distinct from actually investigative journalism and more rigorous research based journalism into how higher education actually works. So this is a kind of writing and then social media discourse, all intersecting with one another. That makes exceedingly broad claims. So we have one controversial speaker, and the plotline often goes, well, you have protesters show up, those protesters allegedly are doing something wrong, they're hostile to free speech, they're trying to inhibit a diverse set of viewpoints. What gets alighted there is that again, on university campuses coast to coast today, tomorrow, next week, next month, there will be classrooms, which are essentially open, where people are free to discuss hundreds and hundreds of different ideas, by discipline, and then university campuses again, today, tomorrow, next week, next month. For years, they're going to be regularly hosting all kinds of outside speakers, and those go off without a hitch. So why are we focusing on one incident, and then in sort of Op Ed discourse and online discourse, making it the example of how allegedly institutions of higher education don't welcome diverse viewpoints? A more fact based evidence based interpretation for me is, again, these are intentionally manufactured conflicts designed to create that appearance by groups that don't like the fact that people are openly discussing this kind of idea or that kind of idea on university campuses,
Jenna Spinelle
I mean, there are from what I saw on its on its website, about 5000 members of Heterodox Academy, which is a fraction of the total number of of faculty and instructors across the country. But it's also it's not nothing either. So that seems like I guess maybe like we were talking about before with the, you know, the media piece, like there is a kernel of something here that that people are feeling and I think they also frame it as as political diversity, which I know you you also get to in the book that there's, there's a feeling that people who are conservative or libertarian, or sometimes they'll describe themselves as classically liberal, like don't have a place in university, faculty, university governance, these types of things.
Brad Vivian
So this would be the label of viewpoint diversity, the claim that universities now are not open to a diversity of viewpoints based on the idea that conservative or libertarian viewpoints are not welcomed. So my concern, though, is that is a centrist argument or a seemingly centrist argument which might operate in some potentially prejudicial or discriminatory ways. The viewpoint diversity platform is critical of pro diversity pro inclusion policies. And I try and stipulate particularly in the concluding chapter to the book, pro diverse Through the impro inclusion policies have been welcomed by say many Bible based Christian colleges and universities, military Institute's like VMI, one of my former employers, a private Vanderbilt University, which was actually its controversy, like pro segregation late in the game throughout that desegregation period, or at least tacit desegregation. So the viewpoint diversity argument sounds on the surface like a very appealing I think this explains why it's not nothing, say 5000 People might want to be aligned with this. It sounds terrific on the surface. So let's make this university community more hospitable to more viewpoints. In my understanding, it's actually an argument against pro diversity, pro inclusion policies, that many types of institutions, many of them that have sort of social or political conservative leanings, or religious ones have embraced and adopted. And so it's actually an argument to narrow what counts as things we're going to focus on. And in my understanding, then just saying, Well, is it conservative or liberal, libertarian or progressive that's emphasized in this university campus, that's a very narrow slice of what could count as being part of a healthy community of intellectual diversity. This relates, again, to the sort of situation of different speaking events on a particular campus, medieval history, Chinese archeology, North American indigenous culture, history of political campaigns in the US, these are all topics that get featured in classrooms, speaking events on university campuses, all the time, to boil them down to is that a liberal or conservative viewpoint is, again, a very misleading frame of analysis.
Jenna Spinelle
And can you talk about the role of dystocia? Here, too, I think as as is often the case there that does, you know, play a role or people have some some vision in their mind real or imagined from the past that they they think that the entity in this case the university should return to?
Brad Vivian
So that connects nicely to your earlier question about the misinformation component. So yes, some people on certain occasions do on their syllabus, say I have a trigger warning warning you about certain kinds of content here. And sometimes there are controversies over incendiary outside speakers on college campuses. In terms of misinformation, however, oftentimes, my again, this is a claim I try and make in the book, these op eds are so broad, and a lot of the social media discourse is so broad, and so primed to react to any little incident along those lines. And I think the nostalgia component comes in when when a lot of the discourse about these incidents kind of reflect the notion of well, college used to be this way. And the university used to be this way, coming back to people even who are professors on college campuses, I think a fair degree of this is about intellectual credibility, or bought a few days, the idea that, well, when I was associated with this Ivy League institution, we didn't behave this way. And that higher education was supposed to be elite, and orderly, and so forth. So I think there's an idea of what's going on on college campuses, I emphasize idea that connects with an idea of how universities allegedly used to be. And that is a way again, to promote oneself, I came up in this type of institution, and I can speak about it with authority. I try and add certain layers of history, which relates to my training and public memory, though, to maybe reframe that impulse toward nostalgia to say, well, college campuses used to be this way. And the one example I keep coming back to a few times in the book is James Meredith, who tried to he was the first black American who was qualified to be enrolled on academic merit. After nine years, I believe of service in the US Air Force at the University of Mississippi, and mom's erupted. So the idea that universities used to sort of have a healthy respect for all kinds of viewpoints and peoples, the desegregation era. That's just one example of an institution where federal troops had to be called in because one black student was accepted for enrollment. There are many other incidents like that. And there are many ways in which viewpoint diversity if you want to use that phrase, was profoundly barred from all kinds of institutions of higher learning across the US. So there's this nostalgic impulse but I think a more substantive historical understanding of how these institutions used to work would actually give good credence to the claim. They're much more democratic and open by far than they used to be in recent memory, still a long way to go.
Jenna Spinelle
And it feels like these things are distractions, that, you know, you spend so much time focusing on this, both from an administrative level when these things do happen. But also, just as you said, the you know, the, the media energy, all of these things that it kind of makes it it's easy, I think, to lose sight of the the mission of the university to uphold democratic values. And, and all of these things when it all kind of big gets caught in this this misinformation loop.
Brad Vivian
The idea that there, there are these broad narratives that get accepted as true about college campuses, they often break down into a binary either or, you know, do universities prioritize this stereotypical political or social viewpoint or that one, as if, again, there are probably many, many other kinds of views and perspectives that are common even in a 20 person, university classroom, that go far beyond those stereotypes, let alone a whole institution. And so yes, they are in my understanding, they are an intentional distraction to a certain community, which would like to detract from the Democratic work going on in many different spaces. And I try and approach that from two ways in the book. One is to say, I understand there's a kind of cultural politics, which is attacking universities now. Because universities are supposedly kind of elitist and out of touch. I think there's a, there's a great amount of that that goes on in universities, across social and political perspectives. That's my sort of colloquial take. But I also think that is is misinformation to the extent that if you look at student bodies, and who's going to universities these days, lots of people from many different socio economic classes, students, one of the reasons we're talking about student debt as a national issue is because so many people are saddled with it because they don't come from privileged and elite backgrounds. There's an appreciable number of students on college campuses today coast to coast, who suffer from economic insecurity, suffer from hunger, who are caring from caring for ailing family members, and so forth. So the student body is much more democratic in that respect than it used to be not culturally elite, even at traditionally elite institutions. And I think that's something we should appreciate, and listen to them and consider their experience as part of the process of building more democratic higher education infrastructure.
Jenna Spinelle
So the first amendment often comes up particularly in these these conversations about controversial speakers. You talk in the book about First Amendment hardball, can you tell us what that is?
Brad Vivian
So first amendment hardball is me cribbing from political science concept called constitutional hardball. Constitutional hardball is a phenomenon that we find in certain political situations where people use democratic tools or appeal to democratic values in ways that actually allow them to consolidate power in non democratic ways. So if you have, for example, very narrow interpretations of some aspect of the Constitution, and you try and claim it for one's own partisan perspective and say this rule only applies to me now. And it doesn't apply to you. That's an example of constitutional hardball. So a lot of these efforts to talk about or make claims about the apparently poor fidelity to First Amendment freedoms on college campuses. Now to me, they smack of what I call first amendment hardball. And the example we've been talking about, about, say one controversial speaker and manufactured a consciously manufactured set of ugly incidents on a campus becomes the prime evidence of why college campuses writ large supposedly don't uphold the First Amendment. That to me is the classic plotline that we're dealing with a First Amendment hardball, extremist speakers, particularly on public universities, publicly funded universities. If if by the rules of the university and so forth, they're invited to speak, that is protected, of course, under the First Amendment. The narratives often go like this, however, about protests to some of those speakers that because people are protesting. Student groups show up faculty groups show up and they have large organized protests that they're somehow hostile to free speech. They're using their free speech to do protest is a protected first amendment right. There's no psychological litmus test for using your first amendment rights. There's no sort of generational group that you have to fit in to protest in a democracy. This excludes violent protests, vigorous, nonviolent protest is protected every bit as much as different forms of hate, hate speech, in public setting or intentionally inciting speech. And so a robust commitment to First Amendment freedoms would recognize that when people of whatever walk of life engage in nonviolent protest, that's an important form of the democratic process overall, that's called counter speech. And it's a much better thing to have than the state or institutions, setting the hard and fast rules for who gets to speak and who doesn't get to speak.
Jenna Spinelle
But as we as we bring things to a close here, Brad, how many of our listeners are professors or graduate students or postdocs at institutions? Across the country? What what do you want them to take from this book, you're you're thinking about what we've just been talking about here regarding this campus, misinformation.
Brad Vivian
It is absolutely vital to talk about First Amendment freedoms and intellectual diversity and robust open democratic exchanges in higher education. But I'd like to lean into it by calling out some of the sort of misleading assumptions about whether or not institutions today are protecting those sorts of values and priorities in healthy ways. And so the effort of the book is to sort of say, there are these forms of misinformation about the First Amendment itself, the idea that if one speaker doesn't get to speak unopposed on a university campus, somehow that means that campus and then higher education writ large as hostile to free speech, let's question those assumptions in order to have a much more evidence based and rigorous discussion about what First Amendment freedoms look like and a healthy, give and take of of those sorts of freedoms. And again, with intellectual diversity, I try and recommend in the back of the book, let's not look at one poll, or a narrow set of polls or one database. Let's look at as many different types of humanistic scientific, social scientific evidence as we can muster, and listen to as many people on actual university campuses as we can. Because of what you say about everything's recorded, when we have people leading the conversation, who are not at these institutions who are not at certain events, they're looking at a 22nd video on Twitter, and making condemnations of entire systems and institutions. There's a much better way we can have this debate.
Jenna Spinelle
What one more assumption to challenge here. The the, the notion often comes up from Heterodox Academy and others that there's self censorship happening among faculty, they don't want to bring up controversial topics in the classroom, whether they're some in some way limiting what they'll say, how they'll say, what they'll talk about, or not talk about, I think, you know, in part because of these viewpoint, diversity concerns, but maybe also out of, you know, for fear of like, if a student has their phone on, it's gonna record them, I guess, is, is that part of the misinformation as well? Or, you know, how do you think about those allegations in this, this bigger picture?
Brad Vivian
As I understand that, particularly in certain kinds of social scientific research, this phenomenon, or this idea of self censorship is a critical thing that people are looking into, I would say that's a human phenomenon. In my observation, it's not a partisan one, or it doesn't break down according to a stereotypical political orientation. There are, there's a lot of data that institutions themselves generate on a daily weekly semesterly basis about the openness or not of their learning environments, and, and speaking situations and events, and so forth. So I understand that this concern comes from an effort to sort of generate the idea that this group isn't talking this group feels fearful about speaking up and so forth. Universities are great places to look for, actually, I think, better quality evidence and data about that, because, for example, there are anonymous surveys after classes where students can record their impressions. Universities are much more proactive, there's still a long way to go, particularly for certain traditionally vulnerable and marginalized student groups. I want to be clear, but universities have come very far and reaching out to students, many of them and trying to sort of engage their views and so forth. A lot of leadership on university campuses in terms of fact administrators and put us a lot more democratic than it used to be. They're too long way to go. These are big bureaucracies in many respects. So I'd say if you want to address that question, the universities themselves are involved in assessing the openness of their learning environments and whether or not something you could call self censorship is happening. That's probably better data, not ideal data, but better data as opposed to sort of surveys by outside groups that are just trying to assess that at a distance.
Jenna Spinelle
Okay, well, we will leave it there. I hope folks will pick up your book to learn more about all these areas you go into. And thanks for joining us, Brad.
Brad Vivian
Thank you very much.
Chris Beem
So I think this this, the way that the right has framed this argument frame, this understanding of higher education is not merely to denigrate the role purpose activities that go on in higher education. But also there's a partisan policy agenda behind this right, that this argument that higher education is indoctrinating students to think to become lefties is behind or is the the impetus for them to put forward a whole host of policy initiatives, not just in terms of what is of what a teacher can say, in Florida, in terms of what books are allowed in terms of what concept of legitimate on and on and on. And so it is, it is not merely a negative complaint, it is a positive agenda that's born of that negative complaint.
Candis Watts Smith
Right. So Brad, you know, brings up this kind of idea that first amendment rights are, are under assault. And that kind of dominant narrative is that ultra liberal faculty members are shutting down, you know, conservative students or, you know, conservative faculty members don't feel like they can speak up or, you know, anyone who's kind of outside of the norm of a particular department or school. But as you're saying, Chris says that, yeah, there is a First Amendment issue. And, but it's not, it's not just it's not that actually, it is. When we see, for example, other several colleagues of mine who were part of incoax, which is the National Conference of Black Political scientists who were under attack by Florida, who these faculty members were expert witnesses, and voting rights cases against Florida, and the legislature was trying to prevent them from being expert witnesses. So this is an attack on First Amendment, or an Iowa on the governor signed a bill that prohibited teaching critical race theory and divisive concepts, not only in K through 12, but also in higher education, and mandatory and so called Mandatory Diversity, Equity and Inclusion trainings, or in Idaho, and this kind of is a little bit different, but related, that there was Idaho universities were warning staffers not to refer students to abortion providers, or tell them about how to get emergency contraception. This is a first amendment issue, you know, and then we have the whole kind of book banning thing. So, you know, the kind of, as you mentioned, this kind of this kind of manufactured controversies are not just to merely denigrate, but to justify constraints, surveillance and control around talk, discussion topics, that some people would rather not have actually made public part of the public discussion in institutions of higher education.
Chris Beem
And I think there is a you know, when we talk about self censorship, Brad talks about how these polls are, you know, suspect or or not framed quite correctly. I don't think that's exactly right. I think there is a kind of, well, that there are there's a lack of free expression in the university now. That is born of her Oh, man, I shoulda thought better how to say this, that is born of from a left wing perspective that sees that is very concerned about talk as weaponized. And words as weapons, and as undermining someone's feeling of safety and security. And I think that that has had a negative effect on the quality of not just expression. That's not really my concern. My concern is pedagogy. I think, if you undermine or if you put constraints on students to say what they think, then you, you don't have as much opportunity to engage those thoughts. You don't have as much opportunity for them to reflect self critically, you don't give students the opportunity, a sufficient opportunity to hear things that they're not going to like and respond to those constructively. And so I mean, that is there. That's one point in which I think you know, I'm going to disagree with Brad and probably you as well, Candace,
Candis Watts Smith
I think we really need to think about what the denominator is here. That it's easy to kind of point out anecdotes and outliers. And I am curious to know, the extent to which these anecdotes and outliers actually by definition, well, anecdotes are one thing, outliers are right, by definition, are not representative of the normal course of how we kind of live, you know, do do our jobs. And so I think that's one of Brad's main points is that across all of the different kinds of places across the hundreds of classes that occur on campus, across these campuses every day, how many examples of that can we give, the thing that comes to me that I think about when I think about self censure, censorship is I think about people who are nervous about being called out by campus reform, or, you know, like, you know, Professor watch list, who are, you know, kind of under the auspices of diversity, you know, viewpoint diversity, professors, who are, I think, mostly well regarded, or at least well regarded by me are actually getting threats.
Chris Beem
But like I say, I mean, I am I'm not convinced that there's no there there. I don't think this I mean, this didn't just fall out of the sky. There were examples. And there were, and there is data to show it. Now. Is that all may be fake, maybe. But I I've just don't believe that. I think there is something there now that none of that changes, or has anything to do with what you're arguing, which is true, that there is this aggressive, and often even violent reaction on the part of of many directed at people in higher education, for no good reason, just because they're saying things that they don't want to hear. I think that's I think that's I'm just going to completely agree with that. But that but that's not, that doesn't mean the other side of that is just not worth thinking about. But I mean, it sounds to me, like a lot of this is just, in your mind, open as an empirical question that we just can't argue that we can't, you know, get farther on right now.
Candis Watts Smith
The problem here, though, is that now we're living with having to explain what exactly it is that we do, that we're having now to spend time trying to fight against legislation that seeks to control and surveil syllabi, reading choices, so on and so forth. Because a few people decided that this is an issue that we should talk about, even though the denominator is quite large, and the numerator is quite small.
Chris Beem
I think the way for higher education to pursue these questions, is with a priority on pedagogy. How are we teaching our students to become critical thinkers and also democratic citizens? And if we're doing that, well, and if that is our highest priority, then I don't think we Have anything to apologize for or to defend? That's our job. So this is I mean, this speaks to just how helpful Brad's book is right? It really does just kind of lay out these arguments in a way that is thoughtful, clear, and recognizes how important they are so good on him for writing it. And thanks to Jenna for the interview. I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
And I'm Candis Watts Smith for Democracy Works. Thanks for listening.