The Free Speech Issue on College Campuses Is a Far-Right Distraction from the Real Threats to Students

One of the most disturbing and most predictable outcomes of the Charlottesville, Va., attacks earlier this month was that rather than lead to a reasoned and careful conversation about the rise of hate groups in our nation, it led to debates about whether the white supremacist neo-Nazis on display were the victims of discrimination. In Trumpland everything is on its head. Thus we have become desensitized to its dangerous combination of absurdity and malice.

But Charlottesville is not only a story about the mainstreaming of hate and fascism in the Trump era; it’s also a story about how the right has engaged in an all-out war to dismantle our public universities. As we have watched the rising public displays of fascism and bigotry sweep across the nation, it has been easy to overlook the fact that many of these rallies have been purposefully staged on college campuses. The decision to hold these rallies on campuses and to thereby provoke counter-protests also on campuses is a deliberate move by the right: one designed to allow them to further their narrative that college campuses are places that are hostile to free speech.

These days, as many of us across the nation head back into classrooms, we would do well to remember that campus hysteria over free speech has a long history. Before the recent attacks in Charlottesville on the University of Virginia campus, universities grappled with the effects of the McCarthyist red scare of the 1950s. In that period the fear was that communists were infiltrating universities in order to brainwash students and bias knowledge production in favor of a sinister commie agenda.

The details may shift but the pattern of right-wing assaults on higher ed are always the same. Create panic and hysteria by overblowing a perceived threat. Paint the student as an innocent threatened by dangerous professors or describe the student as a whiny, but no less threatening, snowflake determined to undermine any sense of social order. And sow the seeds that will make the public fear, distrust and disapprove of our colleges and universities.

In 1950 fewer than 50,000 Americans out of a U.S. population of 150 million were members of the Communist Party. But that tiny statistic of .033 percent didn’t temper right-wing fears of communist subversion. Government loyalty boards investigated millions of federal employees and more than 39 states required teachers and other public employees to take loyalty oaths.

At a certain level the McCarthy era attacks on higher education as a hotbed of left politics that threatened the fabric of our society never let up; they simply morphed with the times.

In the ’90s, as debates raged over the pernicious effects of multiculturalism and diversity and what Dinesh D’Souza called “illiberal education,” they had little sway. But the events of 9/11/2001 gave the right new traction in their attacks. Led by David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes of Campus Watch, the argument was that universities were not patriotic enough. In Horowitz’s “The Art of Political War,” published just before the  9/11 attacks, he wrote,  “For some time now, conservatives have watched anxiously as tenured leftists have conducted mind experiments on American campuses, regulating speech and punishing ideas that are politically incorrect.”

Thus the 1950s era of red-baiting started to adjust to a new version of blue-baiting.

Blue-baiting replaces the communists of red-baiting with liberals who advocate for marginalized identities, social equality and civic justice. It describes these ”blue” activities as a threat to our society and a violation of our nation’s core values. The transition to blue-baiting from red-baiting started as the right moved to attack academic attention to identity politics and campus efforts to diversify the curriculum.

The goal of red-baiting is to intimidate, and today’s blue-baiting continues that trend. But even worse, blue-baiting follows in the footsteps of red-baiting and is designed to destroy public trust in higher education. Ultimately the goal, as seen in the not-so-subtle policies of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, is the total destruction of public education as a common good and as a foundation for civic engagement.

Blue-baiting operates today alongside red-baiting as a strategy designed to dominate the narrative and control the conversation.  In fact, Kathryn Olmsted, chairwoman of the Department of History at University of California, Davis, argues in her study of Herbert Hoover’s use of red-baiting that the red scare allowed today’s alt-right politics to emerge. Their efforts enabled the ideology and tactics that led to cultural fears that leftists “were endangering the home and family.” Whether attacking red commies or blue liberals, the goal is to convince the public that everything they hold dear is under attack and that college campuses are ground zero.

What’s of even greater concern is that today their plan is working better than ever. A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that for the first time a majority of Republicans (58 percent) say colleges have a negative effect on the way things are going in this country. Just two years ago, 54 percent of Republicans said colleges had a positive impact on the country’s direction, with 37 percent rating higher education negatively.

The 20 percent decline in support can be traced directly to news media coverage of blue-baiting activities on campuses that characterize students legitimately protesting the alt-right as rabid menaces to the social order.

Stories about the antifa movement, for instance, focus on the notion that these protesters are scary and violent. And piece after piece, like this recent one from CNN, puff up the myth that anti-fascists are “just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than the right wing could ever be.”

Today news about college campuses is overwhelmingly dominated by coverage of the debates over free speech.  As Inside Higher Education reports, “virtually every day Fox News, Breitbart and other conservative outlets run critical articles about free speech disputes on college campuses, typically with coverage focused on the perceived liberal orthodoxy and political correctness in higher education.”