E78: Campus Misinformation & Academic Freedom (w/ Dr. Brad Vivian)

3:48PM Mar 16, 2023

Speakers:

Brad Vivian

Alex Helberg (credits)

Keywords:

people

viewpoint

terms

idea

argument

book

university

misinformation

higher education

universities

political

diversity

college campuses

critical race theory

tropes

debate

rhetoric

talking

institutions

students

Right. Hello everyone and welcome once again to reverb. My name is Alex Helberg. Calvin Pollak is off this week. But we are thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Brad Vivian, a professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University. His research and teaching focuses on theories of rhetoric and public controversies over collective memories of past events. He's the author of a number of really excellent books, such as public forgetting the rhetoric and politics of beginning again, and being made strange rhetoric beyond representation. His most recent book, and the focus of our conversation today is called campus misinformation, which is all about some of the more pressing public controversies that have arisen around higher education and what is taught within it and how students and faculty behave within it. So Brad, thank you so much for being with us here on reverb today.

I'm really grateful. That's a super kind introduction. Sorry, Calvin couldn't be here. I'll catch up with him at some point as well. But thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So we wanted to just start off here. Could you tell us a little bit of background about your latest book campus misinformation? How did you come to this from your other interests in studying rhetoric? And what was the major inspiration behind writing this book at a time like this?

Sure. So there's kind of a practical, but also a more, I don't know, maybe idealistic answer. So the practical answer is that around 2017 2018, that was looking back real high point of a very conscious push from several key directions that wants to create a lot of anti University rhetoric in US society. More specifically, what I think is a very deeply cynical, sweeping overgeneralize discourse about many faculty and students. And so at that time, 2017 18, I was serving in a couple of administrative roles. One, I was director of the Center for democratic deliberation on my home campus at Penn State. And in my home department, communication, Arts and Sciences, I was also serving as our Director of Undergraduate Studies. So I was working pretty intensively on questions of democracy. And at that time, a lot of concerns about democratic erosion. And I was also working pretty intensively with and for, I hope, good effects on undergraduate education. So one of the sort of key signs of democratic erosion in many societies are attacks against universities, a lot of anti University rhetoric and sweeping narratives and generalizations that it's just a bunch of radical elites and so forth. And working with undergraduate students, let alone my faculty colleagues, a lot of these narratives being circulated, which again, are oftentimes in many societies, a sign of rising authoritarian sentiment, they also just, in my experience, at that time, until now, 20 to 25 years of teaching, and research at several different universities. It just didn't track there were some kernels of legitimate concerns, as always, with issues of free speech and fairness on university campuses, but like a lot of misinformation campaigns that got really out of control. And so I thought there was kind of effort in terms of just my background and rhetoric and communication, a lot of what we teach and study and theorize about, is not telling people what to say, but about to how to encourage good constructive evidence based arguments from multiple perspectives. And the more so that's the sort of pragmatic thing where I thought, well, you know, I'm at a stage where I can maybe, in my modest way, make a good contribution here. But in the more idealistic answer, simply stated, there was something really bothersome and I think, dangerous about some of these narratives that all undergraduate students are most of them are now this way, they're psychologically disturbed. They're politically radical, or as well as faculty. And when you're an op ed writer, or when you're even a member of our university, yourself, making those arguments I just think it's important to know and I'm not being snarky or critical, but just descriptively. Those are extraordinarily sweeping over generalizations. They're not empirically sound, you're more in a kind of polemical space at that point. And so When somebody makes that kind of argument, they are denigrating, they're not just describing, they're denigrating my students, what I do what my colleagues do in universities, and that's kind of not part of the profession, we should certainly always be ready to vocalize concerns and strong arguments about the state of University Teaching Research Campus cultures, but there are better and worse ways to do that. So the idealistic aspect is to say, yeah, there's a lot of challenges and problems in higher education. Let's have a much more constructive evidence based debate about them from many different informed perspectives.

Absolutely. I really appreciate that. I mean, it seems to me like the pragmatic and the idealistic goals there kind of work hand in hand, because like, I mean, as you were talking about your experience, helping undergraduates, and I mean, with the media ecosystem that exists around higher ed right now, it's hard not to take some of this, I don't want to say personally, but like, you know, it's hard not to see that like this is going these conversations are going to negatively impact my work with my students, my students self perceptions of themselves, maybe the way their family members are talking with them about higher education, or just the general goal of being educated, going through college. So yeah, I really appreciate that, that you're that you're thinking about this from multiple angles, not just the, you know, concern and care for your own students, but also the broader concern that you raised about, you know, the ways that we need to start encouraging more constructive evidence based public discourses. I wanted to take a step back here and ask, particularly though, about, you know, campus misinformation. I mean, there's a lot of different kinds of misinformation campaigns that we could talk about out there. But this one, in particular, you writes that the exaggerations, the distortions, the sort of sweeping over generalizations, as you put it, about what's happening on college campuses, you write that quote, It is a threat, not only to academic freedom, it endangers civil liberties in the US society writ large. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more maybe drawing from other examples of like, like, you know, Hungary and Viktor Orban kind of emerged to mind as the examples of like government takeovers of universities. In what ways do you see these kinds of discourses posing a threat to civil liberties extending beyond the seemingly pointed critiques of college campus culture?

Great question. So there's two angles I'll take on that. One is the domestic US angle. And the other is as you point there are some very suggestive international connections and I don't think they're, well, they're more than suggestive. I think they're, they've been explicitly stated by many people. And the through line on both the domestic and the international in answering is, so my specialty being in language and communication. My argument isn't sort of about getting into direct personal debate with any figures, but I'm looking at the ways that what I describe as the rhetoric or the language of campus information and key terms and tropes, moves across and gains both extremist adherence but also a lot of centrists who are trying to be sort of fair and open minded. And in the domestic US setting the tie between universities and a concern about the state of broad civil liberties. The focus is on how specific terms get used. And so terms or arguments like all undergraduate students, now are coddled, they're being ideologically indoctrinated or students and faculty are radical leftists, as a class as a group or when they say certain things. They might be pathologically coddled irrational, overly concerned about sort of safety ism easily triggered. These all sound like in certain usage of scientific terms, but I think they're at best pseudo scientific in many cases. And they're also a clinical physician or psychologist or somebody looking at how people behave. And sociologists anthropologists do this in university settings. They don't use terms of denigration to categorize people and groups and how and what motivates them. So in terms of civil liberties, then a lot of the very strong reactionary authoritarian, friendly politics that's sweeping the nation now, where books are being banned, where rights of free speech and protests are being threatened in many creative ways in hyper partisan state legislatures. That legislation always uses terms that I've just described that originally started as terms of denigration for what's allegedly happening on college campuses. So when this so there's a sort of a grand political narrative that emerged around the 2020 election, which essentially says every time those terms get used, cancel culture, wokeness, and so forth. These are all callbacks to the original idea that something allegedly radical and dangerous to US society, is being fomented on college campuses. And the real shame of that, as I try and make sure to say in the book is that college campuses and universities don't protect first amendment rights, ideally, there's always a lot of work to be done, but they protect a much better as a class of institutions than many other parts of society. So this kind of opt out upside down world. But that internationally to that terminology is is also connected to a larger international movement. And we can see that in as you said, Viktor Orban and Hungary has become, I think it's pretty out in the open, he's been lauded as a model by certain reactionary politicians and intellectuals, for how to do things. And I think the operative idea here is that, well, democracy is okay, up until a point where it becomes multicultural. And it threatens certain cultural hierarchies, or quote, unquote, self described conservative traditions, and so forth. And so in, in many ways than this kind of terminology, just the idea that there's this alleged LGBTQ radical lobby in universities, or the idea that a true multicultural democracy where people of all races and sexes and genders are truly equal for authoritarian, friendly parts of Eastern Europe, for Russia, these sorts of sites, societies, that's a very dangerous idea, democracy, openness, free circulation of ideas, it's very dangerous. So they have to provide pretext for literally shutting down universities, and limiting the free press, they have to generate these pre texts about the alleged dangers coming from those institutions. So the kind of cycle back then is how we're seeing in the US now similar sorts of pretexts being manufactured in state legislatures to curb first amendment rights to curb academic freedom, access to education.

Yeah. Oh, man. I mean, there's so much we could dig into it, that from the sort of, like attacks on public education writ large, but also like, I mean, the the number one example that that jumped out to me in in your initial, you know, conceptualization of looking at how these arguments travel, right things that things that begin in like a university context, but then kind of like, blown out of proportion, as college campus issues, and then sort of continually like the one that springs to mind right and right away is the current, I mean, to put it kind of bluntly, like extermination is to rhetoric around transgender people, or gender non conforming people that seems to have kind of started with this debate over, you know, over the use of, you know, gender non binary pronouns in university spaces where people being asked to, you know, state their pronouns and things like that, that then, you know, kind of like, I mean, I don't I haven't done an actual analysis of like, the circulation of those sort of, like, you know, queer phobic argument tropes from university to public settings. But it seems like now, I mean, reading some of the op ed columns in major US newspapers, you might imagine that, you know, everybody who goes to college is being encouraged to be, you know, to like change their gender or something like that, when really, this is something that is kind of like a I mean, it seems to be this now massively blown out of proportion, moral panic, that not only, you know, does a complete disservice to the actual lived experiences of queer people, but also, you know, seems to be used as kind of fuel for this kind of culture or fire that that began in a university setting. I don't I don't know if that's something that you have thoughts on or not, but it seemed to me to be a particularly poignant example of that happening.

Well, I appreciate that there's sort of a macro thought and on micro on just very briefly, one of the macro thoughts is that what you're describing is characteristic of how misinformation campaigns operate in from an academic perspective, that it's emphasizing the prefix the "miss" in information. There are kernels of factual information in these sorts of campaigns. But what happens with misinformation as it takes things selectively out of context, it reduces whole worldviews to sort of extreme, isolated anecdotes and things like that, where you get cherry picked evidence being marketed as representative of braderie. realities. So in university settings since the 2010s, just like in society in general, there has been not only the push for equal rights for gay people and same sex marriage and so forth. But a lot of advocacy for transgender individuals. And if we think of the spaces in society, which are more open, more tolerant of diverse ways of living, expressing people, you know, parts of the media, the free press and open society, but also then university campuses, those ideas are going to get an airing. And so the way misinformation works is it takes things that are technically true and might be sort of, on the margins are happening in certain small spaces, and really creates a lot of popular outrage about them. So not just transgenderism. But the idea of trigger warnings or safe spaces, as I say in the book. That's a very small part of any kind of discourse that goes on on most university campuses. I know there are some groups within universities that use that terminology a lot. But universities don't tend to spend a lot of time creating policies about quote, unquote, trigger warnings or safe spaces. These are more colloquialisms, or aspirational ways of talking where they do get used 25 plus years of teaching and research, I think maybe once or twice, I've been in the room where those terms get used in any capacity. So yeah, what you're describing is the kind of taking of something that is true, but out of context from a lot of times, people in the media and so forth. And it's not like university campuses always run great, you don't you know, but they don't probably understand that these are not mandated policies, they're ideas that are being discussed. And so even if you find those ideas objectionable, the fact that they're being discussed is a sign of First Amendment freedom. And then the second part is that there's a lot to say, but the the idea of just transgenderism and so forth, and manufactured outrage and moral panics about that that's a big thing in Eastern Europe, in Russia, that's being used as pretext to say that these quote, unquote, deviant individuals are threatening society at large. So I just think all I'll say is, I think we need to be aware and think critically about how people are using that sort of argument about university campuses in the US.

Absolutely. I mean, it's a Yeah, and beyond even the sort of international context of Eastern Europe and Russia. I mean, this is something that in just like, I mean, we did a whole episode on pronouns, a few, a few episodes back that was all about the ways that specifically, gender nonconformity, and that sort of mode of queerness. Throughout history, actually, I mean, transgender people have existed for, you know, centuries now. And oftentimes are, you know, the target of colonial powers that are looking to impose a sort of, like, you know, a sense of order of rule on on people. And so I think that I mean, I take your point, though, specifically about college campuses, being these places where, you know, as you said before, and as you say, in your book, free freedom of speech is actually these are signs that there is more, more free speech on in places like college campuses, these are almost we can observe, they are observably sort of like, in some ways, better venues or environments for that kind of thing to flourish. And I mean, to that point, I think that it's really interesting that the sort of one of the most key tropes, or I guess, ideographs, we might call them that is sort of, fundamentally at the basis of a lot of this of a lot of this campus. Misinformation rhetoric is what you identify as this term viewpoint diversity. It's one of the most often invoked, and I think you locate it as kind of at the heart of a lot of these, this misinformation, rhetoric and the other tropes that you point out. So could you tell us a little bit about what do pundits and commentators who are critical of higher education mean when they invoke that term viewpoint diversity? And what other contexts might we use to understand what that is actually designed to accomplish in context?

Right, so great question. And I think of the term viewpoint diversity as it's being used in these polemical spaces of misinformation, as I've been describing, sort of as the seemingly scientific and centrist top of the pyramid. For a lot of these more negative terms I've described the idea of social justice warriors or coddled undergraduates or leftist indoctrination. The sort of icing on the cake that makes it look nice is this term viewpoint diversity. That is super important to distinguish viewpoint diversity as it's been used for polemical spaces to generate what I call misinformation about higher education from very legitimate social scientific research, which precedes it. So for a long time now there have been a lot of people working in the social or behavioral sciences are interested from an academic perspective and how institutions make decisions or operate as cultures. There's a lot of business applications to this. So they study the diversity, relative diversity of viewpoints in certain organizations and ask how they function. That's different from what I'm describing in campus informant misinformation. It's sort of an appropriation of the term to advocate for a specific kind of viewpoint. And it participates in what I would call kind of the world of polemical punditry that we've seen before in the US media, particularly in a lot of the more sensationalized political journalism, which a lot of people from many academic perspectives will say this idea of creating equal time, or perfect ideological balance for quote unquote, stereotypical liberal or conservative viewpoints. That's taken over a lot of US political journalism to for demonstrably disastrous consequences. It kind of creates a spectacle in terms of deeply in deep information about how political institutions and actors actually function. So the term viewpoint diversity is kind of a replay of that mentality to look at all of what happens on university and college campuses to say, well, are conservative and liberal viewpoints being given equal amount of time. And as I say, in the book, it's important to understand where political stereotypes come from, but they're not accurate descriptions of reality. That's an imposed set of manufactured abstractions. And the idea that is that university life would be about equal time among conservative and liberal viewpoints, just sort of endlessly debating one another. So if you turn on CNN talk shows or any cable news talk show Fox MSNBC, I just ask if that's what we want for university spaces. This is also worked well. A lot of extremist online groups have kind of adopted appropriated it, it might have been innocently articulated this idea of viewpoint diversity, but appropriated that idea for some pretty disingenuous perspectives to kind of push to make really toxic online discourse, take over culturally university campuses where it's constant debate among partisan stereotypical political perspectives very toxic and and that's actually an opportunity for people to sort of just denigrate other people and dehumanize them and to try and win the quote unquote, political debate. And in many respects, I'd say that's just not what university teaching and research is all about. I know there are a lot of narratives, and a lot of people would be shocked to learn that. But that a lot of university teaching and research proceeds without consideration of partisan stereotypical political viewpoints. And as I, I have several riffs in the book where I say, Well, let's think about how people study and teach Chinese archaeology, the biology of fruit flies, parts of American history, parts of indigenous cultures around the world, and so forth. The idea of kind of imposing those stereotypical political lenses to achieve ideal viewpoint diversity doesn't have anything to do with substantive evidence based information, or discussion about those topics. And then the last thing I'll say, For this reason in the book is I try and emphasize when you're trying to push for, quote, unquote, viewpoint diversity as the norm on college campuses. Again, that's really about them in these terms that I've described with stereotypical political partisan lenses, this idea of ideological balance, you're really trying to mandate a certain required amount of one viewpoint, under the suspicion that there's not enough and what you're trying to do, I think it's I just think it's more accurately described as trying to institute or mandate viewpoint parity, automatic, obligatory parity, parity between stereotypical lenses, not actually an organic environment have really circulated ideas based on academic content.

Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I mean, I like that you bring up those other examples of like, yeah, places were places where this is often you know, not specifically invoked. Like the the kinds of things that we wouldn't advocate for, you know, a diversity of viewpoints. But like, I mean, there were so many examples that you brought up in your book, specifically, that made me think about the sort of like the way that viewpoint diversity is kind of marshaled in some ways to revive debates in academia that maybe took place like decades or centuries ago, like, I mean, I'm thinking about somebody like Charles Murray, for example, who keeps getting invoked in a lot of these discourses, or at least the ones that I've seen online, unfortunately, about reviving viewpoint diversity with Charles Murray's form of I mean, if I may be so blunt as to call it race science. I mean, he's literally talking about, yeah, biological differences among, you know, among, you know, the socially constructed category of races, and how that affects people's sort of, like intellectual outcomes, or their, you know, sort of ceilings on their intellectual intellectual outcomes. And the constant I mean, one of the things that I mean, from an academic perspective, what makes this so grating sometimes to look at is the fact that like, you know, this was a debate that was put to bed, or it seems like it was for, you know, for people who know, who have read, like, a lot of academic literature, you know, many, many decades ago. And now, because I mean, I don't know if I could be the one to like, say why this is being revivified. Now, obviously, there's a large context of a resurgence of, you know, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, just generally, but But I wondered if you had any thoughts on this sort of like reviving of these, you know, viewpoint diversity being used to revive these sort of like, old debates that any any like real academic would know is like, this was something that was rightfully put to rest a long time ago, and now is being, you know, under the guise of viewpoint diversity, we now have to take easily discreditable ideas like race science and Charles Murray, seriously again, right?

That's yeah, that's a terrific question, because it helps me tease out a few other threads of this idea of viewpoint diversity. So as I say, on the one hand, it's not necessarily a new platform at all, this is a new iteration of a long standing conceit, I want to emphasize conceit is that university and college campuses are overwhelmingly liberal in terms of their culture. And here, I'm sort of describing arguments and the way ideas get used. I don't want to kind of participate in like I'm coming from this particular political perspective. My argument I don't think hangs on me identifying any particular political perspective, it's, it's a pretty much a fact that in the 40s, but particularly the 50s and the 60s, there were a lot of reactionary political actors and media figures and members of universities in the era of early desegregation, who started to say that universities and colleges are overwhelmingly liberal. This was a sort of fog, a terminological fog, reactionary in response to the idea that by court order, constitutionally, universities, colleges, public education, now we're supposed to be equally accessible to people of all quote unquote, races and increasingly genders. And so I think it's just important when we hear kind of similar argument today, it's important to remember that the genesis of these sorts of arguments was not It's not new, and it was not fact based, or it was not honest. Because a lot of the culture of universities and higher education at that time in the US, was incredibly elitist, and served many conservative traditional cultural classes. You can look up on your on demand right now, there's an Alfred Hitchcock movie called rope. Oh, yes. And rope is the story of two college students who live in a penthouse in Manhattan, penthouse apartment, they have a maid, they have fancy cocktail parties, and they were expensive suits, their college students. So and that wouldn't have blinked an eye at the time. So the reason we think about the Ivy League in this country, as representative of higher education, when it's actually not now is because it had that legacy. So these ideas originated at a time when education was financially out of reach. For many people, people of color were barred from it. And sort of the idea of sort of achieving equal time between these perspectives, was really a response. It was a fear, if you will, toward the increasing desegregation and democratization of US institutions like higher education. So, yes, so you're right. There's a sort of history here. And I think it's important to be aware of and not just throw around these slogans, but be aware of where we are now in words. In relation to prior history and how certain arguments get recycled, and semantically repackaged the other part of your question then about sort of how this idea of viewpoint diversity gets used as a slogan. You're correct. The example of Charles Murray is an excellent example of how extremist groups, but also people kind of caught up and trying to be set, quote, unquote, centrist. And sympathetic, will say, well, we need to listen to all viewpoints. I try and make the case at the back of the book, we should have as open circulation of arguments and ideas as possible. And race science gets taught, these ideas get taught on university campuses, but they don't get taught to in ideological adherence, they get taught to say, What's faulty science, they get taught to explain in an evidence based way of Dangerous Ideas gets circulated, and can dehumanize and harm entire peoples in groups. And so in the back of the book, I tried to make the argument that there's a distinction between viewpoints and arguments, that university teaching and research is about taking viewpoints, you can walk into any classroom or educational space with your pre existing viewpoints, you can keep those viewpoints. But those viewpoints might not be translated into arguments that are based on a wide variety of evidence that other people will find persuasive. So instead of mandated viewpoint parity, I recommend evidence based argumentation as expressions of First Amendment freedoms and academic freedom in university settings. And so I think, actually, the idea of well, we just all need to have viewpoint diversity, diversity for different viewpoints. Again, which I think is just obligatory parity of stereotypical ideas. That's only the beginning of the conversation, if you really are interested in pursuing academic freedom, First Amendment liberties. Let's turn let's see what happens when we try and turn those viewpoints into arguments that other people can then judge whether or not they're persuasive, and whether they have merit and hold up.

Absolutely, yeah, I really appreciate that that rhetorical perspective on how we how we refigure the ways that yeah, like you say, viewpoints are treated, versus the way that we transform those into evidence based arguments. And I mean, I really appreciate the fact that you're also pointing out that a lot of conversations of this nature are actually happening in college classrooms all across the country, which I think really runs contrary to one of the other major tropes that you have already mentioned here. But I wanted to discuss in a little more detail, you identified as the trope of the coddled student, could you explain to us a little bit about where this trope comes from what it means when people invoke it? And why this might be a little bit of a sort of an example of what you called an overgeneralization or a sort of overblown concern of something that's maybe only happening in very certain locales.

So absolutely, this has become a very influential trope. And I always find it keep me organized here as much as you like, because I always find it challenging to explain it goes in so many different directions at once. The most famous source of this idea is from the best selling book, The coddling of the American mind by attorney, Greg Lukianoff, and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at New York University. And as I said, before, with a lot of this, my I don't care to have a debate with any one person, it's not a personal thing, I just think it's pretty well known that this book has become highly influential in promoting this idea. So I'm just going to sort of describe as best I understand that what they're arguing here and there. Well, it's an echo back to a book called The closing of the American mind previously, which was concerned about the increasing political liberalization and democratization of US society. And so why our undergraduate students allegedly as a generation, coddled, our young people, it goes beyond undergraduate students. I think, in their argument, why allegedly, are we raising a couple generations now of young people who are coddled important to note that their argument is that through parenting practices, allegedly through widespread practices in higher education, and schools and so forth, that I think it's a literal description, young people are now coddled, they're not encouraged to be resilient. They crave what the author's called safety is and so forth. And this gets built up into the argument, which goes beyond looking off and height. Now, I think it's kind of pretty common in these sorts of circles, elite commentary circles I'm describing the idea that well students, young people are coddled now because they have certain social and political viewpoints. So this just descriptively. Again, not even as a criticism, I think it's hard to disconnect books like The coddling of the American mind from a preceding body of literature. In versions, some versions of the social sciences, I'm trying to actually defend a lot of great work in the social sciences Schiller in my own book, but certain versions of the social sciences, which if you think about books and articles in places like Harper's in the Atlantic, about kind of tying Well, what's going on in people's brains, or emotions, and can that explain their political viewpoints. And so political ideology is sort of hardwired if you will, into our brains, or our cognitive psychology. So there's certain things to say about culture, DNA, or brain interactions. But a lot of this kind of research takes liberties with evidence and goes in a more political direction by kind of creating that determinists link that allegedly, if you hold certain ideas, if you behave in certain protests, behaviors, you might be psychologically irrational. And so tying political ideologies oftentimes, quote unquote, progressivism, or liberalism to idea of psychological defects, or being raised poorly and such. And as I understand the coddling of the American mind, and a lot of the argument that's get gets taken up as a result of it. The idea is, if you have certain social or political viewpoints, you might need cognitive behavioral therapy. I think that's a literal description that if you identify as part of a marginalized community and believe you're treated with systemic discrimination, that that's a psychological defect. That's not just a misapprehension about the world. So I think that psychological determinism is not a constructive way of contributing to public discourse. I think there are serious problems with young people in various kinds of environments, we live in changing turbulent times, and so forth. And but I think we need to have a better quality of discourse about those things. And the last thing I'll say, then, as it comes to mind is that this is a very sweeping generation wide diagnosis. And I lean in on diagnosis, when you're recommending a certain clinical treatment for people based on their social and political perspectives without direct examination of those people. In my reading, again, just trying to be descriptive, what you're doing is you're taking this idea of there's a generation, there's a lot of individuals and individual factors in terms of how they're raised and operate in society. generations are, are abstractions, as units of analysis. So you can't kind of diagnose the issues of a generation with the millions of people that involves the way you can in a clinical setting with actual human subjects. And that's why there are protocols for human subject research in universities in order to do that kind of thing, responsibly. So this idea of coddling that's why I said earlier that when you describe an entire generation that way, that doesn't sound like a fully realized scientific or clinical analysis of actual human beings in their specific settings. With all variables being considered in an empirical fashion. That's a term of denigration

Absolutely, no, I appreciate that. You're that you're making that making that again, appeal back to this kind of, you know, pseudoscience trope of, you know, conflating an entire generations perceived behavior, which again, generations themselves over generalizations and kind of sweeping assumptions that we make about entire age groups of individuals in certain cultural contexts, but also being used with this sort of psychological determinism to denigrate people. And I mean, I especially love that you brought in the call back to Allan Bloom's book, the closing of the American mind, which, I mean really just reinforces that point we were talking about earlier that this seems to be just kind of a a an historical recycling of old talking points. That's, you know, not to say that there is no there there behind any of this stuff. But it's also it bears reminding that these that these feel very similar that you know, that Allan Bloom's arguments, in many ways is kind of echoing similar rhetorical or argumentative tropes. Or we're hearing echoes of those argumentative tropes in the work of people like Lukianoff and Haidt, where incidentally, Bloom was probably writing about their generation in his book, right. So I mean, I don't know there there seems to me to be this this interesting within all of these tropes, we can kind of hear resonances of age old arguments that go back way further, which to me is also just an interesting commentary on, on the sort of, you know, forgetfulness, we might say, of the and whether that's convenient for, you know, for their own political or other kinds of purposes. I mean, that's obviously outside of our ability to to actually apprehend that but but it does, I think, bear special attention that these are not necessarily new claims that they're making, right?

Yes. And I really, I try and lean in, in a couple of places to the idea of let's let's consider, if you really want to encourage open disagreement and debate and viewpoint diversity or intellectual diversity, let's consider many different kinds of empirical evidence, yes, state of higher education. And one thing that in our public discourse, unfortunately, gets left out a lot, is the whole idea that I'd say it My argument is that we're not just in a post desegregation era, we're in an era of continuing desegregation, and never really fully happened. And that when we kind of are making claims about how democracies and parallel students aren't open to new ideas, and so forth, and they're not open to constructive argument these days, and that that's something new, allegedly about higher education. If you look at things that were happening in the 60s 70s, and 80s, the dominant trend in higher education has been away from an elitist set of institutions to become not ideally democratic, but at least more democratic and more open have many different intellectual perspectives and evidence based backgrounds. That's what desegregation was very much about, I think it's important to remember there were efforts at massive resistance to desegregation from the word jump, and then a lot of those court orders were rolled back. So we're still having these debates in different languages. And that's where these ideas about coddled undergraduates who believe in full equality and diversity, that becomes a way actually not to have the debate, we can then write them off as being irrational, psychologically disturbed, instead of looking at the history of these institutions, and doing the hard work of leaning in and saying, yeah, that they continue to evolve. And I personally, there's a lot of student groups, from across the social and political perspective, or fellow faculty and so forth, who I think the tactics are not ideally constructive. I think they might be counterproductive, and so forth. So my argument doesn't hang on being aligned with any one group that says, Let's have an evidence based discourse about where we've been and where we are, and not kind of selectively pick and choose ways to say this group or these people are good or bad or right or wrong or disturbed or healthy. And then coming back to your earlier question about civil liberties, and so forth, that kind of a pretext get often gets used in the saying, in effect, well, these groups have the right to protest, these groups don't, or just there's there should be a certain limit on these freedoms, because these people using them are pathologically coddled or disturbed and so forth in irrational. There's nothing in the first amendment that says you have to pass a psychological or generational litmus test, to use your First Amendment freedoms, and the rights of counter speech and dissent, dissent or protest from any group are among the most democratic essential of those rights.

Absolutely. Now, that really, I think it's a good it's a good way of framing that that even if, you know, even if we were to grant any of the any of the premises upon which these are based, which I think you are rightly pointing out and I think I would agree are false, you know, the pathologist pathologizing of particular ways of thinking, but even if even if that was the case, that does not eliminate your right to freedom of speech, right, or your right to protest. And I think one of the things that I really wanted to make sure that we focus on because I think it not only represents the kind of apogee of where these kinds of tropes have gone, but also because it probably bears the most significance on the most sort of bleeding edge contemporary debates around freedom of speech in higher end, secondary education is the term critical race theory he is so you treat this pretty extensively in your book, talking about the kind of fear mongering around critical race theory. The way that it ends up getting talked about now seems to be a you know, this, it's talked about almost in in terms of being like an insurrectionary theory or something that is a revisionist history of the United States. I was wondering if you could help us get a little critical context injected in here. What is Critical Race Theory as you understand it, and then what is I guess the distance between what it actually is in the academic sense and the way that it's talked about in popular media by some of these culture war provocate tours.

This topic was one of the reasons I needed to take a little bit of time and update the book because this became obviously a really intentionally manufactured controversy. I emphasize this too, we're qualifiers to actually manufactured in the last couple of election cycles. So not identifying as a critical race theorists myself, but this is something that it's been present on the margins of a lot of university campuses for a couple of decades now. Or probably even longer. Critical Race Theory is a perspective that originated, especially in terms of graduate levels, not an undergraduate level of graduate level teaching and research about legal, political and economic institutions in the history of the US. And in many ways, those institutions were built originally on discriminatory policies, their systems that were first designed in order to privilege certain people and discriminate and dehumanize others. And when I say that, I know the way that this topic has gotten taken up in popular discourse, it sounds like that might be a controversial claim. One thing to remember about the basic analysis of critical race theory is that it's pretty consistent with a lot of long standing solid, middle of the road history of like it or not, as a historical fact, a lot of these institutions were built in those ways. And so the idea of critical race theory is that those racial or racist components of certain institutions don't go away, that they continue to operate in either implicit or explicit manners, and so that we still have a lot of work to do. That is, I think, something that's threatening to a lot of people who would like to celebrate the greatness of US institutions. And there's quite a lot to celebrate, particularly in an era of increasing democracy and multiculturalism, who would like to celebrate the sort of civil rights era, more romantic narratives from the Civil Rights era? Sort of triumph over these things? And so the idea that we've overcome all those things, and now why are we talking about these kinds of ideas of systemic biases and lingering forms of discrimination? So that's the content of it, I think, and in a pretty good general description, and others should correct me as much as they want, who are more expert. But the significance then is that outside of university, well, even on university settings, that was not a terribly common topic that one would encounter, again, kind of reserved for advanced level teaching and research. But it's, it became a quote unquote, intentionally scary sounding term in past election cycles. And this redounds to the thing I was talking about, about the political update, uptake of some of this terminology, reactionary political movements, pro authoritarian movements, the idea is that there's some nefarious, dangerous, unpatriotic ideology being nurtured on college campuses. I think the way that critical race theory now gets invoked by politicians, is standing less for an actual thing that goes on in certain university spaces than just the general idea or narrative, that college campuses are now dangerous to us society because of these political leanings. So, the result has been a wave of censorship and book bannings and removing materials from library because once you're at that stage, again, this being how misinformation operates, it takes something that's sort of technically true and selectively maybe over to the side and inflates it into the representative, exaggerated, seemingly scary thing about reality in general. So just invoking critical race theory now is a way to further this narrative that that academic freedom, being able to freely pursue the ideas you want on a college campus is dangerous, and that that's also now a signifier for anything having to do with talking about the history of race in the US from multiple different perspectives. It doesn't need to be tied to the original teaching and scholarship. It's being used now for dozens of measures in dozens of hyper partisan state legislatures to curb academic freedom and first amendment rights and remove books from public libraries and things of that nature.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, it's fascinating and terrifying at once to kind of See this, the critiques of something like critical race theory go from, you know, what seem initially to be these kind of esoteric arguments on Twitter or in, you know, online web forums and places like this that are, you know, debating academic theories all the way to now, like it's uptake by politicians, you know, fast forwarding to the present day a little bit. I mean, one of the reasons that I think we wanted to have you on the show to talk about this is because the stakes of this kind of, you know, what initially started out as a culture war kind of debate, which I think using that term can sometimes rob the, or at least dilute the the seeming stakes of this issue. Now, I think it's very clear what is actually at stake when we're talking about this because of its uptake by politicians like Ron DeSantis. I don't obviously want to single just him out, because, you know, according to Education Week, 44 states have now introduced bills or other measures that explicitly banned the teaching of certain topics like critical race theory in both secondary and higher education. And so, you know, Florida's House Bill 999, is the most recent and I would say probably the most baldly authoritarian in terms of its calls to literally restricts what people are allowed to teach in higher education, including potentially the banishment of certain majors of study based purely upon their perceived ideological leanings. And so, what I wanted to ask, and I know that there's really no elegant way to answer this, if you if you have one, I will be, you know, I would love to hear it. But I really want to try and wrap my own head around, because I really don't know how did we move from these earlier arguments in favor of viewpoint diversity, all the way to now this is being taken up in legislation, state level legislation that explicitly restricts free speech in schools. How did we get from one point to the other? Or do you see this as being like two separate lines of argument?

Right? It's a great question. And my argument is not that I know what certain individuals were thinking or that they all met in a room together, something like that, being based on the patterns of language and communication. And so that when you see one kind of term getting used, artificially produced term designed to create a very specific rhetorical effect being used in one context, and then it gets taken up in another. Along the way, I think you've got pretty good evidence, somebody noticed something there something useful. And so the answer to your question is, in a way, simply stated, in that that terminology shows up all over these bills, and that it's actually not new over the past few years. It's been growing since the mid 2010s and late 2010s. So when I was originally writing the book, around 2017-18, the Florida State Legislature had already created legislation to assess the quote unquote, viewpoint diversity to make sure there was quote, unquote, equal time on college campuses, they had already started to experiment with the idea of service required, requiring students and faculty to sort of sort of complete surveys about their political leanings. In a free society, we don't monitor students and faculty political ideas, or make them qualifications for employment, attendance, and so forth. So this led all these terms that I've been describing the idea that college campuses are indoctrinating people to only one political orientation, or that they're not open to heterodox ideas that they're imposing a radical orthodoxy, all of these buzzwords, which were not present in higher education legislation several years ago, they're now riddled with them. And so I think there's a very clear terminological trail where a lot of these groups again, I was saying, they're trying to be scientific and seemingly centrist and so forth. I don't know that they were thinking there, there could be or there wouldn't be any sort of political uptake. That's not my claim. My claim is that there has been that certain hyper partisan actors have recognized, what you can do is you can create pretext using this terminology, this kind of language of campus misinformation, this terminology that actually doesn't get used very much as sort of a focal point of university teaching and research or accurately describe the realities of many issues in higher education. That language has become very useful for saying, Well, I'm going to invoke the label of free speech to regulate what can be said on college campuses are I'm going to invoke in this piece of legislation, the idea we need to have equal time for these political perspectives in order to mandate the kind of perspective I I prefer and make it harder for other people to teach and research what they want. So my claim is that the evidence is there in the language of the bills. And that you're right. It's not just Desantis. This is kind of a wave of what we're seeing. One of the pieces of, I'm not even sure what to call it. It was a piece of draft legislation produced by the Goldwater Institute, which is a it's a nonpublic Think Tank, it's a hyperpartisan think that this was tested in states like Wisconsin, in order to make it easier, essentially, for anyone on a college campus to accuse somebody else of restricting their free speech through just disagreeing with them or through advocating for their ideas that they want, and so forth. So made it convenient to use the courts in order to say you're restricting my free speech, therefore, you shouldn't be ejected from this university. If you're going about the business of your own teaching or research, you're just going to do that you're not going to be looking for opportunities to expel or censure other people. So this is an example of there's been a wave of these pieces of legislation where they take these terms that sound good. But I would encourage people to always think critically, are you talking in broad slogans about free speech? Are you actually citing the full complexities and realities of the First Amendment? Are you talking about ideal ideological parity? Or are you talking about robust academic freedom where you actually have a healthy competition among many different perspectives, however, you might think of those perspectives, if they have merit or not, so all these terms in this legislation, they sound good, but they're sort of like an upside down reality that many of them are referring to. That's a pretext for now, literal state censorship and interference with academic freedom and First Amendment liberties.

Absolutely. And I mean, I that's that's kind of a perfect segue to talking about the actual language of the bill, just taking Florida HB 999. As an example, I think it's useful to actually pick apart some of the actual language, if you wouldn't mind going into a little bit of the actual wording of these bills to kind of identify some of the, like you said, the kind of upside down reality that they are, that they are reflecting here. So I mean, just to just to quote In brief, the very beginning of the, the additions to this to this law, or to the code that it is amending, stating that, you know, the legislature intends that the Board of Governors shall align the missions of each constituent University, with the academic success of its students then adds the education for citizenship of the Constitutional Republic, and the state's existing and emerging workforce needs. Further down in that section, it says the Board shall periodically review the mission of each constituent University, this is for Florida University specifically, and provide updates or revisions to such missions as needed, examine existing academic programs at each constituent University for alignment with the university's mission, and provide direction to each constituent University on removing from its programs, any major or minor in critical race theory, gender studies, or intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of of these belief systems, which is any major or minor that engenders beliefs in the countenance concepts to find it in this other section of the bill. So I was wondering if you could talk us through what that's like, what that means from somebody who works in higher education like what? How can you imagine legislation like that being used? You know, in the context of academic free speech, what does that actually mean for people who are educators in a state like Florida?

Well, yeah, there's a lot of buzz terms there. And first off, kind of reinforcing the point. That bill just says things out loud that state legislatures in several states have been trying to do for a while now, the pattern that's been documented, I cite people. And I cite an organization that's terrific. It's called Scholars At Risk. They it's a nonprofit advocacy for teachers and so forth, academics who are being persecuted worldwide. And as part of their alarming reports. In recent years, they've started cited that sort of political interference with higher education in the US and they've cited in particular the way that interference often takes the form of hyper partisan state legislators or governors trying to institute boards like are being described in the bill, you just read these oversight. They're gonna It's all partisan political appointees, designed to create this sort of layer of seeming approval of what can be said and what can be taught or researched on university campuses and in an open society. We shouldn't have that we should have, of course, rigorous debate about public funding of education and education policies and so forth. That's different from a board set up designed in order to always create a cloud of suspicion. And the language you just cited there, the cloud of suspicion is that certain things being taught are just mere belief systems. That's a highly negative terminology. And so these ideas, and this comes back to that sort of general thesis, the coddling and so forth the idea of, well, if you believe there's a certain sort of social justice work that needs to be done, or you are a group that's historically and presently marginalized, you might just sort of be have a psychological misapprehension that tracks with this more general idea that certain things that are being taught or researched on college campuses are mere belief systems, those things being taught may or may not have great academic merit, but in an open society in a democratic society, what's the best way to resolve that question? Is it through healthy debate among peers and partners, stakeholders and institutions? In terms of what's meritorious? Or Should a partisan political set of appointees make that decision for anybody who truly believes in civil liberties? I think there's a pretty direct answer to that question. And then the last thing I'll say is that these things that are being cited about courses in gender studies or quote unquote, critical race theory, whatever the Bill thinks that might be that's, that's quite serious, I'm not being snarky about this. I don't, I don't know that these, it's always been used with a lot of specificity. Recently, those courses are popular. A lot of students take those courses, they tend to fill. And a lot of people in traditional disciplines even have used the ideas of those more recent forms of study, to update and improve their own teaching and research. All of that's been done freely. Nobody's being forced to take courses in gender studies, and so forth. And actually, I try and make the point, universities are choice based institutions you're not forced to attend. And even when there are certain there's a layer of general education, things that you're required to fulfill a small amount of courses in certain topics, you oftentimes have a choice of how you want to fulfill those requirements. So people are freely studying these things, and freely taking those courses signing up for them and freely discussing them. And the authoritarian standpoint is to say there's some irrational belief system that won't serve the quote unquote, workforce, and that we should monitor those put those under a cloud of suspicion and make them adhere to artificial qualifications. None of that is in the First Amendment. None of that is sort of strictly constitutional. So I noticed that that language, the way these stories and these clouds of suspicion are being told, which obfuscate the fact that it is an expression of academic and intellectual freedom and diversity that those courses exist, and they are popular, and that people want to take them and are interested in them.

Absolutely. I'm glad that you pointed that out. I think it means a lot from somebody who's worked in higher ed not only as a faculty member, but also in an administrative capacity working with, you know, student experience that that is something that needs to be contextualized that this is not Yeah, this is not just some, like nice thing that every or even something that everyone is forced to do. It is something that is both, you know, it's a social understanding, or it's a valuable social discipline that is being infused into other areas of study that is of interest to people, like people are literally using their free choice to seek these kinds of things out.

Yeah. And I'm saying all that it not being pro or against any version of that. I'm saying it's a thing, people are free to do that, right. It's popular, it's an expression of academic freedom. And so it's just one part of a larger component, and all this kind of scapegoating and stereotyping is not useful.

Absolutely. I did want to the only other thing that I kind of wanted to touch on here. I mean, there's there's so much we could potentially talk about in this law, including the you know, the the fact that a university can, the or the board can insert the Board of Governors for university, the state university system could institute or initiate a post tenure review of a faculty member at any time with cause that's a direct quote from there. This board of trustees is responsible for hiring faculty for the university, the President and the board are not required to consider recommendations or opinions of faculty of the university or other individuals or groups. There's a lot of things we could say about you know, shared govern And then it's kind of being eroded here as well. But I mean, sticking to the sticking to the this sort of repeated phrase that gets repeated a whole lot in this House Bill, the education for citizenship of the constitutional republic, I thought was kind of an interesting sort of idiographic invocation of, you know, what it means to, you know, educate for citizenship. And I think that I would maybe want to close with this question on, you know, what does what do you think they are trying to get at with this dissociation between citizenship for a constitutional republic that doesn't include things like gender studies, critical race theory, intersectionality, or any derivatives thereof, versus what we in rhetoric, have, you know, traditionally thought of as education for citizenship in a you know, in a democratic society? I guess? It's a two pronged question. Why do you think that there is this dissociation of those two things education for citizenship in constitutional republic and all these other unwanted you know, belief systems as they're calling it? And what do you think an actual, you know, a better education for citizenship looks like, from a rhetorical perspective?

Got it. Well, yeah, not knowing what what is necessarily strictly intended by that phrase, I'll say what the phrase reminds me of, and I think you're right to suggest a set of terminological distinctions that are being drawn there. It reminds me of the the larger set of slogans associated with a lot of what I call agents or purveyors of misinformation about higher education now, which is the idea that higher education in the US has become somehow dangerously detached from the role of preserving a traditional set of Western cultures or Western values and Eurocentric ideals, principles of reasoning, and so forth. And so the kind of implicit unstated argument there, which works maybe on a more gut level for a lot of people are designed to, is to say that those fields of study are not patriotic, they're not serving Western values, they're not reasoned and so forth. And in terms of education, and citizenship, maybe in a more constructive manner. What I would say is that, I mean, I don't think there are easy answers, the university setting right now is in many ways, a laboratory for collisions among more conservative kinds of institutions, and increasing socially wide multicultural efforts of democracy and equality. And that is a combustible mixture. There's no doubt about it, we need to have serious evidence based, historically informed debate about it. The that term, though, and the larger sort of appeal to sort of traditional western values. That's not, that's not new. That's being used in places like Hungary and Poland to sort of, again, as I said earlier, say, well, democracy is good unless it kind of threatens these sorts of values. So what are you going to have? Are you going to have educational spaces that are truly about knowledge as it existed all of its forms? Or is it going to be knowledge that's only circumscribed by a certain kind of western perspective, or traditional self described traditional or conservative western perspective? The last thing I'll say, In response, the really big dissociation that might be better to think about for purposes of citizenship in the constitutional republic, I want to take that phrase and actually be serious about it sure, is that that is part of the legacy of the Enlightenment. And a lot of this discourse is about kind of universities have gotten away from the western values of admission to the enlightenment. There's a misapprehension, I think, circulating about what the Enlightenment was all about. The Enlightenment was about throwing off any form of groupthink or authoritarian mentality or conformism wherever possible. There was consequential figures of the Enlightenment valued dissent, valued questioning authority, and in many ways valued looking beyond traditional Western institutions like church hierarchy, or existing class authority. And this idea that the Enlightenment is about sort of just preserving traditional polite civil discourse. The key thing, if there was one term that major Enlightenment thinkers were concerned about, it was education. And it was education as a liberatory liberatory exercise where we could throw off and be enlightened from conformism and obedience to the state and groupthink and so forth and what we have in our Constitutional Republic. Like the First Amendment is one of the most glittering legacies of the Enlightenment, the idea that you get to assemble politically how you want, you get to protest whoever you want non violently. And that disect scandalizing forms of speech should be protected just as much as quote unquote, civil debate and so forth. And so I think there's just even among people who sort of refer to this idea of keeping alive the mission of Western values and citizenship for the constitutional republic, maybe are not as informed or honest about the fact that we got the constitutional republic, through a lot of rejection of authority, protests, dissent, in favor of individual rights, and that academic freedom, the ability to pursue education as a form of liberation from existing hierarchies, and forms of status. The Enlightenment is indispensable without that.

Absolutely. That's a that's a perfect, I think, landing point for us at the end of this conversation. I mean, there's obviously more that we could say this is probably going to be a continuing conversation, as you know, legislation works its way through, you know, through various bodies. Maybe it gets challenges by, you know, appeals courts and things like that. But at the very least, I think that's that's really important context to leave us with, and I really appreciate your insights on that. Dr. Brad, Vivian, thank you so much for being here on reverb with us. The new book is called campus misinformation the real threats to free speech in American higher education out now via Oxford University Press. Brad, did you want to plug anything else or leave us with any other final thoughts?

No, it was great. I appreciate your time. And thank you so much for having me.

Absolutely. Well, from all of us here at reverb. Stay critical. We will talk to you again soon. Bye bye, everybody.

Our show today was produced by Alex Helberg and Calvin Pollak, with editing work by Calvin. re:verb's co- producers at large are Sophie Wodzak and Ben Williams. You can subscribe to re:verb and leave us a review on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Android, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Check out our website at WWW dot reverbcast.com. You can also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, where our handle is @ reverb_cast. That's r-e-v-e-r-b underscore C-A-S-T. If you've enjoyed our show and want to help amplify more of our public scholarship work, please consider leaving us a five star review on your podcast platform of choice and tell a friend about us. We sincerely appreciate the support of our listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in.