Professor’s new book examines free speech issues at college campuses

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In recent years, cable news and social media have been saturated with outrage over higher education’s supposed descent into intolerant, anti-democratic groupthink. When Bradford Vivian, professor of communication arts and sciences and former director of Penn State’s Center for Democratic Deliberation, decided to take a closer look at the phenomenon, he found that that argument not only didn’t add up, but actually posed a danger of its own.

The result is Vivian’s new book, “Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education,” a critical examination of the alleged free speech crisis at America’s universities, published by Oxford University Press.

Some pundits and politicians believe colleges have become rigidly ideological spaces where students and faculty support liberal orthodoxy in lockstep while loudly shouting down anyone with contrary viewpoints, according to Vivian. These claims were manufactured by cynical ideologues, he argues, and are based almost entirely on flimsy anecdotal evidence rather than sound data. Along the way, he added, they’ve managed to threaten academic freedom, civil discourse and even democracy itself.

“I tried to write the book for a general readership, not just make it a critical examination,” Vivian said. “This should be important to people in general, because it deals with curbing civil liberties more broadly.”

Vivian, who was recently featured on the McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s "Democracy Works" podcast, came up with the idea for the book about six years ago. It was just after the highly contentious 2016 presidential election, he explained, and extremist groups were beginning to apply the term “cancel culture” to describe people in the public sphere who were being criticized for offensive remarks or ideas. Many singled out college campuses as primary culprits of this scourge, citing instances of controversial speakers having their events canceled or being verbally and sometimes physically accosted by students and faculty.

Before long, said Vivian, journalists, academics and even comedians claiming to hold liberal or centrist views were also decrying the lack of free speech and intellectual diversity at college campuses, further legitimizing the claims and resulting in rampant media coverage that influenced public sentiment on the issue.

“It was a lot of anecdotal information and argument, and I was starting to see a lot of it on social media,” Vivian said. “At the same time, I was also starting to hear from colleagues and graduate students who encountered strong anti-university sentiments in public settings. Public sentiment was starting to set in that if you were part of higher ed, you were part of some ideological cabal. All of this made me worried about the state of public discourse. When you have widespread cynicism and misinformation about universities, that threatens democracy.”

As a specialist in rhetoric whose previous research has focused on public controversies over collective memories of past events, Vivian said he set out to study the phenomenon in non-partisan fashion and come up with a “non-clickbait argument” on the issue.

Through his research, he said, he found the claims to be wildly exaggerated in scope, and advanced primarily by those advocating for artificial parity between liberals and conservatives as a way to achieve “viewpoint diversity,” mischaracterizing the use of trigger warnings and safe spaces, and confusing honest criticism and protest with censorship and cancellation.

In Vivian’s view, extremist organizations use these disingenuous ideas and pseudoscientific data to advance an agenda that actually seeks to inhibit free speech, and can now be seen in some places where the right to protest has been restricted and certain books, ideas and school subjects have been banned or censored.

“There’s a whole political vocabulary used now to create these cynical, anti-diverse and anti-inclusive narratives about college campuses. Like critical race theory, which until the last election cycle was an obscure academic concept,” Vivian said. “It’s really no surprise when you think about the targets, which include programs that want to make campuses more diverse and inclusive to all cultural groups, races, genders and economic classes, not less. One of the great things about this country is how far the American education system has come in terms of diversity and inclusion. And I think that historical perspective is important.”

While conducting his research, Vivian found that politically motivated attacks on higher education have also become commonplace abroad — particularly in countries that have backslid on democracy and adopted more authoritarian-style governments, such as Hungary and Poland.

Political figures from those countries, he said, are using eerily similar language to advance their anti-democratic goals.

“It was surprising to me that U.S. discourse about higher education wasn’t taking place in isolation,” he said. “In Hungary, what’s the government’s argument about universities? It’s that they’ve become too diverse and are against traditional western Christian values, and they inhibit free speech — which in this case, was extremist, pro-despotic speech. Now, these types of political attacks are being replicated in the U.S. As it happens, one of the ways authoritarian movements arise is by expressing outrage over universities.”

To combat this trend, Vivian said people should strive to become more discerning consumers of news and information, which will allow them to think more critically about the contemporary state of higher ed. By doing that, they’ll be better equipped to identify and challenge misleading language — and perhaps more fully understand the threat it poses.

“I’m always concerned about the quality of this debate,” he said. “Are we getting good public information? Obviously, good political and investigative journalism on issues like this is essential. But a lot of what happens on cable news is pure theater. Campus misinformation is a form of punditry. It’s become profitable, and it’s dangerous.”