It's Happening Again
A New Cycle of Campus Misinformation Begins, with Potentially Even Graver Threats to Academic Freedom and Civil Liberties
I wrote Campus Misinformation to help people recognize how exaggerations, distortions, and falsehoods about universities threaten higher ed and democracy. Campus misinformation erupted into public discourse around campus protests in the mid-2010s. It's happening again.
Student protests focused on the social and academic treatment of historically marginalized communities inspired a flurry of reactionary tropes and denigration in both hyper-partisan and mainstream media beginning in 2014. Those student demonstrations frequently helped to advance the Black Lives Matter movement, but also other allied anti-racist, anti-sexist, pro-LGBTQ causes.
Instead of seeking to understand the systemic causes of those protests, pundits and politicians delighted in calling students “coddled,” “triggered,” opposed to “free speech,” desirous of “safe spaces,” wedded to a narrow “orthodoxy,” adherents to “mob justice,” and much more. Doing so became intellectually fashionable in notably faux intellectual circles.
Political officials appropriated these tropes, in the late 2010s and early 2020s, as pretexts for state interference and censorship in both higher ed and K-12. Those forms of interference and censorship overwhelmingly targeted the free expression and academic freedom of historically marginalized communities. The collective result has been a wave of historic bans on DEI, removal of educational materials from public schools, and elimination of academic programs—all for spurious legal and academic reasons.
We're seeing the same pattern again:
A national journalistic obsession with genuinely concerning, but thankfully unrepresentative, events on college campuses, used to make wild generalizations about the psychology of students and the state of higher ed in general.
The invention of a whole new derisive rhetoric about college students and university affairs. “Liberated zone” and “encampment” seem fated to become all-purpose smears just as “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” did—
which does nothing to constructively address actual instances of campus bigotry, including antisemitism.
Intensifying calls for police or military action on campuses and heightened political control over them . . . in addition to last week's NYPD arrests . . . and the police actions at the University of Southern California and University of Minnesota that followed . . . and the horrific use of Texas State Troopers to preemptively arrest dozens of nonviolent student demonstrators at the University of Texas-Austin . . . and now at Emory University as I write this. A new wave of legislation that threatens civil liberties and academic freedom in university systems seems inevitable.
Campus misinformation is a language—an entire vocabulary of distortions, exaggerations, and falsehoods about both higher education and the democratic freedoms that universities typically exemplify more robustly than many other parts of society. And it's a language, whatever lofty ideals about “free speech” and “viewpoint diversity” duplicitous pundits and politicians try to cloak it in, that has demonstrably threatened civil liberties and academic freedom, both on and off college campuses, in recent years.
Recognizing and contesting an entire new wave of it, wherever possible, is an important way to defend both higher education and democracy.