BY JOHN K. WILSON

John K. Wilson interviewed Bradford Vivian, author of Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education (Oxford University Press), by email for Academe Blog. To learn more about Vivian’s book, you can listen to interviews with him on the podcasts Democracy Works and Politics Is Everything. 

John K. Wilson: You write about “the dangers of campus misinformation” What are those dangers? What’s wrong with even excessive attention to free speech on college campuses, if it points out actual problems?

Bradford Vivian: First, campus misinformation misinforms the public about higher education. It misrepresents university policies and teaching practices, scapegoats student groups for systemic problems, disseminates substantially fabricated narratives about a free speech crisis in universities, and portrays campuses as dangerous, violent, and dystopian spaces. Maintaining healthy, diverse, and self-governing institutions of higher education, predicated on robust academic freedom, is essential to democracy. Sowing popular outrage about higher education threatens that mission while impeding constructive deliberation about the formidable problems that universities currently face.

Second, misinformation about college campuses has influenced hyper-partisan state legislatures to restrict academic freedom. Since 2020, many state legislatures have revised the idea that a so-called free speech crisis or poor intellectual diversity plagues nearly all universities, supposedly requiring the state to regulate on-campus speech and academic programming, to justify an alarming increase in state censorship of K–12 schools. Numerous local governments have also censored, predominantly, works by authors of color from public libraries based on the same pretext.

Third, the hyper-partisan uptake of campus misinformation fits a well-documented historical pattern. Reactionary attacks against universities and the free press are classic warning signs of rising authoritarian sentiment. Authoritarian populist leaders in Russia, Hungary, and other parts of Eastern Europe are following this pattern now, exerting state control over universities and the free press by warning that members of such institutions disseminate dangerous ideas (that is, prodemocracy, pro-multicultural ideas) while censoring traditional viewpoints (meaning they openly question or dispute authoritarian-friendly, culturally bigoted ideas). Even people who do not belong to university communities, therefore, should critically examine campus misinformation because it supplies pretexts for curbing civil liberties in general.

My argument about these dangers in Campus Misinformation is not predicated on the notion that it’s excessive. Campus misinformation, however much of it exists, undermines constructive democratic deliberation about higher learning, threatens academic freedom, and generates rationales for restricting civil liberties. If anything, I advocate more public deliberation about higher education in the following senses: by featuring more diverse student and faculty perspectives, enhanced public understanding of the history of higher education, and more accurate information about First Amendment freedoms. 

John K. Wilson: You argue, “nothing is wrong with student or faculty groups asking, even passionately demanding, that an invited speaker not appear on a given campus at a given time.” But isn’t a demand to ban speakers a call for censorship, and why shouldn’t we criticize everyone who seeks this?

Bradford Vivian: Nonviolent protest, dissent, and criticism of institutional decisions are not censorship. Campus misinformation has popularized the hyperbolic idea that most university students and faculty protest most outside speakers on nearly all campuses. Sporadic vigorous debates over invited speakers do occur on many college campuses; as a group, however, the approximately postsecondary 5,000 institutions in the US routinely host numerous invited speakers from across the academic and sociopolitical spectrum.

It’s become popular to assume that students and faculty who petition administrations about invited speakers engage in censorship. Such assumptions entail distorted interpretations of First Amendment freedoms. It depends on how we ask the question. Should student or faculty groups ask universities not to host particular speakers? People can subjectively criticize how, when, and why certain groups do so. But do members of universities have a right, protected by the First Amendment, to petition administrations to not host particular speakers—or to change a policy, spend money differently, listen to other student and faculty concerns? They do. This claim reflects a standard reading of the First Amendment: freedom of protest, dissent, and free political assembly are some of its most democratic elements. Universities have the freedom to host speakers who promote bigotry and hate speech; and members of universities are free to protest those speakers.

Hyper-partisan state legislatures that ban classroom discussions of legitimate academic topics in public schools practice censorship. Hyper-partisan think tanks that draft model legislation, adopted by such legislatures, to punish the speech or academic programs of students and faculty with whom they disagree politically practice censorship. Officials who ban reading materials predominantly written by authors of color from publicly funded libraries practice censorship. We are indeed witnessing a historically significant national increase in censorship—which campus misinformation helped to inspire.

John K. Wilson: One critique I have of your book is I fear that too often it falls into the trap of this right-wing dichotomy: Either one agrees with the right about a crisis in campus speech, or one says that there’s no big problem here. Why can’t we say campus free speech is a serious problem while rejecting the myth that it only impacts conservative viewpoints?

Bradford Vivian: I think I agree, throughout Campus Misinformation, with your concern. I question hyperbole about college campuses (“coddled” undergraduates, “mob rule” in universities, a “free speech crisis”). Yet I also maintain that universities do face serious threats to personal expression and academic freedom. Foremost among them are hyper-partisan state legislatures that restrict forms of campus speech based on the premise that government officials should use state power to ensure “viewpoint diversity”—or, as I call it, mandated ideological parity. An equally serious threat is the normalization of anti-university rhetoric from extremist groups who oppose desegregated, more democratic institutions of free speech and open inquiry.

So, a prime motivation for my book is to question the false dichotomy that one must either agree with sweeping narratives about a “free speech crisis” or say there’s no problem with universities. That said, readers already invested in prevalent hyperbole about college campuses will probably categorize my argument—which advocates more diverse evidence-based perspectives on the state of higher education—as fitting in the latter category to protect that hyperbole and the vocabulary of campus misinformation that supports it. If so, then such impulses might only reinforce one of my overriding claims about campus misinformation: it has become a significant source of intellectual and political capital for pundits and politicians far beyond higher education.

Bradford Vivian is professor of communication arts and sciences and past director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State University.

John K. Wilson was a 2019-20 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, and is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies and the forthcoming work The Attack on Academia.