Campus “Free Speech” Agitation Just a Front for Elite Billionaire Power Play

Trinity College political science Professor Isaac Kamola explains that outrage over liberal academics is mostly manufactured by well-coordinated attacks groups funded by “a small handful of billionaires” whose goal is to undermine higher education and its “central role in creating a large, inclusive, and affluent middle class”:

In short, these attacks follow a common logic: stoke outrage in ways that fuel the now-common narrative that college professors are recklessly irresponsible and dangerous. These individual attacks, however, also have a larger political objective. They use these examples to generally discredit colleges and universities, painting them as places that shelter and enable deviant and socially unacceptable ideas. The result is a manufactured narrative wielded by billionaire donors to suggest that parents, students, state governments, foundations, and other funders of higher education demand greater oversight over these apparently untrustworthy and unruly faculty [Isaac Kamola, “Dear Administrators: To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money,” Journal of Academic Freedom, 2019].

At the center of this assault on higher education are the Koch empire that has South Dakota’s Legislature by the tail and the fake “campus free speech” folderol that local Republicans are using as an excuse to turn our public universities into actual ideology mills.

Why would the Koch donor network fund the Leadership Institute and Campus Reform? Since the 1970s Charles and David Koch have created (and funded) a range of academic, journalistic, legal, policy, judicial, and advocacy organizations explicitly designed to use their vast wealth to push federal and state policies toward greater deregulation, larger tax cuts, and drastic reductions in social spending—a set of economic priorities described by critics as “property supremacy”43and “ultra-free-market.” Unable to convince majorities of voters of the merits of these ideas, the Kochs created and funded avast integrated network of institutions designed to change the national conversation toward their ultralibertarian political and economic priorities. A sampling of these institutions include Americans for Prosperity, the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Heartland Institute. Donor Trust and Donors Capital Fund also fund student groups on college campuses (including Young Americans for Liberty and Students for Liberty) as well as academic centers (such as George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies).

This vast network cannot function without both academic research legitimizing far-right ideas and an ideologically motivated talent pool to populate this vast integrated network of institutions. Charles Koch’s strategist Richard Fink described universities as creating the “intellectual raw materials”necessary to achieve social transformation. In many instances,faculty, students, and university administrations have resisted Koch-funded centers and programs on campus, maintaining control over faculty governance and autonomy over the curriculum, classroom, and research. Attacks on faculty, and more recently “campus free speech” provocations(funded by the same organizations), are part of a strategy seeking to delegitimize the academy and, in doing so, opening this key institution to greater donor influence over academic programs, centers, and curricula. This handful of ultraright billionaires sees their donations as financial investments in a long-term political struggle to eviscerate the state’s capacity to enact redistributive and regulative policies. To this end, they see universities as critical institutions that need to be occupied, pacified, and repurposed [Kamola 2019].

Kamola says the billionaires’ strategy depends on using academia’s own rationality against them and getting professors and administrators themselves to condemn the media-simplified, decontextualized, and overhyped statements of their own. Those reasonable academic assessments of the merits of a few statements are then drowned out by the further manufactured headlines of the right-wing anti-education machine, which squawks, See? We told you so—even other professors admit that professors are radical moonbats! The proper response, says Kamola, is to point out the agenda of the attackers:

Campus Reform,the College Fix, and other watchdog outlets, as well as those platforms that circulate their content, have a political and ideological objective in discrediting faculty—especially those who critique white supremacy, patriarchy, and free-market capitalism. Because the organizations launching attacks on faculty are politically motivated, they have no actual intention of engaging with the actual content of academic speech. As such, administrations should not ground their response in an interpretation of what their faculty member did (and didn’t) say. Instead, administrations should respond by “following the money.” Namely, they should make clear who is mounting the attacks, and why. When the issue was framed as “Did Professor Williams actually call for killing white people?” then Campus Reform has already won. Instead, administrations, faculty, students, alumni, journalists, and the broader public should respond by clearly naming who is carrying out the attack, why, and then offer unconditional support for their faculty [Kamola, 2019].

Among other guidelines for properly jamming the right-wing assault on academia, Kamola recommends we abandon the false equivalency between the statements of academics committed to scholarly inquiry and the rabid demagoguery of the astroturfing billionaires and their demogagued mobs:

As Joan Scott reminds us, however, it is important to maintain the difference between academic freedom and free speech. Whereas free speech protects “one’s opinion, however unfounded, however ungrounded,” academic freedom is a norm of professionalism that involves “thoughtful, critical articulation of ideas, the demonstration of proof based on rigorous examination of evidence, the distinction between true and false, between careful and sloppy work, the exercise of reasoned judgment.” While Campus Reform and the College Fix have every right to produce hackneyed misrepresentations of faculty speech, within the academy such writing cannot be given equal weight as the statements and utterances of faculty, speaking on topics they have spent decades studying. As Scott notes,“This is not elitism but expertise, the production of knowledge informed by disciplined research.” Just as one does not crowdsource cures to infectious diseases, society should listen to faculty—not online mobs—if it wants to understand, for example,“the history and sociology of race, gender, sexuality, and class.”

In contrast, the right-wing donor class has a political, ideological, and economic interest in discrediting their critics. Unleashing well-funded right-wing attacks against college faculty is one strategy to coerce an academic institution into adopting the values preferred by the donors funding the attacks. Ultra-libertarian donors have successfully used the language of “free speech”as the lever to create a false equivalency between the speech of faculty and their own ideological and donor-funded attacks. If free speech, rather than academic freedom, is the primary concern,then Johnny Williams, Campus Reform, and Milo Yiannopoulos all have the equal right to contribute to a conversation about race. However, rather than entertaining these different interpretations, the response should be: “Campus Reform is a bully that, using dark money, seeks to determine the kinds of conversations taking place in the classroom and in scholarly debate. A free society requires rigorous and free inquiry, not threats and harassment from well-funded external agitators” [Kamola, 2019].

So when the billionaires send their provocateurs to campus, remember, they aren’t there in the spirit of intellectual inquiry that our universities promote.They are there to tear down the rationality and inclusiveness that opposes their oligarchy and domination. They are using their wealth to capture more wealth and keep you and me and most everyone else from having a fair shot at earning our share of the nation’s wealth.