The Campus Free Speech Panic: Who’s Fueling the Misinformation Machine?

Cory Barker: In 2023, a viral video claimed that a professor at a major university failed a student for citing the Bible in a paper. The story spread fast—news segments, op eds, endless commentary on social media. Outrage followed. Lawmakers tweeted. A few even cited it during committee hearings—except it wasn't true. The professor had never banned religious sources. The student had failed for plagiarism, but the damage was done. The lie traveled far, and it stuck. That's the power of misinformation, especially when it's weaponized and aimed at universities. Stories like this don't just appear out of nowhere. They're often manufactured by political operatives, think tanks, and trolls who see higher ed as a battleground in the culture wars. And once those stories enter the media ecosystem, they self-replicate. Bad headlines get amplified. Nuance gets lost. Outrage gets clicks. This isn't just some PR problem for universities. It's a problem for democracy because when we distort the role of higher education, when we paint it as the enemy of free speech, we erode public trust in institutions that are meant to educate, question, and expand our thinking.

Matt Jordan: To help us unpack how misinformation about universities is spreading and who's behind it, we're going to talk with Dr. Brad Vivian. He's a professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State and the author of Campus Misinformation, The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. Brad's research focuses on rhetoric, public memory, and how cultural narratives shape the way we see the world and each other. He's also one of the sharpest thinkers out there when it comes to misinformation, political framing, and the real challenges facing higher ed. Brad Vivian, welcome to News Over Noise.

Brad Vivian: Thank you for having me.

Matt Jordan: So, there's a lot of the university in the news right now. And those of us who work in the university setting, this is a period where we are actually having to think about misinformation on a real-time and pragmatic level. So, I'm wondering if you could say when you see these misinformation campaigns about the university starting historically and what they have been aiming to do.

Brad Vivian: Well, in many ways, what I call the misinformation campaign about universities is several decades old. It's not new. It's just a new version of a story that's long been told by certain political and media actors. But the new ingredient is what's important. So let me take the first one, the fact that this is in some ways a dated plotline. The template for it remains, kind of surprisingly, a text like William F. Buckley's "God and Man at Yale." And this is, I always like to say, a McCarthy-era text. What Buckley said was that universities are becoming dangerously liberal in ways that are unpatriotic and disloyal to both traditional moral values and the United States of America. And if that sounds familiar, that's because, again, this template has hung around for a long time. And I always like to say that when Buckley is making these arguments about his alma mater, Yale, in the 1950s, that's before any significant desegregation movement in higher education took place, at a time when Yale was among the most cloistered, elitist, conservative places you could go to in America. What he's really doing, if you look through those pages, is he's saying, well, yes, these Yale faculty members are pro-capitalist, patriotic, and conservatively religious, but, in all cases, not enough for me. It's a project of ideological monitoring to keep things as resistant to change as possible. And we've seen different iterations of the vocabulary that he created about asking, is a campus conservative or liberal? Is it split roughly down the middle? Are people with, quote unquote, "heterodox" ideas welcome? This was also David Horowitz's vocabulary in his project of ideological monitoring in the '90s, and that vocabulary of heterodox ideas against a rigid, quote unquote, "liberal orthodoxy." That's remained super continuous. But this was largely the vocabulary think tanks and relatively closed, or cloistered, I should say, elitist, conservative, and libertarian spaces. The new ingredient that I referred to, secondly, is a wave of international anti-university discourse that's coming from authoritarian regimes. And it's becoming popular in the Western world. And I'm specifically referring to places like Russia and Hungary over the last decade, decade and a half, which have seen the "liberalization," in quotation marks, of universities as a threat to their authoritarian societies. And time and time again throughout history, if you have Western-style universities with at least a modicum of liberal arts, secular-based education, those will be moderating forces in society. And those, particularly Russia, authoritarian countries and the Putin regime from the early 2000s forward watched color revolutions—that is, revolutions in formerly Soviet states like Georgia, Ukraine, and all the time, those pro-democratic, pro-Western revolutions, peaceful revolutions had as key components significant university support. Student movements were crucial to those democratic gains and were crucial to crushing those movements on behalf of Russian interests. So, this is a classic kind of duplicitous rhetoric that says universities are against patriotic values, against conservative values. The two are meeting in the middle, the international and the long-gestating—what I call the long-gestating, low-functioning McCarthyism of these anti-university interests in the United States.

Matt Jordan: In your book, you argue that campus misinformation is not just a threat to colleges, but also a threat to civil liberties in the US. Can you explain a little what you mean by that?

Brad Vivian: Absolutely. Well, as I was just referring to, it's not just in recent history, but throughout different parts of Western history that a classic symptom of rising authoritarianism is political actions against universities. There are legion examples of this, not only dating back in Western history, but also, as I mentioned, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea today, dictatorial regimes in South and Central America. Every time you see a rising dictatorial or authoritarian regime, one of the first steps they're going to take is to try and seize control of universities, along with the free press. And universities, then, are places where, if you're going to have a university that functions to its maximum promise, you will have people pursuing at least some variety of scientific as well as humanistic topics. And you'll have people asking questions. You'll have them analyzing why have things come to be as they are and how could they be different. For an authoritarian regime, they don't want people commonly asking those questions and thinking for themselves. So, I think it's really important to say, when we think of a university, that is the achievement of two things in particular, at least as we're used to it in the United States and the Western world. One is the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment was an anti-authoritarian movement. It was a way to say, you have an individual right to judge for yourself what you think is a persuasive argument and what you want to believe. And then the United States itself, in many ways, is inexplicable without understanding the rise of colleges and universities from the 19th century forward in our society, that we wouldn't have the United States as it exists today. And there's all kinds of ways to talk about this in terms of our critical infrastructure as well as our pluralistic society and values without universities, so that universities then become test cases for asking, well, how can we shut down that individual right of questioning and posing an individual interpretation of the truth, as opposed to a conformist one in line with the state?

Matt Jordan: So, one way of thinking about misinformation campaigns is that they tend to use whatever current events are out there in order to recirculate stereotypes. It's the kind of Walter Lippmann view of how public opinion is formed in the news because the news doesn't do a great job of giving a lot of descriptive information for that. So how and who are circulating these sticky narratives about universities being these places that are infected with a woke mind virus and other kind of sticky narratives like that? Where do they find themselves kind of inserted into the system, and how do they circulate?

Brad Vivian: Well, my emphasis in all of this writing is on language or different forms of rhetoric, argument, and persuasion and a lot of the ways in which people are consuming reports about universities now, in terms of scientific polling and data markers. So, what I try to do is to say, well, those surveys and those poll results are being used in a way that is spinning disingenuous or sometimes outright false and dangerous narratives. So, the question of who is doing it—there's a number of actors but let me list off three quickly. One is in terms of the resurgence of the kind of home-based in the US narratives about universities, the McCarthyist ones that I was talking about, when those meet authoritarian messages from regimes abroad like Russia or Hungary, the joining part there, since the late 1990s and especially the early 2000s, has been people in, say, Russia and the United States who are equally opposed to LGBTQ rights, and particularly in the trans movements in the 2010s. And if we remember when all the discourse in the United States about how undergraduates are opposed to free speech because they want you to call them by their preferred pronouns, or that we're worried about Title IX being overreaching on college campuses during the Obama administration, to answer your question, it's circulating among those groups as a kind of code. It's coded language and rhetoric.

Instead of saying we're opposed to full equality for LGBTQ citizens, and faculty members will say, well, we're concerned that Title IX is going too far in enforcing those rights, or that with that movement to call people by their preferred pronouns, that's anti-free speech for some reason. That actually doesn't make sense as a claim. So that kind of anti LGBTQ coalition that's international, again, when universities are operating as they should toward a healthy pluralistic society, you will have more moderation on those campuses because people from all kinds of walks of life have to come together and freely associate—so a lot of groups that want to shut that full membership for LGBTQ people down. But also, secondly, then, I think, for that reason, that bigoted set of ideas was marketed from the late 2010s until the present as seemingly enlightened intellectual commentary, which is why we get people who have been traditionally described as liberal, if not centrist commentators in US op eds and media spaces, saying, well, should people have so many rights? Is the trans movement unhealthy? Or with reference to what you call wokeism, this idea that, well, are people who want social justice, are they too aggressive in their promotion of full equality and so forth? And you get the anti-DEI movement because of this. So, there's a lot of popularization of things in all those examples I've ticked off which aren't super present on campuses. I mean, they're there, but people are not in positions of power making enormously weighty decisions by throwing the word "woke" around or the phrase "DEI" and so forth. There's a lot of misinformation in those allegedly centrist and liberal spaces, too. And then, finally, I was listening to your excellent episode recently on the brosphere and all these podcasts and so forth. And you have this proliferation of media spaces which are incredibly revenue-generating. You can become a celebrity that way while being very ignorant about topics of the day. And you can spew all kinds of misinformation. And one of the most seemingly popular revenue-generating ones is invective and outrage about what's allegedly happening on college campuses.

Matt Jordan: So, what you're saying is that it's usually op ed writers who aren't having to show their work. They're just fomenting moral panic. What do those things look like? Is it personal experience? Is it somebody who felt icky having to go onto campus and hear this? Is it somebody who's bothered having to address people's pronouns? I mean, what's the evidence that they're using to make these outrageous claims?

Brad Vivian: Well, all of the above, but broadly stated, but the fact that you can tick those off so quickly indicates what I'm always struck by, which is that when—and I'd like news consumers to get in this mindset if I could—that when you read one of these op eds that are—the lead is something like universities are failing us, or that universities have become infested with wokeism, or there's no free speech at universities anymore, normally, those kinds of op eds, but then the larger discourse that they serve, it's absolutely paint by the numbers in the majority of cases. And so, one example might be—Michael Powell is a writer for The New York Times and The Atlantic. And when the pro-Palestine protests were happening across college campuses last spring, he goes to Columbia university and spends a few hours on campus, talks with some various activists and so forth. And remember, it's a campus, then, that's full of thousands of people. And the article that he composes on the basis of this is that this overly aggressive, potentially autocratic ideology that's too social justice-oriented has taken over all college campuses, not just Columbia. So, it's usually these anecdotes. It's very anecdote driven.

The other example is poll-driven because it's very easy to cite a poll. And so, if you look at op eds in major newspapers and magazines in the United States for the past decade or more, you'd think that there was this overwhelming amount of polling data which indicates intolerance and anti-free speech views. And so, you take one or two polls, and you make that argument. The problem is—and I know people will be kind of shocked to hear this if they've been channeled into that kind of information. But the truth is that in the United States, most people are more pro-free speech and social tolerance than other nations and that, within the United States comparatively, college-age students tend to be the most pro-free speech and pro-tolerant. But you can cherry-pick these things and you can write a survey so that you get these cynical results that make it seem like, because somebody has an opinion about the educational value of invited speakers of a certain extremist mindset, that must mean they're anti-free speech. So the anecdote, the individual polling result, and then, finally, very quickly, the common genre is to take a student who is in college or recently in college who identifies as conservative or libertarian and have them talk about how they felt on college campus, that they felt their views weren't listened to and so forth, and that they were shut down in class. Nobody else is interviewed. Student voices aren't interviewed. Faculty aren't interviewed. It's more almost a kind of quasi-religious narrative about how they were persecuted for their conservative or libertarian beliefs, and that'd be terrible for any student on a college campus. But if we're really going to analyze the state of the learning environment, let's have a rigorous look at what's actually going on in those circumstances, as opposed to that kind of anecdote-based self-reporting after the fact.

Matt Jordan: I'm curious why you think, beyond what you've just said, so many of these columnists at places like The Times or The Atlantic seem to just be obsessed with college campuses. I mean, do you think that there are pageview-related incentives for these publications to either cover reported stories or op eds about college campuses because they seem to think that it draws in more attention from their audience? Or does it feel primarily part of an ideological project?

Brad Vivian: In my sense, it's two words. It's money and status. So, an op ed writer, even for a major newspaper or magazine, the pay isn't that impressive. That is in some ways a basis for them to generate revenue and become an influential public figure in secondary ways.

And one of those ways is if you're going to become, say, like a Thomas Friedman, somebody who writes op eds but then publishes books and wants to make those bestselling books, you need to go on a book tour. And where are you going to go on a book tour? College campuses are major places. And so this idea that, particularly in the social media age, they might not be received as obligatory authorities on all subject matters, but students and faculty would push back to their narratives and argue with them, I think there's a kind of reaction on the part of what's been a relatively cloistered, elitist set of commentators, worried about their revenue, worried about being able to go in those book tours—so money, but also, then, the idea that if you, as somebody who has graduated from a leading journalism school and an Ivy League or an Ivy League competitor, and then worked your way up into the higher echelons of national media, I think this is in some ways a temptation to demonstrate, well, because I can talk about universities, that must mean I'm equally smart. And so, this is in some ways what a lot of people call an epistemic position in society. Faculty members, op ed writers, journalists, and so forth, they all want to be seen as having a certain amount of authority over the truth. But more and more people are getting university educations, and more and more people have access to media that allows them to contest these arguments in op ed spaces that, in some ways, are not very well-researched to begin with and cherry-picked. And I think that's a threat—they sense that as a threat to their livelihood, and they sense it as a threat to their status.

Matt Jordan: There seems to be a growing kind of right-wing media ecosystem that is littered with people who come from this place, this kind of have gone through this conversion narrative of somebody having teased them for something in college, and then they parlay that into a Substack or something like that. I'm thinking somebody like Bari Weiss, who came exactly from this milieu and then now is making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year self-publishing these types of pieces. And one of the things that seems to have become central to that ecosystem is a kind of right versus left or conservative versus liberal framing of everything.

In your book, you write about viewpoint diversity as being a place in the rhetoric and discourse on what goes on at universities as being where this kind of gets worked out. How has that worked? And maybe what do you see as an antidote to that?

Brad Vivian: So, the right-left framing is dominant. And this is also one of the ways in which a kind of super conservative viewpoint or perspective about universities has become dominant and pervasive. And I have to use, in conversations like this, the kind of conservative-liberal, right-left framing because it's become so dominant. But I always like to say, as an antidote, that is one of the worst ways in which you can try and assess what's taught, what's learned, the social intellectual climate of any given college campus or university. So, little of what we do comes down to either, well, in fact, there's no conservative or liberal ideas. There's just ideas, and we evaluate them based on evidence and persuasiveness of argument. So, I always try and bracket that out as something that's become naturalized but is super artificial. And it's the same play that a lot of hyper-partisan actors ran in US media and political journalism. And this is not any kind of innovative argument myself. W. Lance Bennett, a lot of media scholars for a long time have pointed out how poor the state of political journalism in our country is because they've willingly accepted this idea that everything comes from right and left, conservative-liberal talking points. So as opposed to just giving and evaluating information, you're already prepackaging it in super redundant, stereotypical ways that make the public actively less informed about how our political institutions function. So, I always stress the importance of just rejecting that whole question—our campus is liberal or conservative—as a question that is totally unproductive and misleading. But you're right. There's this larger vocabulary that's been introduced in order to obscure and maybe do a better, more pernicious job of disseminating these messages than even that right-left framing does. Viewpoint diversity is originally a concept that comes from some excellent social scientific academic research. If you want to understand how a business, how a religious community, how a civic organization operates, you want to understand what the circulation of viewpoints are. And there are people bringing fresh new ideas and perspectives there. So that's something you can study from an academic perspective. The problem is that exactly figures like Bari Weiss and attorney Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt have written the Bible on the viewpoint diversity concept in a much more polemical, opportunist way. They've taken that concept, and they've turned it into something where they're not studying diversity of viewpoint and organizations academically. They are polemically promoting a particular way to understand what viewpoint diversity is and should be. So, their argument, I think, is broadly representative. They say that affirmative action has gone far enough, our diversity measures on college campuses have gone far enough, and that in the interests of viewpoint diversity, we need to ratchet things back to looking primarily at people's sociopolitical orientations for admissions to college, the whole idea being that you want to basically achieve a right-left conservative-liberal balance, some kind of equanimity there. So, I always point out that's meant to be a pro-free speech argument, but it's pro-free speech or viewpoint diversity based on an extraordinarily narrow definition of what would count as meritorious perspectives on college campuses. It's also lazy. It's just a reduplication of that lazy left-right framing that has made our political journalism have so many problems. And it is in that way covertly censorious. It's a way of saying, we want less measures of what it means to have a meritorious perspective that you're bringing to a college campus. And let's just focus on these artificial stereotypes to the advantage of balancing out the one that's perceived to be lessening on campuses, conservative and libertarian.

Cory Barker: One of the things that I just notice as a news consumer is the intense focus surrounding these issues on Ivy League institutions and elite colleges. How does the mainstream news focus on that small number of institutions frame or influence how the public ultimately understands or misunderstands these issues?

Brad Vivian: Yeah, I think the Ivy League—it's not only a focus. I'd say it's nearly a fixation or an obsession. So why is that? Why is so much higher ed reporting skewed to Ivy League campuses?

And I think it's important to remember, for the listening public at large and such, that when we ask that question, we're asking it because the Ivy League is so extraordinarily unrepresentative of higher education in the United States. What's benefited the United States out of the higher education system we have, which includes thousands of community colleges, state systems, but also vocational schools, private religious schools, and so forth—what's benefited the nation writ large so well is that the diversity and decentralization and relative educational access for traditionally underserved populations has been historically one of our most successful drivers of upward social mobility in work and professions and so forth. The Ivy League, however, is enormously unrepresentative of that experiment. And I think why there's such fixation is because many of the leading journalists come from those schools. And many especially powerful political and business actors come from those schools. So, you have a kind of closed loop there where people think about what a university is instinctively, because that's where they're from, if they have a really influential public platform. The Ivy League is also really important because it does ineluctably set the agenda in some ways. It's not representative. But the research dollars that the federal government gives to colleges and universities to do amazing things with innovation that have benefited the republic, I think well over 90% of that goes to only a very small fraction of institutions, and most of them are Ivy League, so that when we hear the current presidential administration wants to cut federal funding to Harvard University by literally billions, it would be easy for the maybe untrained consumer of information to be struck short by, well, why do they have so many billions going to them?

It's because there have been long-ingrained pathways there. And so, there's a lot of very influential people that think about Ivy League campuses as being very influential and just important to the legal, political, and journalistic societies in the United States writ large.

Matt Jordan: One other way to think about it could be that there's a long kind of populist rhetorical tradition in the American experience of antipathy toward intellectual elites, that the egghead professor is the kind of anti-populist figure, and, whether it's in the movies of Capra or whatnot, that they're a suspect. And that kind of also feeds into this antagonism, or at least antagonistic mindset, that these narratives about the universities want to cultivate. And it's interesting that one of the things that you see in these stories, these hit pieces by op ed writers on universities, tends to be this fixation not only on the elite status, but also on vocabulary that doesn't seem plain spoken, a jargon, things like that. Do you think that all fits together as a part of this anti-intellectual, populist aesthetic that we're seeing become dominant in the news system?

Brad Vivian: I absolutely do. And misinformation, as I say in my book, is something that is a kind of narrative or argument that makes wild exaggerations and inferential leaps that aren't justified. But it originally comes from somewhere that has some truthful basis to it. And so, Ivy League institutions, in particular, are some of our most elitist institutions historically. Most of them predate the Declaration of Independence by a lot. So, they are more European-style universities, in some ways, that originally served aristocratic interests to a large degree. And they still do that. So, if you're familiar with the figure of Bill Ackman at Harvard university, he's leading a movement where we have alumni donors that come from these institutions, and they are millionaires and billionaires and business leaders, and they benefit enormously from their close relationships. So, they have a guarded interest in keeping those institutions, essentially the creators of their workforce, the people they're going to hire year over year. And they want a lot of control for that reason. So, yes, there's elitism that's a problem that's built into this. And then, in a larger sense, it is strange that in a diversified population and society like what we have when people axiomatically think of what a college campus is, they go to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, as opposed to a mid-level state school, which is much more representative. But to your deeper question, yes, I think the idea of what language do people use on college campuses, George Will had an op ed not too long ago in The Washington Post, and the premise was that there's all kinds of—his phrase was "weird speaking" going on university campuses.

I think this is, in a way, it's kind of proof that the university experiment aimed at greater egalitarianism and democratization in the US is kind of working to at least a degree insofar as, yeah, there are these conversations where people in universities have theoretical vocabularies that they use to probe various kinds of problems, and then they want to apply those vocabularies. They invent new ways of speaking in order to figure out the reality around them and to try and get some movement on intractable questions. And also, that's not just in the sciences, but that's in the humanities and social sciences to say that, for example, issues like structural racism—that's a real, empirically verifiable thing, or the idea that promoting women's rights is not just an ideological project, but it has all kinds of good economic and political benefits for a healthy, pluralistic society. So as those ways of talking about things work their way out in society, that's a measure that the experiment to some degree is working and having a positive impact. But I think in this day and age, that's why you get such aggressive blowback to those ways of speaking, because why should people talk like that? Why should they have these theories of politics or society or social justice? Just as average citizens, why don't they just be good, obedient workers? That seems to be a lot of the counter discourse, particularly in legislatures like Florida right now, to try and reseize universities for the purpose of not having people think for themselves and speak for themselves in new, creative, insightful ways, but to just slot into the factory assembly line, in essence.

Matt Jordan: Thinking about some of the topics we discuss a lot on this show, as you were answering that last question, I was thinking how some of this story is a story about the decline of local news. So we don't have as many strong local news outlets across the country in college towns or even in major metropolitan areas, so that the elite columnists or the folks who went to Ivies who work in the newsroom at The Times or The Post or The Atlantic, are the ones that get to set the agenda and create the discourse about what's happening in college campuses. And there's not quality reporting maybe happening in those communities as a result of some of the larger shifts that have happened in the news industry, right?

Brad Vivian: Mm-hmm. I think that's enormously important. And it's one reason that I'm kind of continually frustrated by the antipathy for universities that a lot of the major newspapers now seem to have, in their political journalism and in their op ed spaces, not in their very high-quality investigative reporting about higher ed, which has been there, but in the more revenue-generating, clickbaity kind of content. And I'm continually frustrated by that for the reason you cite, because rising authoritarian sentiment—the classic indicators that are always paired to some degree are attacks on universities and restrictions on the free press. And one of those restrictions that we've seen in the US has been operating at a low level. I'd call it a restriction, which is decreased opportunities for self-sustaining local, independent journalism. We have—and I'm no expert on this, but I think it's just true as an evident fact. Our information spaces are dominated by corporate-style large conglomerations of media outlets. They're not concerned primarily with the public interest. They're concerned primarily with their revenues. So, in that space. I think it's been kind of interesting. And I don't want to be overly optimistic, but I think something significant is happening right now when we see the current presidential administration and also state legislatures that have been moving very aggressively to defund university systems—they've been defunded for a while, but to really make them inoperative, in a sense. And you're starting to have some local journalistic reporting which notices, well, if you shut down this community college or this second- or third-level state school in a particular rural part of the country that's stereotypically conservative, that's going to hurt a lot of people's bottom lines beyond the university itself. So, I think we're in for some pain. But if I had a hope, I'd hope that that reality resonates through because a lot of these policies right now are being driven by the more elitist, Ivy League-oriented, politically elitist think tanks. And those think tanks, in a sense, like the Heritage Foundation, have handed over these policies to the administration to just decimate the Department of Higher Education, decimate all these programs in all parts of the country. And that think tank brain is meeting the economic reality, which is that in many parts of the country, colleges and universities are really essential economic engines, and mainly in rural spaces of the country.

Matt Jordan: Massive economic engines, to be sure. I mean, one of the things that people who study the decimation of local news talk about is how nature abhors a vacuum, and something will flow into the spaces that was once filled with stories that help people understand news where they live, the places they inhabit, the people they feel they belong to. And what we get instead is increasingly abstract spectacle. And I think that's what we have in relation to universities. These things are rarely tied to specific policies. They're rarely tied to anybody's actual experience, except for the conversion narrative of the person writing the hit piece. I work in a university. You work in a university. I teach a class on media and democracy. And the thing I stress in that class every day is that there are 20 sides to every issue once you start to get into the specifics. So, this attempt to keep things vague and abstract is also a way to keep things in this two-sided narrative that journalists are comfortable with. So, to me, one of the signs of having misinformation or reading misinformation is it's in this kind of vague abstraction that corresponds to a improvisational commedia dell'arte worldview. It's not tied to anything like empirical reality.

Brad Vivian: Absolutely. I always say that if you want to really probe a topic in a university setting or any educational setting, and promote actual diversity of viewpoints, the first step should be to stay away from any conservative-liberal framing. I teach routinely courses on the history of social and political discourse in the United States. And we deal with really contentious issues and controversial texts and so forth. And I never frame it according to, this is conservative, this is liberal as a perspective. I ask in that situation, why did this person make this argument, why did they adopt that language choices, and how did different constituencies absorb that information? So, yeah, there's a really dangerous idea, I think, that has taken hold, and it's kind of a two-sided danger. One, it's that we evaluate what colleges and universities are doing in the classroom, in faculty research, and in administrations by asking what their private political views are. Are they a conservative or liberal? That's patently McCarthyist. That doesn't have anything to do with anything. If I identify one way or another as a particular private political orientation, that doesn't mean anything about the decisions I'm making in a professional space. It's a massive non sequitur. But then, also, in terms of just educational content, what a university is for and what a healthy educational space is for, in my view, is to get away from those presuppositions, to get away from modes of communication and decision-making and thought in which you are obligated to only think within a narrow set of stereotypical boxes. Authoritarian systems love that because they can say, here's the person with the right views, here's the person with the wrong views, and we all fit things in those nice conformist boxes neatly. The university setting should be the antidote and the opposite to that circumstance.

Matt Jordan: To think more about what's going on right now with the Trump administration's efforts to defund and attack higher education, how would you say misinformation has played a key role in the lead-up to that process and even since Trump retook the White House this year?

Brad Vivian: Well, we're a decade-plus into some really popular misinformation about campuses and the ways that we've described in the media spaces with the types of tropes and so forth. And so, what's been, I think, helpful to the current administration's really aggressive political attack on academic freedom and university systems is the idea that that kind of, again, what I call this kind of latent McCarthyism has become a popular way of talking about universities. And many different institutions and media figures, and even some academics themselves, have combined to make the mainstream centrist view of universities into the following. It's that universities, they somehow should be punished, they've gone too far, they've failed, and so forth. All of this comes at a time when a healthy understanding of the evidence indicates it's completely the opposite picture. Universities have never been as decentralized as they are now in many ways, never as diverse, never as open to true meritorious diversity of thought and academic pursuits. So, in some ways, it's the meeting of two significant factors then—one, the idea that, again, just cynicism about universities and wanting to punish them has become popular. But that's meeting in the middle with this longstanding, hyper-partisan set of think tanks and private political operatives who see universities as competition, who see universities in the kind of decentralized, more equal-access model that we have now as obstacles to their power and authority. And it's no surprise, then, that I think that the current Trump administration has been so embraced by Amazon, by Google, by Apple, Elon Musk's companies, because these are companies where the economic model, if I understand correctly, is to continually take up territory, to absorb other smaller companies, quickly refashion them for large profits, and then move on to the next thing. And so, the workforce there that you want is one that's not university-trained. It's pliable. It's super dependent on the largesse of the billionaire-owned company and is not going to be unionized, for example, is not going to think in terms of larger civic interests, but just in terms of the economic bottom line. And these are even companies that are paying people not to go to university. They're diving into university recruit pools at leading institutions like Stanford, for example, and saying, come work for us for a lot of money. Actively don't go to university. So I think that kind of political movement and the popularization of anti-university sentiment now has a set of powerful corporate political actors that really want to make that idea that you don't need a university education, you won't benefit from it, much more of a reality, at a time when, again, that's an indicator, in some ways, that the expansion of higher education to more of the US population than ever before has been successful to a certain degree in destabilizing those hierarchies.

Matt Jordan: So, one thing I'm always thinking about is the reporting on the university as kind of piecemeal or a symptom of the reporting on general reality. Is it just the application of that? And something that has—you mentioned a second ago, which is that there's a kind of drive for centrism in reporting on the university. And I've been struck, just having read the Chronicle of Higher Education for years, how many academics actually adopt the language that the polemicists use. How do you understand that adoption of these—what seem to me bad faith frames by people in the news, especially in higher education news?

Brad Vivian: So, if we're thinking of the fact that a lot of really high-placed journalists and op ed writers come from a higher education in some very privileged spaces, and so maybe they're working out their issues with higher ed and their experiences in op ed format. Then I think the same thing, to a certain degree, is going on with professors and academics who are joining this anti-university rhetorical chorus. So, for example, Bret Stephens, the columnist in The New York Times, has an op ed that I go back to a lot, which talks about how nobody teaches constructive disagreement on college campuses anymore. And, of course, it's framed by his experience at the University of Chicago. So, I think a similar thing is going on with particularly a class of academics who are now in certain disciplines and who are of a certain age and status, who fear a loss of status and a loss of privilege and authority, with an increasingly diversified, more merit-based—not fully merit-based, but more merit-based educational space in universities.

If you think of a lot of the very prominent academics who have taken on a lot of this rhetoric saying university students are coddled, they're not open to free speech and diverse viewpoints, they are from a certain set of disciplines which weigh heavily on, in some ways, kind of a social Darwinist model of social psychology. It's to say that undergraduate students and certain newer faculty populations—people of color, women, and so forth—are not as resilient as others. They're not tough enough to hear dissenting viewpoints and such. So, I think that we're literally living through a time, if you consider somebody who maybe got their university degree and became a professor as a young person in the 1980s, and now they're in the senior professor ranks and such, they've seen a lot of change and potentially a lot of loss of status. In many ways, it's harder now to get tenure than it was. It's harder to earn an undergraduate degree. And you have a lot more competition for your ideas. So, if you were in a traditional educational space in a lane which was sort of academically conservative for a long time, and you didn't have a lot of pushback on the kind of research you did or competition and such, but now over the last 10 to 20 years, you're probably experiencing a lot. And life is very different in terms of those university hierarchies. So, I think the idea of the academics, that we might be familiar with creating these podcasts and going on these media tours and writing these books about the university as a failure and not open to their ideas and so forth, that's a way of working out their issues with the university. But I think it's probably an irresistible opportunity to become more wealthy and prominent. And the paradigmatic example of this is Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson was a Canadian social psychologist, and I think his academic work was regarded as fine. But he was not particularly prominent. He became an international celebrity and apparently, according to some op ed writers, a leading public intellectual, not for his academic work, but because he got famous in a YouTube video, taking it upon himself to go out and debate trans students in the square of the University of Toronto on the quad. And everything flowed from there, where he became a kind of life guru. This is not academic work, but he's using now that kind of revenue stream and platform in order to generate all this negative messaging. And I think he's sort of a model that many academics have followed.

Matt Jordan: And there's certainly something to that kind of feedback loop of digital and social media, where, if some of these columnists or figures are posting op eds or doing podcasts or just posting on social media, and then they get kind of negative feedback for their opinions, that is a great example or an opportunity for them to say, well, this proves my point. You're not willing to listen to diverse voices or different viewpoints because you're telling me I'm an idiot on Twitter or whatever. And that further just reaffirms not only their viewpoints, but their potential runway for speaking engagements or future anecdote-driven op ed columns, right?

Brad Vivian: I think that's true. I mean, I think free speech is a push and pull. It's a competition. It's argument, counterargument, and it's even very much about contesting other people's norms of speech so that when you say, you probably shouldn't be using that language because it's not constructive or it's discriminatory and so forth, that's a form of free speech. That's not a broad anti-free speech view. And I think universities, then, are one of these places in the intersection with what we call social media, where we are absolutely, in this time and place in our country, our society, working out norms of speech. There's been a democratization of knowledge. People are speaking in different ways from different walks of life. And we get these meeting places for all those messages in public information, in social media, but also in universities. So, the fact that you have some friction and contesting of boundaries—and maybe, yes, some people who are contesting and using protest rights are absolutely not being constructive. And many people are bad actors in these spaces. But the idea that you would encounter dissenting viewpoints or you would encounter protest against your speech is not prima facie evidence that people are against free speech in general or that you can call an entire generation of undergraduate students pathologically coddled and so forth. Those are not responsible, healthy, mature, professional ways in which to deal with that friction of democratic speech and its evolution.

Matt Jordan: Well, Brad, this has been really helpful in terms of helping us understand what are the signs and symptoms of bad faith misinformation in the university. And we want to thank you for speaking with us today.

Brad Vivian: Well, thanks for the invitation. I appreciate it.

Cory Barker: Well, Matt, I think that was a really great conversation with Brad—a lot of compelling thoughts about the role of misinformation and how it impacts the modern university and trickles out into our broader culture. What's your biggest takeaway from that chat?

Matt Jordan: Well, we both work at universities. And things that always strike me in reading about what supposedly is going on in the university is how divorced they are from reality, how, really, what we see on the university campuses every day are students’ kind of exploring knowledge and not talking about things left-right, Republican-Democrat. They're talking about anthropology or engineering. They're not at all doing what the op ed hit pieces claim they are. So, it makes me think that in relative terms, the backlash against universities is a sign of how what we're doing is working.

Cory Barker: Yeah, that's a great point. And I think one of the things that came up a few times as well is just for us, the way in which some of the declines in local news and the challenges that reporters and journalists are facing, that this is kind of a story about that as well, that we have an environment of dominant mainstream news organizations like The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, that have op ed writers that really focus on this stuff that are from elite institutions, that focus on those elite institutions. And the stories of what is happening at all types of other college campuses across the country is not necessarily being told, because there's not always people in those areas to tell those stories. And that's a really important thing to remember as well.

Matt Jordan: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Dr. Brad Vivian, a professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State. To learn more, visit newsovernoise.org. I'm Matt Jordan.

Cory Barker: And I'm Cory Barker.

Matt Jordan: Until next time, stay well and well informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.

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