Your bag is empty.
If you were to listen solely to Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, you might be inclined to believe America’s educational institutions are in the grip of a full-blown free-speech crisis. The refrain is familiar: Colleges, once hailed as bastions of free expression and open debate, are devolving into insular safe spaces where liberal professors coddle students with trigger warnings as right-of- center speakers are chased off campus by hordes of intolerant, indoctrinated snowflakes. Recent studies, however, suggest otherwise. Of note, a 2016 Knight Foundation survey found college students who support speech restrictions on campus are outnumbered more than two to one by those who don’t.
That said, a threat to the free expression of ideas at colleges and universities is looming, but it isn’t coming from students, professors or leftist indoctrination. It’s coming from organizations that fund a so-called “free speech” movement that aims to exploit on-campus confrontations for political gain. With campuses doubling as breeding grounds for the next generation of political leaders, a network of right-wing groups has ramped up their targeting of these institutions to further sow national discord and inject conservative ideology into student groups and campus culture. At the same time, they support legislation that shuts down any pushback.
One of the most prominent players is Young America’s Foundation, which spent more than 8 million on campus events in 2015. Described as a “conservative youth organization” that seeks to “restore sanity” on college campuses, YAF has been a fixture of the mainstream conservative movement for nearly half a century. Author Ann Coulter, White House senior policy advisor Stephen Miller and National Rifle Association senior advisor Chuck Cunningham are all part of the YAF network.
Under the guise of free speech, right-wing donors are pumping millions into an orchestrated effort to force their political agenda onto college campuses.
Between 2005 and 2015, YAF spent more than 50 million on campus speaking events. In 2016 the group funded 111 speakers on 77 campuses nationwide. As it operates nationally, YAF has made a name for itself by deploying controversial public figures—from anti-Islam hard-liners such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and David Horowitz to mainstream conservative figures such as Ben Shapiro and Rick Santorum—to speak on liberal campuses, knowing it could provoke a backlash that can later be exploited as “proof” of a free-speech crisis.
In addition to paying for speakers, YAF coordinates with campus organizations to host “free speech” events and sponsor “boot camps” where students are taught to confront liberal classmates and professors with aggressive tactics. These activities earned at least one university-based YAF chapter, at Michigan State University, the official designation of a hate group—the only student hate group in the country. The chapter was designated as such for hosting white-supremacist speakers, organizing a “Koran desecration contest” and creating “Catch an Illegal Alien Day.”
While YAF may be the most well funded and deeply connected of the conservative groups participating in the campus free-speech wars, it isn’t the only one. The Leadership Institute positions itself as an activism-centered group that trains foot soldiers, or Campus Correspondents. The organization is linked to James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, which tried to discredit sexual-harassment allegations against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in 2017 by providing false testimony to The Washington Post. According to a letter penned by O’Keefe requesting donations, the Leadership Institute’s Campus Correspondents are “freedom fighters” tasked with learning “how to defeat the radical left.” They seek to “bring down professors and school officials,” “stop the advance” of “dangerous leftism dead in its tracks” and “fight back against” the “growing insanity” of liberalism on campus “before it destroys our country.” The institute also runs the Campus Reform project, which calls itself a “watchdog to the nation’s higher education system” focused on “exposing bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses.” On its website, Campus Reform enthusiastically recruits students to join it in fighting back against the “evil empire” of leftism in higher education.
Turning Point USA, which brands itself as a “24/7-365 activist organization,” is another key player in the battle to redefine free speech on campus. The group, led by communications director Candace Owens, has been accused of organizing staged confrontations. It has launched Professor Watchlist, a database of professors tracked for their supposed liberal or leftist ideologies. Professors have reportedly faced harassment, threats and calls for their dismissal after being added to the list.
In a cynical twist, the same conservative donors backing these organizations are also pouring money into efforts to stifle campus dissent, with such investments already paying off in the form of draconian anti-free-speech legislation. In the first few months of 2017 alone, Republican lawmakers in at least eight states introduced so-called campus free-speech bills that prohibit students from engaging in protest in a way that “disrupts” the speech of anyone who has been invited to speak on campus. By March 2018, similar bills had been introduced in at least 16 states, half of which have already passed. In total, 25 states have introduced legislation purporting to protect free speech on campus by cracking down on student protests, encouraging harsh punishment for banned categories of protest and mandating how universities deal with issues related to hate speech and harassment.
Many of these states have passed legislation based on a model bill, the Campus Free Speech Act, designed by the Goldwater Institute. The organization is bankrolled by the Koch brothers and the Mercer family, two of the country’s most prominent megadonors, and the legislation’s implications are chilling. In states where the model bill is passed, colleges can impose academic and legal sanctions on student protesters for “shouting down” a speaker or engaging in other expressive acts , including chanting and singing , during demonstrations. In Wisconsin, which passed a particularly harsh version of the bill, students who are found to have disrupted the free expression of another person (including non-members of the university) can be expelled after a third strike. The model legislation also seeks to effectively force universities to allow any and all speakers on campus and prevent administrators from disinviting speakers.
Under the guise of free speech, conservative donors are pumping millions into an orchestrated effort to force their political agenda onto college campuses. And when they run into pushback, they cynically accuse their critics of censorship and cite it as evidence of a free-speech “crisis.” In fact, it exists only because they manufactured it. So yes, free speech on campus is facing a reckoning. But as with all things political, one need only follow the money to find the real threat.
This article appears in the Winter 2019 PLAYBOY.