When hundreds of torch-wielding white supremacists ended up on the University of Virginia campus last August, it wasn’t because they were lost.
The public university was an easy target for a group of far-right-wingers who wanted to take the fight to the heart of Blue America. They would use guerrilla tactics against an institution that, while powerful, was unlikely to mount much resistance.
After all, who would try to stop them? This was a public campus, not a military compound. The marchers had a right to be there. They also had a right to shout Nazi slogans against the backdrop of a campus that had embraced the rhetoric of diversity and tolerance. Indeed, some of the enduring images from that infamous weekend in Charlottesville show torch-wielding nationalists menacing a small group of UVa students and officials in the shadow of a statue of the free-speech icon Thomas Jefferson.
Campuses have become targets of the political right, attacked both by fringe groups and by mainstream Republicans. Instances of white-supremacist propaganda appearing at colleges more than tripled in the year after the 2016 presidential election. Less extreme right-wing forces, from state lawmakers to the U.S. Justice Department, have also taken aim at campuses. At a time when labor unions are weak and Republicans control the federal government and most statehouses and governorships, conservatives have set their sights on the last castles of liberal power.
The new federal tax on large endowments is an example of a more genteel raid on colleges, according to John Kroger, the departing president of Reed College. “It was included not because it raises significant revenue,” he told The Chronicle, “but because Republicans in Congress wanted to punish America’s elite colleges and universities, which they perceive to be too liberal.”
That is not a new complaint. Conservatives for years have groused about professors “indoctrinating” impressionable students. Lynne V. Cheney, president of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993, made a habit of lamenting the liberal slant of college classrooms, and conservative thinkers have spent decades sounding the alarm about campus “speech codes.”
Those concerns seem to be resonating with more people of late. Since 2015, the shift in public opinion has been striking. According to survey data from the Pew Research Center, that’s when Republican and right-leaning independent voters began losing confidence in the idea that colleges were pushing America in the right direction. Last summer, 58 percent of them said that colleges “have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country.” A Gallup poll around the same time found that right-leaning respondents tended not to have a lot of confidence in colleges. Many of them pointed to liberal bias as the reason.
Now, emboldened by a president and an attorney general who share their disdain for what they see as political correctness, Republican lawmakers and activists are pouncing.
Take Turning Point USA. The nonprofit, founded in 2012, has been funneling money from Republican donors to conservative students as part of a plan to seize control of student governments at large universities. According to a brochure for the organization’s donors, obtained by The New Yorker, Turning Point’s plan is to pack student governments at major public universities with representatives who will agree to defund progressive student organizations and impose rules that will curtail the power of liberal campus activists.
Some media organizations have also turned their sights on colleges. Campus Reform, the news arm of the Leadership Institute, another nonprofit devoted to conservative activism, has enlisted dozens of students to report stories about colleges requiring students to take diversity courses, creating special accommodations for LGBTQ students and other minority groups, and trying to stifle conservative speakers. Campus Reform, along with another website, The College Fix, are at the mouth of a pipeline that often leads through the websites Infowars, The Gateway Pundit, and Breitbart, all the way up to Fox News. That network of watchdogs and pundits, known to some in higher education as “the outrage machine,” can rally a college’s neighbors and alumni if its students or professors run afoul of their politics.
Some colleges have taken this moment to reflect on how they may have failed to communicate all the ways in which their programs help communities beyond the campus. “I thought about this a lot,” says Elizabeth Kiss, president of Agnes Scott College, in Georgia. “What can we be doing that we’re not doing to build better relationships?” She becomes frustrated when her college’s efforts to improve access and opportunity go unrecognized. Some 44 percent of Agnes Scott students are Pell Grant recipients, and half are from Georgia, she says. “We’re an economic asset,” she says. “Somehow we’re not getting that point across.” Alas, critics seem more impressed by stories about how colleges try to turn students into left-wing “snowflakes” once they get there.
Those stories are abundant, and it’s no accident. Conservative pundits may sometimes sensationalize individual stories of left-wing bullying, but survey data show that college professors are more liberal than they used to be, and even routine examples of campus activism can feel deeply offensive to some people watching at home.
That is especially true in states where the political mood is broadly conservative. In Nebraska, the flagship public university came under fire after a conservative student tried to recruit classmates to join a new chapter of Turning Point. A graduate student who was also an instructor at the university protested at her recruiting table with rude gestures and comments and a sign saying, “Just say NO! to neo-fascism.” Campus Reform covered it, then so did everyone else. State lawmakers were furious. The governor weighed in. The university, fearing budget cuts, was forced to play defense.
Amid the maelstrom, the director of a conservative group called Nebraska Taxpayers for Freedom sent the university a list of suggested cuts that might appease its critics. Among the suggestions: defunding women’s- and ethnic-studies programs, along with positions devoted to diversity and multiculturalism.
Why cut those programs? To eliminate waste.
Steve Kolowich writes about ordinary people in extraordinary times, and extraordinary people in ordinary times. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.
