The Two Sides of the Free-Speech ‘Crisis,’ in One Fox News Broadcast

Two major arguments have emerged in recent years as to the true nature of the campus free-speech “crisis.” Many conservatives have long argued that liberal criticism of controversial speakers chills the climate for speech. Some liberals and academics counter that professors who’ve become the targets of the right-wing news media for their speech are the real victims.

In her Fox News show on Thursday, Laura Ingraham managed to demonstrate both sides of the debate in the span of half an hour.

The host began The Ingraham Angle by talking about the birth of the college free-speech movement, in 1964, at the University of California at Berkeley. “Fifty-five years later,” she said, “free speech is more dead than alive at places like UC-Berkeley.”

Ingraham then played several clips, including one of Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative filmmaker and far-right instigator, being shouted at while speaking at Michigan State University, and one of Rutgers University students protesting Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. secretary of state, when she was scheduled to deliver the commencement address in 2014.

Liberals “dominate every aspect of university life,” Ingraham said, echoing a common conservative critique of American higher education. She then praised President Trump’s executive order on Thursday about free speech on college campuses.

That’s the conservative argument.

But later in the show, Ingraham attacked the views of two new instructors at New York University, as a headline appeared on the screen: “NYU Hires Radical Anti-Conservatives to Teach Journalism Courses.”

Ingraham and D’Souza chastised NYU for employing the two freelance journalists, Talia Lavin and Lauren Duca, in its journalism school. Lavin is an adjunct faculty member who will teach a fall course called “Reporting on the Far Right,” and Duca is a visiting scholar who will teach a summer course called “The Feminist Journalist,” according to the journalism school’s website.

D’Souza said Lavin had been “kicked out of journalism.” She resigned last year from her job as a fact-checker at The New Yorker after she posted, then deleted, photos on Twitter mistakenly implying that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent had a Nazi tattoo, news outlets reported at the time.

Fox News is the most-watched network on basic cable. Its viewers are loyal, Ingraham said, because “we refuse to bow, we refuse to cave in to these kind of terroristic tactics, and that’s what they are.”

“They’re little journo-terrorists,” Ingraham said, seeming to refer to Lavin and liberal journalists in general.

What Ingraham did “is insane,” Lavin wrote on Twitter. Describing herself, Lavin said she is a 29-year-old without a full-time job who is teaching one course, for $7,000, as an adjunct. Ingraham’s broadcast, Lavin said, was “irresponsible. It is incitement. It is not OK.”

“Perhaps I frighten her because I write critically about white nationalism,” Lavin wrote, “but I am a nonviolent and quite kind person who is now actively worried about her incitement of violence against me.”

The Ingraham show, and Lavin’s tweets, caught the attention of academics and journalists alike, who rebuked the Fox News host for using her platform against Lavin and Duca. “They’re not full-time faculty, they’re not making boatloads of cash. They’re teaching a couple of electives,” Parker Molloy, editor at large of Media Matters, said on Twitter. “Ingraham just put a target on their backs.”

It was “an incredibly immoral” thing for Ingraham to do, Adam L. Penenberg, director of undergraduate studies in the NYU journalism school, said in a phone interview. Duca and Lavin are young, female journalists who already get death threats and online harassment at an alarming rate, he added, and Ingraham stoked the flames.

Some scholars have lampooned the conservative narrative of a free-speech crisis on campus. Rather, they say, conservative student organizations like Turning Point USA and Campus Reform churn out talking points when they think a conservative professor is being censored. Meanwhile, liberal faculty members get placed on websites like the Professor Watchlist and become targets of online harassment.

Last year Jeffrey Adam Sachs, a professor of political science at Acadia University, in Canada, examined 45 incidents from 2015 to 2017 in which professors were fired, suspended, or otherwise punished, The Chronicle reported. Of the 26 he found in 2017, for example, 19 had made liberal comments. He added the caveat that the finding makes sense given that faculty members are likelier to lean liberal.

In an article for The Washington Post, Sachs made the case that there is no campus free-speech crisis. It’s a myth that young people don’t support free speech, he wrote, and that colleges make them even more intolerant to offensive speech. “Most universities,” he argued, “are not the ideological safe spaces their critics imagine.”

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.