In a 1962 debate with Malcolm X on the campus of Cornell University, the great debater and civil rights activist James Farmer Jr. made a strong case against segregation.
“The disease and the evils that we have pointed to in our American culture have grown out of segregation and its partner, prejudice,” he argued. “We are for integration, which is the repudiation of the evil of segregation. … We are working for the right of Negroes to enter all fields of activity in American life. To enter business if they choose, to enter the professions, to enter the sciences, to enter the arts, to enter the academic world. To be workers, to be laborers if they choose. Our objective is to have each individual accepted on the basis of his individual merit and not on the basis of his color. On the basis of what he is worth himself.”
Farmer’s goal of abolishing racial segregation was largely realized in the 1960s, yet we are today experiencing a renewed sense of segregation characterized by hatred.
Today, our college campuses have become hotbeds of a Red/Blue ideological segregation that is tearing our society apart. Colleges and universities lie at the heart of this sublimated civil war, and studies of American faculty reveal the harsh realities of this dangerous partisanship.
A 2018 study by the National Association of Scholars examined the political affiliations in various disciplines at 40 top universities in the nation. In not a single discipline, did they find a preponderance of registered Republicans. In fact, overwhelmingly ratios ranged in most disciplines between 5 to 1 to 50 to 1.
And American college students are not immersed in a liberal bias, they are immersed in propaganda. Liberalism as a backbone of American collegiate education was banished in the 1990s. Today’s students find themselves aligning with behaviors such as those orchestrated by the administration of Oberlin College, which shortly after President Trump’s election incited its student body to believe that a local business was profoundly racist.
Oberlin’s misconduct is not unusual, and it invites the question of how this problem became so severe. Professor Jason Hill of Depaul University sees the crisis as so severe in his 2018 book, We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People, that he urges that all universities be shut down.
The book brilliantly details the severity and depth of our educational crisis. How have we come to this crisis of propaganda on our campuses?
The NAS study gives some insight. There were two disciplines where the researchers could not find a single faculty member registered as a Republican: anthropology and communication. Communication was the worst, with a ratio of 108 to 0. Is it a coincidence that one of the nation’s most popular majors, communication, has become thoroughly reactionary with regard to politics? No. A concerted ideological project devastated one of the most important areas of study at colleges and universities. Public speaking, critical thinking, and argumentation, once bedrocks of this field of communication, have given way to critical theory and identity politics.
This past month, two former presidents of the National Communication Association, the primary professional association of the communication field, resigned in protest over the internet annihilation of a major scholar in the field, Marty Medhurst. Medhurst had posted in a professional online forum the draft of an editorial in favor of more merit-based and less identity-based assessments of scholarship. This was thoroughly scolded by his fellow communication scholars as an expression of his “white privilege.”
The former presidents who wrote letters resigning from the organization were hardly conservative or Republican. A concerted Jacobin culture descended upon the field of communication decades ago, and now free speech is viewed with disdain in a discipline that ought to view it as the sacred flame of its activities.
It is not, however, unusual for the communications major to be among the top five most popular majors on campus. It is the communications discipline that has over decades pioneered most of the linguistic traps that allow Americans to call one another racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and, yes, a never ending litany of identity-based accusations.
There is nothing in the surveys of political public anxiety that makes Americans more upset on a bipartisan basis than “political correctness.” This nightmare is understood by almost all Americans and is surprisingly bipartisan as a source of civic heartburn. Organizations such as FIRE and NAS have highlighted the severity of the problem, and yet the question of what should be done is not answered so easily.
How can we save our society from this neo-segregationist impulse seizing our academic citadels? Should we shut them all down as professor Hill suggests? The great debater James Farmer Jr. provides a useful model that was not much noticed in the 1960s success: Freedom Schools.
Farmer’s organization, CORE, along with other civil rights organizations, collaborated to bring Freedom Schools to the South and dignify the education of black children in Mississippi.
We should, in the spirit of Freedom Schools, start new Communication Schools on college campuses comparable to the business schools or arts schools that many already have. These communication schools should specifically repudiate the reactionary politics now common in communication faculty and bring together ideologically diverse viewpoints.
And yes, this would include faculty who appreciate President Trump and other Republican presidents. These schools should not be reactionary and form a “conservative” alternative but rather they should enact and demonstrate debate and argumentation of major ideas across the political spectrum. This is the debate pedagogy that transformed the lives of key civil rights leaders including: Medgar Evers, James Meredith, Malcolm X, James Farmer Jr., and even Martin Luther King.
Debate and reason are dying on college campuses as a result of political correctness, as the successful lawsuit against Oberlin spelled out. More suits will follow, and academia must respond constructively or our nation will lose the profound moral leadership we hold worldwide with our higher education system. The time for Freedom Schools is now.
Ben Voth is an associate professor of Corporate Communication and Public Affairs and director of debate at Southern Methodist University.
