Koch's Campus Free Speech Ploy.

• Author: Wilson, Ralph
• Position: BOOK EXCERPT

From Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War by Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola (Pluto Press). Excerpted with permission. Publication date: November 20, 2021.

See a review of Free Speech and Koch Money by Eleanor]. Bader on our website, Progressive.org.

When people raise concerns that college campuses are hostile to conservative and libertarian perspectives, they often point to the same small handful of dramatic clashes over free speech.

In February 2017, a riot shut down Milo Yiannopoulos's visit to the University of California, Berkeley. The following month, protestors prevented Charles Murray from speaking at Middlebury College. Far-right personalities, including David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, Laura Ingraham, Richard Spencer, Candace Owens, Gavin McInnes, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Heather Mac Donald have faced protests on college campuses, or have been disinvited.

At Yale, students protested a professor who challenged an email from the administration requesting that students refrain from insensitive Halloween costumes. Students protested a faculty member at Evergreen State College who derided a request that white students and faculty vacate campus for the day. These and other campus free speech incidents received considerable national--and sometimes international--attention, woven together as evidence of rampant leftwing "political correctness" and "cancel culture" in higher education.

Administrators, some faculty, and public commentators seem engaged in a collective hand-wringing over the needs of aggrieved conservative college students, who claim that their right to free speech is being violated in the name of identity politics, political correctness, safe spaces, and preventing microaggressions.

These examples are taken as evidence that American colleges and universities are openly "leftist," hostile to conservative ideas, and eager to trample over the speech of those with whom they disagree. This narrative about a so-called free speech crisis helps justify the political claim that colleges and universities are primarily sites of political indoctrination and all too willing participants in a broader culture war against conservatives. It also fuels conservatives' blank opposition toward the kinds of higher education-focused policymaking and funding initiatives which used to garner more bipartisan support.

Beyond these same, oft-cited anecdotal examples, there is very little evidence that conservative...