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.
The Koch political operation has historically created phony grassroots movements on behalf of cigarette manufacturers and oil companies to insist that the public hears the “other side” of the story, arguing that free speech requires that smokers and climate change deniers receive the same attention as public health officials and climate scientists.
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 and libertarian voices are routinely stifled on college campuses. Georgetown University’s Free Speech Project identified only sixty cases of speech violations on campuses between 2016 and 2018; with 4,583 colleges and universities in the United States, a serious violation of speech takes place on 0.65 percent of campuses each year. It turns out that the imposition of safe spaces, speech codes, and trigger warnings has been dramatically overstated.
The majority of college students express support for free speech. And some college campuses are more tolerant of conservative ideas than society as a whole. Far from suffering leftwing brainwashing, students rarely feel pressured to change their political views based on ideas expressed by their professors. If anything, some evidence suggests that conservative faculty have more influence in swaying students than liberal faculty do.
Furthermore, some studies have suggested that it is more common for professors on the left—especially those who publicly criticize racism, sexism, homophobia, or who support Palestine—to find themselves threatened, harassed, and even fired. Higher education has long been the home of heated debates about free speech, free expression, and academic freedom. Colleges and universities have also proven to be productive places for contestations to be articulated, debated, and challenged. Examples of conservative voices being stifled do exist. But much of the contemporary outrage over a full-blown, nationwide campus free speech crisis has been largely manufactured as part of a well-funded and well-organized political strategy.
Furthermore, this tactic of manufacturing a campus free speech crisis originates with the same funders, organizations, intellectuals, ideologues, and political operatives that form the core of the libertarian right. Wealthy, hard-right libertarian donors within the network built by Charles Koch, the chief executive officer of Koch Industries, have spent the past half century constructing a dense network of political organizations that seeks to make society align with their free-market fundamentalist views.
Over the past five decades, a range of organizations funded by Koch and likeminded donors have worked in close collaboration to undermine environmental, health, and labor regulations, attack unions, privatize education, reduce taxation for the rich, and dismantle the social safety net. This strategy has involved gaining greater footholds on college and university campuses, understood by libertarian donors and activists as strategic beachheads from which to train experts, legitimize their worldview, and recruit student activists into their political machinery. This plutocratic libertarian class sees university campuses as critical to its strategy for social change and as a pipeline of ideas and talent.
It is not surprising, then, that organizations created by the Koch donor network are also largely responsible for manufacturing the so-called campus free speech crisis.
In debating “both sides” of the ethical and Constitutional questions around particular issues of campus speech, most commentators ask some version of “Should Milo Yiannopoulos or Charles Murray be allowed to speak on campus?” or “Should students be prevented from disrupting their talks?”
These are important ethical, intellectual, and political questions upon which reasonable people can disagree. However, we instead ask: “How did these speakers end up at Berkeley and Middlebury in the first place?” This latter question does not settle the former. However, it does uncover the power and wealth that forces the public to obsess over those first questions. It also reveals the infrastructure that created a highly political framework for interpreting these controversies.
Much of the free speech movement on college campuses is driven by the Koch donor network. What often appears as spontaneous local outrage is actually the product of a larger strategy deployed by well-organized libertarian donors. The Koch donor network funds the student groups that bring provocative speakers to campus, as well as the careers of the speakers themselves. It funds the media outlets that amplify the outrage over protests as well as the lawyers who sue universities for denying the speakers platforms on campus. It even funds the politicians who pass campus free speech legislation that seeks to punish student protestors, as well as the academic centers and institutes in which allied faculty help instigate and leverage the looming free speech threat.
Indeed, the broader political operation funded by the Koch donor network has an extensive track record of weaponizing free speech arguments more generally. Its members have long used the First Amendment to push back against civil rights, environmental and consumer protections, government regulation, and labor unions.
Free speech arguments have been used to justify policies that shield wealthy political donors from campaign finance limits and transparency requirements, thereby maximizing their influence on the political process. For example, the Koch political operation has historically created phony grassroots movements on behalf of cigarette manufacturers and oil companies to insist that the public hears the “other side” of the story, arguing that free speech requires that smokers and climate change deniers receive the same attention as public health officials and climate scientists.
Universities are central to the plutocratic libertarian project. They have also proven more resistant to donor control and influence than other organizations. Wealthy donors can easily gin up a tax-deductible nonprofit organization committed to advocating climate denial or grooming the next generation of libertarian judges.
However, norms around academic freedom, peer review, and faculty governance make it more difficult to persuade universities to generate research and train talent that legitimizes a specific ideological worldview. In this more challenging setting, free speech, combined with a narrative about the silencing of conservative voices, has become a political cudgel that donors have used to justify greater donor access to higher education.
This helps explain why the Koch donor network has adopted the tactic of first provoking, and then leveraging, an illusory free speech crisis to gain greater say over who teaches, researches, and speaks on college campuses. It’s ingenious, we must admit: a kind of jujitsu that enlists a core value of higher education—free inquiry—in order to crack open universities for corporate capture.
Navigating the complex intersection of free speech, academic freedom, campus safety, and institutional inclusion is not easy. What speech crosses the line? Who determines this? How does an institution protect a wide range of speech while also making sure that all students and faculty feel included and welcome within the campus community?
These are difficult questions, especially in a deeply divided country. Asking these questions by themselves, however, also misses the fact that the growing outrage over free speech on campus is not a concern necessarily organic to the schools in question. It was—and is—intentional and manufactured.
Therefore, rather than litigating specific thorny speech issues on particular campuses, we propose that students, faculty, administrators, journalists, activists, and the broader public start by following the money. In doing so, we find, not a free marketplace of ideas, where all are equal, but rather a well-funded project to reproduce power, hierarchy, and exclusion.
As P.E. Moskowitz points out, free speech is often used as a “smokescreen . . . in a grossly unequal society, in which a few corporations control the means of media dissemination and a small group of the ultra-wealthy bankroll entire political movements.” The same, unfortunately, is now true on college campuses.