Campus Misinformation

An incisive examination of how pundits and politicians manufactured the campus free speech crisis—and created a genuine challenge to academic freedom in the process.If we listen to the politicians and pundits, college campuses have become fiercely ideological spaces where students unthinkingly endorse a liberal orthodoxy and forcibly silence anyone who dares to disagree. These commentators lament the demise of free speech and academic freedom. But what is really happening on college campuses?Campus Misinformation shows how misinformation about colleges and universities has proliferated in recent years, with potentially dangerous results. Popular but highly misleading claims about a so-called free speech crisis and a lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses emerged in the mid-2010s and continue to shape public discourse about higher education across party lines. Such disingenuous claims impede constructive deliberation about higher learning while normalizingsuspect ideas about First Amendment freedoms and democratic participation.Taking a non-partisan approach, Bradford Vivian argues that reporting on campus culture has grossly exaggerated the importance and representativeness of a small number of isolated events; misleadingly advocated for an artificial parity between liberals and conservatives as true viewpoint diversity; mischaracterized the use of trigger warnings and safe spaces; and purposefully confused critique and protest with censorship and "cancel culture." Organizations and think tanks generatepseudoscientific data to support this discourse, then advocate for free speech in highly specific ways that actually limit speech in general. In the name of free speech and viewpoint diversity, we now see restrictions on the right to protest and laws banning certain books, theories, and subjects from schools.By deconstructing the political and rhetorical development of the free speech crisis, Vivian not only provides a powerful corrective to contemporary views of higher education, but provides a blueprint for readers to identify and challenge misleading language—and to understand the true threats to our freedoms.

This book is essential reading not only on how to debunk misinformation about academia and college life but also on how and why the college campus became a target of partisan propaganda in the first place. Bradford Vivian does the hard work of sifting through reams of misinformation while maintaining a focus on the empirical, providing context that will change your mind about the latest campus controversy.", Vivian's Campus Misinformation is a timely and useful book that is a thoughtful and elegant response to the fabricated moral panic about supposed suppression of 'free speech' on college campuses. Vivian does an elegant job of showing that this moral panic uses a language of tolerance, non-partisanship, and fairness, when it's actually highly partisan, profitable, and consciously misleading. The book is beautifully written, As someone who is fortunate to teach college students, I have long been concerned about the wide disconnect between a pervasive media narrative about speech and expression on campuses and the actual state of higher education. Vivian has explored this disconnect with care, showing that reports of a 'campus free speech crisis' traffic in a form of misinformation. Those of us who value freedom of expression should find his defense of student organizing and counter speech to be a welcome addition to discussions of expressive freedom on campus.", As the ginned up education panic intensifies across the nation, Bradford Vivian counters the propaganda with a calm and rational assessment of actually existing higher education practices. Vivian shows how the common tropes of the education panic do not accurately reflect the reality at American colleges and universities and how the controversies over free speech, diversity, and critical race theory are part of an authoritarian power grab to control higher education."

Bradford Vivian is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and past Director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State University. His previous books include Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (OUP 2017) and Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (2010), which received the Winans-Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoricand Public Address awarded by the National Communication Association.