Right Wing Think Tanks Are Who Is Really Behind Bias Reporting On College Campuses
Free speech on college campuses is being stifled, however the push to limit free speech was not started by some woke left wing mob. Oh no. It was started by a right wing organization that calls itself Students For Academic Freedom, which is a bit of a misnomer because their key goal is to strip academic freedom from faculty they disagree with. This stifling of free speech did not start all that recently; it can be traced back to the early aughts.
I was attending graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point in 2005 when I first became aware of this organization. They claimed that their goal was to have multiple points of view represented, yet their actions depicted a different set of goals. The group went after a colleague of mine because they said that her graduate thesis compared George W. Bush to Hitler, and that was offensive to them. Members of this organization sought to have my colleague fired and have her degree revoked.
My colleague’s thesis was actually about rhetoric aimed at building support for war, but whatevs; some fragile snowflakes had their feelings hurt. Thankfully, real academic freedom protected her. My colleague went on to enter a Ph. D program, add to a body of research, and taught many more students.
The Students For Academic Freedom like to make the claim that a majority of professors are seeking to indoctrinate students into leftwing extremism. The accusation is laughable. There may be more professors who hold left wing views in certain disciplines, such as the arts, but there are other disciplines where the majority of faculty tend to hold right wing views. So what? College is meant to expose students to different ways of thinking.
Then there is the topic of student groups. Another right wing organization, Young America’s Foundation, through its bias tip line, believes that it has found evidence that more liberal groups receive funding from student government. Now there are multiple Christian groups on campuses that receive the same level of funding from student government as multicultural groups. College Democrats and College Republicans are both allowed to utilize campus resources. To decry unfairness when talking about resources that support student groups is to sink one’s teeth into a big old nothing burger.
So, the next time you hear something about bias reporting on college campuses, please lay the blame at the feet of those who started it: right wing think tanks. Just don’t blame them if you are faculty, or they will attempt to dox you out of existence because their fragile egos cannot handle the truth.