Tag: political

  • “The Myth of Political Correctness,” 30 Years Later

    “The Myth of Political Correctness,” 30 Years Later

    On Oct. 24, 1995, Duke University Press published my first book, The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education. Looking back 30 years at my book, it can be dispiriting to see how everything today seems the same, only worse. “Political correctness” has been replaced by “woke” as the smear of the moment, but otherwise almost every word of my book could be republished today, with a thousand new examples to buttress every point.

    Sometimes the title of the book confused people who mix up a “myth” with a “lie.” As I noted 10 years ago, “When I called political correctness a ‘myth,’ I was never denying the fact that some leftists are intolerant jerks, and sometimes their appalling calls for censorship are successful. My point was that even though political correctness exists, the ‘myth’ about it was the story that leftists controlled college campuses, imposing their evil whims like a ‘new McCarthyism’ or ‘China during the Cultural Revolution.’ In reality, then and now, the far greater threat to freedom on campus came from those on the right seeking to suppress opposing views.”

    I had been inspired to write the book by Dinesh D’Souza; I reviewed his best-selling 1991 book, Illiberal Education, for my column in the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. If D’Souza, a recent college graduate, could publish such a terrible book full of misinformation, then surely I could write a better book. So I did.

    But the publishing market was much more interested in the endless parade of conservatives bemoaning the “PC police” and “tenured radicals” than a refutation of these flawed arguments. My book, which I started to write as a graduate student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago (home to Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom and Edward Shils), was rejected by more than 50 publishers before I was able to persuade Stanley Fish (whom I had encountered as the editor of Democratic Culture, the newsletter of Gerald Graff and Gregory Jay’s Teachers for a Democratic Culture) to publish it at Duke. My editor (and now also an Inside Higher Ed columnist) was Rachel Toor, who helped to make some sense of my ideas.

    In the end, my book failed to shift the debate about academic freedom—not because it was wrong or the facts were refuted, but because it was ignored. From my perspective, I was correct about everything and nobody learned anything from me. And I’ve been writing essentially the same thesis, over and over again, in a second book and essays and hundreds of blog posts.

    Looking back at my first book, I think its claims have been proven largely correct over the past three decades (but I might be biased). At the core of the book were the chapters on the “Myth of PC” (examining how many of the leading anecdotes about repression often weren’t accurate) and “Conservative Correctness” (showing the many examples of repression from the right that were ignored by the media and campus critics of PC).

    The remaining chapters also still seem on target: “The Cult of Western Culture” (why multiculturalism isn’t taking over colleges and silencing traditional works, and Shakespeare isn’t being banned); “The Myth of Speech Codes” (colleges have always had speech codes, often worse ones using the arbitrary authority of a dean, and what we need are codes that protect free speech); “The Myth of Sexual Correctness” (sexual assault is a serious problem, and feminists often face suppression); and “The Myth of Reverse Discrimination” (white men are not the victims of campus oppression and the “fairy tale of equal opportunity” is false)

    Michael Hobbes did an excellent episode of You’re Wrong About in 2021 on political correctness that featured some of the ideas from my book. My position, then and now, is more nuanced than Hobbes’s view of PC as a pure right-wing moral panic. The panic was there, but so were real cases of repression—on both the left and the right.

    The cartoonish right-wing belief that colleges had become Maoist institutions of oppression against conservatives prompted too many on the left (and the center) to counter that everything was fine on campus. In truth, free expression has been in serious danger, both against conservatives who were sometimes censored and against leftists who also faced repression. As bad as things seemed in 1995, the repression is far worse today and clearly aimed at the left—and yet the delusions about the PC police on campus are more widespread than ever.

    Even in the face of the worst campus repression in American history, many conservatives continue to recite the old, tired myth of political correctness and leftist control of higher education—a myth repeated so often for so long has become a truth in the minds of many.

    The worst strategic mistake progressives made in the past three decades was to abandon the cause of free speech. Too many leftists believed in the myth of political correctness; they heard the complaints about free speech and accepted the right-wing argument that only conservatives were being silenced and concluded that free speech was a right-wing plot. They imagined that tenured radicals controlled colleges because everybody said so, and so they clung to the delusion that they could support censorship and it wouldn’t be used against them.

    When conservatives demanded free speech on campus, the left should have vigorously agreed and established strong protections for free expression on campus. Instead, they let the right win a propaganda war by pretending to be battling for free speech against the social justice warriors. And they lost the opportunity to make free speech a core principle established in higher education.

    The war on political correctness succeeded because the enemies it targeted were weak, disorganized leftists who were not, in fact, plotting to destroy conservatives. By contrast, today the right wants to demolish higher education like it’s the East Wing of the White House, and it is willing to use its vast power to do that.

    As bad as the skepticism on the left about free speech was, the right’s abandonment of free speech is much worse, both in the degree of rejection and in the impact it has on campuses. It didn’t matter if a leftist argued against free speech because they had essentially no power, on campus or off, to impose their ideas. They had no legislators joining their demands and no donors threatening to turn off the campus money spigot.

    Critics of PC had many advantages on their side: Enormous money poured into building organizations and ideas that built the myth of PC, funding groups like the Federalist Society and the National Association of Scholars, and paying individual authors such as Bloom and D’Souza to write and publicize their books. A new media ecosystem of talk radio and the internet spread the myth of PC. And the war on PC recruited principled liberals and even progressives who objected to the excesses of the left.

    It will be difficult for progressives to build anything similar. Wealthy donors tend to fund conservative groups, or prefer to put their names on fancy campus buildings. Universities are anxious to create free speech centers, but usually only the kind that conservatives support.

    Few conservatives are willing to speak out against the Trump regime. And many centrists and liberals who have spent a generation obsessing about the PC police find it difficult to suddenly turn around and recognize the repression from the right that they’ve been ignoring for decades. A letter condemning the Trump administration’s compact signed by principled conservatives such as Robert George and Keith Whittington is a good start toward building an ideological coalition against right-wing censorship that matches what the right did against the “PC police.”

    Today, we face the worst attack on academic freedom in American history, one that combines the overwhelming external power of state and federal governments, used for the first time to target free speech, and the internal power of a campus bureaucracy devoted to suppressing controversy.

    Unlike political correctness—which often relied upon exaggerated accounts of dubious examples with marginal injustices—there are so many clear-cut cases of terrible repression and extreme violations of due process and academic freedom that it’s difficult for anyone to keep track of them all. The litigation strategy developed by the right of suing every censor is an important step. Telling and retelling the stories of campus censorship today is critical. So is organizing events, on and off campus, about the repression happening today, and challenging those on the right who defend their side’s censorship.

    It’s not easy to find solutions when faced with this extraordinary censorship, with unprecedented dismissals and restrictions on speech. But the right-wing attack on political correctness, now over three decades old, offers liberals and progressives a guidebook for how to do it. Quote their words. Demand their reforms. Agree with them and confront their hypocrisy when they reject every free speech policy they’ve been demanding for the past three decades.

    The myth of political correctness is still alive 30 years later, invoked to deny and justify the repression from the right. Understanding how the culture wars brought us to this point of authoritarianism is essential to leading us toward the goals of academic freedom and free expression on campus.

    John K. Wilson was a 2019–20 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Routledge, 2008), and his forthcoming book The Attack on Academia. He can be reached at [email protected], or letters to the editor can be sent to [email protected].

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  • UT Austin Muzzles Grad Student Assembly’s Political Speech

    UT Austin Muzzles Grad Student Assembly’s Political Speech

    The Graduate Student Assembly had planned to consider resolutions against two Texas laws.

    Officials at the University of Texas at Austin blocked the Graduate Student Assembly from considering two resolutions against Texas state laws last week, arguing that the student-run body must follow institutional neutrality policies. 

    Mateo Vallejo, a first-year master’s student and representative in the GSA for the School of Social Work, drafted two resolutions for the assembly to consider: one condemning Texas SB 17, which bans diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at Texas public institutions, and another against Texas SB 37, a state law that, among other changes, put faculty senates at public institutions under the control of university presidents and boards. 

    On Oct. 10, GSA president David Spicer submitted the two resolutions to Associate Dean for Graduate Studies Christopher J. McCarthy for approval. According to the assembly bylaws, the dean of students’ office must approve all proposed GSA legislation before it can be considered by the full assembly, effectively giving the office an opportunity to veto, Vallejo explained. Once a bill is submitted to the dean’s office, the assembly cannot make any changes to the text. Vallejo, Spicer and the GSA vice president were careful to follow the bylaws during the drafting process to give administrators as little reason as possible to shut the resolutions down.

    Five days later, McCarthy nixed them.

    “[Vice President for Legal Affairs] considers the legislation to be political speech that is not permitted to be issued by a sponsored student organization in their official capacity,” McCarthy wrote in an email to Spicer, which Inside Higher Ed obtained. “This legislation should not be permitted to go forward.”

    Spicer followed up, asking why the GSA was prohibited from engaging in political speech when others have done so in their official capacity at UT Austin. He pointed to an op-ed by Provost William Inboden in the conservative magazine National Affairs and a statement from University of Texas System Board of Regents chairman Kevin P. Eltife, who said the university was “honored” to be among the institutions “selected by the Trump Administration for potential funding advantages” under Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” 

    “Their speech was on ‘political and social’ matters, so I do not know how they escape the neutrality requirement whereas GSA cannot,” Spicer wrote in his response to McCarthy. In addition, UT Austin’s undergraduate student government recently put out a statement of support for the university’s new president, Jim Davis, which Spicer argued is also political speech. 

    “Like attacks on the Faculty Council, silencing GSA through institutional neutrality is an attack on the notion of shared governance,” Spicer said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “GSA appoints students to university-wide committees and, previously, Faculty Council committees. GSA is the one space at UT Austin where students can voice issues impacting their graduate education.”

    When asked about the double standard, UT Austin spokesperson Mike Rosen told Inside Higher Ed that the resolution in support of Davis is not political speech because he was appointed by a nonpartisan board and not by an elected official. Members of the University of Texas System Board of Regents are appointed by the Texas governor. 

    “UT Austin exercises institutional neutrality consistent with a policy approved by the UT System Board of Regents, which prohibits System institutions from expressing positions on political matters or issues of the day. As a sponsored student organization, GSA acts as an extension of the University and cannot act to cause the University to violate the UT System policy,” Rosen wrote in an email. 

    Vallejo’s resolutions against SB 17 and SB 37 would not be the first attempt by the GSA to address Texas politics. In 2022, the Assembly passed a resolution in response to Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s opinion and Gov. Greg Abbott’s directive to the Department of Family and Protective Services that gender-affirming medical care for minors could be treated as child abuse. In its resolution, the Assembly urged campus officials not to adopt that definition for campus reporting purposes.

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  • Pepperdine Closes Exhibit Featuring “Overtly Political” Art

    Pepperdine Closes Exhibit Featuring “Overtly Political” Art

    Pepperdine officials modified a sculpture to delete the text.

    Henry Adams/Pepperdine Graphic

    Last month Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., opened an art exhibit titled “Hold My Hand In Yours,” which was scheduled to run for six months in the on-campus Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art. But On Oct. 6, the university closed the exhibit after artists learned their work had been removed or altered for being “overtly political.”

    The exhibition, curated by Weisman Museum director Andrea Gyorody, centered on the imagery of hands in paintings, drawings, sculpture and videos, among other media, with a focus on hands as a means of labor and care, according to the museum’s website.

    Last week, one of the artists in the show learned her video had been turned off at the university’s request, and a sculpture had been modified to hide text that said “Save the Children” and “Abolish ICE,” Hyperallergic reported. The creators requested their pieces be removed from the museum, and several other contributors followed suit in solidarity with the affected artists and in opposition to the university.

    Pepperdine administrators alleged the pieces went against the museum’s policy to “avoid overtly political content consistent with the university’s nonprofit status,” Michael Friel, senior director of communication and public relations at Pepperdine, told Inside Higher Ed in an email.

    In addition to removing pieces, the university inquired about posting signage that notifies visitors that “the artwork does not necessarily reflect the views of the university,” Friel noted. “That process has not been successful.” With the addition of the artists pulling their work, the museum decided to close the gallery. All compensation agreements are being honored and inconvenienced artists have received an apology, according to Friel.

    “For the past week, the administration’s rationale for the initial censorship and removal has been murky and opaque, and honestly, still unclear to me. It didn’t have to be this way,” Stephanie Syjuco, an artist who was featured in the show, wrote on Instagram.

    The Weisman Museum is housed under the university’s advancement office. “Our intent is to maintain the highest standards of excellence as we celebrate artistic expression through the visual arts,” Friel said.

    In 2019, Pepperdine censored a senior art student’s gallery because the art featured nude bodies; officials placed the art in a mobile gallery instead of in the Weisman Museum, which featured work by the artist’s peers.  



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  • Federal Union Sues Trump Admin Over Political OOO

    Federal Union Sues Trump Admin Over Political OOO

    Employees who had the messages put on their accounts told Inside Higher Ed that it was “wild to see your name attached to a message that you had nothing to do with.”

    J. David Ake/Getty Images

    The American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing federal workers, sued the Trump administration Friday, challenging the automated out-of-office email responses it placed on many employees’ email accounts when the government shut down. 

    The message, which was placed on the email accounts of all furloughed staff members without their consent, blamed Democrats in the Senate for causing the shutdown.

    AFGE’s members, who will be represented by the legal firms Democracy Forward and Public Citizen Litigation Group, argue in the complaint that the message Trump attached to their email accounts is “partisan political rhetoric.” Not only does it violate the Hatch Act, a federal law that requires nonappointed government staff to stay nonpartisan, but it also violates the First Amendment rights of the individual employees, they argue. 

    “The Trump-Vance administration is losing the blame game for the shutdown, so they’re using every tactic to try to fool the American people, including taking advantage of furloughed civil servants,” Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, said in a news release. “Even for an administration that has repeatedly demonstrated a complete lack of respect for the Constitution and rule of law, this is beyond outrageous. The court must act immediately to stop this flagrant unlawfulness.”

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  • UNC Professor Accused of Advocating Political Violence Reinstated

    UNC Professor Accused of Advocating Political Violence Reinstated

    University officials found “no basis” that Dixon posed a threat or violated university policy.

    Marin Herold/iStock/Getty Images Plus

    Dwayne Dixon, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was reinstated Friday after the university performed a “thorough threat assessment,” Dean Stoyer, vice chancellor for communications and marketing, said in a statement. 

    Dixon was placed on leave Monday following allegations that he was an advocate for political violence.

    “The Carolina Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management Team consulted with the UNC System security office and with local law enforcement, undertaking a robust, swift and efficient review of all the evidence. We have found no basis to conclude that he poses a threat to University students, staff, and faculty, or has engaged in conduct that violates University policy,” Stoyer said in a statement. “As a result, the University is reinstating Professor Dixon to his faculty responsibilities, effective immediately.”

    Dixon is a teaching associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at UNC Chapel Hill, and he’s been active at counterprotests to alt-right rallies, including at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. He’s also a strong advocate for gun rights and used to be a member of the Silver Spring Redneck Revolt, a chapter of the now-disbanded antifascist, antiracist, anticapitalist political group Redneck Revolt. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, called for Dixon to be fired in an X post because of these affiliations.

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  • ED Put Political Out-of-Office Reply on Staff Emails

    ED Put Political Out-of-Office Reply on Staff Emails

    The department is largely closed due to the government shutdown. In the meantime, the Trump administration is using furloughed workers’ emails to make a political statement.   

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images | nevodka/iStock/Getty Images

    Wednesday morning, as the government shutdown began, chief officers at the Department of Education distributed a standard out-of-the-office statement to all furloughed staff members and instructed them to copy and paste it into their email. So that’s what they did.

    But just hours later, those same nonpartisan staffers began to hear that the message they’d pasted into their email account was not the message being received by the public.

    “On Wednesday evening, my supervisor reached out to me on my personal equipment and said, ‘You’re going to want to log in and change your out-of-office status,’” one department staffer told Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity out of fear of losing her job.

    When she followed her supervisor’s direction and logged in, the automatic message she saw was not the one she had saved earlier that morning.

    Rather than the original note, which had said, “There is a temporary shutdown … due to a lapse in appropriations,” the new message said, “Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of [a bill] … which has led to a lapse in appropriations.”

    This is one of the more than 10 emails Inside Higher Ed received as automatic responses including the same political message. Although Keast was appointed by Trump, most of the staffers we contacted were not.

    The outgoing message had been changed internally without her consent. And this staffer was not alone. Inside Higher Ed emailed 10 separate Education Department staffers Thursday, all of whom had been placed on furlough, and each one bounced back with identical responses. One senior leader from the department, who also spoke anonymously, said that to his knowledge the politically charged message was set as the out-of-office notification for all furloughed employees.

    (The Department of Education did not immediately provide comment. In fact, the emails sent to both deputy press secretary Ellen Keast and the general press team account were met with the same automatic response.)

    The first staffer said that while she was caught off guard by the override at first, it made sense the more she thought about it. Similar messages blaming Democratic senators for the shutdown had already been put at the top of HUD.gov, the landing page for all things Department of Housing and Urban Development, and other federal websites.

    As of Thursday evening, the HUD website noted, “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need.”

    Republicans control the White House, the House and the Senate. In the Senate, they need the votes of at least seven Democratic senators to reach the 60-vote threshold necessary to overcome a filibuster.

    “I was really surprised, because we had gotten such explicit instructions on what to use for our out-of-office message,” the staffer said. But “when I saw that message from my supervisor, I assumed it had been changed to something more political than the original neutral one.”

    She has already logged back in multiple times to change the automatic response back to the neutral language. But each time, within hours, the department has overridden her changes.

    “It’s what [is being sent] to people who contact me, and they could reasonably misunderstand it as coming from me, and I don’t feel comfortable as a federal employee communicating a political message like that,” she said.

    A second staffer told Inside Higher Ed that he has worked through multiple shutdowns prior but not experienced anything like this.

    “It’s just wild to see your name attached to a message that you had nothing to do with,” he said. “It feels like a violation … You know that you don’t have any expectation of privacy when you’re working for the federal government. But it’s a different thing to say that you don’t have autonomy over your own words.”

    The second staffer noted that in his view, not only did this seem to be a violation of his personal rights, but also a violation of federal law.

    The Hatch Act, passed in 1939, was intended to ensure that nonpartisan federal workers who worked across administrations remained just that—nonpartisan. And according to documents from the Office of Special Counsel website, the Hatch Act “limits certain political activities of federal employees,” like using official authority for political purposes, soliciting political donations, wearing partisan political gear at work and posting or sharing partisan content on government systems.

    “It’s crazy to see the law violated on your behalf,” the second staffer said.

    None of the department employees Inside Higher Ed spoke with intended to file an individual lawsuit, nor had they heard anything from their union about a collective legal response. But one shared that Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization that has sued the Trump administration several times this year, will be going to court over the matter as soon as Friday.

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  • Trump Administration Compact Demands Universities Align With Political Agenda

    Trump Administration Compact Demands Universities Align With Political Agenda

    The Trump administration has escalated its confrontation with higher education institutions by sending detailed policy demands to nine universities, conditioning their continued access to federal funding on compliance with the president’s political objectives.

    The unprecedented move, delivered via letters signed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon and other senior officials, presents a 10-page “compact” that outlines sweeping requirements affecting tuition pricing, international student enrollment, gender policy, and campus speech.

    The compact mandates that participating institutions freeze tuition rates for five years, place restrictions on international student enrollment, and adopt administration-approved definitions of gender. Universities must also commit to preventing any policies that the administration characterizes as punishing conservative viewpoints.

    The nine institutions that received letters on Wednesday include Dartmouth College, Brown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Southern California, University of Arizona, University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas, and Vanderbilt University.

    According to The New York Times, May Mailman, the White House’s senior adviser for special projects and a letter signatory, indicated the administration remains open to dialogue with contacted universities. “We hope all universities ultimately are able to have a conversation with us,” Mailman stated.

    The demands represent a significant threat to institutional autonomy and could have far-reaching implications for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on college campuses. The restrictions on international student enrollment raise particular concerns about the future of global education exchange and the presence of international scholars who contribute substantially to research and campus diversity.

    The administration’s approach effectively creates a two-tiered system where compliance brings preferential treatment in federal grant competitions. As one senior White House official told The Washington Post, universities would technically remain eligible for grants, but compliant institutions would gain a “competitive advantage.”

    This compact represents the latest escalation in the administration’s sustained campaign targeting higher education. Previous actions have included funding freezes, threats to revoke tax-exempt status, and attempts to eliminate universities’ authorization to host international students.

    The administration has particularly focused on policies related to international students, pro-Palestinian campus activism, transgender student athletes, and diversity, equity, and inclusion programming.

    Harvard University stands alone among major research universities in actively resisting the administration’s demands through litigation. In an April open letter to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber articulated the stakes for academic freedom: “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

    However, on Tuesday, President Trump claimed a deal with Harvard was nearing completion. The administration has already announced agreements with the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Brown University earlier this year.

     

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  • UNC Professor on Leave After Alleged Advocacy of Political Violence

    UNC Professor on Leave After Alleged Advocacy of Political Violence

    Dixon has faced blowback for his political activism before and remained in his role at UNC.

    Eros Hoagland/Getty Images

    Officials at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill placed Professor Dwayne Dixon on leave Monday while the university investigates his “alleged advocacy of politically motivated violence,” said Dean Stoyer, UNC Chapel Hill’s vice chancellor for communications and marketing.

    Dixon, an associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies, used to be a member of Silver Valley Redneck Revolt, a chapter of the antifascist, antiracist, anticapitalist political group Redneck Revolt. The group was formed in 2016 and some members, including Dixon, were present at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., to provide armed security and medical assistance to counterprotesters. Redneck Revolt disbanded in 2019 and has no active chapters, according to its website.

    In a 2018 interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dixon described himself as an “anarchist,” and he is no stranger to blowback for his political activism and support for gun rights. He was arrested for bringing a semiautomatic rifle to a Ku Klux Klan counterprotest in Durham, N.C., in 2018—the case was later dismissed as unconstitutional on the grounds that the charges violated Dixon’s First and Second Amendment rights. He was also among 20 people who protected counterprotesters in Durham when white supremacists protested the removal of a Confederate statue in 2017. Through all these events, Dixon remained employed at UNC Chapel Hill.

    Why is Dixon in the hot seat now? The answer is convoluted, but it begins with fliers on the Georgetown University campus.

    On Sept. 24, Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, posted on X a photo of a flier on the Georgetown campus in Washington, D.C., that read, “Hey Fascist! Catch!”—a nod to engraving on the casing of bullets left behind by Kirk’s suspected killer—and “The only political group that celebrates when Nazis die.” The flier also included a QR code to a Google form for a potential Georgetown chapter of the John Brown Gun Club, a Redneck Revolt affiliate organization known as a “leftist gun-rights group” with multiple independent chapters, including one in the D.C. area, according to the Counter Extremism Project. It “arms itself to defend against far-right violence and often appears as a security force at protests to protect against expected far-right violence,” the CEP wrote. Google has since removed the form for violating its terms of service.

    University officials removed the fliers and reported them to the FBI. Education Secretary Linda McMahon also weighed in: “At a moment like this, Georgetown has to determine what it stands for as an institution … Allowing violent rhetoric to fester on our nation’s campuses without consequences is dangerous. It must be condemned by institutional leaders,” she wrote on X. “I am grateful to those who spoke out against this and made noise about the posters on campus—you made a difference. There is power in speaking up to reveal these hateful ideologies that have incited deadly violence.”

    Kolvet posted again, this time linking to a recent Fox News article that cited Dixon’s involvement in Redneck Revolt based on an old blog post that has since been taken down. “I posted this flyer our team spotted at Georgetown University, and now we find out professors at ‘elite’ schools are members of this group and its offshoots,” Kolvet wrote. “This professor must be immediately fired and the group/network investigated.”

    Dixon was placed on leave Monday, which will “allow the University to investigate these allegations in a manner that protects the integrity of its assessment,” UNC’s Stoyer said in his statement. “Depending upon the nature and circumstances of this activity, this conduct could be grounds for disciplinary action up to and including potential termination of employment.”

    UNC Chapel Hill officials declined to answer any other questions about Dixon and did not say whether Kolvet’s post or the Fox News article led to the investigation. Dixon did not reply to a request for comment but told the student newspaper The Daily Tarheel that he left the Silver Valley Redneck Revolt in 2018.

    A Change.org petition to reinstate Dixon is circulating and as of Wednesday evening had more than 900 signatures. In a statement Wednesday, the North Carolina chapter of the American Association of University Professors, as well as UNC Chapel Hill’s AAUP president, condemned the university’s actions and demanded Dixon be reinstated.

    “Right-wing activists are attacking Dixon for prior membership in a group that has been inactive since 2019, and are baselessly connecting him to flyers allegedly posted by a different group on a different campus outside of North Carolina. Fox News picked up the story on September 27, 2025, without verifying the existence of the flyers, and apparently this was enough for UNC’s administration to remove a professor from the classroom in the middle of the semester and bar him from campus,” the statement read. “Let’s call this what it is: UNC administrators are capitulating to a call from a right-wing group, infamous for attacking faculty, to fire a professor based on an unsubstantiated rumor.”

    Dixon joins the ranks of dozens of college and university faculty members who have been placed on leave, disciplined or fired in the weeks since Kirk was shot and killed. All of these professors have been investigated after right-wing personalities identified them on social media. Two of them—Michael Hook, who was placed on leave for social media comments he made about Kirk’s death, and Thomas Alter, who was terminated after being accused of inciting violence during a speech—have been reinstated by court orders.

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  • What to Do When Presidents Face Personal and Political Attacks

    What to Do When Presidents Face Personal and Political Attacks

    When a crisis strikes, college and university presidents and chancellors are asked to balance competing priorities in real time: protecting students, reassuring faculty, and staff, addressing trustees and communicating with stakeholders, including the public and other key partners. All while trying to be the role model and stay on mission as best as possible.

    While each crisis has distinctive characteristics, these situations never unfold in a vacuum. Today, they are happening as the value of higher education is being questioned, policymakers are sharpening their scrutiny, and financial pressures are forcing tough choices across campus communities. Moreover, our fast, fragmented information environment doesn’t just shape crises. It can, in effect, create them, manufacturing controversy where little existed.

    Strong crisis communications are not just about surviving the alarming hours, days or weeks of a crisis. They are about preserving trust and protecting reputation–which inevitably connects with revenue–thereby positioning the institution to lead credibly into the future.

    We were heartened when attending a recent annual, on-the-record convening of college presidents and journalists at the Press Club in Washington, DC, last month. Campus leaders showed up and readily expressed renewed energy for their roles and prospects for what remains the world’s most admired higher education system. These higher ed leaders gathered voluntarily (yes, voluntarily) to share specific examples of today’s campus environment, dispel some of the current higher ed narratives and inform the media–without defensiveness or naiveté–of the impact on their immediate communities and beyond.

    We cannot recommend engaging in such public conversations highly enough, as a means of building goodwill and busting myths. After all, the best crisis “response” begins long before any crisis occurs.

    Preparing before the crisis

    Presidents should ensure their teams are equipped with:

    • Clear, values-based messaging. A well-defined set of institutional values, articulated consistently (and easily located on public-facing websites), gives everyone a steady reference point. Do students, faculty, staff, families, alumni, neighbors and legislators know what the university stands for during times thick and thin?
    • Scenario planning and tabletop exercises. Running through potential crises, from student protests to cybersecurity breaches, helps identify weaknesses in protocols and message discipline. Exercises also clarify roles so that when a real situation arises, the team knows who speaks, who decides and who executes.
    • Designated spokespeople, prepared with media training. While a president may become the voice in a crisis, other leaders, such as a provost, communications official or dean of students, must be ready to carry the message.

    Leading during the crisis

    During the heat of a crisis, your guiding stars are simple: safety and support for your people. Accuracy, speed and transparency will matter most. Keep the following principles in mind:

    • Respond promptly, but don’t speculate. Silence creates a vacuum, but premature statements can backfire or harm. Even a short acknowledgment, such as “We are aware of the situation and will share updates as we confirm details,” signals attentiveness and concern.
      This playbook paid off during the pandemic for William & Mary, when President Katherine A. Rowe gathered input from the university’s subject-matter experts early on and established credible public health and safety approaches.
    • Center your people, not your process. Your stakeholders need to hear about safety, support and accountability before they hear about the college’s committees or investigations coming together. Prioritize action coupled with compassion. Even 20 years later, we remember the example of Scott Cowen, president of Tulane University during Hurricane Katrina, and the trust built due to his people-first approach. During the pandemic, Colgate University President Brian Casey modeled people-first leadership by moving into student housing to better understand students’ experiences and guide the campus through an especially challenging time.
    • Communicate consistently across channels. Students, families and alumni are likely to first encounter your messages (or off-base, inaccurate versions of this news) on social media, while others may hear news via email, during town halls or staff meetings. Coordinated, consistent language is critical for accuracy and credibility.
    • Engage trustees and legislators early. Surprises erode trust. One university president we admire follows the “No surprises” rule, crisis or no crisis. Keep key stakeholders briefed, even if details are evolving. A healthy president-board relationship, or the opposite, can easily become apparent during a crisis.

    The all-important post-crisis phase

    Too many falter by assuming that once any headlines fade, the crisis is behind them. In fact, the post-crisis period is where reputations are refined and strengthened. Presidents should treat this phase as an opportunity for reflection, accountability and rebuilding confidence.

    • Conduct a candid after-action review. What worked? What didn’t? Invite honest feedback from leadership, communications staff and key campus partners. A president who once worked at NASA introduced that agency’s practice of conducting a “hotwash,” the immediate, constructive, after-action review at her university.
    • Fix what needs improvement. Based on what you learn from the after-action review, consider who among your team demonstrated they are best suited for crisis situations. Determine who will stand in when these individuals are away or temporarily unreachable. Have a backup plan for the backup plan, including communications tools ranging from analog to digital. Cybersecurity breaches happen, as do power outages. Consider engaging external expertise to audit your policies and practices before, yes, the next crisis.
    • Follow up with your community. Students, faculty, staff, families and alumni will remember how your institution followed through. Report on the status of (non-confidential) investigations, share policy changes and highlight steps taken to prevent recurrence. Determine the cadence and keep to it, for communication containing substantive updates. Demonstrating accountability reinforces trust.
    • Reconnect the crisis to the institution’s mission. For example, if the issue involved free speech, show how new steps align with the university’s now-broader commitment to inquiry and dialogue. If it involved safety, emphasize your institution’s improved duty of care.
    • Strengthen external relationships. Use the post-crisis time to meet with legislators, donors and alumni leaders. Transparency about what happened and how the university has responded often earns respect over time, potentially turning doubters into advocates. The word potentially is deliberate here, in that this work can be challenging, it may take years and we need to be realistic about what is feasible. Is there common ground to be found? Are we seeking to please a few at the expense of the many?

    The special case of manufactured crises

    While the principles of communication are consistent across all crises, a manufactured crisis—one designed to harm a leader through disinformation—requires a different approach. Unlike a natural disaster or an institutional mistake, these situations are orchestrated attacks. Their primary purpose is not to address a problem but to create one. They become personal, understandably taken to heart. Leaders must steel themselves, identify key allies to clarify misinformation, and draw from resources in the “bank of goodwill” built during their presidency. Always easier said than done, yet the challenge for any leader in such circumstances is to not become the crisis.

    Why it matters more than ever

    Higher education’s current reputational challenges heighten the stakes. Campus leaders cannot afford to treat crisis communications as a tactical exercise. Instead, crisis communications should be integrated into a broader strategy for sustaining trust in the institution and, by extension, in the value of higher education itself.

    Handling a crisis can demonstrate an institution’s resilience, values and leadership. It can show students and families that the university is committed to their safety and success. It can show legislators that higher education takes accountability seriously. And it can remind the broader public that colleges and universities remain vital engines of knowledge, opportunity and community—even in turbulent times. You may have heard this beautiful phrase before, but remember and repeat: Higher education builds America.

    Crises will come. Presidents cannot control exactly when or how. By preparing in advance, leading with compassion and clarity in the moment and taking ownership in the aftermath, leaders can turn adversity into an opportunity to strengthen their institution’s credibility and standing. All of higher education stands to benefit from such examples of leadership.

    If you have any questions or comments about this blog post, please contact us.

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