Harvey J. Graff
Posted February 27, 2025
The multi-front war on university students, faculty and academic programs is spearheaded by the notorious attack on pro-Palestinian activism, in the guise of “combating campus antisemitism.” But this is just an opening wedge: everything from liberal arts and academic freedom to, of course, the horrors of “diversity” programs are in the crosshairs of the right wing.
The following article by Ohio State University professor emeritus Harvey J. Graff puts the current crisis into some historical perspective. The falsified portrayal of college and university institutions as “left” bastions has its own sordid legacy, seen in today’s repressive revival. –David Finkel for the ATC editors
AMONG THE MOST distorted and damaging myths of higher education is the ideologically driven and profoundly anti-intellectual myth of “the predominance and indoctrination of left-wing university professors.”
Recurring periodically, especially at times of political conflict especially in the United States and England, this assault on truth and free speech rights — and the fundamentals of teaching and learning themselves — reaches unprecedented heights in the 2020s.
To take one example, on Feb. 24, 2025 Washington Post opinion writer Megan McArdle not only continues to brand “academia,” with no qualifications, as home base of “the left.” But McArdle opines, in commenting on Trump’s current illegal assaults: “The left, not the right, picked this fight…. This was politically naïve and criminality stupid for institutions that rely so heavily on U.S. taxpayer support.”
By “myth,” I do not mean false or fictitious. Regardless of any question of truth or accuracy, myths aren’t circulated or accepted by some people if they do not accord with certain recognizable elements. Nor does falseness limit the spread, selective influence, and damaging effects of myth. That fundamental point is too often missed by media commentators and even among scholars in history, politics, literature or anthropology.
Today’s political and cultural crisis of misrepresentation of professors’ ideological conduct and misconduct can only be understood in historical context. For the full millennium of their history, universities have been avowedly culturally and politically conservative.
There is no contradiction between that and traditions of scientific and humanistic discoveries. In recent decades, perhaps most important, is the loss of the meaning of the political and ideological spectrum. Beginning in the so-called Progressive era of the last decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more and more professors identify as liberal. Liberal, critically, is not synonymous with Left. It is much closer to centrist.
At the same time, conservatives are not synonymous with right-wing. “Genuine” or traditional conservatives respect facts, differences of opinion, welcome debate, and crucially do not believe in banning all with which they disagree. This understanding is rare today as ideology, intellectual understanding, and politics are confused.
The present crisis developed in uneven steps from the U.S post-Civil War era and in the UK from the intersections of philosophy and politics. Liberalism underlays the vocational land grant era, and then the reform currents of the last decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Free Speech Fights
Faculty free speech and job protection movements began with the Leland Stanford family demanding that the new university’s first president fire acclaimed political economist Richard T. Eley (an exemplar of the “Wisconsin Ideal” of Progressive education) for his vocal support of labor organizing.
As president of Princeton University, future U.S. president Woodrow Wilson was more repressive. (This led in time to the removal of his name from major parts of that university.)
In the late 1930s and 1940s, professors were attacked as “leftist” for support of Roosevelt’s New Deal and U.S. intervention in World War II.
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s uncontrolled, illegal, and unconstitutional attacks on “Marxist” academics in the late 1940s and 1950s began to lay the grounds for the present campaigns.
Contradictorily, however, McCarthyism contributed to widespread civil rights movements and assertions of the First Amendment free speech rights. Within a decade, civil rights struggles led to student and faculty activism across a wide spectrum of New Left movements. Liberation and rights rhetoric was quickly condemned as calls for political revolution and lawlessness.
Throughout the 1960s, campus activism was misrepresented and vilified as “threats to democracy.” From the 1920s, the rise and fall of the British Labour Party parallels American currents. Influences and interactions demand serious study, including the cultural and intellectual connections between Berlin and Frankfurt; Paris; Cambridge, Oxford, and London; and New York, Cambridge (Mass.), Madison (Wisc.), Ann Arbor (Mich.) and Berkeley.
Left liberal activism of the 1960s remains a distant target first of traditional conservatives and more recently hard right wingers. From Nixon to Reagan to the Tea Party and then Trumpism, century-old conflicts swelled and sharpened. The period from 2010s to the present has seen new levels of anti-factual, exaggerated, and unchecked fabrication and the intersection of politics, ideology, anti-intellectualism and anti-education currents with violations of professors’ and students’ rights. This is not limited to higher education.
Unprecedented over the past decade and a half are 1) the well-documented financial contribution of right-wing billionaires, like the Koch brothers for example; 2) their funding of national and state-wide fake research centers that are quasi-legal lobbying operations; 3) very effective use of new social media; and 4) collaboration with elected officials at local, state and federal levels. Prominent among the latter are Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’ Gregg Abbott, among their many peers.
Despite rightwing organizations’ constant beat of their well-funded drums, there is no more than anecdotal evidence of common let alone mass, inappropriate “left wing” propagandizing on campuses. Old and new once conservative and now rightwing groups from the Federalist Society, American Enterprise Institute, Princeton’s James Madison Society and its peers at Yale and George Mason among others, and more recently FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and Project 2025, promote false narratives and attempt to take over institutions.
Ohio’s new state-mandated (anti-) diversity centers on five public university campuses is a major transparent case in point. Based on false claims and anti-intellectual, anti-diversity mandates, they substitute limited views and narrow requirements. State Senator Jerry Cirino’s legislative efforts to reduce public higher to a tragic mockery of freedom of speech and fact-based pursuit of knowledgeable interpretation sputter — rising again with SB1 passing recently.
Not only is faculty control of curriculum and course content challenged, but so too is academic tenure. The bill also illegally prohibits strikes by faculty and others on campuses.
More concretely, Ohio ordered so-called “diversity centers” — permanent tenuring-in units but with only short-term state funding. They promote a false version of “diversity” while pushing for required courses in their own narrow, conversative and right-wing conceptions of “civility” and obedient “citizenship.”
Glaringly contradictory, Ohio State University’s new center is named for anti-slavery and abolition activist Salmon P. Chase, who was added to Abraham Lincoln’s wartime cabinet to press the president to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Today’s right-wing respects no history.
Among much more, this represents the radical infusion of the private into the supposedly but historical and legal public domain.
A new struggle must be waged to reassert the legitimate rights of both teaching and learning, professors and students, individually and collectively.
Harvey J. Graff is Professor Emeritus of English and History, inaugural Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies, and Academy Professor, Ohio State University. Author of many books on literacy, children and youth, cities, and interdisciplinarity, most recently he published Searching for Literacy: The Social and Intellectual Origins of Literacy Studies (2022). My Life with Literacy: The Continuing Education of a Historian. The Intersections of the Personal, the Political, the Academic, and Place appeared in 2024. Reconstructing the Uni-versity: From the Ashes of the Mega- and Multi-versity to the Futures of Higher Education is in press.
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