Your Outrage Over Hamline University is Helping Destroy Higher Ed

A false right wing narrative about campus culture and free speech is responsible for an environment where Ron DeSantis can seek to dismantle the honors college of Florida and turn it into a conservative Christian school.

by Evan Urquhart

Two stories about American universities have made national news this week. In Minnesota, an adjunct professor lose her contract with Hamline University after using an image of Muhammad in her teaching materials. Many believe this firing to have been unfair because the teacher gave students the opportunity to opt-out or object beforehand. In Florida, the honors college for the state university system, New College of Florida, will be radically revamped by right wing governor and likely presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, who has appointed a slate of culture warriors to serve on New College’s board.

Neither Hamline University nor New College of Florida are household names. Hamline is a private university with fewer than 2000 undergraduates and a diverse student body which is more than 40 percent BIPOC. New College is even smaller, with fewer than 700 undergraduates, and is primarily white. To the extent it’s known at all, it’s known for encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning, with an emphasis on internships, independent study, and research projects as part of the course work.

Why are Americans talking about these small schools? National outrage over Hamline’s firing of an adjunct art history professor can be traced back to the advocacy of FIRE, a group focused on culture war issues on college campuses funded by right wing donors. FIRE’s December statement condemning the firing was covered widely in the right wing press, after which it made it’s way into the mainstream.

The story from Hamline fits the overarching narrative of both FIRE and the larger right’s culture war apparatus. Here’s how it goes: College campuses no longer value free thought, having become vehicles for left wing values like diversity and inclusion rather than institutions for higher learning.

None of this is true. Instead, a manufactured crisis, pushed by the right, has been constructed out of a small number of incidents, in which the targets are just as likely to come from the left as they are from the right.

A piece for Vox in 2018 discussed this evidence in more detail:

screenshot from the Vox article

The Georgetown analysis found about 60 total incidents of someone’s free speech being threatened on a college campus between 2016 and 2018, spread out across the 4,583 two- and four-year institutions of higher learning in the US. Most of the incidents where conservative speech was implicated involved a small number of speakers including Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Ann Coulter, people who have made saying cartoonishly offensive things and complaining loudly when students protest a core part of their public personas. At the same time, they found many less-well publicized incidents where conservatives had successfully silenced or shut down speech from the left.

screenshot from the Vox article

Far from accurately reflecting overreach by an authoritarian left, the culture war over American institutions of higher learning represent carefully chosen anecdotes supporting a narrative created by right wing propagandists to attack higher education in the US. These right wing actors, aided by FIRE and similar groups, tell cherry picked stories that fit the mold of students protesting on behalf of left wing values who bring about an absurd or unfair outcome. The right completely ignores similar, though equally common, incidents where protests from the right result in an absurd or unfair outcome targeting those with left wing views. The mainstream media then picks up the flashiest stories, contributing to conventional wisdom deciding that a left-leaning culture on college campuses must actually be a problem, and something must be done.

That is the point where New College of Florida comes in. While New College has a left-leaning student body, as many schools do, it’s never been the focus of any of these hand-picked stories of culture war outrage. The only time in recent memory the school made national news was when it helped de-radicalize a young white nationalist, R. Derek Black, who turned away from the hate movement he'd been raised to support. Black was the son of the founder of Stormfront and godson of David Duke, and before New College he’d planned to help lead the white nationalist movement like his father before him. In this, the rare campus culture story that can’t be traced to the right wing outrage machine, the left wing values of the student body actually achieved something unambiguously good, engaging with a young man to help him re-examine the views he’d been taught, resulting in him leaving the white nationalist movement behind.

But New College is in the news now, because Ron DeSantis has made this tiny honors college the focus of his attacks on diversity, inclusion, and transgender rights in higher ed. This was detailed in an article for the far right Daily Caller which quoted his spokesman as saying DeSantis’ plan is to turn New College into a copy of Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school with a focus on teaching Christian faith and Western classics. (Coincidentally, New College also offers instruction in the classics, one of its most highly praised areas of study.)

In other words, none of this is happening because New College has ever shut down conservative speech, because it lacks academic excellence, or even because it doesn’t have an excellent program in the classics. Rather, it’s happening because the right's culture war is gunning for higher education in general, using selective anecdotes and performative outrage, and New College happens to be a small and vulnerable school within DeSantis’ reach.

To better understand what’s at stake for New College’s students we spoke with Sam Sharf, a trans student who is also member of New College Students for Educational Freedom, a group organizing to protect the independence and academic freedom New College is known for in the wake of DeSantis’ attacks.

The picture Sharf paints is far from the strident political leftist caricature pushed by the right. She says, at New College, “No one cares if you’re trans. I’m known for my chess skills and for riding a giant skateboard, and not because I’m trans.”

But the right wing press certainly cares that Sharf is trans. After she was interviewed for the Daily Beast, Sharf quickly became a target of transphobic attacks, misgendering her, calling her a “biological male.” Even one of the incoming trustees, Christopher Rufo, mocked Sharf on Twitter with an emoji indicating laughter at the sadness she described.

When we condemn the firing of an adjunct at Hamline, even if that firing was wrong, we’re playing into the bad faith narrative being used to attack New College. And New College isn’t being attacked for any incidents where it displayed excesses of “wokeness” or for engaging in “cancel culture” but because of distortions and lies. The right has made a pretense of being in favor of academic freedom and freedom of speech, but their clear goal is to impose the values of the Christian right on American students by fiat, making public universities like New College into clones of private Christian conservative schools like Hillsdale. If they’re allowed to succeed, the result of years of right wing attacks on America’s universities won’t be more freedom of expression on campus, but drastically less.