I have been reading a lot about the recent dust up at Middlebury College pertaining to Charles Murray. It has engendered a lot of hand wringing about the state of free speech on our campuses, and a lot of vitriol towards students who are characterized as living in a liberal bubble. And while I believe whole heartedly in free speech and having the hard conversations, I am also well aware that venues and microphones can add legitimacy to false and dangerous ideas. Anybody has the right to stand on a soapbox in their town square and spew whatever nonsense they desire, but that is not the same as having a right to a microphone and a podium at a college or a university. By inviting someone into this venue, an institution is essentially saying that it believes that they have ideas that are worthy of serious discussion. This alone lends an air of credibility and legitimacy to a speaker and their ideas.
This is a topic that I believe is worth in-depth discussion, but it is not the main focus of this post. Before moving on however, I would like to point out that in the case of Middlebury College, up to the point where outside agitators turned the situation ugly, students were exercising their right to free speech in order to drown out Murray’s voice. Considering that the right to free speech does not include a clause guaranteeing any one person the right to be the loudest voice in the room, his right to speak was technically not taken away from him. This having been said, the point that I am most interested in, in this case, is the club who invited him to speak.
I was surprised to hear that Middlebury’s campus has an American Enterprise Institute club on it. What is the American Enterprise Institute? The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a conservative think tank that has been around in one shape or another since the 1930’s and exists as a slightly less obviously partisan version of the Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute. In the 1950’s, it was denounced by Congress as essentially being a big business pressure organization that should register as a lobby, and in the 1960’s when many of its personnel worked for the Goldwater campaign, the IRS threatened its tax exempt status. In response to the latter, AEI pulled back from anything that could be interpreted as openly political and focused on creating a veneer of scholarly respectability to promote its right wing agenda. The Heritage foundation was created about the same time that AEI was recreating itself, and wealthy right wing donors began pouring money into the coffers of both. As Jane Mayer writes in her book Dark Money,
“The new, hyper-partisan think tanks had impact far beyond Washington. They introduced doubt into areas of settled academic and scientific scholarship, undermined genuinely unbiased experts, and gave politicians a menu of conflicting statistics and arguments from which to choose.”
In other words, these institutions as Mayer points out, provide a platform for their ‘scholars’ to perform fraudulent research, manipulate statistics and “deceive the public about pressing issues in which their sponsors [have] financial interests.” This then is what has gifted us politicians and a populace who are uncertain whether or not climate change is real. In the particular case of AEI, in 2010 they were caught offering cash payments to scientists willing to undermine a major UN report on climate change. After David Frum wrote a blog post criticizing the republican response to Obamacare, disapproving donors had him pushed out. Most recently, AEI was publishing articles extolling the credentials of Betsy DeVos to lead the department of education. The DeVos family are huge funders of AEI and, until this past January, DeVos sat on the board of Trustees.
That hyper-partisan think tanks such as AEI exist, and have been working hard to manipulate public opinion by producing skewed interpretations based on ‘alternative facts’ is not news, though I believe we need to take serious note of how successfully they are doing it. This leads me to my interest in the AEI club on Middlebury’s campus. Certainly, it is not surprising that a school like Middlebury would have a number of conservative students, but I had not heard of AEI on campuses before this and thought that this was worth investigation. After a little bit of digging, I discovered that beginning in 2013 AEI started expanding its student outreach and developed an American Enterprise Institute Executive Council program. This is a program where college students apply to AEI directly, and up to six students are chosen for each campus and are sponsored by AEI to, as their website declares, “promote substantive conversations about public policy on campus by hosting events and activities throughout the year. Examples include lectures or discussions with AEI scholars or local professors; private dinners with scholars, business professionals, or government officials; student debates: reading groups and film and debate viewings.” This is in addition to opportunities to be published, attend exclusive gatherings at their headquarters in Washington and have career opportunities in the world of public policy following graduation. In other words, AEI is working to bring its agenda to college campuses under the guise of fostering healthy scholarly debate and offering students mentorship and career development activities. Students who join do not necessarily know what they are getting into. AEI bills itself as operating independently of any political party and holding no institutional positions, and claims that their “conclusions are fueled by rigorous, data-driven research and broad-ranging evidence.” Of course, if you look closely, it does not take long to discover that this is a bit like Fox News declaring their news to be ‘fair and balanced.’ Meanwhile, the continuing presence of their pseudo-scholars giving lectures or participating in discussions on campuses around the country lends their organization, employees and publications a veneer of academic legitimacy. Since 2013 they have expanded from 25 campuses to 80 campuses nationwide. In doing so, they have also created a win-win situation for themselves and their scholars. If institutions and their larger student bodies refuse to host speakers invited by a student AEI group, created expressly for the purpose of providing a vehicle to invite said speakers, they can pull the free speech card and rant about how liberal campuses are blocking the free exchange of ideas. If they are allowed to speak and are met with protests, they can rail about the intolerant left that refuses to engage in meaningful dialogue. Knowing what AEI is and what they are trying to do, we need to ask ourselves, where is the line between scholarship and propaganda? To what extent does the latter belong on a campus? And most importantly, is this really a free speech issue or the symptom of a much greater problem?