Opinion: ‘Campus left’ is not silencing conservatives or indoctrinating students

Turning Point is a favorite of the Trumps, but has been the subject of several investigative pieces about its practices and policies.

By Matthew Boedy

When Charlie Kirk stood in front of a crowd at the University of Georgia Tuesday and did what he has done on Twitter and in other campus appearances as part of his “Hard Truths” tour: distort facts, misinterpret research, and so mislead people.

Kirk, the executive director and founder of the libertarian college student organizing network Turning Point USA, the group whom the Southern Poverty Law Center says has a "blooming romance with the alt-right," constantly claims that the "campus left" is silencing conservatives.

Yet he sure does spend a lot of time on campus, well, speaking.

As one of two Georgia professors on Turning Point’s McCarthy-style Professor Watchlist, I am not interested in being the straw man “campus liberal” for his provocations.

In reply, as the adage goes, I say that what defeats bad speech is not silencing it, but better speech.

So I am interested in using his appearance in our state to be the rhetoric professor who assesses Kirk. My simple thesis: Kirk isn’t very good at his job.

Kirk gains ire from people like me not just because of his often inane and asinine claims, but because he positions himself so badly. He performs the worst kind of rhetorical fallacies and his organization reproduces them in their legion of memes on Twitter.

Let me save you some time. Instead of heading out tonight to hear him and watch him “burn” socialists, read my case against him.

The rhetorical legend of Kirk begins in an AP Economics course at Wheeling High School in Wheeling, Illinois in 2012. As described in "How to Debate Your Teacher (and Win!)," young Charlie was incensed at his textbook's portrayal of his hero, President Reagan. As Kirk tells the story, he was so angered, he wrote Breitbart News. They were so impressed they asked him to write an article for Breitbart.com and on April 26, 2012, the post went live. That post began Kirk's meteoric rise in conservative political circles. From there he built Turning Point and its presence on 1,300 campuses.

In this 2012 post Kirk misquotes the textbook so that it appears to contradict his main claim that President Reagan's tax cuts grew the economy. And after "proving" (read not proving) that happened, Kirk then attacks the textbook for refusing to say so, arguing it's part of an indoctrination of students to a pedagogical agenda that "demonizes" his preferred economic theories. That is simply not the case. Read more of my analysis here.

Then in 2015 his organization published a booklet called "Indoctrination Prevention: 10 ways college professors indoctrinate America's youth and how to prevent it." Here is a link.

Turning Point may be effective in using the scare word of indoctrination to pander to its audience. But it's not ethical. Why? The booklet has few if any provable examples of indoctrination happening. And it suffers from fact problems — claims it makes that are easily disprovable. See more here.

I’ve never chided Kirk for not having a college degree. Clearly he has made a successful career at 25 out of his political opinions and being a cheerleader for President Trump.

But his opinions about what is happening on college campuses are just plain wrong. For example, Kirk stars in a 2017 PragerU video titled "The Least Diverse Place in America." He says universities, while being diverse in many other areas, are not "intellectually" diverse or don't have what Kirk calls "diversity of thought." For evidence, he says freshmen orientation week starts your stay in an "indoctrination center."

What rubbish.

He cites a study and says "all your professors on the left." I'm not on the "left" and many of my colleagues are not either. But don't take my word for it. According to InsideHigherEd, the "most complete" study on this issue – one Kirk does not cite – was published in 2007. One key finding: faculty members were more likely to categorize themselves as moderate (46.1 percent) than liberal (44.1 percent). Conservatives trailed at 9.2 percent.

Furthermore, one of the authors of the 2007 survey wrote a 2016 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times debunking Kirk's implied thesis, that liberal professors mean liberal indoctrination in the classroom. The author wrote instead: "Just because most professors are liberal doesn't mean the average student is being force-fed liberal ideology." Georgia's university system surveyed more than 1,200 students in 2008 and found the same thing: only 13 percent of students agreed that professors had inappropriately presented their own political views. See more here.

In a 2017 video, Kirk called higher education a "cartel" that should be broken up by market forces. According to Kirk, colleges should not be given subsidies (i.e. student loans) by the federal government and endowments should be used to lower tuition. Politifact called a similar "cartel" claim by Rep. Paul Ryan "mostly false." By the way, the school Kirk says has not used its endowment for tuition assistance, Ohio State, is doing just that.

Kirk also notes in the video that some of his staff at Turning Point have massive student loan debt from their four-year degree. He notes they would have been better off with two years of community college. This certainly would have cut their debt in half. And it might have gotten them the job they have now.

But talking of a cartel and then saying a two-year degree is a good option is contradictory. The same cartel would run those community colleges, no? Kirk can’t simultaneously call out higher education for conspiring against students and then suggest people enroll in one part of the cartel.

In general, Kirk says he isn’t against college, but his attacks on it – its professors, its curriculum, and its students (who he assumes are so stupid as to be indoctrinated) – show the exact opposite.

Finally, Kirk tweeted in February 2018 his basic philosophy: "Do whatever you want with your life as long it doesn't harm someone else. Just don't make me pay for it." He is also famous for demanding that "cultural Marxists" on campus don't tell him and other libertarians how to live their lives. Yet he has spent the last two years touring college campuses, abusing the responsibility of "free speech," and telling many exactly how to be free: more guns, more tax cuts, and more Trump greatness.

I say let Kirk become the next Richard Spencer. Not Spencer the white supremacist. But Spencer the college speaker whose last audience was a few dozen. And that lack of an audience (and the bigger one outside protesting) prompted him to end his tours, saying they weren't working.

Kirk can say whatever he wants, and we do have to pay for it to live in a free country. But you don’t have to listen.