OPINION: Universities need to call a lie a lie

In the aftermath of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol college leaders in Georgia issued milquetoast statements about the role of higher education in (re)building our democracy. For example, outgoing president of Georgia State University Mark Becker wrote that the day’s events “tested” our democracy like “it has never been tested before…”

I use milquetoast because Becker and University of Georgia president Jere Morehead couldn’t bring themselves to use the word “insurrection” or any noun or for that matter any adjectives to describe that event.

But they did praise the role of universities in forming the link between education and democracy. How are universities to judge their effectiveness in educating students about the “fundamental tenets” of our democracy, to quote Morehead?

Credit: Peggy Cozart

Credit: Peggy Cozart

Do we look at our graduates who play a role in leading it? One UGA graduate, newly elected U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Rome, was suspended from Twitter on Sunday for election lies. She and other GOP representatives who have college degrees from public schools in our state voted to object to the Electoral College based on lies. [If you were wondering, the two key defenders of the integrity of Georgia’s elections -- Gabriel Sterling and his boss, Brad Raffensperger -- also have degrees from public universities in Georgia.]

How about the general population? Thousands if not millions of voters across our state believe the “big lie” that Trump won the election or that somehow voter fraud played a role in the outcome. These voters need to look at why so many of them think (wrongly) colleges are “leftist indoctrination camps” and yet their party has been made over into a Trump cult with its own doctrine. In other words, if they are so keen on noticing such behavior on campus, how come they didn’t notice it on their Facebook feed?

Of course, millions of college graduates who voted for either candidate knew the truth. The first group tells us that a college degree certainly doesn’t guarantee the ability to tell a truth from a lie. The second doesn’t say much other than it wasn’t that hard to do such a thing this time around.

While the university system is required to teach U.S. government, what can colleges do so that in 2022 and beyond voters are not taken in by more lies, more conspiracies, and also vote for those who spread them?

For one, if university presidents feel the need this year to speak after an insurrection that overran the U.S. Capitol, surely they would feel in the future the need to speak out about lies from elected officials. But I won’t hold my breath.

Second, colleges can use their brands to educate people outside the normal course of study. For example, my employer, the University of North Georgia, recently announced an “education enrichment” program for seniors. Could the school not create one session on the various lies about the election? Or the difference between One America News and CNN?

At the undergraduate level, we might look at how students not only ingest misleading claims, say, about the pandemic, but also how they regurgitate those into work products for their courses.

Unfortunately, I had to witness this last semester in a class I taught that centered around issues affecting the election. A student wrote an editorial whose thesis was virus-related economic shutdowns are bad because we only needed to protect “the vulnerable.”

Line after line of misleading stats focusing merely on death rates were marked by me. The student also made baseless generalizations about politics and aging to the end of arguing if 74-year-old Trump can emerge “unscathed” from the virus, others in his age bracket can, too. I had to point out the “unscathed” was not backed by evidence as we at the time didn’t know much about Trump’s condition and what we did know often left us with more questions. He also received medical care unavailable to many “normal” Americans.

Frankly, with my history of being targeted by a conservative student group, I was worried the student was going to claim I was biased against conservatives for grading the paper so low -- albeit as low as others who had different problems.

But alas, that did not happen. The student even wrote to me at the end of the semester: “I learned much from your course and enjoyed your teaching style amid the pandemic.”

Allow me to use this interaction with a student as an analog for universities and their goal to help us rebuild our democracy: universities need to call a lie a lie, stifle misleading claims with context and facts, and be a moral leader.

It’s that last phrase that might raise some eyebrows. But I’m not the only higher education voice saying it. Twenty years ago, a month after 9/11, a university president told his colleagues that they all have “a greater ethical and emotional power than” they realize and that “a larger public forum is available” for the values associated with higher education.

And in September amid the Covid crisis, a community college leader said we need more “moral centers” as leaders.

The Association of American Colleges and Universities noted in its statement about the insurrection that a college should not merely teach skills and knowledge but “assist students in forming the habits of heart and mind that liberate their thinking and equip them for, and dispose them to, the creation of a more just and inclusive society through civic involvement.”

Democracy needs truth as much as it needs law. It needs clear standards of what we should accept in our leaders and in our discourse as much as it needs voting opportunities for all. Universities cannot provide the law or the voting. It can and must provide the moral clarity that education gives.

The university through its faculty and administrations have a needed voice in democracy. We have failed to use it as much as we should.