Hate in the Homeland by Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Author:Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

Responses to Rising Hate in Higher Education

Clearly, there are a variety of factors being deployed by far-right individuals and groups as part of a broad effort to confront higher education and academic expertise. These tactics range from physical and symbolic hate attacks to propaganda directed toward students and scholars, as well as efforts to delegitimize knowledge-producing institutions and develop an alternative ecosystem to train a new generation of far-right intellectuals. The response of university communities to these developments has been mixed and is worthy of much greater discussion than space allows here. Mainstream scholars have been actively focused on how to respond to far-right attacks on individual scholars, providing guidance on how individuals, universities, and disciplinary associations can take steps to protect themselves and respond to threats in the event of harassment or abuse.133 But universities are also working across a range of other domains to address the rise of far-right and white-supremacist engagement on their campuses. Some have also worked to acknowledge their own historical roles in eugenics research, ownership of slaves, and naming of buildings after racists and white supremacists.

Within individual campuses, universities have run training workshops for faculty to better prepare for contentious classroom conversations that might include far-right statements or political views that fall outside of the mainstream, and have ramped up orientation programs designed to help students engage in civil dialogue across differences. Disciplinary groups have run special sessions at conferences on responding to attacks, and launched scholarly campaigns to counter misinformation and misuse of scholarship. National higher-education associations have also tackled campus polarization and attacks on higher education as key parts of their work. Senior leaders have worked to develop new guidelines for responding appropriately to controversial speakers’ events and campus hate. Overall, however, these efforts have been largely reactive, as campuses scramble to respond to rapidly changing campus political climates and to all-too-frequent attacks, hate speech, and propaganda.

These efforts to dismantle knowledge deemed to come from the left and build intellectual capacity for the far right are critical aspects of the overall transformations in far-right extremism. They have taken place alongside the development of new markets and financial capacity and efforts to train youth physically for future battles. But all of these domains rely on new media ecosystems to communicate. The transformations in online spaces, in other words, underpin all of these other changes in important ways that I analyze in the next chapter.

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