Understanding the Evolving Culture-War Vernacular

This article is part of a preview to the spring 2025 issue of Academe. The full issue will be published in May.

I must admit that I was surprised when Donald Trump picked Linda McMahon to serve as the secretary of education in his second presidential administration. I was expecting him to choose one of the culture warriors who have made their names, and fortunes, campaigning against higher education—a Christopher Rufo, Richard Corcoran, Lindsay Burke, or any of the number of other education “experts” cultivated within right-wing think tanks. Over the past few years so much right-wing political capital has been accumulated by waging a relentless war on the humanities, against scholars of race and gender, and against faculty and student supporters of Palestine. Why take the foot off the accelerator? Why choose the former administrator of the Small Business Administration, known primarily for her role as former CEO of a wrestling empire? Why choose someone lacking any significant higher education experience? Besides serving on the board of a small regional university and a two-year stint on Connecticut’s Board of Education (a position from which she resigned after it came to light that she lied about having a bachelor’s degree in education), Linda McMahon has nothing in her short resume that would credential her to head the Department of Education—not even a national profile as a firebrand education culture warrior.

Of course, a lack of understanding or expertise is not an obstacle in this administration. One possible explanation for McMahon’s selection could be that, in recent years, political partisans have successfully portrayed American higher education as little more than a clownish wrestling match. Partisan donors and well-funded political operatives have created an infrastructure whereby it became normal for high-profile provocateurs to arrive on campus for the purpose of causing commotion and throwing the institution into turmoil. In this context, the former head of World Wrestling Entertainment might indeed have all the skills necessary to bash earnest students and woke professors over the heads with the proverbial folding chair.

However, McMahon’s decision to slash the Department of Education’s staff by 50 percent less than two weeks after being confirmed as secretary of education demonstrates that the choice of McMahon is far more sinister. It also reveals the degree to which the partisan culture-war attacks on higher education have impacts far beyond college and university campuses. In the years after Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, McMahon became a major donor to the America First Policy Institute, serving as the chair of its board, where she became an advocate of efforts to privatize public K–12 education. The privatization of public schools has long been a major goal of the Right, from Milton Friedman’s justification of “segregation academies” on economic freedom grounds to the most recent push for school vouchers. And the road to privatizing all public education runs through a culture-war attack on higher education. Or, as Rufo pointed out, saying the quiet part out loud: “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” And relentlessly attacking higher education has proven a particularly successful strategy for undermining trust in public schools.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 makes the privatization of K–12 education a primary objective. The chapter on education in Mandate for Leadership, laying out the MAGA blueprint for the first 180 days of the Trump administration, starts by calling for the elimination of the Department of Education. The America First Policy Institute similarly emphasizes school choice as its primary—and seemingly only—education objective. Trump’s executive order “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families” begins the process of authorizing government block grants to fund private, faith-based, and charter schools.

This current political moment did not come out of nowhere, however. Rather, the appointment of Linda McMahon, and the promise of bringing a wrecking ball down on American public education, was normalized through an evolving culture-war narrative against public education. And the targeting of higher education became an important part of that multidecade strategy.

Our present conjuncture, including the aggressive efforts to privatize public education, has been made possible by successive waves of attacks over the past four decades. The culture-war rhetoric aimed at public education, and higher education in particular, has evolved over time, taking on different rhetorical strategies or culture-war vernaculars. These different vernaculars, however, rely on anecdotes and manufactured evidence about higher education to delegitimize all public education, from K–12 to college. The current political moment requires that we draw out lines of solidarity between the K–12 and higher education sectors while making bold, public, uncompromised demands for more and better public education. In other words, effectively defending the freedom to teach and research within colleges and universities requires that we push back against those narratives being spun by those who seek to discredit that freedom.

Evolving Culture-War Vernacular

Attempts by political and economic elites to determine what educators teach and write have a long history—think of Socrates’s fateful sip of hemlock, or Immanuel Kant’s efforts to carve out a space of intellectual autonomy from the Prussian king. And, of course, many academics in the United States faced repression during the McCarthy era and in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The current moment, however, may pose an even more severe threat. Ellen Schrecker, the foremost historian of McCarthyism in higher education, has noted that during the 1950s the Right targeted individual faculty members for their political affiliations but “did not interfere with such matters as curriculum or classroom teaching”; the current campaign, by contrast, is designed to “limit what can be taught in high school and college classrooms . . . by attacking the CRT [critical race theory] bogeyman and demonizing contemporary academic culture and the critical perspectives that it can produce.”

To claim that drastic changes to American education are needed, the Right must first establish that something is fundamentally broken. Over the past four decades, right-wing donors, media outlets, think tanks, and politicians have paved the ground for eventually seizing the ability to fundamentally shape what is taught and researched by working to delegitimize higher education as a sector. This campaign has been so successful that support for higher education among Americans is no longer a bipartisan issue. Rather, views about whether colleges and universities have a positive effect on society now breaks down along partisan lines, with 59 percent of Republicans saying higher education has a negative effect, versus 33 percent who say it has a positive effect. By contrast, 67 percent of Democrats believe higher education has a positive effect, compared with only 18 percent who see it negatively.

While there are very serious concerns about the current state of higher education—rising tuition, austerity, limited access, and casualization of the workforce, to name a few—the campaign to discredit higher education for perceived political bias does not tackle any of them. In fact, the moral panic about the state of speech on campus facilitates the hollowing out of academic institutions, making them more susceptible to academic capture by those partisans seeking to “fix” the problem.

Sociologist Stuart Hall and his colleagues argued that a moral panic about petty street crime, pushed by British elites and media outlets during the 1970s, created the conditions for enactment of the Thatcherite neoliberal policies of the 1980s. A similar moral panic has been manufactured about higher education today. This moral panic works by using isolated anecdotes to weave a false narrative about widespread censorship, indoctrination, and attacks on campus free speech. It has evolved through an iteration of different culture-war vernaculars, many pushed by the same small group of individuals, organizations, and outlets that have built upon previous vernaculars in ways that helped them metastasize.

"Political Correctness"

During the mid-twentieth century, American higher education experienced a massive expansion, as the federal government dedicated resources to expanding the teaching and research capacities of the academy. At the same time, civil rights, feminist, antiwar, Third World, and gay rights movements pushed growing academic institutions to admit more women, students of color, and people from nonelite backgrounds. As the academy became more diverse, many students and faculty began demanding that their institutions better reflect their lived experiences. As Roderick Ferguson writes in We Demand: The University and Student Protest, “The increasing visibility of communities made up of immigrants, people of color, women, indigenous people, queers, transgender persons, and disabled people represent[ed] far more than a demographic change in numbers”; it also “signaled an epistemological shift of the highest order, a shift in how knowledge can be reorganized in political and academic contexts.”

As would be expected, however, such transformations faced a backlash. In the late 1980s, several academics published highly influential books bemoaning the humanities for having lost their way. Books like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990) fretted over how much of the academy seemed captured by multiculturalism, postmodernism, and moral relativism. Lynne Cheney’s 1988 National Endowment for the Humanities report, Humanities in America, lamented that students were being taught by political activist educators and therefore no longer learned about Western civilization and the “texts that have formed the foundation of the society in which they live.” This hand-wringing about the state of the humanities became popularized in the media under the banner of “political correctness” in 1991. Originally a term used among the Left to denote doctrinaire adherence to certain positions, “PC” was increasingly used among the Right as to refer to forms of speech that, as Christopher Newfield put it, “compromised free speech—or allegedly commonsense language—in order to avoid [causing] offense to a person or group.”

As John Wilson details in The Myth of Political Correctness, right-wing personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Dinesh D’Souza pushed hard on this narrative, supported by organizations like the National Association of Scholars. Right-wing donors including the Bradley, Olin, and Scaife Foundations funded outlets and individual scholars that produced a steady stream of material condemning political correctness. Stories of rampant political correctness filled the airwaves of right-wing radio, receiving wall-to-wall coverage on Limbaugh’s show and in other outlets. “PC” eventually made its way into the mainstream press, which reproduced a narrative about the supposed censoring of conservative views on college campuses. Through a process Wilson calls “mythmaking by anecdote,” exaggerated or often outright falsified stories painted a picture of rampant conservative victimization.

Many academics on the right contributed by describing supposedly widespread political correctness on campus as violating free speech. For example, University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors became a crusader against political correctness after defending a student being sanctioned for yelling a racial slur at Black students. Following the incident, Kors coauthored a book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (1998), which offers a series of anecdotes about political correctness run amok. Kors and Harvey Silverglate built upon the success of their book by establishing the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE, now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) in 1999, with funding from the Bradley Foundation.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the moral panic over political correctness continued to simmer. However, the accusations that campus PC culture violated free speech would reach a new fever pitch during the 2010s—this time in the culture-war vernacular of a crisis in campus free speech. 

The Campus Free Speech Crisis

As Ralph Wilson and I demonstrate in Free Speech and Koch Money, starting in the mid-2010s it became increasingly common for professional provocateurs to visit college campuses. Right-wing donors helped to launch the careers of online and media personalities, many of whom specialized in railing against colleges and universities. The same donors who funded these provocateurs also funded the student groups that brought them to campus, groups like FIRE that sued institutions for not allowing provocative speakers on campus, and the media outlets that whipped up outrage over protests against these ideologues. They also funded groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Goldwater Institute, which wrote model legislation seeking to change campus speech policies to give external provocateurs greater access to campus while punishing the right to protest such speakers. And they pushed the narrative that higher education was rife with “cancel culture.” They bemoaned the “coddled” and “woke” students who avoided difficult ideas by demanding “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”

Milo Yiannopoulos and his 2015 “Dangerous Faggot” tour were particularly successful in stirring up controversy during this period. Yiannopoulos worked at Breitbart News, an organization under the patronage of hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who also funded the campus tour. During his campus stunts, Yiannopoulos would not engage in scholarly debate or discussion but instead staged grotesque displays in which he railed against feminism, engaged in racist and transphobic tirades, and threatened to publicly release names of undocumented students. Yiannopoulos was regularly invited to campus by chapters of the College Republicans, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), Young Americans for Liberty, and other externally funded student groups. More recently, TPUSA—which receives tens of millions of dollars annually from right-wing donors and is well integrated into the MAGA political universe—has brought Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, and Kyle Rittenhouse to campuses in a high-profile effort to generate outrage. Protests against these speakers become the anecdotal raw material used to manufacture evidence that conservative views are being censored on campus.

In more recent years, the conservative Leadership Institute has created a center for Riley Gaines, the swimmer who competed against the transgender athlete Lia Thomas. Gaines regularly visits college campuses to promote transphobic campus policies in the name of Title IX protections. In addition to platforming Gaines, the Leadership Institute also trains right-wing activists on college campuses and runs the media outlet Campus Reform, which began as a social media messaging board for college conservatives before being rebranded in 2013. Since then, it has produced a steady stream of outrage pieces about higher education, spreading the narrative that campuses are hostile to conservative speech.

The same year that Yiannopoulos embarked on his subsidized campus tour, and at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was growing on college campuses around the country, the University of Chicago released its Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, otherwise known as the Chicago Principles. The committee, established by the president and provost and not by an elected faculty body, was created to respond to “recent events nationwide that have tested institutional commitments to free and open discourse,” including the supposed crisis of students protesting speakers. The Chicago Principles laid out a vision of campus speech as “debate or deliberation,” maintaining that “members of the University community are free to criticize and contest the views expressed on campus, and to criticize and contest speakers who are invited to express their views on campus, [but] they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe.” Sigal Ben-Porath has correctly pointed out that the Chicago Principles “serve as a rather effective response to the portrayal of campuses as ‘safe spaces,’ or as caving to student identity-based demands and to faculty ideological biases.” In other words, forms of speech that have historically benefited from existing hierarchies remained privileged, while speech seeking to fundamentally challenge those hierarchies was labeled disruptive and deviant. This point was made abundantly clear in the 2016 letter that University of Chicago Dean Jay Ellison sent to incoming students, which explained how the Chicago Principles would be interpreted on campus. Dean Ellison wrote, “We do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

In the years leading up to the massive Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the moral panic around campus free speech was already taking hold. The same few anecdotes about speakers being protested and videos of campus altercations became all too common on social media and in the right-wing media ecosystem, and they gradually seeped into the broader public discourse. In this way, a handful of local speech controversies were catapulted into the national conversation through a political and media infrastructure created to ensure that protests against Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley, or Charles Murray at Middlebury College would form the basis of a barrage of news stories, reports, and books claiming that campuses are hostile to conservative speech. Instead of taking time to understand why students might protest a speaker, attempting to appreciate the complexities of contested speech on individual campuses, or following the money that often made these spectacles possible, the narrative of a supposed campus free speech crisis became a kind of common sense.

However, even as the vernacular of a campus free speech crisis was growing in popularity among those concerned with the state of higher education, its scope remained fairly limited. This moral panic would once again evolve, becoming supercharged in 2020 as right-wing donors and activists scrambled to discredit the Black Lives Matter protests and the scholarly arguments about race and racism that informed them. 

CRT and DEI

During the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement brought millions of people into the street to condemn police violence—and other forms of social violence—aimed disproportionately at Black and brown people. From late May through June 2020, somewhere between 6 and 10 percent of adult Americans participated in a Black Lives Matter protest. And demonstrations took place in 40 percent of counties, including many that are rural and majority-white. Protesters demanded that the federal government, states, cities, schools, corporations, libraries, universities, and other institutions take active measures to address structural racism and social inequality. And these demands were being heard, understood, and honored.

This unprecedented uprising caused a collective freak-out among the Right. The then largely unknown partisan activist Christopher Rufo began expressing concern that traditional lines of attack against “political correctness” and “cancel culture” were not effective against this mass movement. Rufo fell upon the strategy of weaponizing the term critical race theory, explaining to the journalist Benjamin Wallace-Wells that “its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’” Disconnected from its scholarly context, Rufo wrote, “‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American,” and the term could therefore become “the perfect villain.” Rufo proceeded to use his extensive platforms at right-wing think tanks, including the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation, to promote his hyperbolic mischaracterization of a whole field of legal scholarship, cynically portraying it in ways that fit his partisan cause. In September 2020 Rufo took his crusade against “CRT” to Fox News, calling for an executive order banning critical race theory. Trump saw the interview and the next day summoned Rufo to help author Executive Order 13950, “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” This executive order served as the basis for more than a hundred so-called divisive-concepts bills seeking to fundamentally shape professional trainings and course content in K–12 and higher education.

Leaked messages from this time also show Claremont Institute chair and Republican megadonor Thomas Klingenstein similarly concerned that his preferred ideology was facing considerable challenge from the mass Black Lives Matter movement. For example, in text messages to Scott Yenor—a Claremont fellow who would go on to write a barrage of reports slandering and misrepresenting campus diversity work—Klingenstein wrote, “Rhetorically, our side is getting absolutely murdered. . . . We have not even come up with an agreed-on name for the enemy.” Yenor replied that it was necessary to make lawmakers “reluctant to take on anything called ‘diversity and inclusion’” and that they should focus on ensuring that “terms like ‘diversity’ . . . [were] saddled with more negative connotations.”

This strategy of attacking campus diversity efforts was particularly useful for those seeking to undermine the racial justice moment. By 2022, “divisive-concepts” or anti-CRT bills targeting research and teaching, such as Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, were facing successful First Amendment challenges. Yenor, Klingenstein, the Claremont Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and others rapidly refocused their culture-war attack away from criminalizing certain kinds of speech and toward dismantling the offices, staff, and institutional strategies created to make campuses more inclusive to people from all backgrounds. This shift represented a rapid escalation of the culture-war vernacular. Like Rufo’s willful misrepresentation of scholarship, the villainization of campus diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts were also incubated in a network of well-funded and deeply interconnected think tanks, media outlets, and partisan organizations. The result not only chilled faculty and student speech but also made it possible to remake academic institutions themselves, forcing colleges and universities to close offices, lay off staff, and stop offering support services.

These culture-war vernaculars targeting scholarship and campus justice efforts became so mainstream that during the first days of Trump’s second term in office, he issued an executive order calling diversity work “illegal and immoral discrimination” and a violation of civil rights. This threat of using civil rights law to punish colleges and universities engaging in campus diversity efforts was expanded even further when the acting assistant secretary of civil rights at the Department of Education released a “Dear Colleague” letter interpreting the Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admission, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College as applying not only to admissions but also to “hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarship, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.” In other words, programing and supports aimed at ameliorating a lack of racial diversity and inclusion on campus—that is, the work known as DEI—is now considered a violation of civil rights by the federal government.

Accusations of Antisemitism

Efforts to target the teaching and scholarship on race and gender were given additional fuel in the aftermath of campus protests over the Israeli government’s disproportionate use of violence in Gaza. Rufo, Yenor, and the political infrastructure built around them quickly seized upon these protests. Think-tank personalities at the Heritage Foundation and elsewhere, who had been pumping out distorted stories about CRT and DEI, rapidly pivoted to stoke a moral panic about the prevalence of antisemitism on college campuses. While isolated incidents of violence did occur on college campuses, 99 percent of campus protests were peaceful. This fact did not prevent the Right from painting the protesters as coddled students and members of riotous mobs seeking to destroy higher education and American society.

On October 13, 2023, only six days after October 7, Rufo posted on X about the strategy of using claims of antisemitism to delegitimize political opponents and academic scholarship: “Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic ‘decolonization’ in the public mind. Connect the dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left disavow them. Make them political untouchables.” When criticized for “saying the quiet part out loud,” Rufo simply responded, “Yes.”

By spring 2024, the right-wing infrastructure was well-practiced at rapidly adapting and deploying culture-war vernaculars to delegitimize higher education. And media outlets and mainstream institutions had become all too eager to give credibility to these manufactured culture-war narratives, publishing their own stories about CRT and DEI run amok.

In the case of student encampments and institutional responses, Rufo gloated about how he got respected outlets to do his dirty work for him. In the weeks following Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Rufo and right-wing activist Christopher Brunet planted a story in right-wing outlets accusing Gay of plagiarism. These stories had limited effect until Rufo waged a “substantive campaign of shaming and bullying” that caused “left-wing outlets” to repeat his allegations, basically verbatim. Gay was fired only after Rufo’s story crept into CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Rufo called it a “textbook example of successful conservative activism.”

With the media willing to repeat right-wing culture-war narratives, student protesters were increasingly framed as deviants and threats that needed to be pacified. It became common to see faculty being arrested, even thrown to the ground, for supporting their students’ right to protest. In conversations with journalists during this time, I would regularly ask if they had been to the encampments to talk with students about why they were protesting. The answer was often no. As a result, the selected anecdotes of violence and antisemitism that fit a partisan narrative were amplified, backed by a political infrastructure, while very little was done to put the protests and disruption into context or to understand why students might be protesting. Isolated incidents of antisemitism quickly became national stories, but the protesters themselves were rarely humanized. All of this was possible because the groundwork had already been laid. Journalists, politicians, and the broader public already expected to see thoughtless left-wing ideologues seeking to silence others on campus—an updated vernacular for a culture-war narrative honed over decades.

Organizing for the Common Good

The evolving moral panic about higher education has brought us to this current moment, when Linda McMahon can become the secretary of education while promising to dismantle the department she oversees, and the president can use DEI as a sledgehammer with which to cancel funding, pressure institutions to preemptively change their policies, and scare faculty into self-censorship.

At this juncture it is necessary to recognize that the culture-war attack on higher education was always about delegitimizing public education writ large for the purpose of defunding and privatizing it. It is incumbent upon us as academics to forge alliances with K–12 educators, to better explain the deep connections between our work and the work being done in primary and secondary schools around the country. In doing so, academics should draw from the examples of teachers’ unions in Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and elsewhere that have successfully bargained for the common good. These unions have worked with parents and community groups not only to advocate for better wages and benefits but also to fight for smaller class sizes, increased school funding, better student supports, and racial and environmental justice. In other words, they have used organized power to fight for things that benefit the broader community.

It is dispiriting to think that a small handful of well-funded think-tank hacks and activists have been able to manufacture a widespread moral panic about higher education. However, they have succeeded in part because we have isolated ourselves, thinking about our work as disconnected from that of others: a special, and specialized, profession. Turning the tide on the manufactured moral panic, and the devastating policies it legitimizes, requires building real power among students and higher education workers. It also means organizing for a common good that extends far beyond our campuses.   

Isaac Kamola is director of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Higher Education.