Threat to campus speech isn’t coming from the left | Will Bunch Newsletter
Plus, a new book puts America’s 1980s/’90s ‘crack epidemic’ in its place.
If you’re a morning person like me, you probably saw the United States crash out early from the women’s World Cup taking place Down Under, in a heartbreaking penalty-kick shootout with Sweden. The two-time defending champs were a flawed squad, for sure. But that didn’t explain the blend of vitriol and a strange joy from right-wingers, from Donald Trump to Franklin Graham, who despised the team and its most visible star, the retiring Megan Rapinoe, a fighter for LGBTQ rights and social justice. It turned out the team’s greatest feat was proving it’s conservatives who truly hate America.
📮 Last week’s question — which recent celebrity death gutted you the most? — drew an interesting array of responses. They included the soccer writer Grant Wahl (me too, as I wrote last year), the Notorious RBG, Tony Bennett (of course!), and even one vote from Jill Browne for “Lady Liberty.” Heh, I get it. But the most moving response was from Freddi Carlip about the iconic Philly DJ, Jerry Blavat, which cut to the real essence of why we care about celebrity deaths: “The Geator’s passing reminded me of lost youth, amazing music, and my own mortality. Although always a Yon Teenager in my heart, Jerry embodied eternal youth, and, when he passed, I realized that if he could die, than we all will, all the Yon Teenagers who listened to him, danced with him at Chez Vous, Wagner’s, Memories, and other dances, will at some point, pass too.”
This week’s question: The same one a reader asked me this week — do you think Donald Trump will go to prison if convicted in his multiple indictments? Should he? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.
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How a diversity scandal at Texas A&M exposed the right-wing threat to academic freedom
It felt like something of a coup for Texas A&M University, the nation’s largest public campus by enrollment, this spring when it heralded the return of journalism as a degree program by announcing the hiring of Kathleen McElroy — an alumna who’d become one of America’s top Black female journalists — to head the rejuvenated department.
In fact, administrators at the sprawling College Station, Texas, main campus put on something of a show in June, welcoming back McElroy — a former New York Times reporter who’d become a professor at the rival University of Texas. They handed her Aggies swag and festooned the stage with balloons to publicize her hiring as a tenured member of the Texas A&M faculty.
But it turns out the real coup was just beginning.
Jay Graham, a millionaire oilman and one of the Republican megadonors added to the Texas A&M Board of Regents by Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott — who’s received a whopping $1.7 million in campaign donations from Graham — texted a fellow regent to complain that McElroy seemed too liberal for their schemes for Texas A&M to produce conservative thinkers.
“I thought the purpose of us starting a journalism program was to get high-quality Aggie journalist[s] with conservative values into the market,” Graham wrote. “This won’t happen with someone like this leading the department.”
In the coming weeks, McElroy was stunned to learn that university officials were changing the terms of her hiring — to just a one-year appointment, with no tenure protection. Her main contact with Texas A&M, interim dean of liberal arts José Luis Bermúdez, suggested to her the problems were political, noting “you’re a Black woman who was at the New York Times!” But the specifics of what happened that caused McElroy to reject the drastically downsized offer were lacking.
Until now.
Texts released by Texas A&M late last week and reported by the Texas Tribune show that the school’s right-leaning, Abbott-appointed regents expressed concerns that McElroy’s expected hiring would be a setback to their major if undeclared project: undercutting liberal thought at the university and boosting conservative values. Graham texted fellow regent David Baggett that school president M. Katherine Banks “told us multiple times the reason we were going to combine [the colleges of] arts and sciences together was to control the liberal nature that those professors brought to campus.”
“The New York Times is one of the leading mainstream media sources in our country,” another regent, wealthy car dealer and $250,000 Abbott donor Mike Hernandez, texted a colleague. “It is common knowledge that they are biased and progressive leaning. The same exact thing can be said about the [U]niversity of Texas.”
The reason we’re seeing these texts is because the school’s double-cross of such a prominent Black woman journalist became a national scandal. Texas A&M agreed in a settlement last week to pay McElroy $1 million. University president Banks has resigned in disgrace, as has Bermúdez, the dean.
But despite the uproar, the momentum in Texas — and in other GOP-dominated Sunbelt red states like Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia — remains on the side of governors, state legislators and their political allies they’ve appointed as university trustees who increasingly seek to crush the aspects of higher education they blame for promoting liberal ideas branded as “woke.”
In the McElroy matter, her conservative critics — which included more than half of the Texas A&M regents — questioned her statements embracing diversity in newsrooms, at a time when Abbott and Texas lawmakers were successfully pushing a bill to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, or DEI, at public universities in the Lone Star State.
What’s striking is the blatant sentiment that state schools should not be producing diverse thinkers — but conservative ones. In an age where Republicans’ trust in higher education has plummeted to a rock-bottom 19%, GOP governors such as Abbott or Florida’s Ron DeSantis are packing boards of trustees with rich donors who lack real academic insight but share their cynicism. The new political hardball on campus is the greatest threat to academic freedom since 1950s’ McCarthyism.
Just ask Joy Alonzo, an assistant professor of pharmacy practice at Texas A&M who — coincidentally, at the peak of the McElroy controversy — gave a talk on drug-abuse policy in the state that included some criticism of ultra-conservative Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (her exact words were not recorded and remain a matter of dispute). The comments made their way back to the thin-skinned Patrick, and the university quickly suspended Alonzo and placed her under an investigation for possible firing. One could reasonably question whether Alonzo was just “cancelled.”
The Texas A&M follies have placed a long-overdue spotlight on the rule of increasingly politicized college trustees. The Texas Tribune has reported that eight of the 10 regents that Abbott has appointed to the Texas A&M University System have given him at least $200,000 apiece in campaign funds. According to the Texas A&M website, the 10-person board where so many questioned DEI programs has only one Black member (chair Bill Mahomes), only one with a Hispanic surname, and only one woman, the student regent. As the McElroy emails expose, many are against student indoctrination — unless it’s conservative indoctrination. They oppose today’s “cancel culture” — until it’s their patrons being criticized.
What happened to Kathleen McElroy and Joy Alonzo at Texas A&M is just one front line in a sweeping Republican war against higher education. There are many other battles: the push in multiple states to halt and undo DEI initiatives, restrictions in states like Florida on what professors can say about race or LGBTQ issues, the takeover and destruction by DeSantis and cronies of New College of Florida (a former bastion of liberal ideas), the weakening of tenure protection, hiring GOP pols as university presidents, and even messing with college accreditation.
Their methods are diverse, but the goals are always the same: to chill free speech and undo the post-World War II consensus — as described in my recent book, After the Ivory Tower Falls — that higher education can be a public good to train generations of Americans to become critical thinkers, to embrace an open and diverse society, and to take what they’ve learned into the voting booth. Because that would surely be the end of manipulative politicians like Greg Abbott, and the filthy rich, reactionary friends they placed in charge of our universities when no one was looking.
Yo, do this
Donovan X. Ramsey really gets it. In his new book, When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era, the freelance journalist does an amazing job showing the straight line from the crushed expectations of the 1960s’ social rebellions to the sense of despair behind a national outbreak of destructive drug use that, by the 1980s, settled on crack cocaine. Ramsey doesn’t downplay the extent of the problem, even as he traces how politicians, the media, and others cynically exploited “the crack epidemic” for their own ends. Blending his narrative with the personal sagas of four all-too-human beings in that brief moment when crack was indeed king requires some writing gymnastics, but Ramsey sticks the landing.
It’s hard to imagine that there’s an incredible true story about political activism in the late 1960s and early ‘70s that you knew nothing about, until you watch the 2022 documentary The Janes, now streaming on Max. In Chicago, a band of 20-something female political activists who became the Jane Collective realized that a) thousands of women were desperate to undergo abortions, which were illegal and, b) the male-dominated antiwar and civil rights movements didn’t care. But they cared, creating a remarkable underground network that safely carried out some 11,000 procedures before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in January 1973. The echoes, 50 years later and just one year after Dobbs, are deafening.
Ask me anything
Question: Even if convicted of something, what are the chances an ex-president will actually end up behind bars? — Via @katwild72 on Twitter/X
Answer: It certainly would be just to impose a jail sentence on Donald Trump, given the severity of the allegations against him. For example, there hasn’t been a recent federal classified-documents conviction that hasn’t resulted in substantial prison time, even for someone like Reality Winner who took and leaked merely one document. And the ex-president’s newer indictment, regarding his efforts to overturn the election, is far more serious than that. Despite all that, I have a hard time imagining incarceration. Trump is 77 now and getting older. Any criminal conviction would (remarkably) be his first, in a nation that notoriously spares white-collar crooks. And he was the 45th president of the United States, still assigned a Secret Service detail. Even if he’s convicted in all of the cases against him and loses the 2024 election, I do not see Leavenworth as his next residence.
Backstory on a Biden broken promise no one talks about
It was the summer of 2020. Millions marched in the streets to protest the police murder of George Floyd, and the scent of criminal-justice reform was in the air. Joe Biden, then the Democratic nominee for president, breathed that in. He surprised many by renouncing his career-long support for capital punishment — promising voters that he would work from the Oval Office to end the death penalty, by supporting federal legislation and urging the states which carry out the bulk of U.S. executions to do the same. It provided a sharp contrast to then-President Donald Trump, who reaffirmed his inhumanity in the final days of his presidency by signing death warrants for a slew of prisoners.
Biden was, in essence, promising to bring America into the 21st century, when the rest of the world’s democracies have long banned this barbaric practice. But it still takes a lot of political courage. It’s one thing to abstractly support, in principle, the notion that the state should not be putting human beings to death — especially in a society that sees far too many wrongful convictions. It’s something else to hold firm to this belief when confronted with the absolute scum of American society — like Dylann Roof, whose hatred of Black people led him to murder nine people in a Charleston church. Or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a terrorist whose 2013 bomb killed three people watching the Boston Marathon.
Or Robert Bowers, who in 2018 decided to go beyond his online anti-Jewish hate-mongering, walking into Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue with an AR-15 and three Glocks and murdering 11 people, in the worst antisemitic attack in American history. It’s hard to imagine a lower moment, or a more despicable human being. Perhaps that’s why there was little outcry or debate this summer when federal prosecutors — under the direction of Biden’s hand-picked attorney general, Merrick Garland — proclaimed after Bowers’ conviction on federal murder and hate-crime charges that they would push for the killer to die by lethal injection. The jury agreed.
Bowers’ capital sentence was the punctuation on a broken campaign promise. True, there have been no federal executions under Biden, and Garland’s Justice Department claims to be reviewing the practice. But there’s also been no White House push for a federal law, and certainly no pressure on the states which have executed 41 humans since Jan. 20, 2021. Garland’s Justice Department has fought to uphold death sentences for Roof, Tsarnaev, and a couple of others. As noted above, ending the U.S. death penalty requires courage — and Joe Biden doesn’t have it. Maybe in a second term, but I’m not holding my breath.
What I wrote on this date in 2016
Poking around, it seems I’ve written at least three pieces around the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s Aug. 8, 1974, resignation announcement (here’s the 40th anniversary) — except none were published exactly on Aug. 8. As a stickler for the format, I’m going to instead revisit my piece from Aug. 8, 2016, when I was worried about the awfulness of Donald Trump, but also the lousy campaign that Hillary Clinton was running to stop him. I wrote: “Yes, blame Hillary and blame the Democratic elites who threw everything they had behind such a flawed candidate. But the lion’s share of the responsibility for this mess belongs to Trump and all the voters and enablers who put a dangerous man this close to actual power. They have robbed America of the fundamental thing that makes a democracy: A real open and contested election.” Nothing has changed my opinion in the seven years since I published: “The other surprising risk that Donald Trump poses to American democracy.”
Recommended Inquirer reading
After an exhausting escalator ride of eight years and counting, the challenge of writing anything new about Donald Trump is a daunting one. That said, learning last week that the 45th president has been indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and that one of the counts stemmed from the so-called KKK, or Klan, Acts of 1870-71 inspired me to place Trump (and even his dad) in the long sweep of America’s struggle against white supremacy. And there’s little question that the 2020 votes that Trump wanted to throw out, in places such as Philly and Detroit, were mainly Black ones, a modern take on 1870′s nightriders.
Holding the actual power players in Philadelphia to account can be difficult — especially in the case of the Fraternal Order of Police, the influential police union. For decades, political leaders — eager for the group’s support, wanting to prove their “law and order” bona fides — have been largely afraid to take on the FOP. This despite persistent problems like an arbitration system that protects bad-apple cops, or — as The Inquirer recently exposed in an investigation — an unusually high rate of officers granted disability benefits. In the wake of that article, The Inquirer’s Barbara Laker — who shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for reporting on cop corruption — and David Gambacorta got a tip that a high-ranking FOP official had helped a Philly police widow gain $100,000 in state benefits, then steadily harassed her to ultimately loan her $20,000 of that money. When the two journalists investigated, that official paid back the money, retired from the police force amid an Internal Affairs probe, and got fired from the union. Their remarkable story was published Tuesday. If the local newspaper wasn’t working to keep the FOP honest, nobody else would. You support this vitally important work when you subscribe to the Inquirer.