It sounds like a miracle. A small community college with a politically divided student body achieves the impossible: an agreement on the need for civil discourse among different political viewpoints. Free speech becomes a campus-wide value, and a growing number of students participate in contentious debates with no hurt feelings or ex-post investigations.

Before long, the national media takes notice. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Reason magazine cite the college to declare that the so-called censorship problem on American college campuses is overblown. With a little work, all can be set to right. The New York Times joins the chorus, citing the college as an example that conservative concerns are a myth and that academic freedom is on the upsurge across America.

At last comes the imprimatur of the Heterodox Academy, founded in 2015 by the New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt, to bring “open inquiry and constructive disagreement” back to American college campuses. It grants the college Heterodox Campus Community status in 2022, a gold standard. The college, it gushes, “is a microcosm of many divisions that currently exist in the United States” which makes it “an ideal home for a HxA Campus Community.”

Linn-Benton Community College is indeed an unusual place. The Oregon college sits athwart a largely Democrat-voting county to its west (mainly due to the presence of giant Oregon State University) and a rural, Trump-voting county to its east. Seemingly out of nowhere, even as Oregon’s major state universities descended into woke nightmares, this little college tried a better way.

But for all the fuss about Linn-Benton, the true story of this campus along the Calapooia River in central Oregon is a stark reminder of deep-seated censorship in American higher education. It also shows the inadequacy of superficial fixes often put forward by Heterodox Academy or the new faculty-led Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. This is a deep dive into a small place. But sometimes the inherent obstacles to free speech and actual political diversity in American institutions are seen better in miniature. If this is the free-wheeling Socratic campus of the American future, then the problems are far worse than we imagined.

Miracle on the Calapooia?

Linn-Benton’s faint efforts for free speech and viewpoint diversity are wholly the result of two individuals, one of whom is no longer there. What’s more, what passes for political diversity at the college is highly circumscribed and curated. I spoke to club members and leaders, but will keep their names anonymous here at their request. Readers are welcome to double-check my findings.

Linn-Benton is a typical community college with 18,000 students split roughly between technical and liberal arts programs. These “two worlds” as they are known on campus, draw from the two different counties that define the institution. In a survey of students in 2018, 24% were Republicans and 26% were Democrats, while 40% called themselves some brand of conservative and 33% liberal. Linn-Benton is as purple as they come. And that is not unusual for the nation’s 1,000-odd community colleges where more rural and veteran student bodies lead to more political diversity.

But having politically diverse students does not guarantee political diversity on campus. Far from it. In fact, Linn-Benton has all the hallmarks of an intellectually stagnant organization.

As a feeder school for nearby Oregon State University, the college has mainstreamed the social justice indoctrination courses required to graduate at OSU, known as the Difference, Power, and Discrimination (DPD) Program. This also requires training for faculty who intend to teach such courses. DPD is rote left-wing indoctrination, plain and simple. In one writing exercise, students must rate their commitment to “thinking about ways you belong to oppressor and oppressed groups” and then complete a form undertaking to change their behavior. But it receives a gushing welcome at Linn-Benton, whose faculty and administration are perfectly aligned with this understanding of education.

The faculty and administration lean heavily to the left. In the 2020 election cycle, according to data from the organization Open Secrets, all nine donors who identified the college as their employer gave to the Democratic Party. In the 2022 elections, all ten donors from the college gave to the Democratic Party. This is consistent with the political monoculture among faculty and staff at the major universities in Oregon where something like 96–100% of both monies and donors from the universities are directed to the Democratic Party.

Linn-Benton’s “free speech movement,” if it can be called that, was initiated in 2018 by the college’s president at the time, Greg Hamann. He read Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s book on the disappearance of political pluralism in American higher education, The Coddling of the American Mind, and sent a copy to every top administrator and faculty chair, urging them to read it. Hamann is typical of the movement that took shape in the wake of Coddling: a moderate liberal who feels a degree of guilt about the censorious and intolerant atmosphere in their workplace and feels the need for some therapeutic interventions that do not threaten an overall leftward tilt to the university.

Hamann’s initiative prompted communications professor Mark Urista to expand an informal Civil Discourse club into a formal program through which students could earn credits.

Institutionalized Limits

The result was an immediate backlash. “Quite a few” people did not support the initiative, Urista told a gathering in 2022, reviewing the lessons learned. Left-leaning students complained about “trying to incorporate views from students who hold patently offensive positions like xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny.” As a result, debates on controversial topics like immigration, gay marriage, or Title IX due process were immediately off-limits.

A bigger threat came from the college’s diversity director at the time, Javier Cervantes. When Urista announced the expanded civil discourse program, Cervantes complained that it was in conflict with campus DEI policies. (Cervantes did not respond to an email asking about his opposition.) That is the sort of veiled threat that would have most college presidents running for cover. But Hamann was nearing retirement and decided to stand firm. (Hamann is now a member of Oregon’s higher education agency and would not comment for this essay.)

Cervantes left in 2021 to join a nearby K-12 school district, where his radical DEI policies went over like a lead balloon. Within two years, he was forced out, along with a race-obsessed superintendent who had banned police from the annual First Day of School celebrations. Both were given positions by Oregon’s governor Tina Kotek, whose K-12 educational staff have become a Who’s Who of ousted radicals in the state.

Even with Hamann and Urista standing firm, the Civil Discourse Club has been cautious, sticking to largely non-controversial topics. Recent barn-burners included whether Oregonians should be allowed to pump their own gas and whether online college classes do more harm than good. When the club goes to the local farmers market on weekends with signs advertising “Free, Intelligent Conversation,” they are instructed to avoid political topics in favor of such hot-button issues as “Do you like gardening?”

The only time the club veered into mild controversy was a 2020 debate on whether the protests that destroyed downtown Portland in the wake of the death of George Floyd had “done more good or harm.” This brought criticism from campus, forcing Urista to remind critics that a survey on the same question by The Oregonian showed that a majority in the ultra-liberal city believed they did more harm.

More generally, there has been no mainstreaming of free speech on the Linn-Benton campus. Urista’s Civil Discourse Club is a program, not a campus-wide policy. Plans for free speech-based faculty development at the campus under the new Heterodox status have gone nowhere. The DPD faculty training program, meanwhile, continues full-steam ahead. If this is what constitutes viewpoint diversity on an American college campus, then Cambridge University scholar Nathan Cofnas’s critique of Heterodox’s mild approach is well-validated.

What constitutes “informed” views or “grandstanding” activities on a campus whose faculty and staff are virtually all leftists?

Hamann was replaced as Linn-Benton College president by pride activist and “cultural competency” advocate Lisa Avery in 2020. She told one interviewer that she supported the HxA initiative, but only because she learned so much from those she disagreed with. In response to emailed questions, Avery says that “civil discourse and freedom of expression are critical to the campus culture” at Linn-Benton, and “that is also true with our commitment to equity and social justice, which are cornerstones of our college’s mission.”

The new DEI director, meanwhile, may outdo even the fiction of Cervantes. Jason Jamal Dorsette is a former president of the local NAACP branch. He began doctoral research in Critical Race Theory at Oregon State and advocates that it be taught to K-12 children. He frequently speaks to cooing liberal Oregonians about how, having escaped the terrible racism of his native North Carolina, he has suffered even more from the “micro-aggressions” and “passive racism” of stupid nice whites in Oregon.

In his role with the NAACP, Dorsette leads the annual Linn-Benton “Unity Celebration that puts “social justice and equity” as the core values of the college. The group begins each meeting with a moment of silence to reverently atone for the stolen land on which the campus sits, some participants ruefully clasping their hands in Buddhist fashion. (Dorsette did not respond to questions).

Lower down the batting order comes the new dean of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, Meg Roland, who sits firmly within the Marxist-leftist traditions of the academy. In response to emailed questions, Roland expressed support for the Heterodox Academy’s aims of “informed” discussions at Linn-Benton while cautioning that “we are less interested in grandstanding activities” from controversial speakers. That perhaps speaks to the problem: what constitutes “informed” views or “grandstanding” activities on a campus whose faculty and staff are virtually all leftists?

For instance, Roland concludes her 2022 book on medieval maps by insisting that her research highlights the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement. The movement “laid bare the geographies of structural racism as well as the risks of traversing privileged spaces as a black or brown body” which shows that the “power structures” in today’s America are enforced spatially “as they were in feudal medieval culture.” Is Roland’s argument that the alleged victims of racism in America today are just like serfs in medieval Europe an “informed” one? Or would a talk on the medieval parallels to contemporary black life in America be a form of “grandstanding”?

Roland’s associate dean, Oriana Mulatero, does not even believe there is such a thing as objectively “informed” views. As she wrote in her master’s thesis on “feminist pornography” from Oregon State University, citing the French philosopher Michel Foucault, “institutions— such as academia or a government—construct knowledge and therefore construct what is considered ‘Truth’.” It is difficult to imagine how she would mediate potential conflicts about whether an opinion was “informed” or whether a speaker was “grandstanding.”

A Mammoth in a Tar Pit

In praising Linn-Benton, the New York Times cautioned that academic freedom still allowed faculty to weed out viewpoints that “misrepresent evidence,” citing critics of vaccinations and Christian-centered histories of the United States as the sorts of arguments that should be banned. Yet a casual glance at course syllabi at Linn-Benton from just one instructor in history and political science reveals such “scholars” as Howard Zinn, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Rick Steves (yes, the travel guide), and not a single recognizable conservative or classical liberal text. Is this “informed” teaching?

Mark Urista, in other words, is like a mammoth caught in a liberal tar pit. The more that Linn-Benton has been celebrated in the liberal media as evidence that campus censorship is a right-wing myth, the more the program has been trapped by left-wing ideology. Roland cites Urista’s successful 2022 grant from the Teagle Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities to “creatively engage” political differences at the college as evidence of blossoming “viewpoint diversity” on campus. But the grant to study famous works was premised on efforts to “address issues of equity and inclusion in ways that are distinct to the social and economic justice mission of community colleges.” This would entail working “closely with our Office of Institutional Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and our Difference, Power, and Discrimination (DPD) Faculty” to ensure the syllabus “reflects the perspectives of historically marginalized or oppressed groups and rigorously engages in the work of critical pedagogies and curriculum transformation at the institutional level.” In other words, heterodox thinking is allowed as long as it sits within the confines of institutionalized left-wing premises.

Urista now stands against a constant drumbeat of scolds from the faculty, students, and administration intent on shutting down anything they sniff as a conservative point of view. The small aperture for un-woke thought is under tremendous strain. As he noted of his battles: “Focus on allies, don’t try to convert the opposition.”

So, unfortunately, the miracle on the Calapooia is a myth. So are other places where liberals would have you believe there is a pandemic of free speech and political pluralism. When Harvard star professor Stephen Pinker announced the formation in April of a grandly named Council on Academic Freedom that included many members (“even some on the right”), it was dead on arrival. The Council had no plans to challenge institutions of thought control on campus. Instead, it would host seminars and speakers, as if the Berlin Wall was brought down by the peace movement. Free speech at Linn-Benton exists only in the mind of Mark Urista, and free speech at Harvard exists only in the mind of Stephen Pinker.

In the end, as the Linn-Benton case shows, attempts by campus liberals to introduce free speech and viewpoint diversity are bound to fail because today’s liberals endorse a view of the world that, deep down, denies the legitimacy of these aims.

The news from the banks of the Calapooia is not good. It is a story from the frontier. But it paints a portrait of the whole.