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Crackdown on Academic Freedom: Prof Under Attack for Asking Students to Think Independently

Source: The Defender

A professor at New York University, Mark Crispin Miller, is suing 19 colleagues for libel after they signed a letter to the school dean demanding a “review” of his conduct because he urged students to look into the scientific rationale for the mask mandates and to assess the truthfulness of the media drive to promote them.

Story at-a-glance:

  • Propaganda is an organized attempt to get large numbers of people to think or do something — or not think or do something. It’s not like classical rhetoric, which is about persuasion through argument, but rather a means of sub-rational manipulation.
  • For the past two decades, professor Mark Crispin Miller has taught a course on propaganda at New York University, in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
  • In September 2020 after urging his students to look into the scientific rationale for the mask mandates, to assess the truthfulness of the propaganda drive promoting them, he was subject to an administrative “review” for that and other alleged crimes.
  • Miller is suing 19 of his department colleagues for libel after they signed a letter to the school dean demanding a “review” of Miller’s conduct, falsely accusing him of “explicit” hate speech, mounting “attacks on students” “advocating for an unsafe learning environment” and discouraging his class from wearing masks.
  • Miller’s case shows that the infringement of academic freedom is inimical to independent thinking and free inquiry. Without such freedom, higher education is more than likely to teach students only to believe what they are told by state and corporate powers, which means not educating them at all — a failure damaging to them and catastrophic for democracy.

In this interview, professor Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D., provides us with a startling example of a crackdown on academic freedom, with dire implications for free speech in America today.

Ironically, it was his teaching students how to question propaganda, and to resist it, that brought on the curtailment of his academic freedom, after over 20 years of teaching that important subject at New York University.

His experience at NYU in the fall of 2020 culminated in his suing 19 of his department colleagues for libel — a case that has become a major flashpoint in the larger struggle to defend free speech and academic freedom, not just in the U.S., but throughout the West today. Miller explained how he had come to teach the study of the media, and propaganda in particular:

“I had learned, as an English major, how to read literary texts closely and carefully to discover their hidden depths … and I discovered to my delight that you could do that with great movies as well. The more closely you watch them, and the more times you watch them, the more you see in them.

“I then began to notice that TV commercials were also extremely subtle. As propaganda messages, they were really very carefully done so that they would appeal to you on both a conscious and an unconscious level. So, I started writing about those, and then about political rhetoric.

full story at https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/80115/crackdown-on-academic-freedom-prof-under-attack-for-asking-students-to-think.html

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