Jon E. Travis

The Anti-Freedom of Speech Mission to Destroy Public Education in America:  A Counter-Essay

Thought & Action (the National Education Association’s Higher Education Journal) published (Fall 2012) “The Anti-Egalitarian Mission to Destroy Public Education in America,” written by an educational bureaucrat, Jon E. Travis, Professor of Educational Leadership at Texas A&M University-Commerce.  In that essay, Travis decried so-called “anti-egalitarians” as “individuals hostile to the tenets of American liberty.”  Furthermore, he labeled those faceless individuals as “oligarchs” seeking to restrict “educational access to the rich and white.”  They remain faceless because Travis lacked the courage to name any of them. 

As a white, more or less unemployed professor, I’ve always dared “go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways” (Emerson), especially regarding institutions of higher education employing me.  Travis blindly, if not religiously, praises those institutions as “revered.”  Likely, he has never mustered the courage or dared think as an independent citizen to actually question and challenge them. 

Travis and the bulk of educrats seem purposefully ignorant of the damage left-wing ideological political correctness has been doing to higher education, especially in the form of restricting (often unconstitutionally!) democracy’s cornerstones, vigorous debate and freedom of speech.  Why the egregious ignorance?  Evidently, it is self-serving.

As a white citizen, I take offense at the anti-white racist programs educrats have institutionalized in those so-called “revered” establishments of higher education.  Affirmative Action and the Un-Fair Campaign (see http://unfaircampaign.org) are several examples.  Institutionalized multiculturalism has served to diminish the very “tenets of American Liberty” (the words are Travis’) more than anything else on college campuses across the nation.

Yet why the silence with that regard? Why do our so-called “revered” institutions of higher learning evidently prefer diversity over democracy? Why have most, if not all, of them established Departments of Diversity, as opposed to Departments of Democracy?  Could educrats like Travis possibly be unaware of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the annual statistics it compiles with regards campus speech codes?

“Public education faculty, staff, and administrators need to believe they are in a war,” notes Travis, but I note in a war not with the nebulous “anti-egalitarians,” but rather with freedom-of-speech libertarians. In fact, the politically-correct  institutions of higher education praised across the board by Travis tend to be anything but egalitarian in nature. Conservative white students, for example, are surely not considered on an equal footing with minority students. The professorate is anything but egalitarian.

Finally, how can independent-minded citizens, as opposed to politically-correct indoctrinated college graduates and professors, possibly agree with Travis’ overall assessment of America’s institutions of higher learning as “revered,” especially when the majority of those institutions willingly and often illegally suppress freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech?  

Neither Travis nor Thought & Action deigned to respond to this counter-essay.  Perhaps both he and editor Mary Ellen Flannery are examples of those anti-egalitarians.