I hate being manipulated. Absolutely hate it. Of all of the things that people can do to me, being manipulated tops the list for things that piss me off. But I must say, its one of the most useful tools in politics for getting people riled up about whatever issue you want them to be riled up about. There are many ways to manipulate people. You can lie to them about the issues. Or you can tell half truths about an issue. Or you can just plant one. The best way of all to manipulate people is to plant an issue that was nonexistent the day before, and water it with twisted rhetoric until it grows like a tree. Then all you have to do is watch it grow and take on a life of its own while you sit back and enjoy the fruit.
But what is a planted issue? Its one for which a group of people sit down, make up an issue that furthers their agenda and say, "this is what we want people to care about." Then they work day and night to plant this issue in our consciousness as something that is important. For example in the 1920's, smoking was considered a man's activity. Considering this bad business, the tobacco giants hired public relations genius Edward Bernays. His solution was to pay women to dress as feminists and smoke while marching in the 1929 Easter Parade in New York City. They were instructed to refer to their cigarettes as "Torches of Freedom." This planted event was a catalyst that caused smoking to become acceptable for women. (http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/educational/handouts/tobacco_advertising/women_and_girls.cfm) Once the idea was planted in peoples heads, it only needed watering in the form of positive encouragement from the tobacco industry. Another such planted issue is Hitler's scapegoating of the Jews. German society had no previous record of committing such heinous crimes against Jews on such a scale, but they were suddenly convinced that an ethnic group was responsible for all their problems. Although he watered fertile soil, he cultivated well, and we are still eating the deadly poison fruit that tree bears today.
So this is what a planted issue is: an issue that people sit down and invent for their own purposes that has no contribution to the common good. They manipulatively plant it in our consciousness in a way that we can accept, and then we are suddenly, passionately campaigning for this crap as if it came out of our own volition. Then when we start dealing with these manipulatively planted issues, their resolution only makes society and the body-politic worse. Women start smoking. Jews die.
So what about modern examples? A strong example is pundit David Horowitz and his Students for Academic Freedom (SAF). In 2002, in tandem with Frank Luntz of Luntz Research, Horowitz came out with a survey on the ratios of conservative professors to those with more liberal leanings. He found that there were more liberal profs on campuses by a ratio sometimes as high as 30 to one in certain fields. Using this data as a springboard, he started speaking about how a liberal dominated system was excluding conservatives, even though this ratio is probably due to the fact that conservatives just don't want to become teachers, much like liberals don't want to become soldiers. Nevertheless, he proclaimed a "Liberal bias" in higher education, and decreed that diversity of thought was in danger on college campuses. He created Students for Academic Freedom, a lobby organization with headquarters in Washington DC which has the aim of getting every university and state legislature in the country to pass a "student's bill of rights." His logic is that professors are using the classroom as a "moral pulpit" or "political soapbox," assigning "stacked reading lists" which are meant for moral indoctrination. For ammo in his arguments, SAF collects complaints that people send into them about what the bad, bad professors are doing now. By placing articles in his online magazine FrontPage, holding conferences, etc, he has gotten a large group of people jumping out of their shoes about this. The thing is, before he released his info in 2002, no one gave one hoot about this. No articles were being written, no people were complaining. By calling on our sense of oppression though, he has planted a sense that it is vital that we police our universities.
SAF does exactly that. They tell you how to set up your own student organization, and give you everything from bylaws to constitution to flyers to goals. In their handbook, they tell you what the problem is you are supposed to be combating, how you are supposed to do it, and what the ultimate solution is. They give examples of the "violations" that you're supposed to watch out for. If your prof makes remarks on a political issue in math class, that’s a violation of academic freedom, and you're supposed to write it up and send it away to SAF. Or if his readings are only pro or only anti affirmative action, do the same. You get to help water the tree.
It is from this document, the handbook, not with the actual student bill of rights that the real problems with this system become evident. May of these outlined violations come directly from the AAUP's professional code of conduct and are SAF's own evaluation of what a violation of their bill is. This effort is then a codification of a workplace conduct code into law. If you violate a workplace conduct code for a fireman, you are a bad fireman. If you violate a workplace conduct code for a store clerk you are a bad store clerk. If you violate a code of conduct as a prof, then you are a bad prof. So now what, is being a bad teacher suddenly going to be illegal? Since when is having a good teacher a right? The plague of bad teachers is as old as time itself, and opening up the court system to disgruntled students could be disastrous. Have you ever been in a class larger than 20 people where everyone loved the teacher? Probably not. So what’s to stop a student from suing every time they get an F? Or someone suing for representation of neo-Nazi views in a class on the holocaust? or someone demanding that Marxism be taught in an economics class? The potential for this to stop acadamia in its tracks is limitless.
On the side of professors, what is to stop them from feeling like if they say the wrong thing they could loose their reputation and job? It would be, after all, the student who judged whether to take the prof to court on an issue, whether the case was won or not, so the prof would always be doing guesswork as to what would be "political indoctrination" or not. Even if they were aquitted, appearing in court costs time and money. In this situation, I would go teach in England. So if we want to gut our higher education system, which is right now the best in the world, lets go along with this planted issue and take the quick bus to hell.
