Welcome to Carolina Journal Online’s Friday Interview. Today the John Locke Foundation’s Donna Martinez discusses liberal bias in academia with Mike Adams, who teaches criminology at UNC-Wilmington and writes a popular column for TownHall.com. The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio (click here to find the station near you).
Martinez: Your work is so fun to read. You have a really interesting writing style and you are delightfully sarcastic at times. If people are not aware of your work, we should let them know that you are a conservative working in academia, which is dominated by liberal folks on campuses. What is that like — to be that one lone person?
Adams: I like it a lot. I mean people always ask me — how do you survive? And, [the answer] is tenure! Actually, the fact of the matter is, the thing that probably gives me the most protection is the column because I have, quite frankly, a much bigger reading audience than the chancellor. If I make the chancellor mad, she has to write a letter to the editor of the [Wilmington] Star-News or something like that, in front of all of its hundreds of readers, and there is not a whole lot that can be done. And so that keeps me in there. But the other question is — why do you want to be in there? And the fact of the matter is, I like it. I like being sort of an institutional gadfly, and I’ve always thought that a public university is not a place where you have a right to be unoffended, or should even have a desire to be unoffended. It should be a place of constant debate and tension. And, through a clash of different perspectives should emerge the truth, and that is what I enjoy about academia.
Martinez: What is it like for you with your colleagues?
Adams: The funny thing about it is that, when I first came out of the closet, if you will, and started writing, and initially wrote some columns for the Agape Press — a small Christian newsletter out of Tupelo, Mississippi, and I am a native of Mississippi — I started doing that a few years ago, and they went crazy when I first started writing the columns. But then over the years, as I started to write for Town Hall or Front Page and for a number of print publications, and started to speak around the country, it has gotten to a point where they couldn’t avoid actually reading the columns. And, they are seeing a very consistent theme that is popping up throughout the columns. And that is, that I am sincerely making an effort to expand, not to contract, the marketplace of ideas. What they see is, there are all of these controversies, and many of them have been in North Carolina, many of these controversies have been in different states. After they are over and the dust has settled, all you have is a new voice in the debate. So they recognize, well, you know, maybe if I were in trouble and my speech were threatened — which is hardly theoretically possible on my campus if you are a liberal — but they realize that under no circumstances would I try and shut them down, and I might even defend them. So, there is a greater number of liberal readers on my campus. And recently, a funny thing happened where someone actually brought up my column in a department meeting and said something positive about a point that I had made. And, I heard a couple of feminists talking in the office just about a month ago, and one of them was talking about how she didn’t agree. I walked up on them during this conversation and she said, “Well, we are talking about you right now. We are talking about your column, and I want you to know I don’t agree with a single thing you’ve ever written, but it’s intoxicating, it’s fun.” And I said, “Yes, isn’t that something? Now, do you remember in the era 10 or 15 years ago, before we had speech codes, when we used to debate, how much could be fun if you use a sense of humor and never really lose your temper?”
Martinez: You mentioned feminism, and that happens to be one of my pet peeves, and you see a lot of examples of radical feminism, where in my opinion, it’s really just teaching young women some things they’re going to find out down the road really are not true.
Adams: That’s right.
Martinez: Tell me about some of your experiences with feminism and feminists.
Adams: When I did come out of the closet, if you will, my first free speech controversy was with the Women’s Resource Center at UNC-Wilmington, and I’ve had some later with the Carolina Women’s Center at UNC-Chapel Hill. But my first free speech controversy, which was very minor, was one where I was simply trying to get them to not speak entirely about abortion when it came to feminism. That’s their issue. That’s almost all that they talk about — reproductive choice — and they talk about it from a narrow perspective. My first encounter with them was trying to simply get them to add to all of their Planned Parenthood literature and links on the website and addresses and phone numbers — [I] tried to get a crisis pregnancy center added to the equation.
Martinez: They didn’t want you to be able to do that, did they?
Adams: No, they fought that. And they started coming up with different rules, and ultimately, they decided that these crisis pregnancy centers, at least the one we have in town, were overtly Christian. And so they shot us down on that basis, and then subsequently started to promote gay web sites, which had essays about Jesus coming back to Earth as a gay activist in San Francisco. I’m not even joking. They would allow in church advertisements, ads for gay churches. They would allow Christianity to be presented on that web site — as long as it was advancing the liberal agenda. And so, I had one of my first controversies on my campus with the feminists, recognizing that they are willing to do anything — distort the rules, engage in ideological discrimination and religious discrimination — to keep a situation on campus where they talk about pro-choice by limiting the choices, namely, to the perspective of Planned Parenthood.
Martinez: Ironic, isn’t it?
Adams: It is absolutely ironic and hypocritical. And I sort of learned some important lessons working with the feminists on campus, and one of those is that sunlight is not always the best disinfectant, as Justice Louis Brandeis once said before the United States Supreme Court. The fact of the matter is, sometimes you have to sue.
Martinez: What about this issue of moral relativism? I know that’s a frequent theme in your columns.
Adams: Oh, sure, sure it is. It’s something that pops up. I’m getting a whole lot of support recently at speeches, from black students, who might have been there thinking, “He’s against diversity, blah blah blah.” They hear what I have to say, and one of the reasons why I’m starting to get a lot of support from black students is [that] one of the things I talk about in my lectures on diversity is how it began as a promise to increase black representation on campus. For example, at UNC-Wilmington, we looked at it, our diversity problem, and said, “Well, we have 6 percent blacks on campus. We need diversity initiatives to increase that.” After one million of spending down at UNC-Wilmington, the black percentage dropped, after a million dollars, from 6 percent down to 4 percent. And at that time, you looked around and all you saw was that diversity had taken the form, now, of gay activism. They’d switched groups. Started out by promoting black interests and shifting over towards gay interests. And what you recognize is, in this shift to a new favorite group on campus — and clearly there is a lot more emphasis on alternative lifestyles today; there used to be a much greater emphasis upon race and there’s been a big shift — along with that has been endorsement of a new university religion known as moral relativism. We’re doing some funny things to combat that, and that’s been my favorite change in the diversity movement, because it’s so easy to debate these people who always call you a liar but don’t believe in the truth. For example, I’m going to be running a column soon in conjunction with the Leadership Institute out of Washington, D.C., and we’re going to be sponsoring a thing called Marry Anything Day. And this has happened on campus, where we’ve actually had on some campuses — we’ve tried this out — where we’ve had an ordained priest, and someone will come up and say “I want to marry these three people.” Someone will say, “I want to marry this antique lamp because I love it a lot.” People say, “I want to marry this dog,” and it’s funny making fun of this “anything goes” moral relativism, this gay marriage effort that’s being promoted on our campus.
Martinez: Haven’t you done those similar types of things in terms of racial preferences? You wrote a column talking about how people would be charged a certain amount for a certain product based on whether they were a female or what their race was, or things like that.
Adams: Oh, yeah, I actually had done a column on my new affirmative action grading policy of just giving away points, taking them from whites and giving them to blacks, for example. But I think you’re referring to the cookie bake sales that have been disrupted by college administrators all across the country. A couple of the things I’m going to be working on with the Leadership Institute in the future is to get, for example, a National Change Your Ethnicity Day, where people just become the race or ethnicity that they feel like, just like [University of Colorado at Boulder Professor] Ward Churchill, in order to get special benefits. We’re going to continue to simply make fun of them constantly and it’s really fun to be a revolutionary on campus, but you can only do it if you’re conservative.