previous books include Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (2017) and Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (2010), which received the Winans-Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address awarded by the National Communication Association.
Vivian applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education, and reported the following:
From page 99:Follow Brad Vivian on Twitter.Provocateurs and propagandists are free to irresponsibly sensationalize episodes of campus debate as caustic spectator sport. Yet those activities evince dubious commitment to protecting free speech and academic freedom for everyone. A cluster of hyperbolic terms dating to this phase of campus misinformation [2017-2018] now circulate widely in public discourse as all-purpose denigrations of movements for social justice or democratic equality: shut downs, cancelling, and mobs. Such terms not only project a misleading alternate reality of higher education; they also help to popularize a deeply cynical way of talking about and defining freely exercised rights of protest and social advocacy on behalf of historically disenfranchised communities—first on college campuses, then in society at large.”Page 99 of my book is a good snapshot of my overall analysis for browsers. It includes part of the introduction to my fifth chapter, which examines common misinformation in the form of purposefully manufactured controversies over invited speakers to college campuses. This page highlights the approach to language that I use throughout the book. Agents of campus misinformation aggressively promoted the vocabulary of shut downs, cancelling, and mobs to describe allegedly poor climates for free speech and diverse ideas on college campuses in the late 2010s; this same vocabulary reappeared in partisan political rhetoric designed to delegitimate First Amendment liberties of nonviolent protest, counter-speech, and dissent.
Other important examples of key terms in campus misinformation that I examine include trigger warnings, safe spaces, viewpoint diversity, and orthodoxy. Such terms, I argue, helped to popularize a misleading, politically reactionary meta-discourse about higher education that bore only faint resemblance to how universities typically operate or the truer complexity of student and faculty groups within. I further argue that even readers who do not belong to university communities should care about this topic because campaigns against academic freedom are often early warning signs of growing anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian sentiment writ large. I hope that readers will find in this book both practical ways to pursue a more constructive and inclusive public debate about the state of higher education as well as effective techniques for recognizing misinformation campaigns in general.
--Marshal Zeringue
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