Is this ironic?
NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, who for years—until recently—taught a popular course on propaganda, took to the airwaves to describe in detail his ordeal with his university’s administration.
Per his recall of the events, the university would not allow him to analyze in his course called “Introduction to Mass Persuasion and Propaganda” the most pervasive and destructive propaganda campaign in recent history, if not world history—the COVID Public Health™ narrative about masking, vaxxes, and lockdowns—after a lone COVID cult member student complained.
According to reporting from the time in late 2020 when this controversy erupted, via New York Post, a still-unresolved lawsuit ensued:
A New York University professor sued fellow faculty members for libel this week after they complained to administrators about his encouraging students to question whether masks actually prevent COVID-19 from spreading.
Mark Crispin Miller — a media professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School known for his contrarian views — says his fellow faculty sent the school’s dean a letter filled with a “pack of lies” about his position on mask use and his treatment of students.
Miller says the Oct. 21 missive prompted the school to open a review of his behavior that could lead to disciplinary action against him — and now he wants the other professors to pay up for their allegedly false claims. His lawsuit, filed Monday in Manhattan Supreme Court, demands $750,000 in damages from 19 of the teachers, whom he accused of harming his “career and professional standing.
An online Change.org petition asserts Miller’s right to conduct his course as he sees fit in accordance with the curriculum (emphasis added):
We the undersigned support the academic freedom of Prof. Mark Crispin Miller, now under siege at New York University for urging students in his propaganda course to read scientific literature on the effectiveness of masks against transmission of COVID-19. We see his situation as but one example of a growing global trend toward rigid censorship of expert views on urgent subjects of all kinds; so this petition is not just in his defense, but a protest on behalf of all professors, doctors, scientists and journalists who have been gagged, or punished for their rights to freely research, study, and interpret data on a variety of matters regardless of their controversial nature.
Censorship is nothing new. We have been edging toward it ever more for decades, as both academia and the media have long discouraged free investigation and discussion of urgent public questions of all kinds, as those who would attempt to tackle them empirically have been slandered as “conspiracy theorists” or “truthers” and other slurs deployed to shut them up, or purge them as purveyors of “misinformation,” “fake science” or “hate speech.” Such censorship has blocked the sort of open, civil, reasoned give-and-take without which higher education—indeed, any education—is impossible, as is scientific progress overall.
We see Prof. Miller’s situation as a flashpoint in the struggle not just to reclaim but to protect free speech and free inquiry. NYU officials have no right to intervene in Prof. Miller’s courses or message his students surreptitiously undermining his integrity as an instructor. They have no right to deprive him of the courses he was hired to teach and they should not join in a public smear campaign against the very rights they should uphold at a university.
Strictly speaking, “propaganda” is a value-neutral term that means, per Cambridge, “information, ideas, opinions, or images, often only giving one part of an argument, that are broadcast, published, or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people’s opinions.”
What you’re reading right now, frankly, is propaganda.
As such, the Public Health™ messaging is by definition propaganda. Whether it is beneficial propaganda in the public interest is another question, one that presumably would be ripe for exploration in a college course on propaganda.
So what possible justification is there to bar a professor teaching a propaganda course from broaching the forced masking/vaxx mandate/lockdown agenda—possibly the most consequential, again, of all propaganda campaigns in memory?
The government, of course, is always open to dissecting state propaganda from the past, from other countries and other time periods because dissecting those propaganda campaigns and the state interests that they furthered poses no threat to the current status quo.
How telling is it that the COVID stuff is a third rail?
Methinks thou dost protest too much, NYU.
