Digital Social Hour - How 39 Professors Silenced Academic Freedom | Ann Atkinson DSH #1068

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

🚨 How 39 Professors Silenced Academic Freedom | A shocking expose of cancel culture in academia 🎓   Tune in as Sean Kelly sits down with Ann Atkinson to uncover the alarming truth about academic censorship! 😱 Ann shares her jaw-dropping experience at Arizona State University, where 39 professors united to silence free speech and dismantle a million-dollar program. 💸   You won't believe the extent of self-censorship and fear among students! 🤐 Discover how a simple event with successful entrepreneurs led to a full-blown cancel culture campaign. 🎤   🔥 Hot topics include: • The shocking 15:1 ratio of Democrat to Republican professors • How faculty, not students, drive cancel culture • The urgent need for syllabi transparency in universities   Don't miss out on this eye-opening conversation! Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly. 🚀 Join the conversation and learn how to protect academic freedom! 🗽   #AcademicFreedom #CancelCulture #HigherEducation #DigitalSocialHour #SeanKelly   #currentaffairs #accountabilityculture #educationreform #futureofcollegeeducation #criticalthinking   CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:26 - Amfest Event Overview 06:38 - Prolon Health Benefits 07:33 - Legal Action Discussion 11:38 - College Students' Fear of Disagreement 13:39 - Solutions for Student Concerns 18:01 - Importance of Syllabus Transparency 20:00 - Following Ann's Work   APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail]   GUEST: Ann Atkinson https://x.com/ann_atkinson_az https://www.instagram.com/k.ann.atkinson/   SPONSORS: Prolon: http://prolonlife.com/DSH   LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/

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home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with Bet MGM, a sportsbook worth a celly, and an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Bet MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Orthodoxy. And it's not a conservative, Democrat, I mean a model, but it's really about people that are free thinking, libertarians,

people that value hard work, that think we're all equal despite our skin color or where we're from, that we all are deserving of respect. If you don't subscribe to what's really the pervasive orthodoxy, I mean, you're ostracized. That's insane. All right, guys, Ann Adkinson here today. We're at AmFest. Is this your first one? This is my second AmFest.

I was here as a speaker last year talking about cancel culture and free speech. And this is my second annual and best AmFest. Let's go. Yeah. You went through some cancel culture yourself. So I'd love to hear more about that. I did. You know, what's interesting about cancel culture is it stems in higher education from

arbiters who appoint themselves as those that know best, right? And my experience in cancel culture came from the largest public university in the nation with close to 180,000 students, Arizona State University. And my wrongdoing was to bring Charlie Kirk and Dennis Prager and Robert Kiyosaki to have a lecture and interview on the topic of health, wealth, and happiness. And the students didn't protest. The faculty and the deans ran an all out condemnation campaign.

So I dealt with cancel culture from within. And I also got to see really the inner workings in higher ed and what should be a great university, Arizona State University should be leading in public speech and freedom of thought. But I saw how cancel culture really works and how what they, the radical activists from within cause people to self-censor too. So there's top-down, covert, and then there's this self-censorship movement that's overt. So my personal experience went viral. It turned into a national story. And I've been very public about it and working hard to do something and get some real results

so that more students to come and other faculty and staff don't face the same thing that I went through. Here you are providing three great entrepreneurs to these students to learn from and then you get canceled for it. I mean, Kiyosaki is a billionaire. I think Charlie Kirk's obviously got a huge company. We're at his event right now with 20,000 people and you get canceled. And did you lose your job over this? I lost my job.

So here's how it happened. I was the executive director of the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development at Barrett the Honors College at Arizona State University, which happens to be my alma mater. And I ran this center as really an outside entrepreneur coming into higher ed to bring the real world to these students. Our center existed to teach entrepreneurship, career success, personal finance, self-awareness, happiness, really great, we're great comfortable practical topics, and we also existed to address the traditional American values of hard work, personal responsibility,

faith, family, community service, and civic duty. And that was very triggering to many of the faculty from within. So in my role as executive director, I curated programs and content and had Robert Kiyosaki speak to the students on seven different occasions, had speakers like Joe Polish of the Genius Network coming in to pour into these students at no cost to them to help connect them to the real world, the faculty didn't like it much. We were a very successful program. The turning point there, and there's a lot that happened from within, but the real turning

point was my invitation of Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk, and Robert Kiyosaki. And the faculty launched a condemnation campaign that led to the loss of my job as executive director. It led to the dismantling of the entire Lewis Center, which was a million dollar program. Wow. And led to the loss of Ms. Lynn Blake, who was the events operations manager at the venue that hosted our event. Wow. So they took all of us out. It had anything to do with this. And again, it wasn't

public protesters. It wasn't students picketing. They were the faculty and the deans of the Honors College. Crazy. That's unreal. Do you think this is an ASU issue or do you think it's affecting all of college campuses in America? This issue is so pervasive. ASU should be on the better end of the spectrum, but the college fix just came out with research in the past couple of days. They looked at party affiliation within just ASU faculty through public records requests

and 15 to one, these professors at ASU are Democrat to Republican. And that is very representative of what happens within the university. So in higher ed, think about the talent pipeline of professors. Where do they come from? They come from higher ed. And so their ideas, their studies, their research tends to go deeper and deeper into issues. Hockey League and has your back all season long from puck drop to the final shot You're always taken care of with the sportsbook born in Vegas That's a feeling you can only get with bet MGM and no matter your team your favorite skater or your style There's something every NHL fan is going to love about bet MGM Download the app today and discover why bet MGM is your hockey home for the season

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At the moment, there's a lot on gender studies and kind of obscure topics and trans studies and women's studies and critical race theory. And they go down these holes and tend to get more and more extreme as they're educating themselves and then coming back into their own systems. So this is an issue that's pervading all of higher ed. Some universities are better than others, but then you get programs like the Lewis center, which wasn't a political program at all. It wasn't faith-based. We just brought the real world.

And those programs are attacked from within. Now in my personal experience, again, covert, overt, some attacks were really direct. I had, over my decision to invite those speakers, a long-standing professor within the university emailed me on the ASU email account threatening to write a media hit piece focused on me and my career. Crazy. Because he didn't like the opinions of the speakers that I brought. And I've seen and I know the people within the university and with other universities that have faced complete retaliation for simply having a view

that's different from the orthodoxy and it's not a conservative Democrat I mean a model but it's really about people that are free-thinking libertarians people that value hard work that think we're all equal despite our skin color or where we're from that we all are deserving of respect if you don't subscribe to what's really the pervasive orthodoxy I mean you, you're ostracized. That's insane. Did you want to pursue them legally after this happened to you? So I considered pursuing ASU legally. And my decision was, I really think I can make more

change by dealing with things a little untraditionally. So after these attacks went on and which by the way 39 of the 47 honors faculty signed a condemnation campaign petition against me in the Lewis Center. 39 of the 47. That's crazy. This wasn't you know a couple faculty that were. People you're talking to on campus right they're not just strangers. These are professors within the Honors College and the super majority. The deans at the Honors College removed our marketing posters featuring Dennis, Robert and Charlie

because it offended the faculty. Wow. And allowed the faculty to put up counter protest lines, saying that our event was white supremacy and dangerous hate speech. Robert Kisaki is Asian. That's crazy.

He's Asian. Dennis Prager is an Orthodox Jew. By the way, prayer to Dennis Prager. He's in the hospital. We're lifting him up as he recovers from a really, really bad accident. But he's an Orthodox Jew. Our other speaker, Dr. Radhigo Polin, is not American as well. He grew up in Sri Lanka.

And somehow the faculty framed this as a white supremacy rally. So I decided not to just take a standard legal route. I thought, this is crazy, the way these people attacked us and compared us to the KKK. So I thought at Arizona State University we have reasonable people in charge. They're going to do something about this. So I took this through the normal channels, through HR, through all the acronym levels of the bureaucracy, all the way up to the president and the board of regents, which oversee our public universities in Arizona, thinking that they would see how insane this is, thinking that they would see the student testimonials I provided talking

about how their teachers told them in their class, do not attend this as an event for white supremacists. I thought leadership would say no. And nothing happened. So I met with the provost. I submitted documentation to the president and the Board of Reg met with the provost. I submitted documentation to the president and the board of regents and the provost, including student testimonials,

students saying how they were afraid to be photographed at our event, and nothing happened. Wow. The new dean of the honors college fired me, and the provost said, well, you know, you invited these controversial speakers and you need to face the consequences for that.

That's when I went public. That is nuts. Did the students end up backing you afterwards? The students were even the most, the strongest students, those with the most conviction. Ultimately, they're students that don't want to have their academic records dinged for expressing their views. Even the strongest students asked me not to publicly reveal their involvement, or those that attended the event made me promise they wouldn't be photographed.

They were scared. They were scared of facing consequences and retaliation by their professors. So privately, they were very supportive. Some of them met with legislators in Arizona. Some of them went to the Capitol with me later on. They were involved, but timidly so because they feared the professor's backlash. That's such a shame, right?

You know, they're going there to learn, to make a living and they can't even be themselves. They can't express themselves. They have to self-censor. And isn't the point of higher education to prepare us really for the real world? Right? And to let people explore truth and ideas. But what's happened is now higher ed is prescribing acceptable views and so often saying, well other views are hate speech and dangerous and you shouldn't think that way, which then causes this self-censorship that we're seeing. So, quick research, FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Free Expression,

put out their 2025 annual student survey. Yeah. They surveyed 58,000 undergraduate students across the country. They do this every year. They work with College Pulse and only 13% of the students surveyed this year are comfortable disagreeing with their professors on any type of controversial political topic in the classroom. That's so low.

And publicly only 10% of these students are comfortable disagreeing with their professors. I mean, I personally never questioned my teachers when I was in school. You know, I felt so like scared to even do that. Well, what's the upside? You have tremendous downside, but what's the upside? Not much, because they're not going to change their opinion. Right. So the issue is that in higher ed, they're filling their own talent pipeline

and more and more it's become this ideological battleground where I think these professors really feel that they're right and good and protecting people from dangerous things. But rewinds to our program, the topic was health, wealth and happiness. Charlie Kirk talked about enjoying the Sabbath. Dennis Prager talked about honoring your mother and father. It was a really wholesome

program. And in fact, it's still on YouTube. There are tens of thousands of views on the lecture, which is great turnout for a college campus lecture. And we had thousands of students there in person. If there was students there in person, if there was anything controversial about it, if there was any degree of hate or white supremacy or anything that the faculty alleged there would be, they would have come out with that. We had a robust attendance by media at this program. There was no story because it was just a good wholesome program where there were a lot of things shared. Most people in the audience probably agreed with some things, disagreed with some things, because we're all free thinkers.

Yeah. But in higher ed, we're just seeing more and more faculty push students to self-censor. Yeah. What do you think something actionable people can do watching this for their nearby college campuses? Maybe their parents sending their kids there or their students themselves. What do you think they could do? Your viewers, the students, they have to be aware of how bad this is.

It's really easy to gloss over and look at the things the universities say. Look at the policies that they promote. It sounds great. ASU is a perfect example of that. They say they investigated themselves after my experience and after my Wall Street Journal op-ed that went viral, that led to a media tour in time with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business and Sean Duthie and Dagan McDowell and the Rubin Report with Dave Rubin, with so many amazing people stepped in

and brought attention to this. Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk, Robert Kiyosaki, they all took time to really explore this issue. So we then led into legislative action because ASU did nothing. We had multiple legislative hearings as a result of this issue, this event. We had the Arizona legislature formed the Ad hoc committee on freedom of expression in Arizona's public universities And we had a five-hour legislative hearing Dennis Prager came He testified Seth Liebsen who is a phenomenal conservative radio host in Arizona He came to testify we had one brave ASU professor. Dr. Owen Anderson came to testify

The hearing happened. There were multiple follow-ups, but the legislature demanded that ASU investigate what happened, so they investigated themselves. And they found, surprisingly or not surprisingly, a series of unfettered examples of free speech, which is total baloney. If you know any of the details of the story, I've shared some today, but it's bad.

So did they hire a third party to investigate or they did it themselves? They hired an outside law firm and then assessed that law firm's findings. Actually hired a good lawyer, like a good person in Arizona. And then ASU went through and had their board of regents review the findings and then they made the proclamation that they found a series of examples of unfettered free speech. Wow.

And then that's how they tried to kill the story. ASU started a new free speech center. I still haven't seen who's running it. What are they actually going to do? That sounds great, but what's the substance there? Not much really changes. So what can your viewers do? People have to wake up. They have to see what's happening. Ask parents, ask your students. Students, think to yourself, how many times have you or a friend signed up for a class thinking it would be one thing and

then finding out it's actually an ideological indoctrination course on Marxism. That happens all the time. For example, as executive director of the Lewis Center, we put on 150 speaker programs in two years. We had 30 plus or minus courses each semester and I'm reviewing the syllabus of one of our courses on personal finance and life skills. Great topic, right? Any student should be aware of personal finance and life skills. The homework reading assignments for this course included the case for slavery reparations and the case to defund the police. Now, I'm okay if any professor wants to teach these things.

They have academic freedom. If they want to teach things like the Honors College really focuses on their witchcraft professor. I think if students want to learn about witchcraft, they can do that, they're adults. But not in a personal finance and life skills class where they're tricking students and misleading them to sign up for a class that then Turns into indoctrination to a worldview, right? That happens every day

I'm writing home with our with our friends last night who was talking about her niece and her niece signed up for a class and it turned out to be really a Marxism activism class and Her niece wrote a paper on that spoke out against Marxism and her professor said, no, no, no, no, no, you need to make the case for Marxism. This is happening everywhere. So solutions, one solution no one is talking about syllabi transparency. Think about when you go to buy a car, you know what you're buying when you leave the lot. When a student signs up for a course, most of the time there's no syllabus.

And they sign up and the topic sounds great and the course description sounds great, but they don't know what they're buying. They're paying thousands of dollars and they don't get the syllabus most often until the course is starting. By then, it's too late to move around to a course that's a good time, that's a good fit, that fits their interests and their major requirements and their schedule, timing of the day. There's no syllabi transparency.

Even at ASU where the university says we provide syllabi, they don't. At Barrett, I looked at it was last spring semester, over 80% of the course sections of the required honors course do not provide a syllabus at registration. So students are picking a class that's required out of the, I don't know, 50 or 80, I forget how many sections of that course there were, and they're picking based on time and days of the week, because it's all required. And then they end up getting the professor who wrote a book. I'm not going to say the word, but how to F a Kraken, which is a mythical sea creature, or they're going to get the professor that brags to me when I was

executive director there at Barrett, the Lewis Center, on how at least one student in every one of her classes each semester will come out as gay or trans or something. Bragging of that, like it was an objective. And a student is just taking a mandatory honors class. So I've been working with our legislature in Arizona on syllabi transparency legislation that would just return power to the students. Let them see what they're signing up for before they pay for it, before they put it into their schedule. And we've received tremendous pushback on that. I bet you have. Wow. And where can people keep up with you, support you, and follow you?

Well, thank you. I so appreciate this conversation. I'm on Twitter. It's hashtag Ann underscore Atkinson underscore AZ. That's A-N-N underscore Atkinson. A-T-K-I-N-S-O-N underscore AZ. I'm active on that. I'm on Instagram, also Ann Atkinson. And I'm really fighting to make a difference. So students, if you are facing these issues, reach out. Let me help.

Bring these issues to my awareness. Let me connect you to people who can do something. Speak up. They have to speak up. If they don't, this continues. And we can have real common sense solutions, common sense policy solutions, like syllabi transparency, which who would disagree with that, except for the professors who have something to hide, Who are intentionally deceiving students.

So follow me, help the mission, this is a fight, it will continue, it's a big one, and we're not going away. Amazing. We'll link your stuff below. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thanks for watching guys. Bet MGM is an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League and has your

back all season long. From puck drop to the final shot, you're always taken care of with the sportsbook Born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with Bet MGM, and no matter your team, your favorite skater or your style, there's something every NHL fan is going to love about Bet MGM. Download the app today and discover why Bet MGM is your hockey home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a celly, and an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League.

BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact CONNECT ONTARIO at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BETT MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement

with iGaming Ontario.