WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Gary Frankel: Are Universities Breeding Intolerance Instead of Civility?

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

A chilling transformation is unfolding on America’s college campuses: nearly one in three students now say it is acceptable to resort to violence to silence controversial speakers — a record high. As institutions designed to educate and civilize, universities instead appear to be incubating the very intolerance and aggression they were meant to tame. This abrupt rise in acceptance of campus violence signals a direct threat not only to free speech, but to the civic foundations of democracy itself.Garion Frankel, a doctoral scholar studying educational leadership at Texas A&M University, warns that America’s universities have lost their moral compass. He argues that restoring higher education’s civic mission is the only way to reverse the rising tide of radicalization on campus. He joins Laurn Bixler of WRFH to discuss.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Lauren Bixler. With me today is Gary Frankel, a doctoral scholar studying PK12 educational leadership at Texas A&M University. He is a young voice as emeritus and his articles have appeared in outlets like Newsweek, USA Today, and The Houston Chronicle. In an article he co-published on October 30th, he warns that America's universities have appeared in outlets like Newsweek, USA Today, and The Houston Chronicle. In an article he co-published on October 30th, he warns that America's universities have, have lost their moral compass. He argues that restoring higher education's civic mission is the only way to reverse the rising tide of radicalization on campus. We're here to discuss those claims. Mr. Frankel, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Wonderful. So first to get us started, I would like you to address in a little more depth the rising aggression on college campuses. So to quote your article, you said, as controversial speakers are threatened and students get into altercations over political beliefs, it's unsurprising that the foundation for individual rights and expression, also known as fire, recently found that one in three students believe violence against controversial campus speakers is acceptable. So what about that number, one in three students, is really so terrifying? What is the proper response to that number as we read it?

College students being a little rowdy has been a pretty consistent theme in the Western corpus for about a thousand years at this point. And even in the United States, Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia as a mechanism to prevent student-aged men from rioting. Now, we kind of got control on that for parts of the 20th century, parts of the 19th century as well. But just to give you some perspective, at Texas A&M, we have something like 70,000 undergraduates, and one in three is more than 20,000. So, you know, it's not the same.

every university. It's not the same at every part of the country. But if you look at the average, that's over 20,000 students at one school who, you know, based on the results of this survey, could statistically believe that violence against controversial campus speakers is acceptable. And as we learned from the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk is that all you need is one. And there are thousands of students around the country who think this way. And that's a big problem. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Lauren Bixler and I'm talking with Gary Frankel, a doctoral scholar studying educational leadership at Texas A&M University. We are discussing the need to restore higher education's civic mission as the only way to reverse the rising tide

of radicalization and political violence on campus. I think putting it in that regard that, you know, from that number all it takes is one. And when we look at you know, some of the bigger universities like Texas A&M. And if you even think about Hillsdale, though we are small, you know, a third of campus is still hundreds of people. And that is significant. So then considering the rising campus aggression that we've seen, and especially as it's kind of, we've seen it come to fruition with actual violence with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, what is the link to that aggression? and neglected civil education? And what does civil education entail?

Well, there's been two underlying processes that have contributed, that have contributed to this problem. And for the most part, they're actually unrelated to one another. The first is that we as a society have just heaped larger and larger expectations on higher education. You know, there's that, there's that famous saying that a bachelor, is like what a high school diploma was 30 or 40 years ago. There's just an expectation that universities are there for job training and to credential people and all that jazz. And, you know, no matter how big or wealthy a college is, they can't do absolutely everything.

So given that society and particularly state governments have sort of increased these burdens on them, less lucrative, more difficult, more, I guess, less measurable sorts of outcomes have gone by the wayside. And civic education has been one of those. On the other hand, you have the takeover of many universities by the critical theorists by the postmodernists who think that everything is a binary struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed, and that the point of education is liberation and revolution. And when you think that everything is liberation and revolution, there might be a little bit of overlap with some of the goals of civic education, but the end result is just totally different. Because what Jefferson had in mind when he

created UVA and what has really been the consistent theme in higher education throughout American and really Western history is that we're educating for virtue. We're creating people hungry, for capital T truth. We're creating people who want to contribute to their society as it currently exists and be able to engage with one another in civic Republican discourse. And that's just not happening right now. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Lauren Bixler and I'm talking with Gary Frankel, a doctoral scholar studying educational

leadership at Texas A&M University. We are discussing the need to restore higher education. education's civic mission as the only way to reverse the rising tide of radicalization and political violence on campus. There's a theme in your article kind of beginning to make the connection of political violence and as more of a learned behavior. So to quote, you said, people who support political violence aren't born that way. They emerge from environments that promote narcissism, dishonesty, and disagreeableness. And then to fulfill our developmental mission, higher ed must intentionally counter these corrosive tendencies by intentionally fostering

environments that demand self-reflection. So can you explain a little more why narcissism in particular is at the root of the supportive political violence and then why self-reflection is part of the solution. Absolutely. There's, you know, there's a lot of really interesting research in the social psychology literature about this. And, you know, it's fortunate that my co-author, Hillsdale Allen, believe it or not, he's at Rice University now, is a social psychologist that was able to contribute a lot of

that. But, you know, the heart of the matter comes from the fact that a lot of these belief systems that are rooted in collectivism, at least from an ID. biological or philosophical standpoint are in the end really entitled beliefs. You know, they sort of co-opped the language of human rights and human liberties and that they're entitled to all these benefits. They're entitled to all these services. They're entitled to a certain position in society. And when they don't get that, they get really angry. And when they get angry, bad things start to happen. So, you know, there's a, there's a few really old school professors who will say things like,

you don't matter. That's not important. Your opinion is irrelevant. And while I think approaches like that go way too far, there is a kernel of truth in it and that you kind of have to shatter this framework of entitlement and narcissism and a really corrupted form of self-interest that has really generated a lot of political violence. And especially once you get some of the post-colonial people telling you that, you know, nothing is unjustified when you're pursuing liberation, that's where violence comes from. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Lauren Bixler and I'm talking with Gary Frankel, a doctoral scholar studying educational leadership at Texas A&M. university. We are discussing the need to restore higher education's civic mission as the only

way to reverse the rising tide of radicalization and political violence on campus. Yeah, it makes sense why kind of self-reflection and things in that realm can combat that narcissism, which is just I mean, so violent in nature. And it makes us, you know, because it harps on this nature that all humans have. Thinking about the solutions to this within the education sphere, what are some tangible ways we can maybe promote like humility or intellectual humility, self-reflection to directly combat that narcissism that seems to be so present in our culture? Yeah, I'm glad you brought up that question. We talk about three. in the article, and I'll go over each of them as briefly as I can. The first is executive

coaching, which is what my colleagues Institute at Rice University does. And what they do is that they give college students the same type of training that CEOs and other very powerful executive sorts of people normally get, which is meant to increase their self-awareness. It's meant to develop their humility. It's meant to sort of direct their base. abilities and skill sets towards purposeful, virtue-based outcomes. And, you know, when we talk about lowering the temperature in politics, all of that is pretty essential. The second is more my research area, which is arts and humanities education, talking about dance, visual arts, music, theater, all that sorts of good stuff. And, you know, it might seem, no pun intended, a little artsy

artsy. The way that it really takes hold is that the arts really force you to immerse yourself in somebody else's perspective in a way that lots of other methods don't. So, for example, if you're in a play and you're playing a character, you know, that character is not just some expression of yourself. That character is going to have different ideas, different experiences, different values than you do. And if you're going to do that character justice, you really have to immerse yourself and their mentality. And once you do that once, it kind of gets hard to stop. And that same skill set can be applied to politics. Then the third one is museums. Lots of campuses have museums. Museums contribute to a lot of the same sorts of results that the arts do.

Now, you know, you don't want the museums to be captured either. And some of them have been. But, you know, many of many colleges and universities have museums on campus that haven't been captured in that same way. And even if they have, you know, they can still contribute awareness of the world around them. They can still incorporate balanced perspectives. They can still force students to reckon with other viewpoints and traditions. So, you know, even if the museum in question is a bit on the woke side, you're still combating that narcissism, which I think is really important. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Lauren Bixler and I'm talking with Gary Frankel, a doctoral scholar studying educational

leadership at Texas A&M University. We are discussing the need to restore higher education's civic mission as the only way to reverse the rising tide of radicalization and political violence on campus. Yeah, I think those all seem, at least to me intuitive, but probably because I've been classically educated my entire life. It might not be so intuitive to others. But a question on this, because I know your focus in the article and with this, you know, sphere you're addressing is higher education. But my question is, where is the presence of these things, like the arts and museum history and just kind of teamwork-esque training? Does that just have no place in?

elementary education. Yeah, how do we kind of address the conversation of elementary sort of development? What could we do differently to kind of mimic this in higher ed? Great question. And you're talking to a K-12 education research or so very much something I've been thinking about as well. I think a lot of the problems start with the No Child Left Behind Act. which is over 20 years old at this point. And, you know, the sort of the shift in K-12 education to outcomes that we can measure, math scores, science scores, reading test scores, all of that was very important. But all of those developments in education policy, you know, there's only so much time

in a school day, had to come at the expense of something else. And that's something else in many cases, particularly. and lower-income school districts was the arts. And I don't think it's really a coincidence that some of the struggles that we've seen in K-12 education really started to become noticeable around the same time. Another problem, not a problem, another sort of response is, and you'll appreciate this since you're classically educated,

is something a little bit more Aristotelian, in that the purpose of higher education for hundreds and hundreds of years was moral formation. You know, certainly academics were a very valuable contributor to that, as was the broader pursuit of truth. But for hundreds and hundreds of years, whether directly or indirectly, it was about moral formation. And the problems really began when higher education became about something other than moral formation. So, you know, if you want to talk about functionalism, if you want to talk about the telos of higher education, it's character. And I think it would be better for all of us if it even started to pivot back in that direction, much less got all the way there. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Lauren Bixler and I'm talking with Gary Frankel,

a doctoral scholar studying educational leadership at Texas A&M University. We are discussing the need to restore higher education's civic mission as the only way to reverse the rising tide of radicalization and political violence on campus. I can see why, you know, it's important to address these things in college where maybe the people, passions are a little more tense, as you were mentioning, like Jefferson had recognized as well. But so many of your character formation and your personality and your social formation is done from a very young age. So I'm sure it's much more difficult potentially to try and combat years of formulated tendencies toward narcissism. Once you're approaching an age where you're even more prideful than you may have ever been. And it takes a lot of pain to be humble. But I think a good final direction for the questions that really ties all this together. I'd like to bring in

another quote from your article that I especially liked. You say that importantly, our coaching, so the things you mentioned as responses to that narcissism, is both non-directive and non-political. We don't tell students what to think. We achieve results by provoking meaningful self-reflection about who they want to be. So then my question to that is, why is it appropriate and if I may suggest necessary that the solution to ideological rigidity is not a political one in nature? Well, yeah, because the, and that's a great point, because the whole direction of ideological rigidity is towards political ends. It's towards the exercise of power in some meaningful way. So if you try to combat ideological rigidity through something, you know, that's clearly ideological, at least in terms of politics, then you're essentially pouring gasoline on a raging fire. It's not going to do anything. What we're trying to get at is something much more fundamental to a person's character. You know, what is their base personality? What are their values? Where do they see

themselves in five years? Not just in terms of what job they have, but what kind of person they want to be. You know, how do they want to be perceived by others on top of how they perceive themselves. And you can get somewhere by approaching those sorts of really base questions with, you know, a certain degree of bluntness, but what that bluntness is really baked into is honesty. And, you know, to a certain extent, compassion and empathy, at least for a person's, for a person's experiences or conceptions of the world. So, you know, What we really want to try and get at is not just developing the person's ideas. You know, that's a part of it.

But in the end, that's ultimately secondary. We want to develop the person because those ideas come from who the person is. So, you know, it's not going to help to trim a few branches if the roots are as strong as ever. Yeah. Is there any, like, final things you would like to disseminate into, those who are listening just about education and maybe what is the hopeful outlook for all of this? Because I know there has been just a lot of weight, especially since, you know, the horror of Charlie Kirk's assassination and just thinking about the scope.

You know, we're looking at that one and three number and it's hard to grapple with and, you know, be truthful about this is how things are. Are there any kind of hopeful responses you have and researching these? things, any of those remarks? Well, I'll, I'll start my hopeful response as I usually do with a little bit of pessimism, with a little bit of pessimism. Well, not so much pessimism, but, you know, truth, I'd say, because, you know, while we present all of these solutions, they're partial at best. You know, this is a whole society sort of problem. And there are no silver bullets. There are no easy answers, and it's going to take a considerable amount of time and patience.

But I'm already seeing signs, at least from the people I talk to, from the people who really engage with these subjects, and especially how you engage with these subjects, because if you do it from the position of honesty, of understanding, sort of that cognitive empathy we were talking about, I see much better results than just trying to own whoever it is I don't like politically. This is something that while it's a whole society problem, every individual can take on a certain amount of responsibility. And even if there isn't really an easy answer in higher education or even K-12 education, a person can still raise their families to have these kinds of values, develop meaningful social relationships with people who share or at least predisposed to these types of values.

There are lots of problems in our society where it's like, oh, I can't do anything about this. Well, you can and should do something about this one because I think it's really important. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Our guest has been Gary Frankel, and I'm Lauren Bixler on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. Thank you.