Transcript: The Media Should Be Biased—Against Authoritarianism

Forde: My God we couldn’t in this country even get federal anti-lynching legislation passed. That was first passed not too many years ago. It’s extraordinary. But she played this really important role in helping us understand why lynching happened—that it was not for reasons that white people were saying it was happening. Lynching was happening as a form of social and economic and political quashing of Black opportunity.

Bacon: You’re a journalism professor there. You’re also, I think, a dean, and maybe your title includes the word “inclusion” in it. I don’t want to get title wrong, but can you talk about what you do in terms of inclusion and why we should defend those things as opposed to surrendering them?

Forde: I am so worried about this in the world of every space that matters in public life—universities, civic institutions, and higher ed—because of all these anti DEI efforts at state level and also at the federal level what. I am an associate dean in my college, at UMass Amherst, for equity and inclusion. And for all the grotesque caricatures of what DEI means, at the end of the day, what it means is creating space, at least in my world, in university life where we are examining any kinds of structural or policy or programmatic matters that aren’t fully inclusive, that don’t open the doors of access to the good that higher education is to people across all identities and all socioeconomic statuses.

And so that seems to me, it’s all about access. It’s all about including everyone in the democratic project. It’s about widening the circle of “we” that get to participate and get to enjoy the amazing resources of freedom and dignity and opportunity that democracy and higher ed and in other areas of our public life give us. That’s what we do. This woke indoctrination and all these culture tropes that demonize DEI, I find to be just truly offensive and I see it as a form of backlash. We’ve lived—we continue in this country’s history to have backlash at once where there is progress made. I see it in some ways, some forms, a backlash to not only to Black Lives Matter and its many successes—but to some degree that.

Bacon: You are working on a project around higher education and defending higher education. Talk about that a little bit.

Forde: Thank you so much for asking, Perry. This is a project that’s keeping me sane during these really dark and troubled times. I co-founded with a colleague at UMass Amherst—and now our former chancellor at UMass Amherst has joined us—an organization called Stand Together for Higher Ed. And what we are is a nonprofit that is trying to support a grassroots movement of faculty and staff across the thousands and thousands of higher ed institutions across this country to reclaim the public narrative, to ask policy makers and everyday citizens to demand protections for federal funding for higher ed that has done so much to open the doors for access for everyday Americans, including me, to get a college education.

I grew up disadvantaged in rural East Tennessee. I don’t want the doors to close. They cannot close. And we also need federal funding for open inquiry and research that then gets taken up by corporations and fuels the economy but also saves lives consistently and makes life better. We’re doing that work. You can find us if anybody’s interested. We really need faculty and staff to join StandTogetherHigherEd.org.

Bacon: Great. And can you say it one more time because somebody is asking?

Forde: Stand Together for Higher Ed is the name of the nonprofit, and we are www.standtogetherhighered.org. All right, great. Kathy, it’s a great conversation. Thanks for joining me.

Forde: Yeah, it was great.

Bacon: And thanks everybody for watching, and we’ll be back next week.