During the fall semester of 2024 at Binghamton University, my friend Andy and I hosted a once-weekly public affairs radio show on the campus station, WHRW.  We were fired for being outspoken, conservative, white, older men.

It began when I announced that we had scheduled a live, on-air interview with University of Pennsylvania named-chair law professor Amy Wax. Professor Wax had just been stripped of her chaired position and had been suspended for one year at half pay and publicly reprimanded. Her story was international-level news throughout academia and the fact that we had landed her as a guest was phenomenal, or so we thought.

Students run the radio station. Two young girls, the general manager and the public affairs manager began demanding of us transcripts of what we might say in our interview, even though station guidelines clearly tout an open format and minimal interference. Following demand after demand, which we fulfilled, the girls ultimately shut down the interview just 10-minutes before air, citing “harm to the listeners.”

We filed an official FCC complaint for discrimination and the suppression of speech which is currently pending.

On our show the next week, we had arranged for former University of Pennsylvania trustee and law school overseer Paul Levy to call into the show. Because we had been ambushed over the Wax interview, we decided to keep this scheduled call-in to ourselves. Levy had resigned from his leadership position at Penn over the treatment Wax had received and we had a far-ranging and very interesting interview with him about what had happened. It was the kind of original and interesting reporting a public affairs radio show was supposed to produce.

Immediately after that show, the remainder of our scheduled broadcasts were cancelled.

Fast forward to the winter semester of 2025 and then the spring semester of 2025. We were off the air. We had made no efforts to renew our programming slots, we were gone, we had no desire to return. We had no relationship with WHRW at all.

Despite that reality, the girls began pushing us to avail ourselves to a disciplinary hearing. When we reminded them that we were gone, didn’t want to return, and have no relationship with the station or the university, they nevertheless persisted.

Understanding that this “hearing” was going to proceed with or without us, we decided to present a statement in lieu of appearance, outlining just how unfair and wrongheaded this whole fiasco was. Quite predictably, we were found guilty of all charges and only because there is no death-penalty provision in the WHRW Star-Chamber Manual, we live to fight on.

Within the text of the damning, accusatory documents, we were reminded of our right to an appeal process and furthermore provided a link if we so chose to take that step, which we did, surmising that we might just find justice once outside of the incestuous little hive of the radio station.

Quite promptly after making that appeal, the chief justice of the Judicial Board rejected our efforts, noting that because we were not students, we had no official standing within their fiefdom, however, if we could secure the assistance of a student to act on our behalf, our appeal would live on!

God bless the college Republican organization that agreed to push our claim forward. But just as quickly as the first denial came the second, this time stating that Board had no jurisdiction because this was a “management issue.” In other words, kick the can down the road and make sure all feathers stay unruffled, a judicial board unwilling to make unpopular decisions, afraid to act.

This is the kind of product our college campuses are producing: autocratic, authoritarian, and close-minded bullies. These kids aren’t seeking truth, understanding, or expanding their knowledge, they are instead demanding compliance, enforcing group-think and rejecting all opposing ideas because in their minds, they have it all figured out. No point in debates or discussions, they are the Master Minds and all that is required of others is to get in line. This level of arrogant closemindedness suffocates the truth and tramples on the expansion of true understanding.

To be 20-something years old and to think that you’re that smart, that capable of understanding, that easily and completely having absorbed, through some kind of magic, the manifest wisdom of the ages is truly breathtaking in its colossal audacity. The by-product of this method is not being taught how to think, but instead being indoctrinated in what to think.

Image: Binghamton University -- Fair Use