Forms of Life

Dispatches from the Present

God and Man in Orem
Jennie Lightweis-Goff | New Orleans, Louisiana | October 3, 2025

I grew up a townie near Clemson University, so when campus hits the headlines, I react rather like a San Francisco native to the sight of its landmarks in Dirty Harry. Until recently, the stories were almost never about the SEC schools where I’ve spent my career as a lecturer. Of late, however, we’re living in interesting times.

We may one day forget the order of events in September 2025: the week began with the largest of the Southern publics (74,000 students) shattered by scandal, and ended with an assassination on another quad in the Mountain West. At Texas A&M, a hidden camera revealed a quotidian quarrel between a student and professor wrestling over gender identity in children’s literature that ended with both parties pulling rank, such as they had. The professor lost her job; her two proximate bosses (chair and dean) were demoted. The university president’s resignation was close behind. Then at Utah Valley University, the figurehead of a conservative youth mobilization group—committed to exposing and above all mocking the toffs—was assassinated by a gun that no legislation would have taken from the killer’s hands. It was a legacy rifle, a family heirloom loaded with meme-inscribed bullets designed to dispatch a twelve-point buck.

The culture-war cards began falling. Pundits assured their audiences that the 22-year-old assassin was radicalized at Utah State—a university with a 94 percent acceptance rate and three open-enrollment campuses—even though he’d left after one semester for an electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College. (Of course, commentators scarcely understand the scale of a state like Utah: Orem is closer to Salt Lake City, and St. George is in reach of Las Vegas.) My parents learned on the news that a political figure they’d never heard of had been shot at a university they’d never heard of; they are certain it happened right under my office window 1,500 miles away from Utah’s snowy peaks. Most of the reactions I observed were online or in my parents’ panic over the phone; so often, when we gauge the public response, we are in fact observing the response to the response. Our politics have been replaced with reaction content.

Of course, no one ever went broke overestimating the American appetite for a news account of trigger warnings or supposedly forbidden Halloween costumes. Americans have long loved to pit the slobs against the snobs, whether at country clubs (Caddyshack) or college campuses (Animal House). In my personal favorite, Hart Bochner’s campus comedy PCU (1994), censorious administrators must escape from a locked room vibrating with Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight” on repeat.

But the stakes are higher now, the screens smaller. There are campus protests and professor watch lists, canceled grants and frozen student visas. Last I checked, at least a dozen southern schools have fired at least one faculty member for insufficient reverence or public grief in the wake of political assassination. These firings are the height of what Jodi Dean has called communicative capitalism: the message must circulate, even if the person who shares it does not believe, absorb or even understand it. The likes and shares, the lugubrious “celebrations” of life or death alike, are propulsive, a ritual of penitence and revenge. The bad habits of the MAGA faithful and campus Marxists alike have become grist for the content mill. In this atmosphere, most faculty will fall into silence. After over a decade of social media-driven culture wars, I was momentarily grateful for the quiet. But then you squint and see through the smoke: a unilateral culture war, powered by elected officials rather than the dean of sociology, will have disproportionate casualties.

On the day after the assassination, I picked up a copy of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale from the university library. I wanted to conduct a kind of séance, meeting the spirit of the recently deceased through the early writings of another famous “debate me!” conservative, one who spent 33 years grappling with grown-up co-belligerents on TV instead of bringing a microphone down to the quad. Buckley’s book, the first of the campus-panic polemics, spends the first couple dozen pages listing all the atheists on faculty; it’s assembled with a hand barely lighter than a HUAC subpoena. I’ve always admired the subtitle, “The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom,’” despite the differences in our politics. I don’t trust someone who calls it academic freedom instead of free speech; after all, I am confident that human voice, rights and dignity are endowed by a higher power than a tenure committee. As a kid I was warned against “stranger danger”: which is to say, violence in the circumstances where it’s least likely to happen. I’ve now been assured that it’s not a matter of free speech to experience coercion by platforms and employers: which is to say, speech suppression as it is most likely to happen.

Up in the stacks, I am flipping pages and losing my place. The past ten years of American life have been “unprecedented,” I keep hearing, though it all seems iterative—like a thumb jamming into the same bruise—in the longer view. Indeed, when we free-speech absolutists warned our censorious brethren on faculty against speech codes and deplatforming, we noted as precedent the various shake-ups of the 2010s—Bret Weinstein at Evergreen and Charles Murray at Middlebury—and the “canon wars” of the Eighties and Nineties. None of these worked as enthusiasts planned. We warned our fellow progressives that the cultural power of the Obama and Biden years would not last, though we did not imagine that the pendulum swing might be short enough to deliver the same man—Trump—as punctuation to each of their presidencies.

Now the quad is awash with kids performing for the reels. Be careful on the path, instructors warn each other: you might trip over a TikTok entrepreneur looking to score clout and virality with an intemperate remark. (I look the part, but I have no remarks. I’ve given too many eulogies; my grief is enormous.) I could make predictions, but they would pale against the strangeness of our eternally degenerating present, when we are no longer certain there was a past or will be a future. Perhaps the present moment could best be described as a mirror for the abstract “campus” that haunts our polemics: it is like your middle school, recollected in a nightmare in which you’re forced to return. The anxiety is everywhere and nowhere, latched to the paranoid geography of the red and blue electoral map. It turns twenty thousand students’ bodies into a single, formless body, and their professors into a hostile, invading force. But I save myself from becoming a mass by refusing to turn men into masses, the advice of gentle literary socialist Raymond Williams. Many of my students are like me: curious kids from minor places. I hope they see that, too. I do not know what comes next, but I know that college is not Yale all the way down. It’s Utah Valley from the root to the rafter.

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