Liberty and Leadership
TFAS has reached 53,000 students and professionals through their academic programs, fellowships and seminars. Representing more than 140 countries, TFAS alumni are courageous leaders throughout the world – forging careers in politics, government, public policy, business, philanthropy, law and the media. Join TFAS President, Roger Ream, as he reconnects with these outstanding alumni to share experiences, swap career stories, and find out what makes their leadership journey unique. The Liberty and Leadership podcast is produced at Podville Media in Washington, D.C. If you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org.
Liberty and Leadership
Restoring Honesty on Campus with TFAS Campus Transparency Fellows
Roger welcomes Ben Rothove, editor-in-chief of the Madison Federalist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Elsa Johnson, managing editor of the Stanford Review, for a conversation about their experiences as student journalists and fellows in TFAS’s new Campus Transparency Fellowship, a program created to bring accountability and openness back to higher education.
They discuss the challenges of reporting on controversial topics such as DEI mandates, antisemitism, and administrative overreach, as well as the personal costs of standing up for free expression on progressive campuses. Rothove recounts his investigation into a university-sponsored sex education program that linked to explicit content, while Johnson describes her yearlong investigation into Chinese Communist Party influence at Stanford. Together they reflect on the state of free speech in academia, the fallout from recent campus controversies and how young journalists can pursue truth with courage and professionalism.
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.
Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFES alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today. I'm your host, Roger Reen. Today, the Liberty and Leadership Podcast will focus on a new TFES project related to bringing more transparency to American college and university campuses. My guests are two fellows taking part in our campus transparency initiative. This is a program that will be breaking stories on important topics such as viewpoint-based discrimination, woke university curriculum offerings, unjust campus discipline, and administrative overreach. During monthly group calls, our Transparency Fellows interact with each other and with professional journalists. They attended an August conference in Annapolis, Maryland, and will attend another in early spring of 2026. Campus Transparency Fellows have already reported on DEI infected academic requirements and radical student organizations. Ben attended our TFAS Summer Journalism Program this year, where he interned at National Review. He's covered stories related to higher education, politics, entertainment, and he intends to pursue a career as an investigative journalist. My second guest is Elsa Johnson, a student at Stanford University, where she's managing editor of the Stanford Review. She is majoring in East Asian Studies with a focus on China and national security and is fluent in Mandarin. She's done research at the Hoover Institution and the Foundation for American Innovation. Elsa has reported extensively on Chinese infiltration of Stanford, both for the Stanford Review and National Outlets. And she's produced reports and commentary about Stanford's campus culture. Ben, Elsa, thank you for joining the Liberty and Leadership Podcast. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. It's great to be here.
SPEAKER_00:I think I'll start with you, Elsa, and just ask if you could describe what drew you into journalism on your campus.
SPEAKER_01:My interest in journalism actually started in high school. I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I went to a small Christian high school and I got into journalism right away. I think I was really drawn to just developing my writing. And I also think that journalism is great for learning how to ask good questions. So I did journalism throughout my time in high school. And then when I came to Stanford, I was vaguely aware of the Stanford Review and joined right away. And I just found that it was such a great community at Stanford.
SPEAKER_00:Wonderful. Wonderful. Matt, tell me about your path.
SPEAKER_02:I'd say it was completely accidentally. I didn't really have a super strong interest in journalism until I started writing for the college fix, right before my freshman year of college. And then even then, I wasn't even particularly interested in stories on my campus until we had the Students for Justice in Palestine encampment in the spring of 2024. At that point, I really realized that there was a value in information and sharing information. So right after that, I got in contact with Ryan and Michael at TFAS and we started getting going on the Madison Federalist.
SPEAKER_00:You're part of our first class of fellows in our TFAS Transparency Initiative. It's intended to restore honesty and openness on campus. What led you, Ben, to uh apply to be part of that project?
SPEAKER_02:I knew that I was going to be doing a lot of work for the Madison Federalist this year. And when I found out about the Campus Transparency Fellowship, I knew that it would be a really good compliment for what I was already planning to do on campus. Is that the same for you, Elsa?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I found out about the fellowship shortly after I published my investigation into CCP influence at Stanford. And have always really enjoyed investigative journalism. And I think the Stanford Review definitely aligns with a lot of what you guys represent at TFAS. So yeah, it seemed like sort of a no-brainer.
SPEAKER_00:Can you talk a little bit about that story about that you did that discussed Chinese influence on the campus at Stanford?
SPEAKER_01:The story came about in sort of a crazy way. I grew up going to a Chinese immersion school. That's how I speak Mandarin. And I knew that I wanted to continue learning Mandarin and learning more about China when I came to college. After my freshman year, I was working for the Hoover Institution as a research assistant. And I was reached out to by this man named Charles Chen, and he claimed to be a Stanford student. And over time, throughout our conversations, I realized that there may be something more malicious going on. So I ended up reaching out to my bosses at Hoover and asking, What is this? Because he was trying to get me to go to China and offering to pay, and it all seemed very strange. And I found out that this is actually a CCP recruitment tactic, often used by the MSS, Ministry of State Security. This experience sort of sent me down this rabbit hole with a friend of mine. And we spent a year investigating CCP influence at Stanford. We talked to, you know, over a dozen professors, Hoover fellow students. After the year we had come up with this piece, we were really happy with how much attention it got. I think, you know, malign influence at university is very important. And I'm glad that there's more attention to the issue.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's amazing. He didn't know who he was dealing with when he tried to recruit you. And Ben, you've done some investigative journalism as well at the University of Wisconsin. You want to talk about one of your stories? We can warn people that this may not be for adult audiences, depending on which story you decide to talk about.
SPEAKER_02:Our stories have been a little bit less national security focused and a lot more we probably shouldn't be paying for that. So the story that we used to launch the Madison Federalist with was we went into the school sex education program. It's one of four programs that students can choose from, and students are required to do one of the four. And what the program was was like a sex education module. And we found it, it included a link to a pornographic website. And so we found a 17-year-old student and said, Are you able to access this module? And whenever we did that, we reached out to the university and they kind of panicked. They took down the module before our article was even published. And we still hear about that today. What we have found is that the best way to get people to read our campus publication is to break stories that kind of force them to read it.
SPEAKER_00:Obviously, people know you're a conservative on your campus. I grew up in Wisconsin myself. I didn't go to Madison, but I'm aware of the fact that the University of Madison's reputation, at least, is very progressive. Is it hard to be a conservative at University of Wisconsin and be out front like you are?
SPEAKER_02:I'd say certainly to some degree, but kind of my big project here is to build up like the Madison Federalist and other conservative organizations to be a point where it is easier to be a conservative on this campus.
SPEAKER_01:I think Stanford is a lot more apolitical than I thought it would be. I think because Stanford is such a STEM-focused school, people tend to not care too much about politics. But I will say that I think as a conservative woman, it is a lot more difficult than it would be for a conservative man. I definitely have lost a handful of friends for being right wing. And it's never fun, but I also think as a result, I have just found that my conservative friendships are that much more important to me.
SPEAKER_00:But do some students feel like they can't speak out in class because they might get punished by a professor? Does that kind of thing go on at all?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I we hear that all the time when we're recruiting for like conservative student organizations that people don't want to join or don't want to speak up in their classes. And I think that in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination, a lot of professors at UW Madison specifically, to be fair, none of them were like in support of the assassination, but they used it as a moment to say really horrible things about Charlie Kirk. And one of those professors was like the one I took an international studies course from last year. And I would not feel safe speaking up about my actual views in his class.
SPEAKER_01:I think it's very similar at Stanford. When people are interested in joining the review, you hear the same thing like, I'm tired of feeling silenced in classes. And I definitely think that there is still a very strong left-wing bias in academia.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And so there's a lot of students might practice self-censorship to avoid being graded poorly or something because they're conservative. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. One of the big controversies on campuses was the cancellation of conservative speakers, the lack of free speech. We had the Chicago principles that have been adopted and in many cases adhered to at a number of campuses. Stanford, I know, has had some incidences that have gained national attention of kind of censorship or shouting down speakers. Is that improved now at Stanford in terms of the free speech environment and the ability of conservatives to speak on campus?
SPEAKER_01:I do think that the general campus energy is a little more positive now. And I've hosted and attended a few conservative events where, you know, obviously we platform a conservative speaker, and they have actually gone well and not been protested. I will say during COVID, Dr. Jay Bodhacari and Scott Atlas were censured by the faculty senate. And the faculty senate still hasn't reversed Scott Atlas's censure. They just did a vote, I think, last Thursday. So there is still a lot of this silencing rhetoric, but I do think that things are getting better.
SPEAKER_00:Ben, you're you're active with the College of Republicans too. So you probably host events, especially in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Is there an effort by the university to require much more like security fees before you can do events? Or does that hinder you from being able to do events on campus?
SPEAKER_02:Security fees, I don't think, are as much of a concern anymore because when we hosted Michael Knowles through YAF, my freshman year, the university tried to force YAF to pay$4,000 in security fees and they got a legal threat for it and they would step back. So I don't think that that is something that they'll be doing anymore. But the thing is that we do get protests at most big speaker events. It's just a matter of what do you do about it. And to some degree, it's their free speech right too, but whenever you're interrupting a speaker, that's not acceptable. And I think that whenever they had the fire free speech rankings come back this year, something like a third of UW Madison students said it was acceptable to occasionally shout down speakers. So I think that we're still trying to navigate a way to make a difference on campus whenever students believe that's acceptable.
SPEAKER_00:As you think about careers in journalism, reporters, journalists, of course, just like both of you and me, we have our opinions about things, we have our views on public policy. Do you think as a reporter, you can cover stories and how you navigate kind of the what you're reporting on being influenced by views you hold?
SPEAKER_01:You know, there's a time and a place for an opinion piece. I think the Stanford Review tends to publish more opinion pieces in general. I do think it's very important to just write a piece that is purely an analysis of facts. Do your best to avoid inserting your own opinion. You know, oftentimes in journalism, it's easy to discredit a good piece of journalistic work if you are overly opinionated. I think that is especially true in investigative journalism. I think it's important that you allow other people's quotes and your own research to shine through.
SPEAKER_02:I agree with Elsa. The point is that lots of the time, just opinion pieces, people don't really read them. And there is a time and a place for reported opinion, but most of the time the best way to make an impact is to have a piece that's rock solid.
SPEAKER_00:I recall probably it was 20 years ago, now Fox News commentator Britt Hume, who had a long career covering the White House for ABC News, in a talk to our students, you know, he talked about the fact that in Washington, D.C., you have journalists who are they're part of the social life of the city, of course. They live here. And he always wondered, you know, when he sees at a dinner party that, you know, some social event and a reporter walks in and sees a senator. They're obviously become very close friends and socially going to the same parties. And then can you cover someone objectively who's in politics when you socialize with them in the evening? And it's really tough to make that kind of separation, I think. And uh as a good reporter, you have to try, as you said, Ilsa, is present the facts, tell the story. Here's what I saw, here's what I found, and I'm reporting it to you. And I'm curious if at our Annapolis retreat, which we did for the fellows on the subject of investigative journalism, was that helpful in some ways, and what ways that maybe what you learned there was useful?
SPEAKER_02:The Annapolis Retreat was a great way to talk to early and mid-career journalists. They helped guide us on ways to really break new stories in a way that is professional and a way that can get as wide a reach as possible. So I think the Campus Transparency Fellowship kind of helped guide us not only through campus journalism, but what to do next.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the retreat was a really great experience. I think it was really valuable to hear from, you know, professional journalists. You know, another part of the fellowship that I really appreciate is that we just have this community of fellow student journalists who we can bounce ideas off of and really collaborate with. I particularly enjoyed the panel with Aaron Siberium from the Washington Free Beacon. I think he is always gonna be very honest with student journalists and always gives great advice on what to cover, what people care about, what people don't care about. And I think as an investigative journalist, sometimes you just want to investigate everything and there's a lot to write about. You know, I think it's great to hear from these successful journalists what is gonna be worth publishing and what's not worth publishing. I also really appreciate the fact that we have sort of developed this community and we're able to meet people who are doing really great work in journalism. So it was such a great time and it's a great group of students.
SPEAKER_00:And then you do monthly calls where you can talk to other young people in your situations on other campuses, and that must reinforce some of that and you know help you draw some courage out of that fact that you're all doing this together and different situations. But it does take courage to be in an environment where there's a lot of hostility to your viewpoints. Ben, you came to our summer program for journalists last summer and you interned at National Review. What can you tell me about that experience?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, National Review was a great time. I had the ability to work on some commentary and some investigative journalism. One of my favorite things that I did was get to go up to Capitol Hill pretty regularly and be one of the reporters who sits there and kind of yells at congressmen and says, Can I get a response for this? So it was a great time. I got to kind of hop around DC and Arlington and break big stories. And you got answers occasionally?
SPEAKER_00:Occasionally Elsa, as a campus journalist, how can you strive to have the most impact on your campus? What kind of things do you think about doing as a journalist to have that kind of impact?
SPEAKER_01:I think one good way of, you know, doing journalism well and having impact is just really leaning into your, you know, innate sense of curiosity. There are so many things that are going on on campus, and sometimes you're so busy that you may not notice. But, you know, if you ever notice something interesting someone said, something interesting about how the university functions, and you just are curious about it, I think it's really important to explore these leads that, you know, you sort of come up with. And that means ask a lot of questions. Take some time to just really get your questions answered, talk to a lot of people. I think it can be a really fun thing to do. You know, I think sometimes I wonder why Stanford has BYD, you know, a Chinese electric vehicle company, buses. And I need to send an email and figure out why that is. And that could be something that would be really interesting to write about. You know, a lot of student journalists that I've met are very brilliant people and they have great questions to ask and they notice things. And I think it's important to really lean into that.
SPEAKER_00:Do you feel like after the Charlie Kirk assassination, the campus environment's any different? Did that have an impact at all?
SPEAKER_01:So we were actually weren't even in session when the assassination occurred. But I did write a piece on the campus reaction to the assassination because Stanford uses an anonymous social media app called Fizz, and the day of the assassination, people were posting just very nasty things on Fizz. And I think it was something like around at least 15% of the student body was supporting these, you know, vile comments. And that made me really upset. And honestly, I was expecting a lot better from the Stanford community. I think once we got back in school, I don't think any of those people would be willing to say these things out loud. And because it's an anonymous app, they feel like they can say things that are really disgusting. I did lose friends over the piece I wrote where I, you know, was condemning political violence and saying that we shouldn't celebrate his murder. So it was a weird reaction, but I hope it will get better.
SPEAKER_00:How about at Wisconsin?
SPEAKER_02:The universe was going to make very clear that the chalkings we're about to talk about were not on campus proper, but directly adjacent to campus. They put big Charlie Kirk is dead with a giant heart under it. Some guy wrote that up on it's in between a bunch of university buildings, but so they did that a couple of times. I think there were three or four places where this person wrote that. Then the Badger Herald, one of the liberal newspapers on campus, interviewed a guy who said he wanted to go dance in the street after hearing that Charlie Kirk was shot. There was another person in that same interview who said that Charlie Kirk should be happy he got shot. There were many professors who went on blue sky, said horrible things. I think that really kind of showed kind of just how bad it was, rather than making a big difference. But the one thing I'll say is that the College Republicans meeting we had the week after was the biggest event that I had seen my entire time here.
SPEAKER_00:The other big event, of course, a few years ago was the October 7th and the reaction on campus of the occupying campuses by the pro-Palestinian people really sent a wake-up call to a lot of donors. You know, we heard a lot more about it on the East Coast at some of the Ivies. I'm sure you had that at Stanford as well. Ben mentioned it at Wisconsin. Has that met with kind of a backlash to some extent among people? This rise of anti-Semitism is so troubling and curious about what that kind of is like on your campus.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we did have an encampment and it lasted, you know, for almost the entire year. And then it came to an abrupt halt when they broke into the president's office and a dozen of them were arrested. And after that, the university just took a very hard stance and they've not made a return. Last year, there weren't really any protests. This year, you see a little bit, like some student groups who, you know, will try to organize something, but they kind of fall flat. And I definitely think that has been good for the campus atmosphere is that the university just shut it down.
SPEAKER_02:So at UW Madison, one of the main things we cover, or at least keep a close eye on, is anti-Semitism. But what I found this year is that it's just a lot smaller. Our students for justice in Palestine got removed from campus for the semester because earlier in the year, Joe Biden's former UN ambassador came to speak on campus, and students for justice in Palestine repeatedly interrupted, like screamed and yelled throughout the entire thing. So that was the university suspended them. They've held not students for justice in Palestine, but organizations that were created after and have the same cause, same people, everything, have held like some vigils or small protests or anything, but it's just nothing like it was a year or two ago.
SPEAKER_00:Well, so overall, Ben, are you feeling pretty optimistic about the future for our country and for what your generation can do to make this world a better place?
SPEAKER_02:I think I'm optimistic. Or at the very least, I at least think that we have the possibility for change.
SPEAKER_00:Positive change. Yeah. Good. How about you, Elsa?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I am optimistic. Ben was, you know, saying this about UW's response to the Kirk assassination, but you know, after this summer, there has been a huge resurgence in people who are willing to be more outspokenly conservative. And I think that is a great sign. And it's really exciting that there are so many people who are coming up with the courage to feel okay voicing their opinions and putting on events and creating these, you know, conservative communities for students on campus. So I am very hopeful. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I feel like with the students we come into contact with that the Fund for American Studies, it makes me optimistic. I mean, I think a lot of the students over the years I find have become more serious about the world. They come to our programs kind of thinking, well, what kind of job can I find? What career should I pursue? They're, you know, focused on what they can do to contribute to the world and get along in the world, get ahead in the world. And, you know, our challenge, I think, for both of you and us at the Fund for American Studies is to show them how human flourishing is the result of giving people individual liberty and economic freedom to use their talents as best they can to pursue their self-interest and in doing so make the world a better place. So I appreciate you coming on today. I very much we appreciate what you're doing on your campuses to cover stories there and are proud to call you fellows in our Transparency Initiative. So thank you both. You probably have class to get to or a story to go cover. So I will let you go. Uh, but thanks for being with me. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast. If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfas.org. And be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review. Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media. I'm your host, Roger Reim, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.
