An undercover sting released this week by James O’Keefe captured what every patriotic American should find shocking: a Georgetown adjunct, identified as Jonathan Franklin, openly using racial slurs against black conservatives and dismissing his white colleagues as “stupid white people” while he believed he was on a private date. When the confrontation came, Franklin didn’t defend his remarks — he fled the scene, tripped, and even tried to lunge at a cameraman in a clumsy attempt to avoid accountability. This isn’t the behavior of a principled journalist or educator; it’s the cowardice of someone who knows his words wouldn’t survive daylight.
The tape makes plain that Franklin explicitly disparaged public figures like Candace Owens and Justice Clarence Thomas and admitted he hides his “real” thoughts when on the record. He also appears to have inflated his professional credentials before conceding he misrepresented himself, further undercutting any claim to journalistic credibility. Watching a supposed journalism instructor reveal contempt for both truth and colleagues is a textbook example of why parents and students no longer trust elite institutions.
What makes this scandal especially poisonous is that Franklin is slated to teach a course on sourcing and interview technique at Georgetown — a university that likes to sell itself as a bastion of debate and inquiry. How can students learn to assess sources or conduct fair interviews from someone who privately mocks the very principles he’s supposed to teach? This isn’t merely hypocrisy; it’s an institutional failure to vet who is shaping the next generation of reporters.
Conservatives have warned for years about the cultural capture of our schools, and this is the sort of episode that validates those concerns. Imagine if a professor publicly smeared minority students or conservative colleagues — the media and university would demand immediate dismissal. Yet when the left’s own fall short of their lofty preaching, the response is often silence or feeble mea culpas. That double standard corrodes trust and shows where priorities truly lie.
To be clear, defending free speech doesn’t mean universities should be safe harbors for employees who weaponize their positions against students or hide blatant bias behind tenure or titles. Georgetown has a duty to its students to ensure instructors uphold basic professional standards and journalistic ethics. If a journalism teacher cannot model honesty and even-handedness, they should not be in front of a classroom teaching future reporters how to find and treat sources.
This episode should be a wake-up call for parents, donors, and alumni to stop pretending their contributions won’t come with conditions. Demand transparency, review boards, and real consequences for faculty who betray institutional values. Citizen journalists like O’Keefe did what the mainstream won’t: they exposed rot where the system prefers to sweep it under the rug.
We can defend free expression while also insisting on standards and accountability. America doesn’t need more elites lecturing students from a pedestal of unchecked bias. Hardworking Americans expect fairness and truth from our universities — and if Georgetown won’t provide it, conservatives must keep shining light on these scandals until the institutions reform or lose the moral authority they pretend to hold.
