BY JOHN K. WILSON
The Mississippi Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning debated proper salad preparation techniques on May 16. That’s because they spent two hours discussing whether James M. Thomas should be granted tenure despite his criticism of Republican legislators. Ultimately, Thomas was allowed to receive tenure (with an untold number of dissenting votes) despite having once tweeted, “Don’t just interrupt a senator’s meal, y’all. Put your whole damn fingers in their salads. Take their apps and distribute them to the other diners. Bring boxes, and take their food home with you on the way out. They don’t deserve your civility.”
Personally, I always make salads with my whole damn fingers, but this crime against civility was used to justify an attack on academic freedom. Trustees should not be judging the worth of candidates for tenure, and they should definitely not be judging extramural utterances, and especially not salad utterances. Despite the ultimate granting of tenure, even the fact that a Board would target one professor for his controversial extramural utterances sends a chilling effect across higher education in the entire state.
Perhaps what’s most interesting about this attack on academic freedom is that the Board used the words of the AAUP to justify it:
In light of recent concerns regarding certain statements by the professor on social media, the Board examined whether those statements were in keeping with the requirements for tenure set out in IHL Policies 402.03 and 403.0101, which require, in part, that the Board and heads of its institutions consider the candidate’s effectiveness in interpersonal relationships, including professional ethics and cooperativeness, in making decisions regarding tenure. The Board is also mindful of the University’s “Statement Concerning Academic Freedom,” which states, in part: “As a person of learning and an educational officer, he/she should remember that the public may judge his/her profession and his/her institution by his/her utterances. Hence, he/she should strive at all times to be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others,…”
But the Board decided to reject those concerns: “ultimately it was the recommendation of the professor’s institution, the University of Mississippi, that carried the greatest weight in the majority of the Board’s decision to grant tenure to the professor.”
The words about “appropriate restraint” were seemingly used to weigh on the side of dismissing the professor, even though a majority of the board ultimately decided not to do that. Those words came from the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles, and this is not the first time these words have been invoked to attack academic freedom. And it makes sense: if the AAUP says professors have an obligation to show respect, be restrained, and be accurate, then a lot of reasonable people would say, surely it’s okay to punish professors who fail to meet their obligations. They are wrong. To understand why the AAUP told the Board it would be wrong to fire Thomas, here’s a little history.
Back when academic freedom was a very young concept, the AAUP in 1940 united with the administrator-run American Association of Colleges (AAC) to issue the 1940 Statement of Principles. The AAUP’s primary goal was get tenure established, and it succeeded. But to do it, the AAUP had to make some compromises, including that language about accuracy and restraint that’s so dangerous.
Very quickly, the AAUP and AAC tried to repair the error. Immediately after the 1940 Statement was endorsed, the sponsors included an interpretation of what this section meant, noting that the standard for extramural utterances is “raise grave doubts concerning the teacher’s fitness for his or her position,” due process must be followed (as it certainly wasn’t by the Board here), and “teachers are citizens and should be accorded the freedom of citizens.”
This wasn’t sufficient. The AAUP has evolved since 1940, and faced with the failures of protecting academic freedom during the McCarthy Era and the growing embrace of free speech the 1960s, the AAUP decided to elevate its protections. Working with the AAC (now AAC&U), in 1970 it issued “Interpretive Comments” that are now part of the 1940 Statement. It incorporates the 1964 “Committee A Statement on Extramural Utterances,” including the stronger requirement that an extramural utterance “cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position.”
Unfortunately, most colleges use the “restraint” language of the 1940 Statement without any of the caveats from the 1940 interpretation or the 1970 Interpretive Comments. This creates a rather oddball interpretation situation. The meaning of the words is actually the opposite of what they seem to say. You might think the 1940 Statement means professors can be fired for lack of restraint in their extramural opinions, but in reality the 1940 Statement forbids this. That’s because the 1970 language is not an amendment, but an Interpretive Comment. Instead of adding new words, it changes the meaning of the original words for the AAUP. And so anyone who invokes the AAUP’s words is also invoking the AAUP’s new interpretation of them, at least for the AAUP.
I don’t know if any court has accepted this interpretive approach, and many administrators and trustees clearly don’t understand it at all, which is a problem. The solution is not easy. The AAUP can’t go back to administrators and ask them to do a brand-new Statement of Principles, because it would probably be worse than what we already have, and it would require convincing vast numbers of colleges to change their policies anyway.
The best solution is a campaign to have colleges fix their academic freedom policies by adding these missing elements from the 1970s Interpretive Comments to the campus statements on academic freedom. Otherwise, we will continue to see powerful figures misinterpreting the language of the 1940 Statement, using it to attack rather than defend academic freedom.
