BY IRENE MULVEY
AAUP president Irene Mulvey issued the following statement yesterday.
On June 1, my predecessor, Rudy Fichtenbaum, issued a statement on protests that occurred in response to the murder of George Floyd. He acknowledged that “institutions of higher education have been part of the problem” of systemic racism, but said that “they can be part of the solution by marshaling the expertise of faculty and the energy of students in developing meaningful approaches to mitigating racism and inequality in our society.” Critical race theory represents an important body of such expertise and President Trump’s recent attack on it is a naked attempt to politicize our national reckoning with racism and a new escalation in the assault on expert knowledge.
Amid a global pandemic and a heightening climate crisis, the administration has denied and dismissed the efforts of scientists to address these challenges. Now, in ordering federal agencies to end trainings that address topics like white privilege and critical race theory, the administration denies and dismisses the efforts of experts across a wide variety of disciplines—such as law, history, social sciences, and humanities—to help us better understand and reckon with our legacy of slavery and persistent institutional racism.
In 1915 the AAUP’s founders warned of the “special dangers to freedom of teaching in the domain of the social sciences.” We have seen illustrations of these dangers throughout our history, and Trump’s attempt to suppress scholarly work on anti-Black racism, social justice, and the complex history of the United States illustrate for us again the prescience of that warning. Critical race theory is a vibrant and rigorous discipline. Few reasonable scholars would deny its importance and timeliness.
Previously the administration raised the specters of “political indoctrination” and “coercion” in an executive order on campus free speech that was largely, as the AAUP pointed out, “a solution in search of a problem.” Now President Trump hypocritically seeks to impose restrictions on the speech of government employees that would exceed by far any restrictions found on college campuses. That his administration does so to advance a political agenda best described as white supremacist makes these actions all the more reprehensible, dangerous, and truly un-American.
The AAUP calls on faculty and administrations to condemn this ban and, further, to actively support the work of critical race theorists and other academics who offer indispensable resources for understanding the past and present and for building a more racially just society.
Peter Kirsanow, appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, makes a brilliant if definitive argument for CRT’s violation of Title VII and 42 USC 1981: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIR7DCV1SKc. It may otherwise continue to exist as an ideology, but as an institutional mandate underwritten by taxpayer finance and federally funded student tuition, it is, like 1619, decommissioned. That otherwise leaves its adherents fully free to embrace it personally, but they will not be institutionally installing it as cognitive code. Replaced with Critical Relations Theory? Regards, ’96, UChicago
As usual, the liberal feels forced to to exaggerate claims — i.e., “Now President Trump hypocritically seeks to impose restrictions on the speech of government employees that would exceed by far any restrictions found on college campuses.”
No one is IMPOSING RESTRICTIONS ON PERSONAL SPEECH or advocacy, as . Any restrictions, as Matt Anderson, points out above, are about “an institutional mandate underwritten by taxpayer finance and federally funded student tuition,” That is THE OPPOSITE of Free Speech.
How about Justice Brandeis’s old axiom: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression.’
Some people must think that the emergency finally arrived, 300 years after 1619.
In reality, this is massive repression of intellectual freedom by the Trump Administration. As Politico reports (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/09/education-department-race-related-content-411487), the Department of Education is even planning to use this new rule to regulate the content of purely voluntary internal book clubs where employees might choose to read the “wrong” books. An internal Department of Ed memo declares a ban on any material “that teaches, trains or suggests the following: (1) virtually all White people contribute to racism or benefit from racism (2) critical race theory (3) white privilege (4) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country (5) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil (6) Anti-American propaganda.”
I have not seen the memo you refer to and don’t consider Politico terribly journalistic, or scrupulous (its Editor publicly disclosed the home address of a conservative critic, inciting violence, all in the public domain). If your points 1-6 are otherwise so articulated, I believe Mr. Kirsanow is ratified.
So often, people JUMP at imagined or proposed actions that never materialize. This is sometimes the result of “the sky is falling” thinking and leads many (including MOI) to think of it as “crying wolf” syndrome.
In this case, I refer to this wording (with my own emphasis): ” the Department of Education is even PLANNING to use this new rule to regulate the content of purely voluntary internal book clubs.”
Sounds scary, right? Big Brother? Book burning? But it is a mere PROPOSAL (maybe). Get me riled when it becomes official Policy or Law.
Likewise, the 6 items at the end comes from “an internal Department of Ed memo,” which may be a trial balloon or exaggerated idea from an off-the-chart opponent of Freedom of Speech. (BTW, in my experience — esp. in academia — it has been the pseudo-Left that has interfered most with First Amendment rights in recent decades.)
This brief WALL STREET JOURNAL article, which features some mention of yours truly, may be instructive:
https://www.academia.edu/31680392/Self_Censorship_of_College_Faculty
Of course, an internal memo is not law, or even policy. And, of course, pseudo-liberals who support CRT should be GLAD about the 6 suspect contents than would ban CTR. Why? because there’s NO WAY that their documents and training sessions tech that (1) virtually all White people contribute to racism or benefit from racism (2) white privilege is rampant and every whitey is born with it, (3) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country (4) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil and (5) Anti-American propaganda is the flavor of the 21st century.”
Right? CTR doesn’t advocate any of these things. It just teaches us about the horrors of slavery and its lingering aftereffects.
Only kidding 🙂
The “problem” that Pres. Trump was trying to find a solution to is REAL. I, a Marxist and “diversity ally” for most of my life, was a victim of “cancel culture.” and the neglect/lack of enforcement of longstanding Free Speech and Academic Freedom goals and policies, the ones pioneered by AAUP and most other faculty unions — except PSC, the representative of CUNY profs, staff, and adjuncts. Almost every week, there has been 1-3 articles in the CHRONICLE about how some faculty member lost his/her job, reputation, or dignity over perceived “MICRO-aggressions,” reading assignments, and art works at the hands of phony “SJWs” and compliant academic administrators.
Read about my case here: https://www.academia.edu/23593134/A_Leftist_Critique_of_Political_Correctness_Gone_Amok_Revised_and_Updated
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Administrations misuse Title IX also, viz. cases of free speech labeled as sexual harassment (where AAUP has supported the free speech). That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t have Title IX protections, affirmative action, diversity/inclusion, anti-racist work, etc. And CRT isn’t an “ideology” or even a single strand of work, it’s a field of inquiry but not the set of dogmatic and reductive precepts it is caricatured as.
Sure, CRT is “a field of inquiry” in that academic usage. I’m all for it, and have even used CRT as a methodological paradigm in some of my published writings and conference papers, as well as in the classroom.
However, one would have to be blind to not notice how and when CRT is used as an “ideology,” a “dogmatic” PRACTICE that is often opposed to Free Speech and legitimate academic inquiry. The academic press, including Inside Higher Ed (IHS) and THE CHRONICLE, is filled with such stories.
In fact, I was forced to attend a “sensitivity training session” for faculty and administrators many years ago, even though I was well-versed in Black History and related issues and had worked for decades as a “diversity ally” (even with the original Black Panthers). The session I attended mainly consisted of a burly Black man shouting insults at the White attendees (and some of the Blacks, especially if they asked questions or challenged the speaker). The “content” was a high school version of Black Studies 101, with a lot of prescriptions based on dubious statistics. (Accurate and pertinent data might have been more convincing.)
That session left a bad taste in EVERYONE’s ears and worked AGAINST the goals we all had for greater diversity and fairness. CRT can be the same, unless carefully explained, taught, and written about. So far, there is some truth to the “caricatures” that sometimes prevail.
Thank you AAUP President Irene Mulvey for putting out this statement!
Our chapter’s executive council issued the following follow-up statement yesterday and want to encourage other chapters to consider doing something similar:
PSU-AAUP Endorses AAUP National’s Statement on Trump’s Attack on Critical Race Theory
SEPTEMBER 11, 2020 / HEATHER NAHMIAS
On September 9, 2020, AAUP President Irene Mulvey issued a statement calling President Trump’s recent attack on critical race theory “a naked attempt to politicize our national reckoning with racism and a new escalation in the assault on expert knowledge.” The AAUP, she writes, “calls on faculty and administrations to condemn this ban and, further, to actively support the work of critical race theorists and other academics who offer indispensable resources for understanding the past and present and for building a more racially just society.” We, members of the Executive Committee of PSU-AAUP, wholeheartedly endorse the national organization’s statement. We pledge to protect the academic freedom of our colleagues in critical race theory, social justice, and related fields against efforts intended to, as Mulvey writes about Trump’s words, “advance a political agenda best described as white supremacist.” We condemn Trump’s threatened ban and commit our unwavering support for the work of our colleagues in critical race theory, social justice, and related fields.
Of course, Jennifer Ruth’s reposting of the AAUP statement is just a reiteration of the original idea.
No attempt was even made to address the critiques I leveled above, or anyone else’s.
Why not ENGAGE in discussion and debate instead of ignoring legitimate, fact-based concerns, and appealing only to the Hallelujah Chorus of like-minded pseudo-liberals?
CRT is dead, as it should be, as an institutional device. As a concept to be consulted? Knock your socks off. As a forced indoctrination of young adults (or adults with young minds), or as a corporate “shaming” program, it must and has been rejected for two reasons: one, it is an agitation and hate-based paradigm; and two, it is factually flawed as many scholars Left, Right, and in the Middle, have pointed out. You have to separate out its existence in a free speech context, and its existence as a political special interest program, including simple financial opportunism. As for the related “1619” program it too has been appropriately addressed in Sen. Cotton’s legislative proposal, and by EO: cite 1619, 1299, 983, 1492, 1177, or 2001 ad any other date, and again, have at it, in the spirit of free inquiry. But these are not going to be spoon fed programs forced through our educational infrastructure. Now voters know what Obama was doing for 8 years, and why his very first White House event was to stage a “beer summit” over police and blacks, and to light the federal race hatred flames along with racial historicism, the BLM program and the reparations scheme.