BY JENNIFER RUTH

In 2016, right after the Presidential election, I wrote on this blog:

Nobody has a crystal ball but given the president-elect’s words and acts during the campaign—not to mention his seedy experiment in higher education—we would be fools not to expect an attack on the liberal institutions of shared governance and academic freedom. . . How will we use what remains of our infrastructure—the tradition and policies built by AAUP—to protect academic freedom from attacks stemming from both without and within the university? (There are always a few intellectuals wishing to hitch their stars to illiberal movements.)

It was easy to imagine the kinds of cases that did in fact occur, such as when professors criticized Israel or when a scholar tweeted their hatred of white supremacy and administrators threw — or tried to throw — them under the bus. It was easy to picture the cases of power asymmetry, in other words, when a person arguing on behalf of a less institutionally entrenched or systemically empowered group runs into disciplinary trouble with university administrators overreacting to outraged external political actors. “The appearance of fascist politics in the United States is not exactly new,” Michael Roth wrote in June, “but what is new is the alignment of this politics with the force of the federal government.”

I didn’t flesh out that parenthetical at the end, though, about “the few intellectuals.” I didn’t think enough about how “academic freedom” would get weaponized the same way “free speech” has been by the alt-right. I had trouble imagining the form the academic grifters would take, the ones wanting to catapult themselves onto a public stage by tapping into the deep vein of racism and sexism exposed and infused by Trumpism. No excuses now. I know what it looks like: it looks like “pro-colonialism,” it looks like hysterical decrying of “left authoritarianism,” it looks like blatant misrepresentations of Black Lives Matter, it looks like attacks on critical race theory and intersectionality and attempts to defund departments associated with this scholarship, and it looks like illiberal people cynically using liberal shibboleths like “the only antidote to bad speech is more speech” to promote and protect hate speech.

In 2016, my post asked how we can use the traditions and policies built by AAUP to protect academic freedom during a Trump presidency. In 2020, is it time to ask what new traditions does AAUP need to build, what new policies need to be written or old ones revised? The vagueness of the “common good” invoked by the 1940 statement to justify academic freedom looks a little complacent now that, quoting one of my colleagues on Committee A from a 2017 article, “the fiction that everyone is making a good-faith effort to find a way to share this country is impossible to sustain.”