BY JOHN K. WILSON

Today, I’ll be speaking on a PEN America panel about “Academic Freedom and Classroom Conduct” along with Jonathan Friedman, Neijma Celestine-Donnor, and Amna Khalid.

So I wanted to offer a few thoughts about what academic freedom means in the classroom. Along with freedom of research and extramural utterances, freedom of teaching is one of the core components of academic freedom. The relative privacy of the classroom has often (but not always) insulated faculty for punishment for what they say, but technological advances have begun to change that.

The AAUP defines freedom of faculty in the classroom this way:

The freedom to teach includes the right of the faculty to select the materials, determine the approach to the subject, make the assignments, and assess student academic performance in teaching activities for which faculty members are individually responsible, without having their decisions subject to the veto of a department chair, dean, or other administrative officer.

The AAUP 2007 report, Freedom in the Classroom, is the best overall statement about this topic,

A classroom is a conversation, and good conversations require some degree of monitoring and oversight to ensure they are moving in constructive directions. And that’s the role of the professor. That’s why we give faculty the powers of a moderator to control the syllabus and the class conversation.

Academic freedom gives near-absolute power to the professor not because the professor is always right, but because the alternatives are much worse. We could have trustees and the government approve all syllabi and provide the “best” script for professors to recite in the classroom, and the result would be a terrible education.

That power is near-absolute, but it is not absolute. Professors can be punished if their classroom speech constitutes harassment or other forbidden behavior, or if it is clear professional misconduct. Professors who use a math class to do nothing but talk about the football team are violating their professional requirements. That’s also true if the professors discuss their political views, but the test is not whether a controversial view is ever uttered by a professor. Instead, political views (if they are actually irrelevant to the class) are treated like other irrelevant ideas, and punishable only if they overwhelm what the class is supposed to be focused on. 

I do think some people go too far in how they define academic freedom in the classroom, like Samuel Abrams: “At Sarah Lawrence, the deans are sending out emails telling us they’d like us to be more focused on x, y, and z in our classes and our teaching. That’s a breach of academic freedom; it’s up to me to decide what I’m going to teach.”

That’s not a breach of academic freedom; people can advise you, train you, and denounce you for your teaching, as long as they do not control it or wrongly punish people for classroom expression. Whether advice or training is valuable or not can be debated, but providing it is not a form of censorship.

Likewise, criticism of what professors do in the classroom is not censorship. In my first book, The Myth of Political Correctness, I wrote about how Stephen Thernstrom became a poster child for the PC police. Some African-Americans students didn’t like the way Thernstrom taught his class at Harvard, and criticized him, urging him to include slave narratives in teaching about slavery. Thernstrom decided not to teach his course (something his critics had never asked for, or wanted), and his cowardice was turned into one of the most cited examples of the power of political correctness. 

The AAUP’s founding Declaration of Principles in 1915 worried about attacks on college teachers for what they say in the classroom because “sensational newspapers have quoted and garbled such remarks” and declared that classroom speech “ought always to be considered privileged communications.” The idea of making the classroom a secret chamber was never possible, but it’s particularly difficult in the age of cell phones and online learning. The problem when professors are punished for controversial classroom remarks is a problem with how we punish free speech, not with the revelation of it. Academic freedom and job protections, not secrecy and silence, is the solution.

Historically, the efforts to punish professors for their classroom speech have usually been used against left-wing faculty. Bari Weiss launched her career as a right-wing pundit in 2006 as a student at Columbia demanding the investigation and punishment of professors who criticized the Israeli government in their classes, with Weiss denouncing “the racism of these professors.” As Glenn Greenwald noted about Weiss, “her whole career was literally built on ugly campaigns to attack, stigmatize, and punish Arab professors who criticize Israel.” Although Weiss was angry when Columbia refused to punish the professors she disliked, her efforts at censorship still had a powerful impact. To appease critics like Weiss, Columbia enacted one of the most repressive speech codes against faculty in America, a speech code that still exists, allowing formal complaints and penalties against any professors who “advocate any political or social cause” in a class.

The case of Teresa Buchanan at Louisiana State University, a tenured professor fired for using profanity in an education class, is the big legal case in this area (and it’s a pretty awful defeat for academic freedom in the classroom).

There have been many recent cases to punish or silence professors for their classroom conduct, including Harvard, Moreno Valley College, University of Central Florida, University of Miami, University of Missouri, UCLA, St. John’s, UIC, NYU, Texas A&M, U.S. Naval Academy, and Syracuse,  

Students also have the right not to be unfairly punished for their classroom speech. Freedom in the classroom is generally limited by the professor assigned to moderate the class, but that power is not unlimited when it is used to censor students, as at Portland State.

Another trend in academia is the punishment of professors for using the N-word in class, including Central Michigan, Augsburg, Duquesque, USC, University of Pittsburgh, The New School, Emory, University of Ottawa, and St. Michael’s College,

Randall Kennedy, the author of a book about this racial slur, has objected to the idea of punishing its use in an academic context. How would a total ban on the N-word impact Black scholars and students? There is a serious danger that they might bear the brunt of disciplinary action.

In June 2020, the University of Waterloo announced, “The University of Waterloo unequivocally believes that there is no place for the use of the N-word in class, on campus or in our community.” However a group of Black scholars denounced a ban on the N-word, writing that it “clearly has a chilling effect on almost anyone who does research relating to Blackness, and a seriously harmful effect on the ability of Black faculty to teach and speak directly to issues related to Blackness, both historically and in the modern world.” In response to this objection (and that of the Faculty Association), the University of Waterloo backed down.

It is possible to imagine a rule against the N-word that only applies to white people, but there is no legal precedent for race-based distinctions in censorship. Can the authorities actually ban one racial group from using a slur while freely allowing another racial group to do so? Of course, racial slurs can be death threats and harassment in many contexts, but context is essential.There is obviously nothing wrong with persuading professors to avoid the use of racial slurs even in an academic context. But to punish them for doing so is a threat to academic freedom, and it may end up erasing the history of both racism and anti-racist activism. Universities do not ban words.

Freedom in the classroom is perhaps the most important aspect of academic freedom, because it strikes at the core of what faculty do. The decentralized control of classrooms in the hands of professors is one of the most important factors in maintaining excellence in higher education, and protecting the free expression of ideas on campus.