BY JOHN K. WILSON

Jennifer Ruth, who is a contributing editor here at AcademeBlog as well as a professor of film studies at Portland State University (PSU) and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A, published an important op-ed this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and so I wanted to offer my critique of the points where we disagree.

While Ruth begins by stating that “we must support the academic freedom of people we disagree with,” the inevitable “but” that follows is a disturbing exception to that principle. Her target is an obnoxious conservative professor at PSU, Bruce Gilley, who has defended colonialism and denounced leftist faculty. Along the way, Ruth seeks to redefine academic freedom in ways that would, I think, substantially weaken it.

Ruth argues, “Academic freedom has been weaponized, cut loose from its traditional mooring in intellectual expertise…” Yes, it has, for more than 50 years, and it’s a wonderful thing. Academic freedom was weaponized by us. By the AAUP. By progressive professors in the wake of McCarthyism who realized that academic freedom was toothless if it only protected professors saying the proper things in the proper ways about their narrow expertise. So we, the AAUP, weaponized academic freedom in the 1960s to make it a more powerful tool to protect political freedom on campus. At the time, leftists were pretty much the only professors being persecuted, but the AAUP stood for it as a broad principle of academic freedom, and we shouldn’t abandon it today simply because some conservatives might also be protected by our weaponized academic freedom.

I disagree with Ruth’s narrow version of academic freedom. Ruth argues, “Professors at public colleges and universities in the United States have the First Amendment right to say any number of vicious, unhinged, and/or batshit-crazy things. That does not mean they have the academic freedom to do so.”

Actually, it does mean exactly that. First of all, Ruth creates a division between “academic freedom” and “the First Amendment” that is wrong. Academic freedom is “a special concern of the First Amendment” as Justice William Brennan noted in the Keyishian case.

The academic freedom of professors should be protected by the First Amendment, but academic freedom also means that professors at private universities who say “crazy” things are protected even though the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Without academic freedom, private college professors would have no freedom at all.

Ruth may be using “the First Amendment” here as shorthand for the idea of “free speech” that everyone has, a concept that she thinks is broader than academic freedom.

Here, too, I disagree. Academic freedom is not a narrower right than free speech; it is a broader right more expansive than free expression, because it also includes the right to say things while doing your job (teaching, research) without being punished by your bosses for your opinions. That’s a right few workers have, and one that is essential to an academic institution.

But academic freedom must also include the right to say some “vicious, unhinged, and/or batshit-crazy things”–not always in one’s academic work when it is judged, but certainly in one’s extramural utterances when one is threatened with punishment. In 1915, the AAUP was founded with a Declaration of Principles that included extramural utterances as a core part of academic freedom. What does Ruth mean by saying you have a First Amendment right to say controversial things but not the academic freedom to do it? Does it mean you won’t be arrested, you’ll merely be fired as a professor for having the wrong political opinions?. And I worry about endorsing a ban on “crazy” ideas considering that almost all social justice advocacy was considered “crazy” until fairly recently, and an enormous conservative movement is trying to ban “Critical Race Theory” and similar ideas at this very moment because they think leftists are unhinged. So let’s not embrace a “crazy” exception to academic freedom.

Ruth wants a vision of academic freedom that can exclude Gilley, and claims: “There should be no sense in which academic freedom entails the freedom to provoke, encourage, and engage in campaigns of harassment against colleagues.” I’m suspicious of the phrase “no sense in which” and similar forms of demands for zero tolerance. I’m also concerned that Ruth elides the difference between three very different things: provoke, encourage, and engage. Engaging in actual harassment is punishable (if it meets the legal definition of harassment and not the far broader colloquial sense that Ruth seems to be using). But provoking or encouraging someone else who engages in harassment is a very different thing. If I criticize a professor and someone else reads my critique and then that person engages in illicit harassment, should I really be found guilty of harassment by encouragement?

That’s a particularly dangerous standard considering that in this essay Ruth herself engages in harsh public criticism of various professors by name (including Bruce Gilley, Peter Boghossian, Scott Atlas, and John Eastman). If someone were to send Gilley a mean tweet or even a death threat, should Ruth be punished for harassing him with her criticism? I certainly don’t think so. 

Ruth reports:

When our colleagues used their Twitter platforms to encourage students to post material from their “woke” and “neoracist” professors on a “woke@PSU” page, we filed a grievance on behalf of all of our members who might find themselves the target of an anti-woke mob.

This is an extremely disturbing action. A grievance is a demand for the administration to limit or punish the individual it is filed against, and filing a grievance against your critics is an attempt at censorship (albeit one that the administration does not appear inclined to follow). To file a grievance because faculty “might” be the target of a mob due to public criticism is an effort to limit academic freedom. Everyone–students, professors, the public–has the right to criticize professors and their views. 

But that right to criticize must also apply to those who denounce Gilley. It appears that everyone involved in this dispute wants to silence each other.

The National Association of Scholars accuses the PSU-AAUP of “slander of the highest order” against Gilley. I think they mean “libel” since this is written, and of course it’s not libel at all to express a critical opinion about someone, and certainly not libel of “the highest order,” whatever that means. By claiming defamation, apparently they think Gilley should be able to sue and have the government courts take PSU-AAUP’s money away for daring to speak critically of a professor.

The NAS writes, “we call on the AAUP to censure its PSU chapter, which is clearly out of line with the principles of true academic freedom.” Needless to say, the AAUP’s censure list is for administrations that actually violate academic freedom in their actions, not for chapters that might express a misguided opinion.

But while I strongly disagree with the NAS and its flawed notions of academic freedom, I also disagree with the PSU-AAUP’s opinions about academic freedom, and where they make “a condemnation of PSU Political Science Professor Bruce Gilley’s ‘procolonialism’ platform. PSU-AAUP stands for academic freedom. PSU-AAUP does not stand for hostile work environments created under the guise of academic freedom. PSU-AAUP strongly condemns Professor Gilley’s platform, and any other abuse of academic freedom used to harass, intimidate, and harm others.”

The PSU-AAUP is simply wrong to think that Gilley’s “procolonialism” opinions create “hostile work environments.” Publishing your political views in an article is not harassment, no matter how wrong those views are. And that certainly applies to support for colonialism.

John Stuart Mill was a colonialist, a racist, and a hypocrite. He worked as a colonial administrator at the British East India Company. In On Liberty, Mill argued that entire peoples live in “backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as” children (shall we guess the skin color of these races?) and declared that these “barbarians” should be denied liberty and ruled by “despotism.” Reading Mill’s procolonial opinions is not harassment, despite how flawed Mill’s ideas are, and it should not stop us from examining his important ideas about free speech even while we should critique Mill’s racist defense of colonial despotism.

Gilley, who is the head of the Oregon NAS, wrote a report declaring himself the victim of the “New Censorship.” According to Gilley, “In March, Portland State University imposed restrictions on the ability of faculty members to criticize the work of other faculty members or departments.” This never happened. The Faculty Senate and the PSU-AAUP and the president of the university are free to express their opinions about what academic freedom means, and these opinions do not censor anyone. Gilley calls it a “gag order resolution” which is a contradiction in terms–unenforced resolutions cannot be gag orders.

Gilley himself wants to silence his critics and limit academic freedom. Gilley claims that “activist faculty and Woke administrators are now a clear and present danger to the mission of the university” and wants “accountability mechanisms” to censor and punish them. In addition to urging state legislators to intervene against leftists, Gilley even calls for the federal government to silence “statements” by anti-racist faculty who dare to criticize him: “The federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights may provide remedies for students or faculty affected by explicitly racist or sexist statements and actions by faculty and administrators acting in the name of ‘racial or social justice.’”

Everyone wants to claim the mantle of academic freedom for themselves and deny their enemies its power. To do that, they manipulate the meaning of academic freedom to serve their needs. Everyone reimagines academic freedom to include themselves and what they support, and to exclude those they oppose. Criticism by professors can be stupid, intolerant, obnoxious, and even batshit crazy. We need to protect academic freedom for everyone, not because it’s pleasant and happy and brings us all joy and understanding, but because that intellectual debate, whatever its flaws, is essential to a university.