BY JENNIFER RUTH
The easiest way to attract eyeballs to a story about academia is to say that the sky is falling on academic freedom. But is this the most accurate way to frame what’s currently happening in higher education? In “Academic Freedom Is on the Ropes,” his recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Alexander C. Kafka writes:
Academics are caught in a pincer grip from the political right and left.
From the right, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Iowa are among states meddling in colleges’ curricula and speech policies. When a Georgia lawmaker asked the state university system to explain how it teaches “oppression” and “privilege,” the system’s leaders felt compelled to pull together a 102-page report. Boise State suspended 52 sections of a diversity and ethics course amid Republican attacks on the university’s efforts to teach students about racism.
From the left, some students declare views with which they disagree to be a form of violence, shouting down voices they don’t want to hear.
What? These are the examples that establish an equivalence between left-wing and right-wing attacks on academic freedom? In one case, we have specific, documented situations in which the state surveils how university professors teach within their classrooms and in the other we have “some students” who vociferously disagree with . . “views”. What views? We do not know (and this, I’d say, is key because if we did know more about what the students were objecting to–intentional misgendering? the “Lost Cause” version of the Civil War? procolonialism?–we might find that many of us loudly disagree, too).
Do these two examples do the kind of work for Kafka’s piece that he appears to hope they do? I don’t think so and I don’t think the rest of the essay establishes its leading claim either. After coming in hot with the rhetoric of crisis and despite heavily relying on notorious ideologues like Amy Wax and Peter Wood crying that conservatives are “muzzled,” Kafka’s piece ends up revealing that a much saner view of the contemporary tensions in higher education is just under the surface of what Kafka himself calls the “colorful culture-war controversies.”
“‘Freedom to teach a range of subject areas,” President of Wesleyan Michael Roth is quoted as saying, “is much greater than it was when I was a student or a young faculty member.” According to Roth, a more politically aware campus culture reflects “how we teach given the fact that whom we teach has changed” (that is, more women and more underrepresented minorities).
Kafka consults Joerg Tiede, Director of Research at the AAUP, who points out that “there’s a difference . . . between a left-of-center academic being fired for his or her views and a right-of-center academic feeling uncomfortable and ostracized.” Kafka writes:
“People on the right, when they talk about this,” [Tiede] says, “seem to be more talking about being criticized or fearing being ostracized by their colleagues.” The AAUP, he says, has historically focused more on administrative firings. “I would say there is a qualitative difference between the two.”
The idea that academic freedom is under universal attack ends up mapping roughly onto the right-wing campaign that cancel culture has run amok. I’m not saying that everyone who laments the state of academic freedom is consciously affirming a point of view that frames the political and cultural center-left and left as an ideological mob but this chicken-little approach to academic freedom has that effect nonetheless. A better way of understanding what we’re seeing is as spill out into the academy of a much larger dynamic. This dynamic is best understood, I would argue, as shifts in mainstream thinking about the nation’s history of racism and about trans rights and a simultaneous right-wing backlash to those shifts.
The reality is that the reckoning at least with historical and systemic racism already occurred in the academy over the last few decades. It’s just that the window for the mainstream to accept some of these facts seemed to open only in the last few years, particularly in the year after George Floyd’s murder. As New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb accurately reports, “A growing body of progressive white scholars and scholars of color have spent the past several decades fighting for, and largely succeeding in creating, a more honest chronicle of the American past. But these battles and the changes they’ve achieved have, by and large, gone unnoticed by the lay public.” Until now. As some people learn for the first time of, say, the Tulsa Massacre, and wonder why they did not learn about it in school, others are actively fighting this growing awareness and painting it as unpatriotic. “The aversion to unflattering truths can be made into political currency,” Cobb writes and that’s what we’re seeing — with the political campaigns to ban critical race theory, with the denial by political appointees of tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones and so on.
There are some fringe academics who are out of step with their discipline’s current thinking (thinking built up in the time-honored way of peer-reviewed research, evidence, etc.) who want to cash in on the political currency Cobb refers to. It would be wrong to understand these individuals as “dissenters”; it is more that the ideas they espouse have gone the way of flat earth. Think Charles Murray on race and IQ. Think people who champion colonialism and erase or minimize the now well-documented evidence of genocide and massacre. If their own colleagues and students wonder aloud if these people deserve platforms to disseminate falsehoods, is that the Jacobins’ guillotine rearing up from the past or is that how change naturally occurs as new consensuses form in response to the accumulation of new research? The next question, of course, is, who is to decide whether what they disseminate are falsehoods or not? But is even that so hard to determine? We decide whether certain scholarly agendas are worth a lifetime platform all the time when we undertake the elaborate processes of external peer view to make tenure decisions.
And this, finally, brings me to that real crisis of academic freedom: the denial of tenure not just to Nikole Hannah-Jones but to the majority of university instructors. And, again, Joerg Tiede is the voice of wisdom in the Chronicle of Higher Education article. “For his part,” Kafka writes, “the AAUP’s Tiede thinks the left leaning of college faculty is an overblown issue.” There is a crisis but it’s not the one suggested by Kafka’s essay. Rather, the AAUP “has held for 100 years that you can’t have academic freedom without tenure,” Kafka quotes Tiede to say, and yet the majority of college and university instructors teach without tenure. These instructors do not have due process rights. If a student or someone else on either the left or the right criticizes them, they are rarely guaranteed the kind of fair investigation most tenure-stream faculty would insist upon. Look at the recent Cypress College incident in which an adjunct instructor was summarily removed from her class after a student posted a video from class and Campus Reform picked up the story. I don’t know any comparable paths by which political outrage is so quickly ginned up in left media outlets and pressure so quickly placed on university administrators or state legislators. Everyone deserves due process but right now most instructors aren’t getting it and this is disproportionately hurting professors perceived to be on the left.
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Tiede is right. But it doesn’t seem to make any difference, except that it gives the academic underclass a sense of vindication that the many deaths of their vocations weren’t because they deserved it. That, in itself, is a beautiful gift, even if we are still a deeply oppressed people.
I don’t think it’s quite so simple as “a left-of-center academic being fired for his or her views and a right-of-center academic feeling uncomfortable and ostracized.” In reality, conservatives would claim it’s the reverse, that academics with conservative views are getting fired while leftists complain about being uncomfortable due to criticism. We should worry most about the firings even while we are also concerned about the ostracism (such as the recent report in Academe about Campus Report’s attacks on liberal professors). And the reality is that both the left and right have been punished on college campuses in recent years. But in some sense, it doesn’t matter who is being censored more: We should oppose all of the censorship, and demand that each side abandon hypocrisy and support policies that fully protect free expression on campus. If conservatives imagine they are the only victims of thought policing on campus, then they should happily join with the AAUP’s call for policies to protect academic freedom and the dramatic expansion of tenure. If conservatives oppose such measures, it reveals something about what they truly think about intellectual freedom and who needs its protection.
An AAUP that is unwilling to speak out in defense of Profs. Bret Weinstein, Sandra Sellers, or Jason Kilborn is going to have an exceedingly difficult time convincing even “left-of-center” academics that it takes its own professions about academic freedom seriously.
So long as that remains the case, what conservative professors think about the Association doesn’t enter into the equation.
I don’t speak for the AAUP, but it has very limited resources and a strong reluctance to speak out on cases because it wants to maintain the appearance of neutrality if it investigates a case. The AAUP often works behind the scenes to help scholars but doesn’t publicize what it does, and only issues a public statement in very rare examples. Many of the cases you cite wouldn’t fit the AAUP’s requirements. Weinstein was never punished and accepted a large buyout to leave. Sellers immediately quit. Kilborn’s case is very recent. The AAUP has defended many conservatives (such as John McAdams) and failed to defend many leftists for various reasons. So the AAUP does take its professions about academic freedom seriously.
I’m afraid I’m not buying it, Prof. Wilson. The AAUP regularly holds forth on actual or potential threats to academic freedom that don’t even occur in this country—the Hungarian government’s withdrawal of accreditation from gender-studies programs is just one case in point. When motivated to do so, it can respond with great celerity, issuing statements, resolutions, and *amicus* briefs with dazzling speed. (Its response to the Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure controversy at UNC, currently featured on the AAUP home page, appeared within less than a week, though to the best of my knowledge she is neither an AAUP member nor had requested the Association to act on her behalf.) My inbox is bombarded on a weekly basis with breathless announcements of the AAUP’s expressions of forthright opinion on a wide variety of topics, at home and abroad, ranging from Supreme Court nominations and the extent of the Second Amendment to the 2018 Oakland teachers’ strike. And whether a targeted professor has accepted a settlement or resigned under pressure has not prevented the Association from weighing in whenever it feels moved to do so. On such occasions the AAUP is not merely voluble, but positively logorrheic.
The notion that the Association is precluded from speaking out on the cases I have mentioned because they “wouldn’t fit the AAUP’s requirements,” if true, is nothing more nor less than a statement of what my British friends describe as its “unfitness for purpose.” But I see little evidence to suggest that it is in fact true.
This argument about students shouting down speakers they disagree with is disingenuous. We have numerous documented cases of riotous students and others disrupting and sometimes shutting down talks–especially ones by “Zionists” or Israelis. Pretending that this isn’t a serious threat to academic freedom because it isn’t state sponsored is simply untenable. We have seen such student movements destroy academic freedom in other countries in the past so to dismiss it as inconsequential is naïve. Here in Austrian the Muslim Students Association and some of their faculty supporters have been demanding the firing of professors who have been critical of Islamist ideology and have sued them in the courts–they won’t win on either front, but it’s a chill wind that does intimidate some people and limits the academic freedom of bothe professors and students who may be intimidated.
If the overall point of this blog post is that only right-wingers are really limiting academic freedom and leftists don’t ever censor people inappropriately, I think this is a very skewed view of what is going on. But I can understand why many folks associated with the AAUP might see left-leaning faculty and students as innocent. This Academe blog mostly covers instances where a left-leaning faculty member is targeted by right-leaning people outside the academy. The Academe blog was completely silent on UNC-W Prof Mike Adams, who was the target of petitions created by left-leaning faculty and students to demand that he be fired because of his right-leaning political views, and who wound up taking his own life.
This wasn’t my experience with AAUP at all. My case was taken up precisely because due process was not followed by my institution when I was terminated, and so my academic freedom was violated. The only political views I openly expressed were support for a faculty union. If right-leaning faculty are also opposed to faculty organizing, full participation in governance, and the right to tenure, then of course AAUP would have conflicting interests in such a case. If a faculty member is persecuted for whatever reason and ends up taking their own life, that is their very sad choice. Do not put that on AAUP.
*My case was taken up precisely because due process was not followed by my institution when I was terminated, and so my academic freedom was violated.*
If this were to be the sole criterion triggering an AAUP response, Prof. Harty, then I imagine we would not be having this conversation. Unfortunately it is not, and that is causing some of us, at least, to reconsider whether there is a point in continuing to maintain membership of the Association.
When too many actually-occurring violations of academic freedom “wouldn’t fit the AAUP’s requirements,” faculty-members will not unreasonably look to organizations that can be relied upon to come to their assistance regardless of the source of the violation.
If I should be denounced by *Campus Reform* or the *College Fix,* I’m reasonably sure that the AAUP would have something to say in my defense. I have no such confidence that it will prove not to be a broken reed in many other circumstances.