BY JULIE A. WARD

I was born in Oklahoma, and graduated from high school and college in this state. I am a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. And I am an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma. But even with my deep connections to this place, I often feel unwelcome in the context of a state legislature that is hell-bent on stifling the people’s right to access free and public education.

The state of Oklahoma has massively neglected its public institutions, including its colleges and universities. The effects of decades of underfunding have led to increasingly burdensome tuition and fees, which leaves a degree at the state’s flagship institution out of reach for many poor and working-class Oklahomans.

Additionally, in the context of higher education, these tight budgets have led institutions to rely more heavily on contingent labor rather than protecting workers’ academic freedom through tenure. In 2008, about 90% of full-time faculty at OU were eligible for tenure; in 2020, that proportion plummeted to only 71%.

Continuing the onslaught of attacks on the right to public education, Governor Kevin Stitt signed House Bill No. 1775 into law last May, prohibiting institutions of higher education from requiring “any form of mandatory gender or sexual diversity training or counseling.” The law’s provisions for primary and secondary education are even more censorious. The policy’s negative effects began immediately and are ongoing.

On the day the bill took effect, the president of my institution announced that a recently approved diversity and inclusion general education requirement—the result of years of work by students, faculty, and staff— would now be voluntary, and announced two new general education courses that would serve as alternatives. Rather than a response to student needs or a recommendation based on faculty expertise, these new courses are being created top-down.

While the bill’s text might appear to uphold racial equality, by making it illegal, for example, to teach that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,“ it is abundantly clear that the intention and effect of the bill is to undo and impede any strides towards racial justice. The harsh law, which has additional severe provisions for elementary and secondary teachers, is worded so generally as to discourage any discussion of race or gender in the classroom, undermine educators, and embolden bad faith actors.

A case in point is a recent public relations attack on the University of Oklahoma by FIRE, an organization dedicated to an absolutist view of speech rights at the expense of other interests. Just as the bill disingenuously disguises its perpetuation of racism, sexism, and oppression of the working class, FIRE duplicitously uses the right to free speech, enshrined in the US Constitution, to undermine professional expertise and public education. FIRE claims to be advocating for the rights of students. But the organization neglects to consider how mitigating the effects of racism, sexism, and homophobia in the classroom are also important components of making education accessible to all.

As professors, our First Amendment right to free speech is limited in the classroom to topics that are relevant to the subject matter of the course. This is the essence of academic freedom. Similarly, it is our legal responsibility to provide an environment free from discrimination, which includes setting guidelines in the classroom that may ensure that classroom discussion is related to course content.

The state of Oklahoma is the site of historical crimes against humanity: in the early nineteenth century the territory was used as an enormous concentration camp where indigenous people from throughout the southeastern part of the continent were forcibly moved; the land was subsequently stolen again from the tribes who have current, active governments in the state, available to take back the land that is so regularly acknowledged as theirs; it saw the atrocious massacre of Black residents and the destruction of their homes in Tulsa, for which restitution has not been made. The University of Oklahoma, once a segregated institution for whites only, remains the site of overt and aggressive acts of racist violence. As a response to these realities, many faculty, staff, and students have sought to make structural changes to ensure public access to higher education for all.

In fact, diversity training was one of the demands of a student sit-in led by the Black Emergency Response Team in 2020. Faculty and staff members of the Center for Social Justice organized a teach-out on “Practicing Anti-Racism in the Classroom and Beyond,” and a task force made up of university librarians and information professionals successfully petitioned the Library of Congress to change the subject heading for the Tulsa Race Massacre. The university has also moved to a test-optional admissions policy, a decision that could contribute to dismantling systemic racism in the institution.

Another example of efforts by academic workers to address the structural inequalities that support the university system was a recent workshop, created for instructors by instructors, on antiracist pedagogy. Led by three full-time faculty who are not eligible for tenure, the workshop was optional and open to first-year composition instructors who sought to create a welcoming and equitable classroom environment.

When FIRE and the media outlets that disseminate their discourse frame this workshop as indoctrination and censorship, they strip the situation of all meaningful context: the persistent racism we are seeking to dismantle, the state legislature’s complete abdication of its responsibilities to properly fund public institutions, and academic workers’ responsibility to ensure equal access to all students.

When FIRE focuses only on the hypothetical students who may be “silenced,” they tellingly conflate conservative ideals and overt racism. Rather than focus on the freedom of speech of those students who have been systematically intimidated or blocked from accessing their public universities, they instead direct our attention to a misleading version of “freedom of speech” that only protects hateful and unfounded speech at the expense of all other interests.

When FIRE and national news sources release the names and photographs of non-tenure-eligible instructors, inviting their audiences to call for the end of their livelihoods, they are attacking academic freedom, freedom of speech, and instructors’ responsibility to provide a classroom environment that is free from discrimination. They may claim to be nonpartisan defenders of speech, but their actions in this case uphold racist, sexist, and classist systems. An absolutist view of free speech rights in the classroom is at odds with other legitimate interests that instructors have to consider and balance as they work to ensure that every student has the access to quality education.

While this incident is disheartening, it is merely one more flume of smoke in a vast wildfire: our public institutions are burning. In the case of the university, truly promoting social equality would mean democratizing the Board of Regents, abolishing standardized testing and tuition, cancelling student debt, paying all workers—faculty, staff, and students—a living wage and ensuring job security. Without such structural measures, any claims of valuing diversity and inclusion are just blowing smoke.

Julie A. Ward is an associate professor of Latin American literature at the University of Oklahoma and vice-president of the OU chapter of the AAUP.