BY EVA CHERNIAVSKY
As we enter a fourth decade of life in the neoliberal university, where permanent austerity rules everywhere except in the swelling ranks of upper administration; where the pretense of shared governance has all but collapsed; where tenure lines are vanishing (particularly in the humanities and social sciences), and the faculty continues to spiral on its downward social trajectory, we should think twice about the place of institutional protocols that further amplify the power of administration to surveille and to discipline faculty. This is no less true when these protocols are the result of faculty and student activism for racial and gender equity on campus. Case in point, institutional mechanisms for the redress of harm.
In the current landscape of campus debates over racism, misogyny, queer- and transphobic speech, the concept of academic freedom is invoked almost exclusively on the Right. There it is used, or rather misused, to support a notion of “viewpoint diversity” as the remedy to the supposed tyranny of the social justice warriors in academe. Of course, in so doing, the Right misapprehends academic freedom, confusing and conflating it with a free speech, as Joan Scott trenchantly observes. “Free speech makes no distinction about quality,” she writes, but “academic freedom does.” Put differently, in the context of the college classroom, not all viewpoints have a claim to be heard—and some, indeed, can and should be excluded.
Interestingly, though, the Left tends to shy away from a robust defense of academic freedom on the precise terms Scott proposes. I explore some of the reasons for this Left abandonment of the concept in “Against the Common Sense: Academic Freedom as a Collective Right,” my contribution to the new issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom. Instead, the campus Left has generally sought to respond to racist and other forms of offensive and injurious speech through a concept of harm. On this model, sexist, homophobic, or racist speech is disallowed because it inflicts material and psychic damage on women, queer, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) students and faculty.
There is, of course, nothing contradictory in asserting both that (for example) racist and colonialist thought is intellectually untenable and that its expression is damaging to specific campus communities. Both statements are unquestionably true. At the same time, institutionally speaking, there is a world of difference in the operation of these two statements and in the powers that they activate. The former rebuts the culture warriors of the Right on the very ground of academic freedom: it asserts that racist (and misogynist and antiqueer) thought does not rise to the level of contemporary academic debates. This amounts to a critical determination of quality on the part of (a critical mass of) scholars working in particular fields. Against the Right’s argument that all perspectives must be represented, the faculty assert a collective authority to norm intellectual debates in our fields. The latter statement, however, summons into existence a juridical apparatus that functions primarily at the discretion and under the authority of university administration. Charges of harm are addressed and adjudicated by chairs, deans, and increasingly (at least at my institution) by academic HR. The arbiter of quality is the faculty; the arbiter of harm turns out to be administration.
Melinda Cooper, in her excellent book Family Values, makes an interesting argument linking the emergence of trauma and harm as a prevailing imaginary for equity work on university campuses to the broader, neoliberal re-imagination of education as a fully private good. “Campus racism, misogyny, and other kinds of collective violence are… refigured as sources of psychic trauma that might depreciate the value of an expensive education,” she writes, “therefore warranting legal action or, at the very least, pure outrage against the institution that has allowed this to happen.” She makes two, related and crucial points. First, that the discourse of personal injury, derived from tort law, permits the university to approach questions of campus culture within a framework of risk minimization (forestalling litigation). Second, that this discourse remains sutured to neoliberalism’s “moral logic of personal responsibility, merely reversing its terms to focus on the fault of the perpetrator rather than that of the victim. In this respect, it speaks less to a rampant culture of grievance [as the Right alleges] than a hyperrestriction of the space of dissent.” Small wonder that university managers have been largely receptive to the creation of protocols around harm and safety, which signal “antiracism” and yet imply no real challenge to the structure of power and privilege within the institution.
In no way am I suggesting that we eliminate hard-won procedures for students and faculty to report and to grieve injurious speech. But I invite us to interrogate our overinvestment in this kind of institutional apparatus. The situation was driven home for me in an incident I discuss in my article, in which several hundred graduate students, postdocs, and others at my institution petitioned university leadership for the summary dismissal of a tenured faculty member for racist speech. On the executive board of our AAUP chapter, we struggled to devise a response that would affirm the legitimacy of the students’ protest, but condemn the inflation of administrative power implied in the demand for summary termination. Many of us felt strongly that the principle of academic freedom does not protect a faculty member’s racist speech; but that same principle confers on faculty (not administrators) the right to determine what crosses the line.
There is little reason to believe that university administrations have embraced the discourse of trauma, harm, and safety out of a deep commitment to equity. They have done so precisely because, in the guise of responding to student and faculty demands, they can implement protocols of faculty accountability usable for any number of institutional (and political) ends. (The recent AAUP report COVID-19 and Academic Governance offers a useful reminder that every struggle or crisis on campus is approached as yet another opportunity to consolidate managerial power.) It’s worth noting that the offending faculty member against whom the students petitioned (a white man) was neither dismissed nor disciplined. But in my work with our AAUP chapter, I have been involved in multiple cases where women and BIPOC faculty have been charged with creating an unsafe environment and inflicting harm on students or colleagues; in each of these cases, the charges were brought, the hearing conducted, and the penalties imposed by administrators. In these austere times, we need urgently to assert academic freedom as, precisely, a vital principle of faculty self-governance.
Guest blogger Eva Cherniavsky is the Andrew R. Hilen Professor of American Studies at the University of Washington, director of graduate studies in English, and president of the UW AAUP chapter.
Read the complete volume of the 2021 Journal of Academic Freedom at https://www.aaup.org/JAF12.
Wonderful: “Many of us felt strongly that the principle of academic freedom does not protect a faculty member’s racist speech; but that same principle confers on faculty (not administrators) the right to determine what crosses the line.” Thank you for this excellent piece as well as the essay itself in JAF. You are so admirably clear about the two separate sources of authority for adjudicating incidents involving racist and colonialist faculty speech: the collective body of faculty, on the one hand, and DEI offices under the direction of administration, on the other. I agree that two different discourses underwrite each group’s authority and that both are valid but that the former — academic freedom as a peer-driven, collective practice — urgently needs to be better understood and strengthened. Michael Bérubé and I draw on Scott, as you do, but also Robert Post, particularly his book Democracy, Expertise, Academic Freedom, to make this argument in a forthcoming book. Thanks so much for the clarity of the thinking here.
I enjoyed Cherniavsky’s post here and encourage everyone to read the full essay in the Journal of Academic Freedom, but I strongly disagree with the idea of academic freedom as a collective right of faculty. This makes academic freedom a power of faculty, rather than a principle. If a professor is fired for being a communist or criticizing the government, we should be able to define this as a violation of academic freedom. But Cherniavsky’s theory would require us to ask “who is doing the firing?” rather than “why were they fired?” If the faculty, rather than the administration, calls for firing the professor, then the academic freedom right belongs to the collective faculty, no matter what the reason.
In fact, the idea of academic freedom as a collective faculty right poses a serious threat to victims of race and gender discrimination. If academic freedom belongs to the collective rather than the individual, then any decision by the collective faculty (including acts of discrimination) holds the authority of academic freedom and it would be a violation of academic freedom to overturn the decision of racist faculty to deny tenure to an African-American professor.
Ultimately, I don’t think this concept will increase the rights of faculty. As Cherniavsky acknowledges here, the apparatus of punishing faculty for speech often gets used to silence marginalized faculty rather than hateful bigots. All administrators need to do is find a few obedient faculty willing to serve on a committee, and they can claim the faculty’s “academic freedom” right to silence dissenting voices.
Instead, I think we need to understand academic freedom as an individual right of faculty that’s best protected by the collective power of faculty. Thus, faculty should determine hiring and punishment of faculty, not because they are always right, but because they are the most informed and the most likely to defend academic freedom. But ultimately, we must define academic freedom as a principle that protects the rights of individual faculty.
This is an excellent post, as is Professor Cherniavsky’s welcome article in the JAF. The collective nature of academic freedom in all three of its elements is an essential argument of my forthcoming book, Understanding Academic Freedom (https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/understanding-academic-freedom), an argument that I summarized in a recent newspaper op-ed, reposted to this blog (https://academeblog.org/2021/07/27/defining-academic-freedom/).
That said, however, it is important to emphasize that faculty members are human and may abuse not only their academic freedom but also their responsibility to protect it. For one thing, as the Garrett Felber case illustrates (https://academeblog.org/2021/08/05/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us/), cowardice, complicity, or mere conformity may lead faculty committees to abdicate or even abuse their obligation to protect the freedom of more controversial colleagues. Also concerning is that the dwindling ranks of those protected by tenure (or even by something remotely resembling tenure) creates a reduced universe of potentially effective support for dissenting (but academically legitimate) expression in and out of the classroom. Even more problematic — and Prof. Cherniavsky does acknowledge this in her full article — the bifurcation of the faculty into tenure-track and contingent creates a growing and troubling chasm of both experience and interest between those fortunate to have tenure and the expanding cohort of those left out of the system. If academic freedom is a collective right (and responsibility) of the faculty, one now needs to ask, “which faculty?”
As the 2011 AAUP statement, “Ensuring Academic Freedom In Politically Controversial Academic Personnel Decisions,” noted, “mere adherence to due process or weak or substantively biased faculty committees may provide politicized decision making with a veneer of legitimacy. As the past century of political threats to academic freedom has revealed, although procedural protections— such as providing adequate notice, a statement of specific charges, and a hearing before one’s peers— are crucial to the defense of academic freedom, they may not be sufficient in themselves, especially in cases where the dissenting faculty member confronts a strong mainstream consensus in support of repression.”
While I am generally confident that faculty committees will handle their responsibilties to protect academic freedom more appropriately, fairly, and judiciously than will administrative bureaucracies, they are by no means perfect.
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