BY HANK REICHMAN

In the wake of a week of statewide campus protest against poor COVID-19 practices at Georgia’s state universities and colleges, more than 50 faculty members at the University of Georgia, full and associate professors in the life sciences, have announced that they will require masks in their classrooms, in violation of the University System of Georgia’s rules.  In a letter sent Tuesday to university administrators the faculty members declared, “We will wear masks and will require all of our students and staff to wear masks in our classes and laboratories until local community transmission rates improve, despite the ban on mask mandates and the USG policy to punish, and potentially fire, any faculty taking this action.”

It is unclear whether the university administration will take action against these scientists, but this act of what can only be called civil disobedience may mark a potentially important moment — and not only in the struggle for sane and sensible public health protections on campuses.  For these faculty members are also taking a stand, I would argue, for academic freedom, specifically the freedom of the faculty to teach their subjects and govern their own classrooms free of external interference.

When a few years ago faculty members at the University of Texas unsuccessfully challenged in court a Campus Carry policy mandating that faculty allow concealed hand guns in their classrooms, the AAUP filed an amicus brief arguing that the policy violated academic freedom.  The brief argued that the “decision whether to permit or exclude handguns in a given classroom is, at bottom, a decision about educational policy and pedagogical strategy.  It predictably affects not only the choice of course materials, but how a particular professor can and should interact with her students—how far she should press a student or a class to wrestle with unsettling ideas, how trenchantly and forthrightly she can evaluate student work.  Permitting handguns in the classroom also affects the extent to which faculty can or should prompt students to challenge each other.  The law and policy thus implicate concerns at the very core of academic freedom: They compel faculty to alter their pedagogical choices, deprive them of the decision to exclude guns from their classrooms, and censor their protected speech.”  It is certainly arguable that decisions on whether to require masks in the face of a public health crisis carry similar implications.  For if a professor or that professor’s students cannot feel fully safe, their expression will be affected.

In my near-decade leading the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure I found that it was often more difficult to mobilize as much support for academic freedom among faculty in the sciences as it has been in the humanities and social sciences.  Although our committee paid considerable attention to threats to academic freedom in the sciences — for example, in our 2017 report, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom” — it often seemed that too many faculty members in STEM disciplines view academic freedom as largely a concern of colleagues in disciplines such as Gender or Ethnic Studies, English, Sociology or History, where individuals often espousing eccentric or otherwise controversial views demand protection for whatever they want to say — what Eva Cherniavsky has in the just-published 2021 issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom usefully called the “common sense” view of academic freedom as an individual free speech right.

Now, however, in the wake not only of growing attacks on the science of climate change and longstanding hostility to evolutionary biology the politicized assault on public health extending into the classroom may, one may hope, suggest a new attitude.  Ironically, it is those who most loudly and thoughtlessly lay claim to some twisted notion of individual “freedom” who would use the power of the state and university administration to constrict the academic freedom of the faculty to teach in safety.  That scientists are taking the lead in standing up to this ill-advised policy is potentially critical.  Their action reminds us that academic freedom is ultimately the collective freedom of the scholarly community as a whole to govern itself, in the interest of serving the common good in a democratic society, limited and guided only by the principles of that community.  Two such principles are, as the Georgia scientists remind us, devotion “to the education and well-being of all members of the University community” and the obligation “to protect our students and fellow employees from the unnecessary dangers associated with inappropriate public health planning and messages.”

The signatories of this courageous statement deserve our gratitude and our support.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom will be published in October.