BY HANK REICHMAN
This week, within a span of 24 hours, I read two newly published articles that so coincided with my recent thinking and writing (and, at least implicitly, with each other) that I immediately felt a bit jealous that I hadn’t written them. Of course, there’s plenty of space for multiple voices arguing for similar positions in varying ways, so jealousy wasn’t really the issue. I just think I couldn’t have said it better myself.
The first piece was Eva Cherniavsky’s essay in the newly published 2021 volume of the Journal of Academic Freedom, entitled “Against the Common Sense: Academic Freedom as a Collective Right.” (There are surely other terrific articles in the issue; I just haven’t read them yet.) A professor at the University of Washington and president of that institution’s AAUP chapter, Cherniavsky also riffed on her piece in a post to this blog. Her contribution helpfully distills an argument that Joan Scott, Robert Post, Jennifer Ruth, and I (as well as others) have been making for some time: that an individualist interpretation of academic freedom as a species of freedom of speech, what Cherniavsky labels the “common sense” position, is both insufficient and incorrect. Instead, she argues, “academic freedom at its origins is the collective freedom of a faculty from extramural control.” In this light, she continues,
the research faculty conduct and publish must meet certain collectively established norms of relevance, coherence, and evidence. These norms are neither static, transparent, unproblematic, nor uncontested— however, they are altered not at the whim of the individual scholar but through the collective elaboration of new objects, methods, and stakes. In other words, the terms of scholarly debate within a field are transformed when the practitioners collectively place pressure on them. Moreover, curricular design, course content, and teaching methods are determined by the same norms and debates that structure research in the field—and indeed, teaching, like research, is subject to regular peer review.
This is an argument that I also make — repeatedly, in fact — in Understanding Academic Freedom (forthcoming October 5, but available for pre-order). Cherniavsky developed her argument in wrestling with a troublesome case at her university in which a professor was accused of racist speech (the details are not provided, however), which reminded me of a similar incident at my own institution (from which I am retired) that I wrote about previously on this blog. These kinds of conflicts are at the center of contemporary debates about academic freedom, but correctly understanding academic freedom as the collective freedom of the faculty to self-govern (democratically and with tolerance for dissent) can have other, sometimes more surprising, implications as well. As I pointed out in a comment on Cherniavsky’s blog post, pointing specifically to the Garret Felber case, faculty themselves “may abuse not only their academic freedom but also their responsibility to protect it.” Moreover, they at times simply abdicate responsibility, as this story, taken from Understanding Academic Freedom (p. 57), may illustrate:
In 1965, the AAUP investigated a case of an openly Marxist sociologist at Adelphi University, whose views were known to and tolerated by both his departmental colleagues and the university’s administration. He was suspended, however, when he posed multiple-choice questions on a midterm exam that the investigating committee would deem “thoroughly unprofessional—badly drafted, ambiguous, tendentious, and prejudicial.” The questions were inappropriate because their answers were based on acceptance as unquestioned truth of Marxist doctrines not collectively accepted as such in the academy, and the multiple-choice framework provided no opportunity for expressing dissent. Nonetheless, the committee did not approve the scholar’s suspension because, if academic freedom is understood to be a collective right, its report found, the department’s laissez-faire approach to the curriculum had given him “good reason to think” such questions might be “perfectly acceptable.” The committee concluded that the professor had acted “in ways that were far from professional, as most academics would interpret professionalism. But this raises the question of professional standards at Adelphi.”
To be sure, I can’t say that I agree with every word of Cherniavsky’s article (in particular, I think she somewhat misreads the AAUP’s position on the Salaita case, in which I chaired the investigation), but this is hardly the point. Read her piece, please! It’s important.
Implicit in the understanding of academic freedom as the collective freedom of the faculty is that more than a handful of privileged faculty members will not only enjoy that freedom’s protections but will be both available and unconstrained to take responsibility for its protection and for the enforcement of professional norms. Which brings us to what I have repeatedly called the single biggest threat to academic freedom today, the erosion of the tenure system, which is the subject of the second article that I wish I’d written.
When University of North Carolina historian Molly Worthen published a piece in the New York Times calling for reform of the tenure system, I thought to myself, “this is disappointing.” While she raised some good points, ultimately the piece conceded, I thought, far too much to tenure’s ostensible critics and underestimated the real factors driving its decline. I considered writing a response, based on chapter 5 of Understanding Academic Freedom, but University of Texas historian Steven Mintz beat me to the punch with a fine essay on Inside Higher Ed entitled “Academic Tenure: In Desperate Need of Reform or In Desperate Need of Defenders?” It’s no spoiler to point out that he thinks it’s the latter, as, of course, do I.
His concluding paragraph says it all: “I whole-heartedly agree with a comment written in response to the Worthen op-ed: ‘The travesty in our universities today is not the availability of tenure for some, but its absence for many.’”
You should read Mintz’s column, but let me once again (in an act, I acknowledge, of relatively shameless self-promotion), conclude with another excerpt from Understanding Academic Freedom (pp. 131-32), which, I think, links Mintz’s concern with that expressed by Cherniavsky:
If we understand, as this book argues, that academic freedom does not aspire solely, or even mainly, to protect the rights of individual teachers and researchers, but is instead designed to protect the collective freedom of the faculty, then we must ask, as two adjuncts have, “What becomes of that freedom if the vast majority of faculty members cannot exercise their collective functions without fearing employer retribution?” . . .
If the tenure system has at times appeared—and, more often than it should be, has actually been— elitist, the emerging “gig academy” offers anything but an egalitarian alternative. Contingent hiring must entail continuous monitoring and assessment of faculty work, too often by nonfaculty bureaucrats. The result is frequently a culture of, as Ernst Benjamin put it, either “mutual back-scratching or mutual back-stabbing.” . . .
In this environment the shrinking minority of tenured and tenure-track faculty are cast in the role of props to a reconfigured and expanding unprofessional structure. The focus shifts from the faculty as a community of self-governing scholars to the faculty as a collection of individual struggling entrepreneurs. As a result, the increasing vulnerability of those outside the tenure system inevitably bleeds into that system itself. “Once dethroned, a costly and unruly tenured faculty will be hard pressed to secure its own restoration,” adjuncts correctly warn.
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.
