POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH
As readers of this blog and so likely AAUP members, you may already know about one of the two events. On October 2nd, Chair of the AAUP Racial Justice Committee Glinda Rawls wrote members about the AAPF Call to Action Teach-in on October 14th:
National Critical Race Theory Teach In
Thursday, October 14, 2021 at 3 p.m. ET
The African American Policy Forum has issued a call to action for faculty to push back against these attacks on teaching by introducing faculty senate resolutions at the institutions. You can see a model resolution here and register for an October 14 kickoff event here.
At the event, Professor Crenshaw will speak on “What’s Behind the Attacks on CRT” and a panel will discuss how you can empower your Faculty Senates and University Councils to protect our institutions from this attack on academic freedom.
McCarthyism, New and Old: Today’s Culture Wars in Historical Context
Tuesday, October 12, 7 p.m. – 8 p.m. ET
With historian Ellen Schrecker.
State legislatures prohibiting “anti-American” teaching. Vigilante groups publishing lists of “unpatriotic teachers.” Committees investigating who teaches what and where. Books banned. Paranoid rumors about brainwashing vulnerable youth.
All of the above is happening right now, affecting thousands of teachers. Rightwing politicians and cynical operators are whipping up public sentiment about “Critical Race Theory” as a subversive plot against America.
We have been here before. From the 1940s through the 1960s, reactionaries used anti-Communism as a weapon to attack educators at every level. Thousands were investigated, many jobs were lost, and “loyalty oaths” were required for decades. Textbooks were sanitized as patriotic myths took the place of careful analyses of evidence.
McCarthyism expert Ellen Schrecker looks at how the current assault on teaching the truth reprises the outrages of the Cold War red scare, while the activist educators, Jennifer Ruth and Jesse Hagopian, describe what’s happening today and how teachers at every level are combatting it. Historian Van Gosse moderates the discussion.
Ellen Schrecker is the pre-eminent historian of McCarthyism, author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities; Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America; and the forthcoming The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s. She is also a noted expert on academic freedom. In this webinar, she will discuss the New McCarthyism and the attack on K-12 teachers, and what we can learn from past battles. Read her article Trumpism is the new McCarthyism. Explaining what McCarthyism was, Historians for Peace and Democracy issued her “Broadside for the Trump Era” in 2017.
Jesse Hagopian of the Zinn Educational Project and Jennifer Ruth, an AAUP activist promoting a resolution for faculty senates to fight against the new gag laws, will respond to Schrecker’s presentation.
Van Gosse, professor of history at Franklin & Marshall College and co-chair of Historians for Peace and Democracy, will moderate.
Sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action, Historians for Peace and Democracy, the Zinn Education Project, and Radical Teacher.
Photos: Students march at Federal Building as the House Un-American Activities probers meet, April 25, 1962; Valley Times Collection. Anti-communist rally at the Hollywood. Bowl, October 17, 1961; Ralph Crane/ LIFE.
