BY JENNIFER RUTH
We at Academe blog have a number of posts discussing the legislation attempting to restrict curricula teaching race and gender justice and critical race theory. See here, here, here, and here. “This is the new McCarthyism,” historian Ellen Schrecker has written. The AAUP itself has put out a number of statements criticizing the legislation, such as this one.
Recently the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) sent a letter to a smattering of individual faculty across the country about these bills but this letter needs to reach a much bigger audience. Faculty at all institutions of higher education need to know about this important initiative and consider bringing a senate resolution forward.
From its founding, AAUP has defined academic freedom as the faculty’s right to determine curricula free from political or state interference. Academic freedom may mean other things as well but freedom from state coercion is fundamental. The House Bills passed and pending across the country are an attack on the academic freedom of all of us, whether we teach topics they are designed to censor or not and whether we are in the affected states or not. Faculty Senates or Councils across the country need to voice their refusal of this interference.
“Dear Faculty Colleagues,” write the 2021 Critical Race Theory Summer School Steering Committee (Professors Devon Carbado, Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and Gary Peller), “As educators, we know that the proliferation of ‘divisive concepts’ bills enacted in eleven states and introduced in over a dozen more must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.”
“We must collectively demonstrate that faculty are organized on our own campuses across the country to fight back . . . Faculty must use our most powerful channel of shared governance – our senates and university assemblies – to make strong statements rejecting political interference in higher education to serve narrow partisan interest.”
The AAPF higher education working group, of which I’m a part, has documents to help faculty develop a resolution that makes sense for them on their individual campuses. Please see here for these documents. You’ll find a page that has links to a resolution template as well as two examples of how different institutions adapted the template to their own campuses. You’ll also find the letter excerpted above in its entirety as well an open letter you might wish to sign. We can protect our academic freedom by standing up together, institution by institution.
Jennifer Ruth, professor of film studies at Portland State University, is a contributing editor to the blog and was the faculty editor of the Journal of Academic Freedom from 2016 to 2017. She is the author of Novel Professions (Ohio State University Press, 2006) and, with Michael Bérubé, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (Palgrave, 2015). She and Bérubé have co-written a second book, forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press and entitled It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom.
