BY JENNIFER RUTH
“One looks in vain for mainstream reporting to call this what it is,” Columbia law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw told the audience at the National Teach-In held on October 14th in honor of George Floyd’s birthday. The fanatical distortions of critical race theory by partisan politicians, the alleged “woke” orthodoxy stifling free speech on college campuses, the school board turmoil—these are all part of a backlash to the reckoning with racial justice begun by Floyd’s murder among much of the American public but very few journalists cover them this way. Crenshaw also might have had in mind a longer history, the one in which pro-business and anti-regulation interests paved the way to the present. This, too, gets little coverage. Who knew, for example, that the Atlantic‘s reporting on “the speech wars” is supported by the Koch foundation? It’s right there, albeit in very small print, but who is following the money behind stories like “Don’t Let Students Run the University,” the tagline for which refers to undergraduates’ “preening would-be totalitarianism”?
Thankfully, a couple people have foregone the pleasures of weighing in on every controversy popping up in the press so that they could do the harder work of researching how we got to this point where seemingly every incident on college campuses is inserted into a narrative about “the crisis of free speech.” Isaac Kamola and Ralph Wilson’s Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (Pluto Press, 2021), which I review in the next issue of Academe, is a fantastic primer on what they call the “Koch donor network.” They show how libertarian funding has worked to undermine social movements for decades and how it targets universities as prioritized sites for asymmetric warfare. What struck me in reading their book is the degree to which the libertarian’s playbook has made an authoritarian right wing possible today. By funding think tanks, academic centers, and fellowships for individual academics happy to churn out stories decrying campus illiberalism (stories like American Enterprise Institute fellow Samuel Abram’s latest in Inside Higher Ed, “Many Liberal Arts Students Need a Lesson in Free Speech”), the libertarian network has succeeded in portraying universities and colleges as places where left mobs run rampant and conservative speech must be defended. (For what the climate has been like on my campus, please see “Who’s Silencing Whom On College Campuses?” posted today by Ms. and for what it’s like on his campus, see Aaron Hanlon’s “Have the Founders of the University of Austin Been in a Classroom Lately?” in The New Republic.) This well-funded and well-coordinated network has helped to create a political world in which right-wing pundits and politicians argue that authoritarianism is now necessary and desirable.
In a column in August, Ross Douthat explained that Viktor Orban’s Hungary is an aspirational ideal for some conservatives because Orban’s “interventions in Hungarian cultural life, the attacks on liberal academic centers, and the spending on conservative ideological projects, are seen as examples of how political power might curb progressivism’s influence.” In “How the American Right Fell in Love With Hungary,” Elizabeth Zerofsky quotes conservative writer Rod Dreher on Orban’s defunding of gender-studies programs: “A few years ago I would have said, No, the government cannot get involved in the freedom of the universities” but now “having seen how incredibly destructive these sorts of programs have been to American society . . . I’m much more sympathetic.” Of course, exhibit A in the authoritarian attack on higher education are the legislative bills discussed in PEN’s excellent recent report (see here for a condensed version of the report). The report calls the bills “educational gag orders,” Ellen Schrecker calls them the new McCarthyism here, and here Eric Smaw refers to them as the Black Scare.
How do academics fight back? In Free Speech and Koch Money, Kamola and Wilson advise us to refuse to engage the narrative and to instead “follow the money.” Further, they call upon us to “insist on a distinction between free speech and academic freedom” and to “draw out the similarities between the manufacturing of the campus free speech crisis and other examples of the plutocratic libertarian class weaponizing free speech to make equally disingenuous, yet politically expedient, arguments.” I agree with this advice. What do we do, though, if no journalists are calling us to ask our opinion or if we aren’t skilled at connecting the economic dots and making those connections in the press?
On October 28th, the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project held a virtual panel called “Historicizing the Assault on CRT: the Right versus Public Education.” The panelists placed the anti-CRT and “divisive concepts” legislation sweeping the country in their historical and economic context, tracing the genealogies by which interest groups have colluded to resist and roll back decades of civil rights and social justice work. Towards the end of the panel, as discussants turned from analysis to strategies of resistance, Cornell Law professor Aziz Rana admitted that he doesn’t have “a knock-down solution.” Speaking for what surely must be many academics, Rana added, “I feel like I probably wouldn’t be situated at a university if I had a better sense of some of the conditions by which we can engage in transformational politics.” But there is something we can do precisely as academics situated at universities and colleges. We can use shared governance to fight back. As I wrote in “What Can We Do About McCarthyism 2.0?,” The African American Policy Forum (AAPF) has launched an important call to action that faculty everywhere need to take up. The AAUP, the Modern Language Association (MLA), and also LPE has sent information on the AAPF senate resolution to their members, encouraging faculty to bring resolutions forward on their campuses. Please go here to learn more. A number of universities have already passed resolutions defending academic freedom to teach race and gender justice and critical race theory and a number of others have the resolution on their agendas for discussion. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with me if you have questions and please be sure to write me if your campus senate has proposed, or is planning to propose, a resolution.
Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. She is the author of three books, the most recent being It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), co-authored with Michael Bérubé.
this is a welcome piece and the Kamola/Wilson book is excellent, but as with so many pieces on this topic, the fact that it is possible to target one very bad actor in the conflict seems to make some people satisfied that the other side is not acting badly–or possibly worse, is insulated from the ideological pressures exerted by actors like the Kochs.
in my opinion, the “left” has itself been heavily conditioned and possibly influenced by those same forces. whether they/we know it or not, authoritarian tactics have become the default for many on campus. i don’t understand how pieces like this can assert that because Koch money is exaggerating some of this, it also means that it isn’t happening.
everywhere I look, including my own campus, I see examples. but I’ll just choose three very public ones: students demanding, and having some success with their demands, that a UCLA professor be fired for correctly pronouncing conversational pause words in Chinese, a topic in which he happens to be an expert, because they “sound like” a racial slur; and students demanding that a UIC law professor be fired for not using but *referencing* a racial slur in a case law exam question that is directly relevant to a subject (discrimination law) being taught in the class.
the third example, printed on this blog, involves a professor put through months of grueling administrative procedure due to showing the film Night and Fog, despite no concrete allegation even being identified in that procedure, but in which a student clearly wanted the professor fired.
in every case, students do see themselves as having a kind of remarkable authoritarian power, in which they can and do monitor and judge the speech of professors and should (in their minds) have the power to fire professors for actions that may not even be mistakes that deserve reprimand, let alone rising nowhere near the level which AAUP and this blog ever consider firable offenses.
why is it so difficult to admit that yes, the Kochs are distorting and attacking education in the US, but that some actors on the left openly embrace authoritarian disdain for important norms (and, in my opinion, in so doing, playing right into the hands of right-wing media)?
Thank you, Robert. I appreciate this thoughtful comment. I agree with you about the UCLA prof using the Chinese equivalent for “um” as an example — he should not have been taken out of his classroom. In that case, administrators didn’t handle the situation well, as far as I can tell, and acted prematurely to the students’ complaints. I don’t know enough about the law professor to feel like I can comment. I don’t trust the press to report upon these cases thoroughly enough — it’s too easy to pop them into a prefabricated narrative. I’ve seen this firsthand with how the press has taken my ex-colleague Peter Boghossian’s stories at face value and reported them as “free speech crisis” material without looking very closely. I’m very pleased, though, with Colleen Flaherty’s reporting on the Bright Sheng case in today’s IHE (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/11/15/seeing-middle-ground-bright-sheng-case-u-michigan). Students were right to complain about a film being used that had been criticized for its blackface even when it had appeared in the 1960s. From what I can tell, they did not call for Professor Sheng to be fired but they did expect some kind of accounting for what happened. It looks like faculty there are working to resist easy narratives and considering more thoughtfully how to responsibly handle mistakes like that of Professor Sheng’s.
I struggle, too, to understand the disproportional attention to single cases in the press while, meanwhile, partisan politicians are using legislation to mount the most effective assault on academic freedom that we’ve seen since McCarthy. There is a free speech crisis but it’s not the one that gets all the attention!