BY MARK JAMES

A year ago, I was called in to meet with my dean after a parent complained to the president’s office that I had been discussing white supremacy in my American and African American literature classes. I wrote about that experience last summer in Inside Higher Ed, and I hoped that would be the end of it. But then I recently heard that another faculty member was called in to another meeting with another parent angry about critical race theory, so I decided it was time to introduce the African American Policy Forum’s “Resolution on Academic Freedom and Critical Race Theory” to our AAUP advocacy chapter’s executive committee and our faculty council. I did, and both bodies passed the resolution swiftly and unanimously. Then, as if to highlight the danger of the current moment right here on Long Island, the Proud Boys marched through town about 2.5 miles from campus the week before we presented the resolution to the faculty.

Like other faculty members that Colleen Flaherty describes her article “A Template for Academic Freedom” that appears in today’s Inside Higher Ed, we presented this resolution to faculty and administration to add our voices to the growing chorus of faculty expressing solidarity with other educators who “teach about race and gender justice and critical race theory” across the country, including those teaching K–12, that are experiencing direct assaults on their academic freedom. But we also sought to enlist that nationwide support to put our weight behind the administration’s effort to push back against similar assaults on academic freedom that are sure to continue over next year’s election cycle and beyond. 

Surprisingly, that is not how our administration chose to receive the resolution. Far from interpreting it as a gesture of support and solidarity, the provost informed our faculty president that it “comes at this from a negative position,” and “fails to recognize the support we have given faculty,” even though the language was taken verbatim from the same template other colleges and universities are using. As I sat down to write this post, I reached out to the provost to clarify if this is the administration’s position, and she replied, “[t]he accurate statement is that [the college president] and I support the AAUP-AGB statement.” Assuming she meant the “Joint Statement on Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism” upon which the resolution is based, one can’t help but notice that the Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities (AGB) is not one of the four associations that authored the statement. It is one of more than 140 associations (and counting) that have signed on to it. Since the faculty president has already informed the provost that the AAUP also endorses the resolution—indeed one of my fellow contributing editors to this blog, Jennifer Ruth, along with one of our colleagues from the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, Emily Houh, helped to write it—the inescapable conclusion is that the relevant authority here is the AGB, not the AAUP.

The administration’s resistance to the resolution is also troubling because of the college president’s explicit commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as academic freedom. In fact, just as the faculty president was presenting this resolution to the faculty during our monthly teaching faculty meeting, the president of the college sent an email to the entire campus community announcing an appointment of a founding vice president of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). As with other colleges and universities across the country that have created offices and high-level administrative positions dedicated to DEI since the protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, what remains to be seen is if this appointment heralds the start of a serious reckoning with race, gender, and other sources of injustice and inequality on and off campus, or if the purpose of the appointment is to contain, manage, and ultimately stymie that reckoning. Too many of those hired to do this work at both the K–12 level and postsecondary level resign due to lack of support, respect, and other issues. The administrative response to the resolution does not bode well, but our faculty leadership stands united and will continue to work for meaningful change in solidarity with faculty across the country.

Contributing editor Mark James is associate professor in English at Molloy College on Long Island, NY, president of Molloy College’s advocacy chapter of the AAUP, and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.