BY JENNIFER RUTH

In a speech in Georgia on Tuesday, President Biden called voter suppression and election subversion “Jim Crow 2.0.” Criticism of the comparison was swift. The “worst hyperbole to date,” an op-ed in Boston Herald called it. Republican Senator Tim Scott* of South Carolina took to the floor to express his irritation and wonder whether today’s Americans even know what Jim Crow was. Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the speech “was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend.”

The comparison may be dramatic but I found it apt – and not just with regard to voting rights but with regard to college campuses. I’m reading two excellent books — Joy Ann Williamson-Lott’s Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Order (2018) and Eddie R. Cole’s The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom (2020) – and the turmoil they describe in the 50s and 60s sounds painfully familiar. The anti-woke culture warriors today conflate communism and racial-justice activism to try to delegitimize anti-racist work just as the white supremacists did then; state politicians today seek to control what professors can teach just as they did then; college administrators today struggle to reconcile the principle of free speech with that of inclusion (see in particular Cole’s chapter on the dilemma facing Princeton President Goheen when a university club invited the vicious Mississippi segregationist Ross Barnett to campus at the same time Goheen was struggling to increase Black student enrollment by demonstrating that Princeton was a welcoming environment).

At the same time, I have been working with others to promote the African American Policy Forum’s Senate Resolution “Defending Academic Freedom to Teach Race and Gender Justice and Critical Race Theory.” (Kimberlé Crenshaw, Sumi Cho, and others invite people to sign an open letter and encourage them to take the resolution up on their campuses here.) We have contacted senate leadership at public flagships across the country. The success has been remarkable. Ohio State, Michigan State, the universities of Delaware, Minnesota, Colorado, and Oregon have all passed resolutions they adapted to their institutions. See here for a list and, where available, the resolutions themselves. Below the Mason-Dixon line, though, is a different story. (With the very notable exception of the University of Alabama – there, senate leaders passed their own unique resolution, after what Sara McDaniel described as a “long and arduous but worthwhile” process.) Where numerous senate leaders report passing resolutions swiftly and “overwhelmingly,” as presiding officer at Portland State Vicki Reitenauer did, senate leaders in the deep south hesitate. Individual senate committees have adapted the template but have not yet brought it to the floor over fears of retaliation. The faculty leaders at these schools are often passionate about the resolution but they have to wonder whether repercussions might lead them to regret taking action.

The concerns from faculty below the Mason-Dixon line tell us all we need to know about the suppression of academic freedom where bills to legislate what happens in the classroom have passed or are pending. This only makes it more important that as many institutions as possible pass the resolution—there is strength in numbers.

Even Michael Barbaro’s The Daily criticized Biden’s speech – not for the Jim Crow line, though, but for its inefficacy to change the minds of key players like Sinema and Manchin. The speech, journalist Astead Herndon said, was more an attempt to score “effort points” than any realistic strategy to change the Senate vote. The organizers and activists in states like Georgia, Herndon said, “feel like these politicians are coming to their communities over and over to tell them about a threat that they already know, that they’ve lived with — not in the last 10 years, but in the history of this country. You ain’t got to tell Georgia about voting rights, right? These people feel that it is about follow-through.”

*In looking online at the criticisms of Biden’s speech made by both Senator Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) and Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), I moved too fast when writing and originally conflated the names, calling Senator Tim Scott, Tim “Sullivan.” Thank you, Indy at madeupemail@gmail.com, for making me aware of the mistake so I could fix it.

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.