BY JENNIFER RUTH AND ELLEN SCHRECKER

We’re used to hearing that American higher education is in serious danger. Many of us have developed a kind of learned helplessness in response to the regularity with which we hear about the crises of the academy. But we are not powerless. Although the current educational gag orders targeting universities are the most serious threat to academic freedom in more than a generation, they can be resisted. As Ellen’s recent book, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s, shows, faculties that come together can change the direction of history—or at least that of their university.

They did it at Berkeley in the fall of 1964, when in the midst of the Free Speech Movement’s sometimes disruptive protests against the administration’s repressive behavior, the Academic Senate voted overwhelmingly to support the students’ right to participate in off-campus political activities without being punished by the university. Though the faculty was still recovering from the McCarthy era trauma of a divisive loyalty oath, its collective action to support the students’ reasonable demand for political freedom forced the University of California’s regents and administrators to reverse their ban on political speech—thereby facilitating the free expression that we now take for granted as vital to the fabric of campus life—at Berkeley and elsewhere.

Today, however, under very different circumstances, this new threat to academic freedom requires faculties to raise our collective voice again. This time in support of an equally fundamental principle of higher education and one that directly impacts teaching and research. We must protect our autonomy over the curriculum. As a prerogative faculty members have held for decades, that autonomy enables the university to function free from external political interference. It distinguishes academic institutions in democratic societies from those in authoritarian ones and explains why American higher education still enjoys such a positive reputation around the world. At most schools, professors control the content of the education they offer. They do so because a near-universal consensus within every constituency of the academic community agrees that, as the AAUP explains, faculty members “are distinctly qualified to exercise decision-making in their areas of expertise” and should have “the chief competence for judging the work of their colleagues.”

But as a wave of right-wing populism contests scientific knowledge and professional expertise, the faculty’s role in shaping the curriculum has come under attack. Opportunistic politicians and libertarian operatives tied to the Republican party seek to rouse voters in 2022 with a dog-whistle backlash demonizing efforts to teach about the racial, sexual, and other forms of oppression in the American past. They single out Critical Race Theory and claim it is a malignant force that makes white students feel bad about themselves and Black ones turn against their white classmates. In dozens of states, they have passed or are considering laws that ban teaching about racism, sexism, and other “divisive concepts.” As the president of Ohio State’s AAUP chapter explains, these laws seek to turn earlier legislation against its original purpose of supporting minority groups: often citing the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection clause, they mount the absurd argument that anti-racist educators are themselves somehow racist.

If we don’t oppose these measures, will someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and not our departmental and disciplinary peers, evaluate our teaching and research? Will state attorney generals, to whom these bills grant incredible power, determine curricula? Will Montana’s Attorney General Austin Knutsen, who issued a formal “Opinion” that using Critical Race Theory and similar materials in the schools is against the law, take action against an instructor if a white student feels bad reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved or seek to defund a university where sociologists assign Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law? These are not idle speculations. Even before Idaho’s education gag law was enacted and the legislature cut Boise State’s budget, the university canceled all fifty-two sections of a required course on ethics and diversity.

To stop the gag rules from spreading and destroying the integrity of American higher education, the academic community must act now. Lobbying, sending emails to politicians, and writing op-eds and letters to the editors, of course. But it is even more important to take collective action. As faculty members, we need to mobilize the colleagues on our campuses to do something that will show the rest of the country that the entire academic community is united in opposition to these cynical efforts to interfere with our freedom to teach.

Currently the most effective way to assert that solidarity may well be for academics to encourage their university senates, councils, or other such official bodies as unions and AAUP chapters, to pass resolutions denouncing the right-wing attack on their teaching and research and asking their administrators and trustees to join them in upholding academic freedom. This past summer, as reactionary state legislators and other officials began implementing the far right’s educational agenda, activists under the aegis of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) pushed back. They wrote up and then circulated a draft resolution entitled “Defending Academic Freedom to Teach About Race and Gender Justice and Critical Race Theory” that they hoped faculty bodies throughout the country would customize to their institutions.

Taking a stand against the attack on teaching CRT or other “divisive concepts” should not be a hard sell. These educational gag rules are such a blatant violation of the academy’s values that a resolution enabling the academic community to express its widespread disapproval of them should gain considerable traction. Even if your university or college is not under attack from its administrators, trustees, or state legislature, it is essential for faculty members everywhere to participate in the academic community’s common defense of the right to teach and do research without political restrictions—as well as provide support for the K–12 educators now on the front lines.

Besides ramping up the academy’s general opposition to the current attack on academic freedom, passing these resolutions will enhance faculty governance by showing administrators and trustees that their faculties are willing to act collectively to protect their autonomy. They should make an institution’s leaders think twice about responding to outside pressure before taking a repressive action that could trigger a strong faculty pushback. This is what happened at the University of Florida where the administration was forced to reverse its attempt to keep several professors from testifying before official bodies—and its once successful president decided to resign.

The AAPF’s campaign is already gaining support, as a recent article from Inside Higher Ed  reveals. The faculty senates of more than a dozen universities—DePaul, Michigan State, Ohio State, Portland State, Washington College, Molloy College, Penn State, Virginia Commonwealth and the universities of Colorado, Delaware, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wisconsin—have passed the resolutions. As the chair of the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee at the University of Minnesota told The Minnesota Daily, “Sometimes you have to remind [people] of basic principles.” Consulting the AAPF template, faculty senate leaders at the University of Alabama, the flagship in a state with two bills under consideration in the legislature, developed their own unique Defense of Academic Freedom Resolution and it passed on December 14^th. Faculty groups at a half-dozen other institutions have developed resolutions that are expected to be acted on in the spring. These measures work. Once the Faculty Senate of the entire University of Colorado system adopted its resolution, the Board of Regents dropped its consideration of an anti-CRT measure.

Most of the campuses involved at this point have been state flagships. But the voices of faculty members from all types of institutions need to be heard. It’s not hard to organize your campus. Contact as many friends and sympathetic colleagues as possible in your department, union local, AAUP chapter, or other faculty group and ask them to urge your Faculty Senate or other official body to pass such a resolution. Reach out as well to your networks of colleagues at other colleges and universities. You do not have to reinvent the wheel. There’s plenty of material that you can copy or alter to fit the needs of your own institution. The AAPF website has a useful tool kit for this campaign, with documents and templates from which to borrow. It also includes a list of institutions that have passed the resolution and, where available, the resolutions themselves. In fact, two of the original drafters of the template are holding a webinar with AAUP this Thursday at 1 p.m. EST to assist people in proposing a resolution on their campus. Please register here.

We need to act now. There is no guarantee that the national campaign to mobilize faculty senates will succeed in turning back the forces of willful ignorance. But a refusal to act will definitely doom the campaign. We have found that the history of academic freedom during moments of political repression like the McCarthy era is all too replete with fine words and passive complicity. We cannot let that happen again, especially when today’s university may well be too enfeebled by decades of under-funding, right-wing propaganda, and now COVID-19, to preserve its own autonomy. We have no alternative but to stand up for ourselves—and for the rest of the country as well. As one University of Colorado philosopher explained, “All of us should be prepared to die on this hill.”

Historian Ellen Schrecker has written extensively about McCarthyism, higher education, and academic freedom. Her most recent book is The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s. Jennifer Ruth is a professor in the School of Film at Portland State University. She serves on the AAUP’s Committee A for Academic Freedom and is a contributing editor of the Academe blog. Her most recent book, co-authored with Michael Bérubé, is It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and Academic Freedom.