BY JENNIFER RUTH

In February, historian Ellen Schrecker and I called upon faculty to use the power we possess through shared governance to fight the education gag orders sweeping the country. In January, I commented here on how institutions in the south hesitate to pass resolutions out of fear of “poking the bear.” I am very happy to now report that the resolution campaign has decisively turned a corner: faculty senates and AAUP chapters across the country—in red states as well as in blue—have passed resolutions to defend academic freedom to teach race and gender justice and critical race theory. Faculty senators throughout the nation have voted overwhelmingly to defend themselves against legislative interference and called upon their provosts and presidents to affirm their academic freedom to do so. “Displaying an unprecedented solidarity,” Schrecker reported in the Nation, “the academic community is mobilizing to confront what its members rightly perceive as an existential assault on their professional work and values.”

The resolution campaign first received attention in December when Colleen Flaherty reported on it in Inside Higher Ed. In February, the Washington Post noticed: “College Faculty Are Fighting Back Against State Bills on CRT.” In March, Salon published “Fighting Back Against CRT Panic” and the College Business Insider wrote about “how colleges are fighting conservative bills in states like Florida and Texas that they say throw ‘red meat’ to Trump supporters and muzzle educators.” “We just wanted to send a message to the Florida legislature,” Kathie Russell, president of the College Senate at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida says in College Business Insider. “Pass all the laws you want. Academic freedom is what we will stand by.”

To date, some forty faculty senates have adapted and passed some version of the template resolution. And this only represents a portion of the senates across the country that have organized to articulate their refusal of these bills. Back in September, when the higher education working group convened by Sumi Cho at the African American Policy Forum was just getting started on the campaign, a few schools had in fact already acted—such as faculty and staff at the University of Utah who passed a joint statement in “support for anti-racism,  diversity and inclusion scholarship, teaching, and training at the University of Utah” and Faculty Senate at Virginia Tech who issued a statement on academic freedom. The Virginia Tech statement, posted by faculty senate president Robert Weiss on behalf of the senate, is eloquent. “It is August 10, 2021,” it begins, and “eight states have passed laws that define how educators can and cannot discuss race, gender, and ethnicity in the classroom.” It goes on to say:

Laws that constrain the examination of slavery and racism and their impact on contemporary society are particularly disturbing for what they reveal about our inability to set aside political differences in the interest of scholarly, educational, and social advancement, for it is impossible to honestly consider the history and nature of the United States without asking uncomfortable questions about how race has shaped and continues to shape our society. Some subjects should cause discomfort and even challenge deeply held beliefs, and we have examples of how honesty and forthright treatment of a disturbing past can benefit a society in the long run. After World War II, the Germans chose to directly present and confront Nazi racial ideology and its horrific outcomes, in part by engaging in educational discourse that included visits to concentration camps and the amplification of the voices of the murdered and oppressed. The past will always speak; the question is, do we listen and respond.

The statement asserts that faculty will never accept these attempts to deny our academic freedom, concluding:

While academic freedom is a concept, it is also, in the way of a chisel to a sculptor, a tool and requirement for our work. We need those who would try to dispense with academic freedom based on a disagreement over what our history is or says about us to recognize that faculty can never accept this kind of eclipse. We invite them to join us instead as we discuss, debate, and even argue about these and other questions, with the shared goal of advancing our understanding and appreciation of life as it was, is, and may one day be.

The naked attempt to empty critical race theory of content and fill it with everything Chris Rufo and his buddies believe terrifies a sizable swath of white America is behind many of the education gag orders that have popped up. Faculty in education, humanities and social science departments were instantly alert to the threat to their academic freedom. Faculty in other fields sometimes have been slower to realize that a threat to one is a threat to all and that we all have a dog in this fight regardless of our discipline. But, faculty senate meeting by faculty senate meeting, chemists and engineers and pharmacologists have quickly connected the dots. It’s race, gender, and sexuality now: it could well be climate science and public health tomorrow. If we do not protect academic freedom as a collective right of an institution’s faculty body to form departments and hire faculty as it sees fit, to reject or approve curricula as it sees fit, etc., we are all vulnerable to finding ourselves out of a job or forced to go underground for as many years as it takes for partisan political power to change hands.

If schools below the Mason-Dixon line were understandably hesitant at first, given the volatility and unpredictability of state politics, they no longer seem to be. To take just two examples: in Mississippi, the University of Mississippi, Jackson State University, and the University of Southern Mississippi have all passed resolutions; and in South Carolina, the University of South Carolina, Coastal Carolina University, the College of Charleston, and Furman University have. After the University of Texas at Austin passed their resolution, the bear did indeed see itself as poked and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick launched a full-throated attack on the faculty and vowed to end tenure for future appointments and revoke tenure for those who teach critical race theory. His temper tantrum inspired Baylor, Prairie View A&M, and University of Houston-Victoria to pass resolutions defending academic freedom and demonstrating solidarity with their University of Texas-Austin colleagues. (The UT students also demonstrated their solidarity, passing this joint resolution less than two weeks after Patrick’s threats.) Faculty will not be intimidated. Knowing full well how at least one Republican state official had reacted in Texas, faculty senators at the University of Arizona last week decided to declare:

WE, the elected members of the Faculty Senate at the University of Arizona, support legislation that prevents discrimination toward individuals and groups based on race or ethnicity.

However, WE, the Faculty Senate, do not support legislation that prohibits scholarship, instruction, and programs on the UArizona campus that explain, debate, and mitigate the causes and consequences of racial/ethnic discrimination.
Therefore, in the service of academic freedom, the Faculty Senate opposes specific provisions in the “Stop Critical Race Theory and Racial Discrimination in Schools and Other Public Institutions Act” (HBC 2001) that prohibits scholarship, teaching and programs that address discrimination based on race or ethnicity, at the University of Arizona.

There is no point, many seem to feel, in waiting to see what happens with these bills. They are not going to go away on their own; they are too useful as political weapons for Republican politicians seeking election or re-election. We have to stand up for our academic freedom. And the good news is that we are.

So what’s next? More faculty senates can and should pass resolutions but university and college presidents and provosts need to launch their own campaign. “Political interference in higher ed is becoming endemic,” write the president of Hamilton College David Wippman and Cornell University’s Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies Glenn C. Altschuler in yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed. “For better or worse, and, alas, often for both, colleges and universities are inextricably part of our nation’s polarized political environment and increasingly in the crosshairs of local, state and federal authorities,” they say. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, president emeritx of Macalester College and president in residence of the Harvard Graduate School of Education Brian Rosenberg asks, “Should Universities Take Political Stands?” He writes:

When President Michael Roth of Wesleyan University writes that higher education must defend voting rights or President Patricia McGuire of Trinity Washington University writes that higher education bears some of the blame for the events of January 6, each is understanding the mission of the university more broadly . . .  and as including a commitment to equity and honesty.

Rosenberg continues:

If one believes that the purpose of higher education is not limited to ‘teaching and research’ but also includes preparation for ‘public participation in democracy and civic life’—a common though not universally held view—then the university must consider how and when, as in institution of great privilege and influence, it models that participation.

The rock on which the AAUP was founded is the university’s freedom from political interference and it is one of the bedrocks of democracy that the country can pursue and disseminate knowledge that has not been controlled, manipulated, or eliminated by partisan politicians. University and College Presidents need to issue their own statement on the inviolability of academic freedom for a functioning democracy.

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. An essay adapted from the book was recently featured in The New Republic.