BY REBECCA T. ALPERT

The following remarks were delivered as part of an online forum on “The Assault on Academic Freedom” sponsored by Temple University April 7.

I want to focus today on my own experience of academic freedom in two very different (but related) locations: in and also beyond the classroom.  Academic freedom in the classroom means the opportunity to discuss controversial matters related to the field of inquiry but not dogmatically or in a way that intimidates rather than educates students.   Academic freedom beyond the classroom means the right to speak as an individual without fear of employer sanction or reprisals.

While I believe academic freedom should apply to tenure line and contingent faculty and to administrative members of the academic community, it is usually understood as a privilege of the tenured, although even that privilege has come increasingly under fire.  For everyone who works in the academy speaking publicly about controversial issues carries risks of censure, intimidation, and sometimes loss of employment and employment opportunities.  Those responses to our speech and acts from students, members of the board, legislatures as well as donors and interest groups outside the academy can (and in my experience does) have a chilling effect that often leads to self-censorship.  That is mitigated by tenure to some extent, but not completely.

In the classroom, academic freedom is a limited but useful concept that allows us room to discuss controversial matters (ones that cause conflict or dispute) related to course content.  Faculty need to be free to structure and discuss classroom material as they deem most pedagogically effective so long as they don’t indoctrinate students or violate standards of pedagogical relevance.  But it is not “free speech,” and it must be grounded in the goals of engaging students in thinking about the world around them and encouraging them both to think for themselves and question their assumptions.

I believe the best way to do that is to avoid, as best as humanly possible, sharing my own opinions, but rather to stay focused on the students, remaining open to the positions students enter the classroom with, but at the same time guiding them to materials that challenge their opinions (both the ones I agree with and the ones I do not), making sure they understand that they need to back up their opinions with evidence, and making sure the classroom environment is comfortable enough for them to be willing to disagree with one another, and understanding that no one, including me, can learn beyond taking the next step, one step at a time.  Learning is a slow process.

The best way I have found to do that is to provide texts that speak for themselves.  Persepolis is a good example.  For my Intellectual Heritage students in this course that’s required for every undergraduate, this very personal story of growing up in Iran challenged their views of that country.  Most notable have been students from India and Israel who said they had to re-think what they had been taught about Iran and its inhabitants by their families, and a host of other students who had never given a second thought to Iran but realized they had to begin to question what they heard in the media.

I will admit that staying neutral is often challenging when students state matter-of-factly things I disagree with, like: everything happens for a reason (when they read the book of Job), that sports aren’t political (when discussing Colin Kaepernick in my Sports and Society class), or that abortion is immoral, which I heard from a few feminists for life when I was teaching Gender Studies.  It hasn’t been easy, but I try my best to respect positions that are supported by evidence, make a persuasive argument, or are based on strongly held religious beliefs.  I am also clear that there are topics where neutrality is not an option, such as teaching about Critical Race Theory, and I’m grateful that I’m not teaching at the University of Florida, like my daughter-in-law, who despite having tenure, finds herself intimidated to say those words in her courses this year.

But even when there is more than one legitimate view, there are cases where neutral is impossible for me and given my unwillingness to state my views in class, I have decided to refrain from teaching the subject.  I want to focus the rest of my remarks on the most difficult case that comes under that rubric for me, Palestine/Israel.

My discomfort in teaching this subject in the classroom is connected to the second definition of academic freedom—the right to speak out on controversial issues in public.  While I don’t want to teach courses about Israel/Palestine, I am quite outspoken on the topic outside the academy and recently in my academic writing.  I have not for many years been able to do what is expected of me by the Jewish community, or what I would expect of myself in a classroom: to present impartially the Israeli side of what Israelis and the American Jewish establishment euphemistically call “the conflict.”  I am one of a growing number of Jews who believe that the issue is not about two equal sides, that being part of the Jewish people requires a commitment to justice and peace rather than a “love of [the state of] Israel” at least while Israel continues its policies of violent repression of the dignity and rights of the Palestinian people, inside and outside its (contested) borders.  I have made solidarity with the Palestinian cause a central commitment of my social justice work, as part of both Jewish Voice for Peace and also with Religious Scholars for BDS (the movement in Palestinian social society for Boycott, Divestment and Sanction), an organization I helped to found at the American Academy of Religion.  I know well (and at different parts of my life agreed with) the arguments that Israel makes on its behalf, and I am acutely aware of the perils of antizionism bleeding into antisemitism, but I can’t defend the actions of the State or imagine the two sides to be commensurate.

I found it interesting to hear Temple’s new president, Jason Wingard, more than once use Israel/Palestine as an example of what we should be teaching and talking about.  And Temple has had its share of very difficult incidents related to this topic that make his bold statements both exciting and fraught.  Academic Freedom at Temple has been challenged by hostilities around Israel/Palestine, generated primarily by members of Temple’s board, local Jewish leaders and students and alumni, but also extending to pro-Israel organizations, both Jewish and Christian, from around the country and the world.

Temple has a mixed history of how we respond to intimidating tactics from those groups and individuals that have affected both tenured and instructional faculty, putting the idea of academic freedom in jeopardy.

• Academic freedom did not help when in 2004 when I was Religion Department Chair and had to turn down an endowed chair in honor of my colleague Mahmoud Ayoub to be funded by a Muslim organization because of pressure from some members of our Board that intimidated the President.
• It did not protect an adjunct in the Department of French, German, Italian and Slavic whose job was not renewed in 2014 because of remarks he made on social media about Israel.
• Academic freedom did protect two teaching/insructional faculty who signed a letter in support of Steven Salaita who was “unhired” by the University of Illinois after protests of tweets he posted about Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2015.  It also protected the organizer of this teach-in last year when another teach-in he organized was attacked by students who demanded that he be fired for showcasing a speaker from Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).  It protected Marc Lamont Hill, a full professor in an endowed chair, from losing his position when he spoke out at the UN about Palestinian rights and subsequently when he published a book on the topic, Except for Palestine, although his removal is still being demanded behind closed doors.  He was protected only because of the strong support of his Dean and the Board member whose name is on the endowed chair that Marc sits in.  But academic freedom did not keep any of them from harassment, hate mail, intimidation, and profound discomfort.  One wonders whether that should be freedom’s price.

I have also experienced harassment, hate mail, intimidation, and profound discomfort because of my public stance, as well as censorship: I could not give this talk at Temple Hillel or have information about it printed in the local Jewish newspaper; both are forbidden by the organized Jewish community.  I am lucky that I have colleagues in Jewish Studies at Temple who support me, some of whom have suffered similar consequences for taking less radical stances, some who agree with me behind closed doors and others who believe that we can disagree about these issues and still maintain respectful collegial relationships—academics at other universities are not so fortunate and find themselves shunned by their colleagues or unsupported by administration: one professor at the University of Washington recently lost $5 million from a funder who did not like her signing a letter opposing Israeli violence in Gaza last spring.  But I am guessing that this is another reason I don’t teach this subject: it’s just too damn scary and academic freedom doesn’t change that reality.

Let me end on a more optimistic note.  When I served as Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) I was informed in 2018 by central administration that our college was to take part in Temple’s exchange agreement with Ben Gurion University (BGU) in the Negev, Israel.  Administrators do not have anything remotely resembling academic freedom so I did not have a choice in the matter, despite my support of BDS that would prohibit my doing this task since this was an official relationship with a state-funded University, not a conversation with individual scholars who are not the target of the academic boycott.  I proceeded to help orchestrate a conference under the auspices of the Center for Humanities at Temple (CHAT) that brought a group of faculty from BGU to our campus for a conference where they and Temple faculty presented papers on CHAT’s theme that year, “Borders and Boundaries.”  The SJP did plan a boycott.  Among the participants from BGU was a founder of B’Tselem, the leading human rights organization and supporter of the Palestinian cause in Israel that is included as a “terror organization” by the current Israeli government for their public pronouncement that Israel is an apartheid state.  He, and several others in the faculty group understood why SJP might want to boycott since some of them supported BDS themselves.  But despite the threat, no boycott took place, and several of SJP’s leaders even decided to show up for one of the sessions.  They asked respectful and challenging questions and got respectful and challenging answers.  This moment, and others like it, give me hope that President Wingard is right, and we can find ways talk across differences.  But it also reminded me that while words are important in creating change (and I have spilled many of them here), deeds still matter more.  And passions about this topic make it really difficult to think open dialogue can solve the problems or change hearts and minds without real change taking place on the ground.

But I still remain hopeful that at the least we can turn President Wingard’s words into actions that can make a difference and “unchill” some of the very cold atmosphere in which we find ourselves.  One way to do that is to make sure that academic freedom, both in and beyond the classroom, is a commitment that Temple University will keep in both word and deed.

Rebecca T. Alpert is Professor of Religion at Temple University.  She is the author of Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition; Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism; and Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball, as well as several edited volumes and numerous articles.  Her specialization is religion in America, with a focus on sports, sexuality, and race.