BY JENNIFER RUTH
In It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom, Michael Bérubé and I argue that academic freedom is not free speech (thus, the title) and that it operates with a different set of rules and expectations. We further argue that those rules need firming up:
When universities respected the integral relationship between job security and academic freedom, and the majority of faculty were tenure-line, these processes [of the promotion and tenure system] worked for the most part. Before fundamental changes to American news outlets, social media, and democracy in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, changes that led to the profound polarization of the electorate and the proliferation of phrases like “alternative facts,” these processes were adequate. When there was a more or less shared reality (rather than one in which the Sandy Hook massacre occurred and one in which it didn’t), these processes sufficed and, indeed, were great accomplishments of the twentieth century (thanks to the AAUP). With fundamental changes to the environment both inside (with the erosion of tenure) and outside (with the erosion of a shared reality) of the university, they no longer appear to.
On the one hand, academic freedom needs a touch up because it no longer protects the majority of us in the classroom. Faculty in contingent positions are rarely afforded due process when their “free speech” comes under fire. Administrators can appease partisan forces by simply not rehiring instructors who have become the focus of right-wing outrage. On the other hand, another necessity for fresh thinking, we say, are those job-secure professors whose privileged positions bestow upon their speech a credibility that it demonstrably doesn’t deserve. (The demonstrable part would need to be demonstrated by a panel of peers.) The problems posed by misinformation and disinformation to our democracy are now well established. When misleading information is purveyed by professors, the veneer of academic respectability makes it especially dangerous. We offer a rogues’ gallery of academics whose speech arguably does not deserve the protection of academic freedom in It’s Not Free Speech, but watching part one of Frontline’s series The Power Of Big Oil this week, I realized we missed a rogue or two. Professors Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer required their own chapter, as this clip PBS labeled “Truth Has Nothing to Do With Who Wins the Argument” shows:
“You want to make an assumption that it is a meritocracy,” John Passacantando, the founder of Ozone Action, says in this clip. “A good argument will prevail and it will displace a bad argument. But what the genius of these PR firms who work for the big fossil companies know is that truth has nothing to do with who wins the argument.” As this piece by Climate Investigations Center makes clear, Patrick Michaels joined the Exxon and Koch-funded party early and never looked back, eventually moving from his academic post at the University of Virginia to the role of director of the Cato Institute. Capitalizing on his credentials as a professor and the mainstream media’s tendency to fall spell to the idea that “balance” means telling “both sides,” even if one side has mountains more evidence than the other side, Michaels became a regular voice in op-eds, television segments, and newspaper articles. The New York Times wrote in 1993:
Some critics contend that even if the atmosphere does heat up, the warming will be benign. Dr. Patrick J. Michaels, a meteorologist at the University of Virginia, points out that the warming seen so far has made itself evident mostly at night and in winter. If that continues, he argues, global warming will be a boon, not a catastrophe. Growing seasons will be longer, winters less harsh and plants invigorated by rising carbon dioxide will grow faster.
Perhaps most devastating were Michaels’ performances at congressional hearings. The Frontline exposé entitled Climate of Doubt—produced in 2012, a full decade before this week’s The Power of Big Oil—shows Michaels in Congress given equal time as a scientific expert opposing legislation on cap and trades policy and sowing doubt on the testimonies of Harvard professor of earth and planetary sciences Daniel Schrag and Thomas Karl, the director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. Despite a history of getting the science wrong, Michaels was “somehow taken seriously, even when he veer[ed] into economics and environmental policy, subjects well outside his area of scientific expertise.” Congress is trying to do its job—the work of democracy—but is being fed misinformation, damning the planet to a decade of inaction.
Faculty are speaking up in greater and greater numbers about the corrupting influence of fossil-fuel money on scientific research. Last month, the Guardian reported on an open petition signed by over five hundred academics declaring that universities must reject fossil fuel cash for climate research. “This sort of funding has been used to compromise leading academic institutions,” says Professor Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. “It’s a two-for for polluters: they purchase the imprimatur of these institutions and their presumed authority and objectivity, while funding research that often translates into advocacy for false solutions.” Tulane University has received millions of dollars from the Murphy family, of Murphy Oil, but professor Jessie Keenan signed the petition, telling the Tulane Hullabaloo that fossil fuel firms use research language in “very counterproductive ways” that are “probably illegal or unethical as it relates to misinformation.” (See also this month’s LA Times Op-Ed by Michael Mann and Ilana Cohen, “Climate research funded by fossil fuel profits discredits universities and hurts the planet.”)
In Free Speech and Koch Money, reviewed here in Academe, Isaac Kamola and Ralph Wilson explain that “the same motivated donors and political operatives who use free speech arguments to defend plutocratic spending in elections, breaking unions, and denying climate change have also invested heavily in manufacturing campus free speech controversies.” As I argued here, the libertarian-funded reportage on campus free speech controversies provided the ammunition for the authoritarian bills popping up across the country restricting teaching on race and gender justice and critical race theory. And, as with climate change, some opportunistic academics have eagerly jumped on the bandwagon to spread misinformation about critical race theory and the teaching of history in American universities and colleges. (The bandwagon does not have to be a gravy train, it seems; some opportunists are just happy if Tucker Carlson pats them on the head.) Like the faculty organizing to reject the fossil fuel industry’s corrosive interference in the work of universities, faculty are organizing to reject this partisan interference in the autonomy of faculty to determine curricula, as Ellen Schrecker’s article in The Nation pointed out recently.
It’s Not Free Speech asks that faculty form Academic Freedom committees so that we do not leave decisions up to administrators vulnerable to outside pressure and so that we can do a better job of ensuring that our colleagues are held to the standards not of free speech but of academic freedom. As Ryan Cooper wrote in “The Cure For Hate Speech is Not More Speech.” his review of the book for The American Prospect:
Academic freedom should protect professors’ ability to say controversial things and start hard discussions, but it comes with an equally important responsibility that those statements be grounded in serious thought and research—and in reality. The authors suggest the “purpose of institutions of higher education is not to ensure that all views be heard, but to determine, by careful and impartial review, which views merit a hearing and which serve no conceivable educational mission.”
Please note: The AAUP is presenting a webinar this Thursday with Trinity College Professor Isaac Kamola, one of the authors of Free Speech and Koch Money. Along with dean of the College of Arts and Letters and professor of sociology at San Diego State University Monica Caspers and professor of sociology and senior associate dean at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Jennifer Lundquist, Kamola will speak about the organizations that fund campaigns of manufactured outrage and misinformation, the faculty (often, faculty of color) who get targeted by them, and what faculty and institutions can do to support targeted faculty.
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), coauthored with Michael Bérubé. An essay adapted from the book was recently featured in The New Republic.
