BY JENNIFER RUTH

The education gag orders sweeping red states are being challenged in the courts on First Amendment grounds. This makes sense and we must hope that all such challenges prove effective. The reality, though, is that the anti-CRT and “divisive concepts” legislation directly attacks academic freedom. As AAUP President Irene Mulvey recently tweeted (and AFT retweeted):

It is important that we understand why this legislation is an attack on academic freedom separate from an attack on free speech. In a recent interview conducted by Daniel Gordon for the journal Society, Michael Bérubé and I discuss our book It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). Gordon asks about the difference between academic freedom and free speech, saying, “It is common to assume that academic freedom and free speech mean approximately the same thing. This is perhaps a legacy of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Can you say more about how and why you distinguish these two values?” I reproduce our answer to Gordon’s question below.

It is more important than ever that we understand that academic freedom is not the same thing as free speech. Unlike, say, politicians in a political ad, professors cannot lie. Politicians can make demonstrably wrong, irresponsible, and race-baiting claims; responsible professors cannot. Academics have First Amendment rights in other aspects of our lives, but we are held to the standards of our profession when we make claims in peer-reviewed journals or submit our work to promotion and tenure committees or engage in intramural or extramural speech related to our areas of competency. We must meet collectively determined norms that may be challenged, but those challenges must, in turn, also meet norms of coherence and relevance and gain some degree of collectively agreed-upon legitimacy.

Academic freedom, not free speech, allows society to come into possession of a body of work that has been vetted by experts and that cannot be easily reduced to opinion or hearsay. It provides a democratic society with what the law professor and former Yale Law dean Robert Post calls ‘democratic competence.’ This is critical at a moment like the one we’re in today, in which well-funded and highly orchestrated campaigns attempt to sway public opinion to further corporate (think Big Oil) or partisan (think Big Lie) interests. Academic freedom was invented so that universities can mitigate or counteract, however inefficiently or indirectly, the kinds of damage done to democracy when the power of the state or the market is allowed to operate unchecked.

Further, academic freedom distinguishes universities in democratic states from those in authoritarian and totalitarian states where one political group has the ability to control knowledge. Despite all its old Cold War fear mongering and all its talk of freedom, the Republican Party now harbors a sizable contingent of politicians who are increasingly willing to use authoritarian tactics to get what they want. The legislative bills banning so-called divisive concepts are the biggest assault on academic freedom this country has ever faced. Where these bills pass, we might rightly refer to ‘subnational authoritarianism’ of the kind that existed during Jim Crow— whole regions of the country unable to teach and discuss concepts that should be protected by academic freedom.

It’s worth underscoring here that banning The 1619 Project or educational practices that have been empirically proven to increase inclusion and student success suppresses free speech, but that is not necessarily the problem—a number of speech acts are legitimately suppressed in educational settings. The problem is that this work has earned the protection of academic freedom by having been vetted by expert peers and so what we have is a fundamental violation of academic freedom in an allegedly democratic country.

At the same time that we are witnessing the use of the state to control what we can research and teach, we also see groups weaponizing free speech to further fundamentally fascist causes. We see this in the way that racism and white nationalism—two forces fundamentally at odds to the common good of our multiracial democracy—are being defended in the name of free speech (the Proud Boys regularly hold what they call “rallies for free speech”).

The complete interview can be found here:  rdcu.be/cRRTn

Many thanks to Dan Gordon for featuring It’s Not Free Speech in the latest issue of Society and many thanks to Irene Mulvey and the AAUP for standing up to the authoritarian attack on academic freedom and standing for educators’ right to pursue truth in a democratic country.

Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. She recently wrote on pandemic opportunism in higher education and the importance of unionization for Truthout.